 
Doubt and Reassurance Volume I

(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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About the order of the Contents:

For some of us, well, at least for me, Doubts are ill-behaved guests, unwilling to politely remain in their assigned rooms. A rabble of Doubts of heart and mind; faith and intellect; self and society meander about, egging each other on.

This renders the following attempt at a Table of Contents a somewhat contrived and arbitrary structure for corralling doubts into specific holding pens for the convenience of the reader.

But it seems proper literary etiquette to provide at least some minimal illusion of organization to material that like life and our doubts was actually generated in a wonderfully chaotic randomness.

Table of contents

**Doubt and Reassurance**

Part I Why?.............Why what?.............Why everything!

No reason to dillydally in facing our doubts. Lets jump in to the biggies, why suffering, why death, why life?

Part II: The Reassuring Universe

It's big, cold, violent, and doomed. Now what could be reassuring about this?!

Part III: Religions, faith, sects, cults, creeds, denominations, institutions, mythology, shamans, preachers, priests, anyone with "holiness" in their title, and those guys with the perfect hair asking for our money.

If you don't have some doubts about these, you probably didn't pick up (or down-load) this book.

Part IV: The Joy of Cat-box Cleaning

Time to return to earth and deal with real life doubts.

**PART 1**

(back to table of contents)

Welcome to Why.....Why What?.....Why Everything!

Mystery of Darkness or Bright Mystery of Light

"The mystery" Ben eloquently called it on Sunday, this life, the Source of that life, and our relationship with it all. Ultimately, when we finally lie exhausted from our intellectual, philosophical, and theological exercises, it all does indeed come back to mystery.

It is not given us to fully solve or understand the mystery. But I believe we are empowered by virtue of our freewill consciousness to choose whether to see the mystery as dark and impenetrable, or bright and welcoming. Is it mystery because it is hidden, or is it mystery because there is no bound to its dimensions, and each step of discovery leads to ever brightening light? Is it mystery because it is inexplicable, or because none can explain it to us, leaving us each invited to discover it for ourselves as individuals?

Is the mystery cause for despair or celebration? We are fully free to choose our answers to those questions, that freedom itself being part of the Mystery. We may freely choose whether to let our heart and soul experience that which our mind cannot grasp.

Perhaps the great imprisonment wrought by modern science has been the decree that if we cannot analyze and measure something, it does not exist; this capricious and arbitrary decree leaves us in spiritual solitary confinement, all interaction, experience, and awareness limited to what can be slipped in through the bars of our physical senses and intellect. Yet even with senses satiated with experience and intellect saturated with knowledge, we still hunger. The mystery has returned.

With invocation of mathematical symbols, rigorous logic, evolutionary pragmatism, and scientific inquisitions we seek to dispel the mystery. We need but faster processing speeds and greater bandwidth, and of course expanded budgets, to conquer this impudent "mystery".

Indeed, we are free to do so, to turn our back on mystery.

Or, with the same invocation of math, science, logic, and evolution, we can turn toward the mystery, not conquering, but exploring, children at play in bright woods and meadows without bound.

Such a subtle difference in attitude toward mystery would at first glance seem inconsequential. But in our acknowledgement of mystery we open ourselves to experiencing that which we cannot understand or explain or categorize or quantify. (Three seagulls fly over as I write! Seagulls here?! Now that is a mystery!)

The Mystery inexorably returns, however steadfastly we deny it. Dark and impenetrable, it lurks behind our conscious awareness. Or bright and promising, it welcomes us when we turn toward it and walk into the warm embrace of relationship with the incomprehensible.

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Doubt is possible only if one is thinking, if one is open, if one is wondering, questioning, and searching......

...... _and doubt is only possible if one is aware of something, something that prompts the wondering, the questioning, and the searching in the first place......_

...... _.and that awareness is itself reason for Reassurance._

What Matter?

What source?...

those subtle sounds and callings,

those whisperings to the soul.

What certainty, that sense of rightness

on path through woods in pre-dawn light.

What matter, the meager scribbles and

sketches of our lives,

left strewn along our path

that others only briefly cross.

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What of the nature of this world and our nature necessitates doubt, leaving us each looking, but each seeing something different?....and might the answer to that question itself provide reassurance?

Sunrise Blindness

As I watch the sunrise each morning, at least if the sky is not blanketed with thick clouds as it was this morning, I celebrate the colors, the rays, the growing brightness on the horizon, that first flash of brilliant orange diamond as a tiny fraction of the solar disk first penetrates some geographic slot on the distant horizon.

But then I must look away.

We cannot look directly at the sun.

As we consider the diverse spectrum of religions that have come and gone through the ages, as we consider the limitations of our intellect to grasp the concepts of even our religions already simplified down for digestion by the masses, I think we see something akin to the sunrise and its aftermath.

We are not yet ready to look directly at the Source.

Of course our religions and beliefs differ, just as each sunrise and sunset differs.

If we all could look directly at the sun without obscuring and distorting atmosphere, we would of course see the same thing. But that is not possible. So we can only look toward the sun, before sunrise and after sunset. We see its light, but light refracted, reflected, and diffused, light reaching us indirectly.

Today I saw the sunrise as a slowly brightening but still dim blanket of gray.

Someone this morning saw their sunrise as a brilliant cascade of pink and orange across the entire sky.

So also in our different lives, cultures, histories, and experiences, we see different patterns of enlightenment and understanding when we look for the Source.

We, sharing 98.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, are not ready to directly see the Source.

The disparities among our experiences of the sunrise from different points on the globe in no way imply the sun does not exist.

The disparities in our perception of the Source in no way imply it does not exist.

Though we cannot yet look directly at the Source and Sustainer, let us at least look at the beauty of the refracted, reflected, diffused light of Source and Sustainer. Let us recognize that our view of sunrise and our view of Creation/Creator will differ from that of the other person in different place and different life. But let us acknowledge that we are all looking toward the Light, from our particular vantage points, through our particular distorting and overcast atmosphere of circumstances.

And as we grow to begin to feel the first warming rays of Source directly revealed in our lives, let us do our imperfect best to pass on that Love, that someone else may through us experience sunrise Light, indirect and distorted, but still beautiful in its promise of coming day of vision clear.

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Blinding Glare of Ignorance

How little we know.

I just read John chapter 14. What do these words of Yeshu (Jesus) mean?! I don't know.

I listen to the announcer on the Christian radio station quote Bible verses, and then expound on what a power the verses contain. How would that announcer answer if asked to explain those verses?

In such situations don't many of us simply recite credos and dogma and what we learned in Sunday School?...and we recite it all from rote, not really knowing the meaning of what we say. Or is that just me who does not understand, and all the other people quoting Bible verses understand them in profound and personal depth?

I just read an article on quantum loop gravity. Cool stuff! But those boys and girls inventing it don't understand its meaning any more than most of us in the pews understand John 14.

In recent weeks (October 2008) the worldwide economy has collapsed in a messy heap, leaving the "experts" in disarray and conflict regarding what should have been done and what should be done. Sounds to me like the money gurus understand economics about as well as I understand loop quantum gravity.

As much as we hate to admit it to ourselves or to others, almost all of us don't really understand squat about much of anything.

Of course we think we understand some things.....which is probably far more dangerous than realizing we actually do not understand.

Look at the impassioned debates people have about politics and the economy. Those debates unfold with such certainty from both sides. But obviously at the least one side in the argument must definitely be wrong. That being a given, do we really believe that the other side is absolutely right?

Our beliefs, science, economics, and faith today bear little resemblance to those dictated by general wisdom only a few years ago. And we dare to think that today's beliefs, science, economics, and faith are right? Such silliness!

I'm reminded of some legally but not quite totally blind friends of mine who deny to others and themselves that they are almost completely blind. That allows them to accomplish some amazing things, and also leads them to some pretty impressive accidents.

Doesn't it seem easier to just admit we are blind, be it literally, intellectually, or spiritually? That need not mean we sit in the dark security of our mental living room and never grope into the surrounding unknown. To admit our various forms of blindness simply liberates us from the dictates of our imagination that so readily fills in the unseen blanks in our understanding.

With our admission of how little we really understand, we open the door to a bright world of adventurous exploration of all that we wish to understand.

It is a step of great spiritual maturity to proclaim, "I don't know!"....and perhaps the wisest thing we will ever say, almost as wise as the silence of a person who attentively listens.

Of course "not understanding" causes no small distress. We desperately want to understand. The unknown is as fearsome as a dark room. We require some foundation, some reference point, some intellectual harbor from which we can launch at least the mundane activities of another day of living.

But we can focus on what we do know, what we know without words or dogma or verses, but what we know in our heart and soul. And we will find that such ineffable knowledge suffices, to a surprising degree. As we navigate through one day after another relying on heart's faith while confessing our intellectual ignorance, we may find that what we do not understand is not essentially important after all. We may find that the knowledge of the heart and soul, though not expressible in mere theories or theology, provides a far more enduring and reliable foundation than any fleeting mental construct, trembling theory, or teetering credo.

We may find that upon turning from the glare of our insistent intellectual understanding, the ensuing darkness of our worldly ignorance makes way for another light, a light of the heart, a light soft, a light gently revealing, a light welcoming our exploration and encouraging our growth.

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What greater source of doubt than the undeniable harshness, the unrelenting savagery, and the indescribable suffering inherent in the nature of this world......

Why the Harshness of Nature?

Sitting on the back deck, I restrain 'Tasha kitty from chasing the baby bunny that uses my yard as a daycare center. I think on how many times my PC kitty terrorized baby bunnies in years past, how I would race out the backdoor to rescue them, usually unsuccessfully.

Those little homegrown mini-melodramas of grisly violence, instigated by none other than my very own teddy bärla cuddle kitty, illustrate at only the most microscopic scale the unrelenting, brutal, harsh savagery of God's Creation.

The fact is one would reasonably expect that as humanity developed its awareness and constructed its religions, humanity would model its institutions and beliefs on the only examples God provided, examples of merciless killing and compassionless violence.

Little wonder that bloody sacrifices, animal and/or human, became part and parcel of most religious rituals.

Instead of feeling queasy revulsion at liturgies involving buckets of blood and entrails, we should feel amazement that in the midst of still beating hearts and crucifixions, any rudimentary concepts of compassion, mercy, and forgiveness ever arose at all!

Certainly the lion, the raven, and the spider did not teach us these altruisms.

We do indeed see something miraculous and mysterious in the propagation of even crude concepts of mercy and tolerance in the face of the nature of Nature. Taken to the extreme point of view, you can almost conclude that humanity gets high credit for having conceived of humane and loving values in the face of, and in spite of, the uncompromisingly consistent examples God provides in merciless Nature.

At the very least, in light of the lessons offered by this dwarf planet on which we reside, perhaps we can be a little less judgmental and critical of our species' proclivity for warfare, genocide, slavery, and TV wrestling. We're just doing what we see God's Creation do.

Well, or maybe not exactly.

The lion kills to eat, the wasp paralyzes to feed its young, my cat stalks the baby bunny (or she would if I let her) out of survival instincts.

Indeed, Nature demonstrates harshness and brutality, but not meanness and greed for their own sakes.

Of our own freewill volition we have elevated sadism to new heights, and institutionalized violence not in order to feed our families and village, but to feed our greed and lusts.

In God's Nature we see the foundation starting points from which our lives spring. The lion cuddles its playful kittens and then mercilessly torments the wounded gazelle in order to teach those kittens how to hunt. The lion, the raven, the wasp, show us life at its Source and life in balance. But their cuddling affections and heartless killing are constrained to needs of offspring, flock, pack, pride, or colony.

We though, humanity with the potential of God and the dangers of Satan, know no such constraints. Our affections and love need not be limited to family or tribe. Our avarice and tortures extend far beyond expediencies for our own survival.

We are empowered in the image of God, profoundly free in our deeply personal Choice.

I said at the beginning that Nature offers an endless parade of savagery but little precedent for compassion and forgiveness. After more careful considerations I must recant that thesis.

No animals bear grudges. Offending members of the pack, pride, or troupe remain welcome once the argument over the remaining bone or berry is resolved. Many the time have my cats hissed and slapped at each other, only moments later to return to cuddling and exchanging grooming.

Per their God given nature, animals cuddle or kill. In their lives we are shown the departure point, a point in perfect balance, a point necessary in the very structure of Creation if we are to experience true freedom of Choice in sculpting our individual souls.

From this profound, balanced starting point that Nature provides, we each as individuals can then freely Choose in which direction we will grow, lashing out further with our greed and cruelty, or extending our embrace to encompass wider love.

In their suffering and in their play, the fauna of the loving Creation demonstrate the foundation starting point for our freedom, our Choice, and our ensuing direction of growth. From that exquisitely balanced point of departure we then create our schemes for empire, or our prayers for Paradise.

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Embracing the Terrors of Change

I long ago happily quit keeping up with celebrities, fads, and trends. I couldn't tell you who's hot on screen or in music, and I'm quite proud of that disciplined ignorance, a token liberation from marketers' enslavement.

Only recently I finally also quit worrying about keeping up with changes in technology.

True, technology, morals, and entertainment change faster each year, a runaway avalanche sweeping foundations and reference points out from under our feet. Sure, at my age I find this rate of change a source of mild distress.

But compared to real change, I really cannot complain. I've never watched my city radically changed overnight by an earthquake or falling bombs.

I've never watched the TV programming change overnight to accommodate an occupying military force.

I've never changed my diet because of a famine.

So, change is relative, always challenging, always promoting personal growth, often to be feared, but not always. Change is simply the world reminding us it is out of our control. There's not a bloomin' thing we can do to avoid change, except temporarily hide from and deny it, which is surely the most dangerous response.

We do not necessarily have to embrace change. In fact, ignoring it is sometimes the most courageous course, something to keep in mind as body changes with age and health retreats before accumulated wear, tear, and toxins.

But ignoring is not denying, as my ignoring the latest media personality in no way implies I deny the influence they wield over society.

It is through change that we are forced to choose our life priorities and values.

Who and what will we sacrifice from our daily life in order to remain up to date on the latest musical hits and media technology?

To what lengths will we go to get money and food when the changes of recession and drought leave us destitute and hungry?

So let us welcome change, from irritating fads to terrifying catastrophe, because in each inescapable personal choice of priorities that change forces upon us, we enter an opportunity to freely sculpt the very essence of our being.

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

Cults for Everyone

We hear about the cult, the kids, those strange people, the inexplicable behaviors, and we carefully avoid the realization that we are all members of cults. Some cults and their belief systems are just big enough to be called the norm. From where do these cults, including our own societal, national, majority, "normal" cult arise?

What of the wrenching changes in the lives of the cult members removed from their isolated compounds, forced to see the world in the light our society casts on it? And are the rest of us, in the "majority cult" of mainstream society, immune from such shocks?

How we all long for something stable, reliable, unchanging, and true!....something that absolves us of the responsibility to question, something that obviates the necessity for us to decide.

How eagerly we flock to cults and fraternal orders, how hungrily we ingest ritual and recitation.

Inerrant Bibles, holy texts, prophecies, and scriptures, at least if in our language of choice; or colored pieces of cloth raised on poles; or prophets, preachers, and presidents; these command our unquestioning allegiance.

The leader we follow gets his instructions directly from God, and such surcease and comfort is to be found in following orders and donning the uniform, whether issued by military or marketers, patriarch or popular trend.

How irritatingly inconvenient are the nagging facts that counter holy text, slanderous fictions besmirching our leader, untidy revelations toppling beloved institution.

Usually our religious faith, patriotic fervor, and zealous loyalty can trump intellect, twisting and bending our perceptions of reality in a mental contortionist circus-act that sustains our predilection for blind following and dodges the insistent demand that we pose, and worse, have to answer questions, with their implicit association of personal accountability.

But if any consistency is to be found through the course of history, it is that revelations bring not confirmation but contradiction.

Over and over and over, our various temples do get toppled, our armies do get routed, our leaders do get caught, and text and teacher leave us with questions instead of answers.

We cannot long rest complacent in our faiths and loyalties.

The God in which we would or would not believe allows us but brief times to blindly obey and believe, before wrenching revolutions of heart or circumstance place in our path the bridges we must cross and the forks at which we must choose. Our temples of certain faith and blind loyalty come tumbling down, to reveal the selves we will create by our response to the glaring light of uncertainty that brings the gift of freedom to we children created in the image of God.

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Seeing the grandiose size of the universe, the great tides of civilizations that come and go, the inexorable march of evolution, could leave one doubting the value of the individual in these great currents of time.

Meaning of the River

Humanity, as a whole and individually, is simply carried along in great tides and currents of interaction, reacting to the inputs and relationships and circumstances of the moment. Even the seemingly independent and innovative actions that seem to redirect the great currents can be found to be rooted in compiled experience and personal history of those involved.

It is only in the aggregate that tiny uncertainties of individual freewill become manifest in discernable influence.

And in this great, dynamic, unstoppable cascade of events, relentlessly and irrevocably moving per the dictates of time, does the individual droplet of humanity possess any importance whatsoever? Is it only in the great flow of events that carries us along that we find meaning?

Or conversely, is the torrent and cascade actually at the service of the individuals? Is the destiny of the river to reach that next sea, or is it actually to carry the individuals, and all Purpose and meaning is found not in the great course and flow, but in each individual, each focal point of connections, relationships, and interactions that in their sum define the very essence of the river?

We are carried by events, but carried not just to a river's mouth, but to our own self, our essence, created in the course of the rapids and falls that shape and sculpt, or more accurately said, give us the opportunity to shape and sculpt, our souls.

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Seeking a better God

The fact is, the unremitting harshness, unrelenting suffering, and inevitable death that comprise this temporal world stand as almost insurmountable barriers to many seekers trying to discern a loving, compassionate creator.

From even my relatively gentle exposure to human suffering I can understand why Gnostics and others would indict this world and its creator as evil, or at least not particularly adept at love and compassion.

Yet we can find love in the world, in fact we can create love in the world. That fact seems all the more outrageous considering the brutal ambient in which that love must be instantiated.

Indeed, sometimes it seems this is hardly a loving world....other than the beauty we choose to see and the love we choose to create.

We can look at this world and summarily declare it harsh and brutal, along with its creator. Like the Gnostics, the aesthetics, the mystics, we can then invest our life in seeking some other higher world, in search of a more desirable creator.

Or we can surrender to the world's nature, immersing in it, seeking to saturate our senses with at least whatever temporary, carnal pleasures we can briefly salvage.

Or, in our freedom, we can choose to do something about the nature of this world, not running from it, not immersing in it, but declaring our intent to claim our individual potential as one created in the image of God.

Nothing in this harsh world, not an evil demigod creator, not some malevolent underworld spirits, not any institutional perversion of religion, not Satan and his numberless minions, keep us from choosing to love.

Escape into pleasant meditation or immersion into exhausting debauchery, exotic spheres of spiritual transcendence or reductionist nihilism....these responses to the harsh and loveless cruelty of this world do not excuse us from loving, in whatever little sphere of influence we find ourselves, with whatever meager abilities we possess.

How dare we blame God for this loveless world! Let us not deny its harshness, but let us not deny our complicity in that harshness.

Fine, see God as heartless or non-existent, but know that in your response to that god's, or non-god's, world, you define yourself.

Fine, the world is merciless, God's Creation is unremittingly cruel, but what has that to do with how you choose to shape your Youniverse?

Those that cannot believe in a loving God because they see so little love and compassion in this harsh world are simply being reasonable, rational, and observant.

But I know that even in the face of all the horrors, grief, and loneliness that fill this world, any individual who freely and defiantly chooses to compassionately love anyway will find their light illumines a dark corner; there in that dim but warming glow, they will see theirs is not the only love; and in the faces newly revealed by that individual's waxing light will be seen the face of God, present here, in Love, when invited by our freely chosen acts of selfless compassion.

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How often do our doubts arise out of fear of the unknown, an unknown in which reassurance awaits our discovery, if we can summon the courage to look.

Apeirophobia (Fear of Infinity)

'Tasha kitty took me for a long walk in the woods, her longest and furthest ever, by far. All the way to the ridge she went, coming over the lip to get her first shocking view of just how big the universe is, as she peered down to the road below, and for the first time beheld the summits in the far distance.

Her little kitty brain immediately overflowed with this revelation, and she promptly retreated back down, at least for the time being, to the much more constrained views of a reality bounded by nearby trees and rocks.

True, obscuring bushes and forest may hinder movement and hide the unseen predator. But perhaps even the most terrible hidden and imagined threats are preferable to that higher view into distances unimaginable, potentials incomprehensible.

Little fuzzy minds are not alone in this response to first sight of a distressingly bigger universe.

It is not mere vastness of physical distances that sends us in hasty retreat back over the edge and into our familiar comfort zone.

For us it is the concept of something profoundly greater, more powerful, unfathomable.

If in scaling the hillside of fact or faith we peer over its summit and catch glimpse of something unfamiliar and challenging to our comfortable little mental universe, our tails bush up in defensive antagonism and we turn our backs on the unwelcome grandeur, retreating to our long cherished beliefs and ignorance.

Indeed, ours may be a world of insecurities and hidden threats, but at least our associated fears and prejudices are familiar and unchallenging. Better to live in continuous readiness to counterattack whatever enemy lurks behind bush close at hand, than to grapple with concepts, revelations, and God majestic beyond our comprehension. Better to fight and claw in the trenches of our little personal universe, than to have to learn, change, grow, accept, and surrender to a greater, more majestic, awe inspiring Reality.

Hence we turn and flee from God and our own potential.

But 'Tasha kitty's morning was still young. Her bright-eyed spirit was not ready to long hide from the majestic expanse revealed above.

Kitty courage gradually, cautiously, overcame trepidation. She explored a different path to ridge's edge.

At her own pace, she regained the ridge and all its views.

With cautious bravery she investigated its features, and with time gained the summit of comfort.

Eventually, there she sat, seemingly as secure as kitties ever get, soaking up warming sunshine not present in the thick bushes below.

It's natural that upon glimpsing ideas that stretch our conceptions, when first brushing against the magnitude of Life and its Source, we run back to our little worldly cares, concrete worries and specific fears filling our mind so as to erase views of unbounded grandeur. We are merely doing as Adam and Eve, hiding from their God as S/He walked though the Garden calling for them.

But we mustn't stay hiddk *le:.....oops....perhaps because this essay is in part about her, 'Tasha hops into my lap, adding her editorial changes, arguably as valid as most editorial changes. Anyway, as I was saying before the fuzzy interruption, we must not stay hidden. The higher ridge and its enlightening, and challenging views of majestic grandeur await our Choice to climb. There, out of the shadowy thickets of our own construct, shines warming sun.

Like 'Tasha, we mustn't fear the views of revelations majestic, or the Source they reveal, a Source too large to fit in our little imaginations.

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In case you do not yet harbor doubts about a loving God, listen to the screams of a child crushed in an earthquake, look at the face of the mother trying to reach that child. Surely there is no reassurance in this scene!

God and a Child's Terror

Those Gnostic belief systems about a "bad" god of the earth/creation and a 'higher/good" god do have a certain logical appeal.

To condemn all physical existence as corrupt and enslaving does make a certain amount of sense.

(As I write, the sunrise wind ripples grass, leaves, and my paper. Only in recent years have I become aware of the consistency of that motion each morning at behest of sun's first light.)

To eschew all worldly involvement and flee to ascetic isolation as a means to liberate the soul from carnal enslavement does seem not totally unreasonable. Little wonder that such beliefs appear in sects of Gnostic, Christian, Hindu, and most other religions.

Such dualistic models of gods good and gods bad, munificent and petty, seems a perfectly reasonable outgrowth of our mental and spiritual struggle to resolve the undeniable harshness of the world with our insistent longing for and instinctive belief in something beautiful, just, and eternal.

Yes, it is understandable that through the ages every belief system has spawned a subset of beliefs and sects espousing radical renunciation of this physical world created, from all appearances, by a god or gods with at least a little malicious intent.

Sure, we see the occasional sublime beauty in this world, but that can readily be explained away as seduction and delusion.

To honestly look at this world, its savage beasts, its ravaging pestilence, and its sadistic citizens, and still proclaim faith in a loving, compassionate Creator, requires either faith of monumental proportions or undiluted self-delusion. To the casual, objective observer there appears little clinical difference between the deeply faithful and the abjectly delusional mind.

Believing in the unseen is one thing. Believing in the face of unrelenting, contradictory evidence is another.

Yet believe we must, or at least some of us want to. So to excuse the good-guy- god we so fervently hope to believe in, we resort to putting the blame for atrocities and disasters on a lesser god, a mere worldly god, a petulant and almost human god....or the devil, Satan, demons, etc.....a thorn by any other name, you know.

Through the ages we have meticulously constructed belief systems to exonerate our loving supreme being from any guilt for the horrific carnage that afflicts most days on this planet, and we have provided witness for the defense that God was nowhere near the scene of the crime(s).

In that defensive role we squirm uncomfortably, and adeptly dodge, the question of how a supreme, living God could have unleashed the demigod, or devil, or demons, or Satan, who is responsible for all the bad in the world.

To this day we find it devilishly difficult to look at genocide, earthquakes, mass graves, and politics, and not feel compelled to invoke demonic forces that for a little while escaped God's control, but will soon enough lose out in a big battle of good and evil, good triumphing of course. Then in that life to come, as we stroll streets of gold below the crystal throne, we will not even whisper the question, "why did He let us suffer through those millennia of plagues and predators, pestilence and politicians?"

Hey, I'm all for resolute faith, but I also believe real faith must have the resolve to ask the hard questions. Where is God at the moment the blade comes down, the bullet penetrates, the earthquake crushes? Where is God when the child screams in pain and the mother cries in anguish? Where is God in the moments of terror, horror, and writhing agony?

Faith, real faith, must ask those questions, and any God worthy of our worship will not deny our asking.

That God may not have given us the power to see all the forces and futures that might clarify the 'why". We may not have the intellect or insight to fully comprehend reasons infinite and eternal. Ultimately, all we may have is our little Youniverse of personal experience, and what we choose to do with it.

Ultimately, in each of our personal Youniverses, we choose if we will contribute to or ease the suffering of the world.

Dare we demand of God(s) an explanation for Creation's harshness until we have made our Choice of response to that harshness?

Can we feign understanding of the world and Creation and God or pantheons of Gods, until we exercise the one certainty in our existence, our profound freedom to choose whether to multiply or mitigate the suffering within our reach?

Yes, I passionately counsel asking God the hard questions. But I fervently believe we must first ask them of ourselves. That is our power and our inescapable obligation as freewill, conscious beings created in the image of God.

Somewhere in that process of exercising our free Choice between compassion and conflict, we will better, even if not completely, come to understand the Creator, and the sometimes harsh, sometimes beautiful Creation that miraculously enables that Choice.

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Doubt: Why is life so bloomin' hard?! What's the point of the unrelenting struggle?!

Empowered for creation of the self

I keep saying that we are empowered to create our eternal selves. But what does creation always entail?

If we create a house, a business, a work of art, a football team, all of those creations entail effort, will, and work. You don't just sit in your lounger, think about it, and "poof", there's your custom car, barbequed steak, or new porch. "Creation" means making something happen that would not have happened otherwise, and that means investing some energy to change the direction of the universe in some small way.

Should we expect any less in the creation of our souls?

We're handed all the clay. Someone else created the raw materials of our bodies, our conscious minds, and the world that sustains us. But that clay, the clay of our soul, will sit there as a lump unless we invest some effort to do something with it.

That's why effort, if not out and out struggle, is involved in any act of personal growth.

All the autopilot, programmed behaviors just happen. The sex, the eating, the striving for money, all these reflect necessities of survival. Everything we do because it's natural or necessary is the spiritual equivalent of the lump of clay sitting on the table and just being, well, a lump of clay. All the behaviors associated with lusts and desires and wishes are nothing more than our minds obeying their natural law programming just like the lump of clay obeys the law of gravity.

When God breathed life into the lump of clay, that did not entail merely giving a pulse to the clay. That giving of holy life, that creating by God in the image of God, did not mean simply shaping the clay into a more complex form and adding laws of survival to the law of gravity the clay had to obey.

The clay, you, was gifted with the essence of life itself, the ability to create itself.

This personal creation, as all creation, entails the conscious, chosen, freewill application of effort to make the Youniverse move in a slightly different direction from what it would otherwise.

The cruising, easy, comfortable, and natural paths are the paths of the clay lying on the table, obedient to gravity, passively unchanging. The struggles, temptations, setbacks, and challenges of life are the stuff of self-Creation, opportunities for the Choice.

The wood provides the raw material to serve the carpenter's will, and through his/her work and sweat to become creation. The paint provides the raw material to serve the artist's eye, and through invested time and training to become beauty. The challenges, difficulties, and opportunities of life lie on the shop floor and easel of your life, the raw materials ready for the toil of your conscious free will to create your soul.

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And after all that creation and toil and growth.....we die. Time to face the Big Doubt, what's this death thing all about anyway?!

Healing Death

The meadow stream is running!....right near the house! I do not remember seeing that before!....at least not during these many years of extended drought.

I am taking off my wrist splint for longer periods. 'Tasha's hair has grown back. Alice asked for a hug.

Such a miracle, healing in its many forms.

Of course sometimes we do not heal, or may only partially or imperfectly heal. Yet always, as long as life endures, the body and heart try to heal, cell by cell, breath by breath.

It is as inexorable as the pull of gravity. This drive to heal, this ongoing struggle, is surely a miracle, a constant, miraculous influence of stunning proportions.

Our lives depend on this ongoing, constant, unseen, seldom recognized, healing process. No life form can long exist without the ceaseless repair, reconstruction, and maintenance of each cell and tissue.

We seldom think of the invisible healing continuously occurring at the cellular level. And when we think of healing of our visible injuries, we mainly think of it as taking too long. But I think we would feel stunned in amazement if we could watch a time lapse movie of our cut or scrape or contusion disappearing, filling in, covering over, right before our eyes. It would appear as a special effects marvel, a trick of makeup and digital manipulation.

Real and miraculous it is, even if too slow and imperfect for our tastes.

Life wants to heal!

Living systems are driven to heal, as long as life remains.

Of course equally universal is the ultimate surrender of all healing powers to inevitable mortality.

Healing..... miraculous, beautiful, and universal healing will always lose?!....surrendering in abject defeat?

What a grim and depressing end to the tale!

Or is that view too narrowly focused? Is there not more to healing than repairing physical cuts and breaks?

Hearts, souls, and spirits require healing as much as flesh, limbs, and organs.

But with healing of heart, soul, and spirit we again we face the inevitable question of ultimate outcome.

Just as cuts too deep and cancers too spread will leave our bodies scarred and disfigured, the harshest abuse and most wrenching grief will, with passing years, accrue burdens on our hearts that time cannot heal.

So is spiritual healing, like physical healing, universal but also universally doomed?

Does inevitable physical death make a cruel joke of the ceaseless healing struggle of heart and soul as well as healing processes of cell and protein?

After all, physical healing, for all its miraculous wonder that I celebrate this morning, is really only a rearguard holding action, a valiant defense of a hopelessly doomed bodily bastion

Why this prolonged defense in the face of inevitable demise? Perhaps we find the answer in the nature of that physical defense.

All that healing and repairing and curing actually involves the sacrifice of countless multitudes of living cells, blood cells white and red, collagen and epidural tissues, bone and skin, all these cells filling a momentary role, only to die and be replaced.

Such is the nature of our physical body, not a constant structure, but a form resulting from process, dynamic and vital, each cell continually in the process of being replaced.

Physical death is our constant companion, active in every cell, each cell facing imminent demise and replacement in order to sustain the ongoing dynamism of our physical life.

Yet through this all, the soul persists intact, accruing its scars and distortions, yet present still as individual identity animating that dynamic body.

Here, in sustaining spirit and soul, we find the whole purpose of all that physical healing.

The physical healing, for fleeting temporal moments, buys time for the conscious soul. The physical healing, for all its miraculous wonder, is not the purpose, but only an extension of a greater healing purpose.

It is the soul and spirit that healing ultimately serves.

But soul scarred, spirit crushed, and heart broken can only heal so far while still sustaining the assaults and insults of this worldly life.

Yet healing will not be denied the triumph due its tenacious effort. And so our bodies finally die, that our souls may be healed of their emotional scars and spiritual infirmities.

As the white blood cells die to free us from the infection, our bodies die that our souls may be freed from the compounded griefs and spiritual fractures that dim their light.

Healing is universal, and ultimately triumphant.

Inexorably the healing Spirit calls to our soul, trying to heal as best it can while in this temporal veil, beseeching us to seek those ways that bring the soul health; all the while, assuring us that spiritual scars will fade, disabled hearts can heal, and this world's grip will soon enough be loosed.

During our physical time in this temporal world, if we choose to seek spiritual growth and health we should also choose those physical behaviors and lifestyle that best heal our bodies, delaying their inevitable end.

For now, we can also choose those ways of being and believing that will best heal our hearts and spirits, but in this case not buying time before inevitable ending, but preparing for promised new beginning.

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PART 2

(back to top)

Reassurance: you are at the center of the universe!.....Really!

Look at the shape of the Universe from every individual's perspective! You are at the center! You are the focus of a perfect symmetry! All time comes to you! You are the leading edge of time itself! The most distant past lies at the edge of your universe! All events through all time coalesce onto your consciousness at this moment of now! This is not poetry or allegory or religion or spirituality, this is the literal, incontrovertible fact of physics!

Welcome to The Reassuring Universe!

Reassurance: all from One, One for all

We ponder the meaning of this information age. Why are we driven to collect knowledge and then share it? Might it be because we really are all One, units of the original Source of Creation, and the most natural thing imaginable is that we drive towards the common experience, the shared knowledge, from whence we once sprang.

Infinite Implications of One

I remain fascinated by the fact that particles, waves, and energy all blend together at the smallest size scales. I thrill at the thought that at high enough temperatures all forces become one.

Consider this scientifically irrefutable testimony to the oneness of all, to one source, to individual elements and structure arising from a single Wholeness. Surely the spiritual implications of this cannot be simply ignored.

Even in our vastly expanded universe, still the physics of quantum wave functions and relativity testify that no thing is fully alone, nothing is fully separate, entities do not and cannot exist with absolute isolation.

So obvious are the implications of this that it is with greatest frustration that I face the fact that the spiritual searchers cannot understand the physics and the scientists cannot understand the spiritual aspects. I am frustrated not with them, but with myself for my inability to succinctly digest both sides to make them clear to the other.

All arises from a unified Source! Hence all remains fully part of that Source!

Even space and time do not exist as structure in and of themselves, but only in reference to other existing entities. Space and time are simply geometries that define the connections among diverse components of the Source, and those geometries we perceive as spatial and temporal separations.

The One Source allows ever-greater opportunity for existence of individual entities, hence space and time appear to expand.

In this physics resides stunning Truth and revelations for our perception of reality, revelations I suspect it will take many generations for humanity to comprehend, if ever.

The physicists do a grave disservice to themselves and the populace as a whole if they keep these wonders entombed in cold logic and grave mathematics, discouraging playful and excited exploration of their greater spiritual implications.

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Chicken Soup, Mashed Potatoes, and the Destiny of the Soul

Having propped the handle of the spoon onto the edge of the skillet, seconds later I watch that handle begin to slide to the side, then the spoon pivots around, and before I can catch it, the spoon handle has slid over the inside edge and down into the bottom of the skillet.

As I fish the handle of the now greasy spoon out of the bottom of the skillet, I experience the results of a universal law of physics, well, at least universal as far as we know.

All systems ("systems" is just a technical sounding word for anything) will try to find a way to their lowest energy state. That's always true. It happens on Mars and in your kitchen.

What's that mean? It means that when you drop something it goes down and wants to sit on the floor, or spread across the floor if it was liquid in a glass. It means the spoon precariously tilted up on the edge of the bowl wants to slide right or left, the spoon doesn't care, as long as it can try to slide off the edge and into the middle of the bowl.

It means streams find a way down, even if that means crashing over a cliff and forming a water fall.

Everything's looking for a way to get down, as low as it can, whether that means physically reaching a low location, or chemically reaching a stable configuration, or atomically decaying to stable, non-radioactive substances.

Well, if that's the case, everything trying to get lower and lower, then eventually it seems everything should collapse into a tediously boring flatland, maybe even almost as flat as the plains around Lubbock, Texas. Mountains should erode down leaving smooth planets, and stars should fizzle out to become dark spheres of packed neutrons.

(I try to type this while a complaining 'Tasha kitty demands my attention and hops up to drape her soft fuzziness across my left wrist. The weight now pressing my wrist onto the keyboard provides scientific evidence of matter trying to get to its lowest possible position, whether it can actually move lower or not. )

So, it appears that in something akin to a Big Bang, although its details remain in dispute, a nicely compact singularity blew itself to smithereens and became the Universe, and has spent the rest of its billions of years trying to pull everything back together, with nuclear forces on the smallest scale cobbling together hadrons to come together as nuclei, and on the largest scale gravity coercing and seducing gas and dust to come together as stars and planets.

Yet for all its efforts, always trying to pull everything back together, which we experience as things always falling down instead of up, the universe still is not even close, nor does it appear it ever will get close, to returning to its original compact source form.

In the process of blowing itself to smithereens, the Universe also came up with some laws of physics and some structures that led to things like big roomy atoms, lots and lots of space separating galaxies, and an expansion rate that works against the pull of gravity to keep the whole kit and caboodle from getting all squished back together.

All that law of gravity influence, all that universal effort to get to the lowest energy state and let the spoon handle slip over the bowl's edge and down into the soup, does indeed help the dust of the universe come together into planets, potatoes and people, but it can't overcome other laws of physics that keep planets in orbits so people can bake those potatoes. In fact, if that bowl with the spoon happens to be full of some of those potatoes in mashed form, even those lowly potatoes suffice to defy gravity and the universe, preventing the spoon from slipping to the bottom of the bowl.

So, that's how the physical universe works, and why mashed potatoes are preferable to chicken soup for keeping your spoon handle dry.

"But what's that got to do with consciousness and individual souls?" you're probably asking. Oh, you're not asking that? Well then, I'll ask it for you, and even better, I'll provide an answer.

For reasons I won't get into here, it appears inescapable that the Universe was, and for that matter is, conscious. This conclusion arises from the degree of interconnection of all components of the Universe, and.....but I said I wouldn't get into that, and a promise is a promise.

Anyway, at the moment of the Big Bang (and we'll focus on that one beginning of this one local Universe, though the following analysis applies equally well to the recently postulated assemblage of countless universes that may be popping into existence like popcorn at the mall theatre) imagine a consciousness that blew itself up.

Now, we said that universal laws such as "all systems seek their lowest energy state" appear to be vestiges of the original "togetherness" of the physical Universe, and evidence of the Universe trying to get itself back together.

What if some original Consciousness is doing the same thing? What if there is a universal spiritual law, equivalent to the "seeking the lowest energy state" physical law, that says the stuff of the Universe will bounce about, coalesce, and chemically react so as to try to get back to a unified consciousness?

What if just as gravity pulls dust together to form planets, the "law of consciousness" pulls nucleic acids together to form potatoes and the conscious bipedal life forms that boil, bake, and fry those potatoes?

Yet just as galaxies, planets, and mountain lakes don't seem destined to actually return to one big squished together black hole resembling the Universe before the Big Bang (or Big Quantum Inflation, or whatever we call it this month ) so too the One Big Honkin' Consciousness is destined to remain instantiated through lots of little consciousnesses. ( Hmph, I'm surprised the spell checker didn't gag on that plural form. )

Just as gravity tries to keep planets in orbit, there seems to be a universal law of spirituality that keeps pulling conscious individuals together, a law we experience in the pull to family, loved ones, and our favorite football team.

The dimensional curvatures that try to pull everything in the universe together are the remnants of the starting point before those dimensions inflated. They now exist in a perfect balance that pulls enough "stuff" together to give us a planet under our feet but still allow lots of separation to leave lots of open sky over our heads, at least in Montana. People in Manhattan are in a different universe anyway, so this doesn't apply to them.

Likewise, an incessant call to Connection with each other, and an innate and undeniable awareness of something greater, whisper to us of One Source. Yet we exist as completely separate conscious entities.

Just as planets are all pulled together by gravity yet remain in separate orbits, so conscious souls are pulled together, not in order to dissolve individuals into an oblivion of Oneness, but to exist together, still as individuals but in Connection, Communion and Unity.

Asteroids and star clusters have little choice about obeying the laws of gravity and conservation of energy. We on the other hand are not so law abiding.

If indeed there is a universal law underlying the development of individual conscious beings, ironically our very consciousness, albeit perhaps immature, empowers us to act in contradiction to that law. We merrily hate, despise, bludgeon and obliterate our fellow conscious neighbors on the planet, quite in flagrant violation of any poorly enforced universal law that might have given birth to our consciousness in the first place.

Though it took us a few thousand years to figure out the laws of gravity and electromagnetism, they've proven to be rather convenient tools. It just took a few millennia of growth of intellectual and scientific awareness for us to be able to quantify such laws and start building airplanes and power plants.

Shouldn't we ask what might happen if people began to recognize and apply in their lives a "universal consciousness" law, recognizing that our individual lives stem from One Source, and that from that Source we each experience in our yearnings the pull to bring consciousness back together.

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Planck and Einstein Wrecking Our Comfortable Foundations

Of course Space-time is too flimsy to build our reality upon it! We shouldn't be bothered by space-time that warps. In interaction events we find immutable, reliable foundations for reality!

That's it! Dang, I love these Eureka moments.

Relativity shows us that there is nothing sacrosanct about space-time coordinates. Two moving observers watching the same two events can even see the sequence of the events switched, one observer saying "A" happened first, the other observer with a different relativistic perspective swearing that "B" happened before "A". (Though mind you, the speeds and distances required for such conflicting observations ensure no violation of causality. In other words, neither observer will see a ball caught before it's thrown.)

At first these seemingly conflicting observations, time itself proving unreliable and even the sequence of events turned topsy-turvy, may seem disconcerting. But hey, if we were staking our whole foundation and security on nothing, and space-time is after all actually just about as "nothing" as you can get, we shouldn't get too upset about discovering that in fact the flimsy network of our projected Cartesian coordinates and measurements on that "Nothing" prove fragile and unreliable.

But what are we left with? What is unyieldingly, objectively, resolutely, absolute? The event! The interaction! The time of the event, the energy released or absorbed, the momentum carried away or added, velocities, lengths, and locations, these quantified values will vary from observer to observer, being mere whims of our relativistic circumstance.

But the nature of the event itself, the collision, explosion, decay, or collapse, this the observers will agree upon, even if every measured detail about it is subject to relative disagreement.

In terms relevant to us, did the ball hit the goal? When, how fast, and with what impact, our relativistic referees may disagree on, but the fact of impact, the indentation of net, the buzzer detecting contact, the bending of the supports, that qualitative fact, if not quantitative details, all observers will agree on.

This provides profound testimony in support of the premise that interactions themselves underlie the foundations of reality. Ultimately, only the fact of interaction can be trusted. And ultimately, it is interaction events upon which all existence and reality are built.

All the queasy insecurity of quantum mechanics and the confounding twists of relativistic space-time no longer vex our perception of reality once reality is perceived as built upon interactions, with everything else, including even space-time, flexibly bending to accommodate the building of those interactions upon each other.

We have long held fast to locations, times, and outcomes of mechanical trajectories as the reference points, literal and figurative, for our framework of reality.

People's reluctance to accept the inescapable conclusions of quantum mechanics and relativity arose in part because we lacked another firm foundation reference base to replace those dismantled by Planck and Einstein.

We need not despair, for there is in fact an immutable foundation upon which reality solid and reliable can be built, and it is the interaction events themselves. Upon those interaction events of the past, through the ongoing crystallizing network structure of ever forming new interactions, the events of the future are quite securely anchored, not left to dangle in Einstein's space-time that twists and bends upon the slightest gravitational breeze and merest relative motion.

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Cataclysm of Reality

It becomes clear as we peer deeper and deeper into the sub-nuclear world and discover ever more forms of matter and energy and dimensional curvatures, all blending together and changing identities as conveniently as business cards exchanged at a convention, that at the quantum level we see the remarkable flexibility and variety of the very structure of existence.

It's as if space itself is aching to give birth, the potential for virtual particles present everywhere at all times, energy impatiently putting in its appearances only to be yanked back behind the curtain not yet raised.

Matter becomes energy, energy becomes matter, virtual particles tease our detectors, quarks and gluons taunt with their "you know we're here but you can't get to us" game of hide and seek. Color charge remains invisible and always will, structures proven and verified still remain in fact only conjectures of hoped for symmetry.

We see in the sub-nuclear the whirling dance of Creation itself, possibilities unbounded by polite adherence to humanity's convenient labels.

At that quantum level, energy, that ability to alter future possible states, becomes a pure thing, too boisterous and playful to sit still for long in one form or one place.

In exasperation we long for the simplicity of merely a couple of quarks, a dab of gluon between them, and some dignified electrons in stately orbit about them. Instead we get levels of ever heavier and stranger quarks (to the point we name one of them Strange), while leptons of dubious repute and mass instigate disquiet and decay by their suspected, if not always detected, fleeting presence as agent provocateur.

In analogous example, on the surface of a tiny blue rock suspended in black void, mere chains of simple nucleic acids demonstrate dumfounding complexity in the infinite variety of forms that arise when replication runs amok.

From the cataclysm point of relativistic particle collisions we see the infinite variety of Creation, structure, and existence itself, rippling dimensions spawning vibrating strings that in their turn create other curvatures and bonds and energies, and it all shimmers in waves of potential that like all waves carry a beauty in their mathematical simplicity and an infinite complexity in their symphony.

Existence from quarks, life from DNA, and part and parcel of it all, consciousness, individual consciousness, miraculously able to model the infinite complexity of the life and structure that gave birth to that consciousness, models constructed out of math of consciousness' own creation, elegant and simple equations and symmetries.

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Reassurance

Right from the beginning, entailed within the very essence of the beginning of all, is Purpose and hope!

The Beginning

There, in the beginning, at least the beginning of this neighborhood universe we share, can be seen a stunningly elegant simplicity.

In that flickering moment of uncertainty, "uncertainty" in the most profound and literal sense as defined by the immutable laws of physics,............

........was born the makings of the matter that would allow existence of entities,.......

.........and from that same potential in different guise,.....

....energy, the opportunity to connect, link, and communicate among those entities.

There, in that creation born of instability, was another critical ingredient to the recipe,...........

..........necessary for the title "individual" to be added to "entities".......space,..........expanded, multidimensional space,............the stuff of freedom,

......the foundation of identity.

Those individual entities, in myriad forms from hadrons to galaxies, un-tethered from their past form by the very existence of past....past, present, and future,..... together a synonym for time,....

.....the very geometry of change,.......the very Source of growth.

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Void Within the Whole

The presumption is that before space-time, before the Singularity that birthed the Big Bang, before inflating dimensions, there was Nothing. Creation occurred, something came into existence, existence itself became possible.

That presumption is, it turns out, completely unnecessary!

The inflating dimensions, the blossoming of space-time, can just as well be perceived as an opening up of nothingness, the expansion of a void, the initiation of emptiness, a making of room for.....well, for particles, planets and people.

In this perspective this blossoming of three spatial dimensions to eventually create that dark emptiness that surrounds our planet can be seen as occurring within a greater surrounding existence. (Oh, for the moment let's not quibble about trying to visualize the dimensional structure and physics of something surrounding our entire universe.)

The Nothingness of space-time was created out of, and in the midst of, an existent Source. Only then did room exist for unfolding events leading to protons and pions, planets and people.

Here, in the very fabric of interlaced dimensions, resides one of the biggest clues to the overarching laws that govern our universe. Space, volume, and void unfolded to form an emptiness that could then be filled with individual, separate, distinct entities.

Beyond the initial Singularity need not be Nothing. It is on this side of the singularity that empty Nothing appeared, albeit initially rather densely packed with annihilating matter/anti-matter and the ensuing radiation storm.

Obviously it's not easy to come by meaningful analogies to illustrate multidimensional, extra-universal concepts. But for lack of anything better, please consider the following clumsy attempt.

Imagine the formation of a geode. Deep within an endless, mountainous matrix of rock, titanic forces induce a small crack, through which acidic waters flow, forming a tiny void, an opening that grows larger but remains within the mountainous matrix of rock. This represents the inflating dimensions that give rise to our space.

The process continues. Solutions of suspended minerals present in the void allow crystals to begin to form, condensing out according to bonding angles and physical laws that define their geometries and growth rates, crystals that could never have formed in the solid rock matrix, though all the constituents were present.

These beautiful, growing crystals in the geode correspond to the physical reality we experience in this world, interaction events growing through time according to the geometries dictated by the speed of light.

As I said, it is a clumsy analogy. But with or without analogy, I would hope to prompt a sharpened awareness of just how infinite are the possibilities beyond the initial Singularity, and no a priori reason exists to assume "nothing" before the Big Bang.

Perhaps a better analogy would simply be to view the Big Bang as a photonegative of how we usually think of it. Instead of a bright flash in the midst of dark nothingness, reverse that shading and imagine the bright flash replaced instead by an expanding void of space (and geometrically connected time) in the middle of a surrounding (though imperceptible) essence.

I would also hope to shift our mental focus on the Big Bang away from the unimaginable energy, the unfathomable density of the condensing matter, the freezing out of today's four forces from the original unified force, and instead pause to consider the momentous meaning of the inflating dimensions, the space itself, the astounding and contingent void necessary for existence of anything "individual".

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Space for Individuals

There is no greater and more critical evidence for a Creation intended to give rise to individuals than the creation of space itself, the essence of the separation necessary for existence of anything we can call "individual".

If you were to watch the event of the birth of this universe (I'm not sure why I'm not quite fully comfortable calling it the Big Bang ), and if while watching this unfolding you were to ask yourself what each development would lead to, you could, a few billion years before the fact, surmise what the future would hold.

I think I would like to call the event the "Great Blossoming". I've no illusion that such a title will ever catch on with the scientific community or general public, but indeed, "blossoming" is what it resembles when viewed from outside this universe.

There, perhaps as a quantum fluctuation in some corner of some other universe, began to uncoil dimensions, three of space, one of time. What a truly remarkable concept!.....the very structure of space and time itself coming into being, and with them all the physical rules that would define interaction across those rippling, newborn dimensions.

You, as observer in this first instant of birth of this universe, viewing from your outside vantage point the inflating three dimensional matrix of space, would note that it provides opportunity for separation, for distance, for existence of more than One.

Immediately, in that first infinitesimal moment of creation, you see that this universe possesses the potential to contain multiple individual entities, by virtue of the separation offered by this new marvel "space".

Densely packed into the finite volume, a volume not small because "small" is a relative term and there is nothing else with which to compare, resides the very essence for existence within this new universe, energy.

The very structural foundations of this universe are such as to allow condensation of this energy into entities constrained to existence within finite volumes of the rapidly expanding spatial dimensions. Within multiple billionths of billionths of what will 18 billion years later be called "seconds", already this potential is realized, energy, the very gift of existence, already condensing out into particles, and most amazing, these are separate particles, individuals, identifiable and detectable.

Individuals!......This was what those first moments of inflating dimensions portended, this was the singular, unique gift lying within the uncoiling spatial dimensions, the gift of individual existence.

In that other odd dimension, time, we already see at the moment of first existence the potential nature of this universe. It will be time that will constrain all energy, defining transit rates across the uncoiling dimensions.

Hence, whatever individual entities arise do not exist alone. They can interact with each other. Energy will connect the physical entities, while not negating their individual existence.

If one did not even know what space and time were, if you were watching this exploding universe while you were trying to comprehend its nature, in your efforts to define these oddities we refer to as spatial dimensions, I believe you would have no other recourse in your definition than to simply say "dimensions are that which allow existence of separation....separation between individual entities and across the spatially extended structure of an entity.....separation between and across individually identifiable entities.

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God in Quantized Space-Time

The most fundamental principle of physical existence is the quantum potential. I use the term "quantum potential" to describe the consequences of the uncertainty principle. From the uncertainty principle arises the opportunity for spontaneous appearance of matter and energy at the miniscule Planck scales. In its more remarkable extreme of behavior, the quantum uncertainty principle, or quantum potential, gives birth to even the very fabric of space-time. In the particulars of that birth process all laws of physics that will govern that corner of the universes arise.

In this we see the very quintessential essence of the "I Will Be What I Will Be". Planck, Heisenberg, et al, gave eloquent mathematical formulation to this ancient self-appellation.

Ultimately, no more fundamental principle of physics is yet conceived than the uncertainty potential, for while all other physical laws and constants may vary from universe to universe, the uncertainty potential is what allows existence of these universes in the first place.

And what in common do each of these universes share in order to even wear the title of "universe"? Some dimensional extension, some inflated metric over which some kind of interactions can transpire. In other words, some volume....and "dimensional volume", in its simplest and most profound definition, means nothing less than that with the potential to harbor individual entities, of whatever unimaginable scale and form they may take in any particular universe.

And so we come to the very essence of all existence, inescapable, universal, and extra-universal.

We have found the universal potential for the indeterminate, an unbounded potential present in all existence in all universes, an unbounded, indeterminate potential that gave birth to all those universes.

And in each of those universes we find dimensions, inflated, unwinding, uncoiling, expanded dimensions, which is to say, the opportunity for existence of individual entities.

This then, this primal, universally shared essence of all existence, shows us in its indeterminate, unbounded potential the nature of the Source, and in the one spatial trait shared by all universes, the underlying Purpose.

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The Big Bang, the appearance of life, evolution......

God does play dice! But the dice are loaded!

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Morphing Universes

Through the ages, humanity's view of the universe has regularly changed, sometimes painstakingly over centuries of discovery, sometimes violently during a few days of invasion by foreigners with different gods.

Greeks saw fire and water and earth. Asians saw a giant turtle. Our scientists see rippling sub-nuclear strings and curved dimensions.

It seems the height of hubris to think we have arrived at the final answer, the inarguable Truth, that which will stand verified and substantiated as future millennia pass in review.

If honestly and objectively assessed, one would have to conclude from humanity's panoply of universes that the only certainty is that in a few centuries at most, and more likely in a few months, our "sure and certain foundation of reality" will once again change its ephemeral costume.

Again, if considered honestly and objectively, one would have to admit that for the average person making their way to the office, or school, or field, or pyramid, or altar, or hospital, that day's grand conceptions for the form of the universe matter not a whit.

Well, maybe those models of the universe matter a little, or else the pyramid and altar wouldn't exist in the first place. But when one's child is sick, and you're hungry, and you wonder how well your tribe or nation's army is keeping the threatening invaders or terrorists at bay, all those universes and their abstract models and their descriptive equations don't really mean a great deal.

In moments of crisis and terror, in moments of love and embrace, all is the same, and always has been the same, and all the images and models and structures and equations of all the universes wither into inconsequential dust.

Surely there, in the anguish and joy, passion and compassion of the human spirit, surely there resides a trustworthy and more enduring conception of reality than all our fleeting universes dictated by doctrine and equations.

So let us playfully calculate our equations, let our curiosity explore with happy abandon the infinite possibilities for fleeting universes awaiting our momentary discovery......and let us humbly acknowledge a reality deeper and unchanging, awaiting our Choice in each moment of life.

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Reassurance: the holistic thread woven through the structure of the universe.

Holistic Threads Through Physics

Do we need higher level holistic laws to explain physical life, and at an even higher level, spiritual life?........Huh?

Let's take a deep breath and I will attempt to explain the question before repeating the question. Trust me, this will hurt me more than it hurts you, and it won't last long.

As an example of a low-level, reductionist scientific law we can consider the laws governing collisions between molecules of air in the room. Akin to the laws governing billiard balls, atoms can bounce off each other, exchange some energy, rebound, stick together, and play catch with electrons.

As an example of a higher level holistic law, a different set of scientific equations get pulled out of the toolbox when the time comes to figure out how to move those air molecules around in your air conditioning system, how big a heater you will need, and how the chimney should be constructed to pull smoke out of the fireplace.

Those laws describing the motions of air in a room are far more convenient than trying to calculate such things from fundamental equations describing behavior of individual air molecules. Yet those "higher level holistic laws" can be statistically derived from the reductionist laws that apply to the smallest, individual components comprising the air.

Whew. With that little bit of background, let me repeat the earlier question, since we've both probably forgotten it by now.

"Do we need higher level holistic laws to explain physical life, and at an even higher level, spiritual life?"

Which is to say, is life so bizarre and complex that we can't even see a relation between its unpredictable antics and the laws of nature that govern atoms, air conditioners, and galaxies?

Instinctively I would react by saying "no", we don't need higher level holistic laws contrived specifically to explain life, as if life were some alien intruder to our physical universe, possessing some diplomatic immunity to the physical laws that govern all the parts and pieces of physical existence.

It intuitively seems that a single thread, a single dynamic, should run from the reductionist level of particles to the highest holistic levels of life in all its manifestations.

I briefly mentioned the laws of thermodynamics (and air conditioners) that can be derived from statistical application of molecular behaviors integrated over large scales. The higher level, holistic reality, though not intrinsically evident at the reductionist level of colliding molecules, nonetheless does seamlessly arise from that reductionist level.

Can the same be said for life itself?.....and even for principles of Unity of that life?

Let's start by looking at the deepest reductionist levels of physics and seeing what patterns we can build from that foundation. Warning: You are about to read the most condensed version of physical existence ever, bordering on collapsing into a singularity.

* At the deepest level we see principles of indeterminacy (usually called "uncertainty").

* From that arises the very potential for existence.

* That resulting existence arises from inflating and vibrating dimensions.

* Inflated dimensions and their associated fields are nothing more than a medium with the profound characteristic of allowing separation, the prime prerequisite for existence of individual entities.

* It is through inflated dimensions that oscillations in other dimensions can give rise to temporally stable structures (matter).

* Through these dimensions the very existence of those structures (matter) is inextricably also associated with fields of potential interaction, connecting those temporally stable structures.

That little summary should leave us catching our breath! Having raced headlong through that brief gauntlet description of the very beginning of existence, let's not dare return to it, but for now continue on.

Individual entities......

inextricably intertwined and interacting,

even if through fields that decrease exponentially with distance,

that interaction unavoidably acting as an exchange of information,

facilitated by some force carrying particle.....

Herein we see the foundations of the nature of life itself, individual entities, interacting and unavoidably exchanging information.

Interactions, information exchanges, and associated bonds led within brief moments after the Big Bang to formation of new structures, the individual strings, membranes, leptons and quarks. Time passes, and these entities still defined by their resonant energies at the sub-nuclear level combined into ever-greater complexity of protons, neutrons, atoms, molecules, stars, and galaxies. All these higher-level structures' existence remained dependent upon assemblages, interchanges, and exchanges among still existent, individual, lower scale, entities.

With each new complexity of structure, new forms enabled yet more and higher complexities of structure and heretofore non-existent forms of interaction, which is to say, information exchange.

Protons allowed atoms, atoms allowed electron shell spectra, nuclei allowed nuclear fusion, fusion allowed more atoms that facilitated organic chemical reaction, those chemical reactions grew to allow replication, replication continued to allow tribes, and from thence regional wars, and eventually worldwide economies......

And through all those levels, runs a connecting thread, long hidden, but perhaps now revealed as brightly colored.

That single thread, spun from quantum fluctuations in vibrating dimensions,

by its more profound and basic nature inevitably weaving individual entities,

entities unavoidably connected by interaction through the fields born of their own existence,

entities combining in ever more complex forms,

combinations not destroying the individual entities,

but by maintaining their individual identity, empowering them in their aggregate to form ever more complex, and still individual, entities,

that in turn are bound by inexorable interactions,

which build to yet higher levels by applying integration of information from others at their own level....

and on the process goes.

That bright thread spun from the loom of earliest creation weaves an ever more complex pattern of......Unity......the creation of higher holistic forms by the mutually constructive, cooperative interaction of lower level constituent individuals.

An elegant continuity appears in protons formed of quarks and civilizations formed of people.

For those people averse to invoking Purpose in the study of life, since "Purpose" holds connotations of future goals and teleology, let them instead look to the data of the past and present while avoiding implications about the future. The appearing pattern, universal and bound in the very nature of all existence, is a pattern of ever growing unity.

Though disguised by forms of ever-higher holistic complexity, the same primal structure of existence itself is seen in both the Big Bang and in the Internet, that is, the creation of completely new entities by information interaction among existing entities.

This is the primal mover, the foundation of existence, the ongoing force of Creation.

Any natural trend, repeatable and verifiable, must eventually be considered for promotion to the rank of "scientific law". If for the moment we dub the aforementioned trend "Unity Integration", what implications does it have?

Should we expect this natural state of ongoing Creation to stop? In parallel to those tedious Bible chapters about lineage, we describe a new lineage, quarks begat protons, protons begat atoms, atoms begat molecules, molecules begat organic chains, and so on to life, tribes, and political parties.

If "Unity integration" dictates evolution of higher, more complex forms, what might we anticipate? Does this merely imply ever-progressing forms of government, economic systems, and communication? Or can we look even beyond that?

Aren't more clever forms of communication and social structure actually just variations on the same theme, analogous to protons eventually forming the complete families of atoms and molecules, but all molecules, even the most complex, are still molecules, not really an entirely new form of higher complexity.

It was the linking of molecules into replicating cells that really represented the next quantum step in increasing Unity integration, which is to say, a totally different, higher level of complex being.

So too we must wonder what the principle of growing Unity might imply for the human race, beyond mere fine-tuning of communication and social organization.

What completely new, and likely unimaginable form of existence might arise from individual conscious humans cooperatively interacting? Considering that dimensions inflated and at least one entire universe came into being to facilitate existence through unity of individual entities, can we even rule out possibilities of further such profound dimensional structural changes to further facilitate the ongoing path of greater Unity?

Of course with humanity, one aspect of continuation of growing Unity does differ from the events that brought quarks together into protons and molecules together into replicating cells. We each have a Choice about whether to personally participate in the next step toward Unity.

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Doubt: Aren't all these thoughts and all our beliefs and all our consciousness merely a product of a sea of electro-chemical reactions in our brain? Unity, schmunity, we're just exercising that gray organ in our skull, or some part of that gray organ is watching the other parts of the brain exercise, and we and our consciousness and our identity all just come down to neurons and synapses.

**The mind and the spirit** , one giving birth to the other, but which to which? Or is the question a duality irrelevance, a fruitless attempt to over analyze and craft simple models that we can pretend we understand?

The topic arises from my efforts to resolve my spiritual experiences with my mental way of being. And the effort leads to intellectual cartwheels tumbling into dead end alleys. I get no more verifiable answers than I got when this afternoon I marveled at the swarm of little wasps or bees busily flying in and out of the juniper tree at the front window, little mandibles greedily working on some unseen treat near the ends of the branches. Or were they collecting material for nest building? What about the tree could possibly attract so many buzzing visitors?

What about my thoughts and feelings and instincts and intuition and needs compels me to buzz about the inscrutable mysteries of mind and brain and soul? Why do we even have those three different definitions in our language?....two of which illusively defy definition.

Yet I find our groping understanding of the terms profoundly relevant to how we live our daily lives. Surely we act and react and choose differently if we believe our consciousness arises from only a soup of electrochemical processes constructed from DNA programs and sensory inputs, versus perceiving the conscious being as existing independent of the "soup", the brain and its functions providing only a distorted lens through which to view this world from the vantage of a bipedal brain transportation unit.

Soul is born of the physical brain?....or soul activates and defines the brain's functioning? Brain provides expression of the soul, making the soul real?....or physical brain shackles the soul, limiting its perception and experience to only that of which the bodily brain is capable?

I think the brain and our body determine what we see and experience. But the soul chooses how we will see and experience, and from among options the brain provides, the soul chooses how we will respond to what we see and experience.

So which defines which, brain creating soul or soul animating brain?....Yes....to both. They are different components, but not divisible components, of the conscious individual.

Does the right hand wash the left, or vice versa? It is a silly question. And perhaps questions of soul versus mind versus brain are also silly. For this time in this worldly life, our souls experience their existence through the brain. Our mind and its mental experience obviously cannot be divorced from brain. Yet I know with immutable certainty that soul's existence, even if not the soul's experiences, stands independent of the physical brain. When the electrochemical processes cease, the identity created by the free choices while the soul had use of that brain will continue, its next form of consciousness perhaps now instantiated through some other system of experience.

And for now, to whatever limited degrees our brain allows, we can choose to explore beyond the sensory inputs and genetic responses of the brain. We can at least ponder the nature of our conscious being, and in moments of calm in the roiling electrochemical soup in our head, momentarily sense our own existence, not merely the existence of brain in this world, but of soul sprung of and part of eternal Source.

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PART 3

(back to top)

Any human made image of God, any human contrived description of God, any human created conception of God, diminishes God. Our idols, stelae, altars, chapels, temples, churches, chants and hymns are for a small and petty God, carved, shrunk, and packaged to accommodate our little minds, petty needs, and selfish desires. One way any cult, sect, denomination or religion captures the essence of God is by providing another example of the boundless, infinite patience and grace of the loving Sustainer in tolerating our self-serving little theologies and childish dogmas.

Welcome to doubts, and reassurances, about religions, faith, sects, cults, creeds, denominations, institutions, mythology, and our seeming proclivity to believe almost anything small enough to fit into our mind.

Doubts about gurus, shamans, priests, anyone with the word "holiness" in their title, all those perfect-hair guys on TV asking for our money, and especially authors of spiritual self-help books like this one.

Spiritual Leaders Should Get Out of the Way

When spiritual "leaders" make grandiose claims of visions and revelations and chats with ethereal beings, one should be wary of arrogant implications that we should worship the spiritual "leader" as someone special.

Spiritual insights are intensely personal, and should be laid before others in humility as an offering for the listener to take or leave as best befits their own personal situation, needs, and understanding. The messenger blessed to deliver those insights should then get out of the way of that other person traveling their own spiritual path.

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Somewhere on Mount Sinai, circa 1280 BC

"Oi vey, not again", groaned God as His/Her eyes rolled up under weary lids and a wrinkled palm slapped His/Her forehead in frustration. Wheeling around S/He fires at Moses: "You want a what?!...a tent?!....I give you pillars of smoke, columns of fire, divided seas, and you want a chintzy tent of cloth and sticks to worship?!"

"Look," said Yahweh/God, "I thought we agreed to leave all that behind in Egypt. I didn't fit between the columns in the Egyptians' Karnak temple, I got claustrophobic in that overrated pyramid thing.... You at least had the "one God" monotheism idea down, well, more or less,... and I thought you could finally get folks to see the Truth and reality that is everywhere!

"If You would just show yourself....." hesitatingly began Moses.

"I do show myself!" thundered Jehovah, "It is, I am, all around you!"

"I know, I know," pleaded a back peddling Moses from behind his open, protectively raised palms, "but..."

"It happens every time," rolled on the thunder, Yahweh walking distractedly around the mountain. "Buddha, look what they'll do to Buddha, a message of enlightenment turned into cartoon characters."

Not bothering to guess what that comment might refer to, Moses put a consoling arm around the big One's shoulders. "How's this sound? We give them the altar, and building, and gold, and smoke and mirrors, but we keep it small, see, we have folks gather outside instead of inside, so while they come for the show, they can't help but also see Your mountains, the birds, oh yea, Your gorgeous sunsets, sunrises, and those towering cumulous clouds....You really outdid yourself on those...

A holy sigh of resignation cut off Moses' pitch. Shaking His/Her head, chin propped on the hands that had created this and no small number of other universes, Yahweh groused "Place a shiny hat on a guy's head, they follow him as king. Pile up a bunch of rocks as a pyramid and they flock to it from miles around. Carve a cartoon cow and they will give their last scrap of food and money to it. Wave a colored piece of cloth around, call it a flag and accompany it with some brass band music, and they will go die for it for cryin' out loud! I tell ya', it's a mystery.

"They want a temple? We'll give 'em a temple. Your "keep it small" idea ain't half bad, ya' know. God knows what they'll come up with if we don't give them something...Har! That's a good one!" (Moses managed to force a polite smile. He still didn't get most of The Big Guy's humor).

"OK, let's get to work. We've got to make sure this thing's sturdy enough so it doesn't fall on their punkin' heads in the first wind-storm. But, listen up Moses my man (Moses involuntarily shuddered, as this statement usually preceded yet another onerous assignment)...This doesn't let you off the hook for trying to hammer a little Truth into their hard heads and showing them the beauty of Creation. This temple stuff just means you will have an even tougher job...

"..it can't get tougher" mumbled Moses under his breath

"..it will get tougher!" cracked the thunder.

("When will I learn I can't get away with anything", thought Moses, "He must have hearing like a bat.")

"The icons hide the Truth!" vented the loving and exasperated Sustainer. "The crowns hide the fact the king is a crook, the temple hides the fact God (that's me in case you've forgotten) is everywhere, the jewelry hides the cold heart within, the Grecian Formula hides the age difference"...

(By now Moses had learned to not even try to understand all the topics these soliloquies would drift into.)

"Teaching Truth will get harder. Believe me, this is only the beginning. First a tent and altar, then a temple. A priest today, judges tomorrow, before you know it they'll be demanding a king to kick 'em around."

"That's nuts..."

"I know", the shrug of resigned shoulders growing dimmer through a thickening cloud. "But what's a God to do?"

"Well you are God after all..."

"Wait! Don't even go there!" You know I vowed the gift of freedom to my children. That's the whole point of this trying little experiment after all."

"But what if they make idiotic choices..."

"They always make idiotic choices! No wait, that's just my disappointment speaking. You'd think I'd be used to that by now, huh?"

The Creator continued, "It's not open to discussion. Free I made them, free they stay. They want to turn their back on all I give them, that's their choice."

"Don't worry", the Source reassured Moses, "I'll stick around, even in that cheesy tent-temple. The crowds will eat up slitting some poor sheep's throats. I swear, it still hurts me every time one of those little guys dies. They're part of me, you know. Oh well, at this point in humanity's spiritual infancy it's what they need, it's what they get".

"But they'll eventually learn, right?" piped up Moses in an attempt at encouragement. "Hey, try this on for size. Maybe You could tone down that glow and thunder and come teach them Yourself! Yea, that's the ticket! Come walk the roads with them, heal some folks, teach the Truth..."

"You don't want to know what they'll do when I try that. And would you believe, when that grisly little venture's all said and done, they will dilute even it down to icons" said Yahweh/God, a sad, distant expression on His/Her face, as if Her/His thoughts were on a hill faraway.

"But hey, that's another story. You've got enough problems with this tent-temple thing. Look", as they walk down the hill, a particularly pretty sunset glowing on the billowing cumulous clouds, "we need to come up with a snappier name for this porta-temple,....how's 'tabernacle' grab you?"

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So from where do all those diverse religions arise? Isn't their very diversity and the sociological and psychological reasons for their appearance in the first place sufficient reason to doubt?

The Source of Religions

This morning I have some sense of things unfolding within the Purpose. Perhaps I have that sense this morning because everything seems so totally hosed up in my life, and I desperately need that sense of "it will be OK, it's all for a reason".

There is always that question, how much of our faith and belief arises out of simple desperation, for without faith and belief we could not go on.

I don't subscribe to such a theory though, at least not usually.

Sure, we may convolute our beliefs to conveniently ease our pain and make ourselves the ultimate winners over the bad guys and guarantee that we go to Heaven. The fine details of our beliefs, at which altar we burn candles and to which saint we pray, certainly appear to outsiders as purely self-contrived hokum.

But I believe that overall, "believing" in the first place does not arise from simply a desperate mental gymnastic providing escape from our wretched worldly condition. For you see, it would be far easier to simply not care about our condition. A huge portion of our misery arises from grief and loss and emptiness and loneliness. If we are going to look for a way out of our misery via mental gymnastics, then it would be far easier to simply cease to care enough to grieve and sorrow, instead of contriving elaborate models of gods and heavens, models that by their nature must fly in the face of worldly common sense. Of course many people do resort to this former recourse, turning off their feelings, compassion, and connection as a way to avoid the otherwise inevitable, overwhelming grief and sorrow.

But of course there is still that inconvenient little matter of our own death, and our programmed fear of that death. That fear of our own annihilation is not so readily turned off by whim and wish. So that fear of oblivion certainly provides ample motive to create elaborate models of afterlives and heavens.

So is that the source of all our religions? We're simply too scared to face the unavoidable reality of our pending demise so, like frightened children, we concoct elaborate tales and models and faiths to ease our blind date with death?

That premise is actually hard to argue against. Without question, uncountable masses have for millennia engaged in ritual, sacrifice, and general towing of the social line out of fear of eternal oblivion or hell. As one of the few inhibiting influences on our enthusiastic propensity for interpersonal larceny and violence, belief in a hereafter has played a pivotal role in fostering at least the occasional fleeting blossoming of civilizations, such as they are. But "blossoming civilizations" digresses to a different topic for another time.

Returning to the premise that simple cowardice about the prospect of the eternal demise of our own personal consciousness underlay the foundation of mythologies and religions, we need to look more closely at the nature of true faith.

I have long argued that a significant number of the people in church, synagogue, temple, or mosque on any given morning are not even remotely committed to the beliefs represented by that institution. Their participation simply provides an insurance policy, their alms paying the premiums, to ensure entry into paradise.

That promise of eternal life is the greatest marketing pitch of all time, putting to shame even the promise of boundless sex that comes with every soda, soap, and sports car sold today. You better believe, that heaven and eternal life sales pitch has, does, and will pack the house on Sabbath morning.

But if we look closer at those people on their knees on Sunday, Saturday, or Friday morning, we see some, in fact, more than a few, for whom the ritual and liturgy and rules and regulations are not actually the most important thing. We see people that don't just follow the rules about "don't do this and don't think that", but proactively do actions, actions of senseless compassion and irrational generosity.

We see devotees for whom their religion is not belief and guidelines, but a way of living, a way of bringing their God into the world. We see people not assaulting others' lives in the name of religion, but giving their own lives in the name of a spirit of compassion.

We see people not seeking to please their God by robes, rites, and ritual, but joyfully seeking to invite their God into their hearts, lives, and activities.

In how such lives are led we see a compassionate faith that goes far beyond superficial religion.

This we cannot explain by reference to a fear of death that motivated myths of Heaven.

In the cold, analytical evaluation of beliefs, religions, and institutions, humanity's almost universal fear of personal end can certainly be invoked as a pretty darned significant motivator for tales of gods eternal and paradise never ending.

But such evaluation of history of religion cannot experience, cannot feel, that core of faith that goes far beyond mere self-preservation. Inarguably, fear of death makes for one heck of a marketing opportunity for any religion peddling eternal life. But in the eyes, hearts, souls, giving, compassion, warmth, tolerance and ready forgiveness of some of the faithful, we experience factors that do not lend themselves to ready analysis based on logic of worldly needs.

We find something more, something deeper, a deeply personal, selfless willingness to sacrifice that arises not from mere recitation of credos.

In that which is intangible and immeasurable, in a gentle touch, in an unconditional welcome, we find the essence that testifies to the foundations that underlie spiritual awareness. From that foundation, into the world and distorted by the world, grow our various religious institutions with their structures and systems that must accommodate our fears and human nature.

That foundation of nascent spiritual awareness speaks of Truth, and Spirit, and Source, and the nature of our relationship to that Truth, Spirit, and Source. That foundation, though often well hidden and disguised, underlies much of what we call "religion".

Much of the history of church and religion can indeed be analyzed by, and in its superficial forms explained by, the sciences of sociology, psychology, and anthropology.

But at the intensely personal level, that level of individual Choice of how to respond to your world, your life, and the person standing before you, we come face to face with those foundational issues of spirit. In the many moments of each day when we choose whether to strive for deep awareness of that living, breathing, feeling person before us; when we choose whether to look up at the heavens or down at our own feet; when we choose whether to open to whatever might lie beyond us or to remain closed in our own needs and fears, then we share a moment that every human has, does, and will experience.

Those are the moments of personal awareness of Spirit, even if dim and initially unrecognized, that through human history have given birth to faiths borne not of fear, but of courage.

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When it comes to the carnage of the Old Testament of the Bible, whether they admit it or not, Christians have to experience some cognitive dissonance and doubt in trying to accommodate its blood, gore, and genocide with the Good News of forgiveness, tolerance, peace, and love delivered by that latter day Meschioch, Yeshu.

Joshua, Terrorism, Holy Scripture,.........

............ **..and Us**

Spiritual growth?....or heresy and apostasy....which better describes the change over the years in my reaction to reading the book of Joshua in the Bible?

Today I read Joshua chapter 10. On the carnage goes as in the preceding chapters, young girls, infants, grandmothers, toddlers, running, screaming, pleading for mercy, as Joshua's sword neatly hacks off little hands raised in defense, splits tear-streaked, graying heads, and opens fleeing, pregnant women.

That's what this chapter of the Bible is all about. I've just filled in a few salient, but undeniable, details.

verse 39: "They took the city, its king and its villages, and put them to the sword. Everyone in it they totally destroyed. They left no survivors." Ditto for a host of other cities given similar treatment at the hand of the swarming Israelites.

I think of the gentle folk in quiet villages I've been blessed to visit in Morocco, Sinai, Kurdistan, and Turkey, the pastoral morning scenes of children taking flocks up hillsides, girls going to the well, old women tending the morning fire....I imagine villages just like this as they are gripped by terror at the first sight of invading Israelites, strangers never before seen, strangers whose blood splattered, murderous faces would be the last thing seen by those children.

When I was a child I read these same chapters. I read as a child raised in a Southern Baptist church, a young person unquestioningly faithful to his upbringing, spiritually patriotic to the chosen nation of God's people described in the Sunday School stories.

Amorites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Canaanites, obviously these were the bad guys, obviously the Israelites were the good guys. There was of course no supporting evidence for these distinctions, it was just so.

As a young person I innocently read of the slaughters without filling in the image of what they really entailed, and I read with a certain celebratory pleasure, good guys winning, God on their side, bad guys getting what they deserved, albeit for unspecified reasons....but we do not need reasons, right? We just have to have faith we are on God's side, and following God's instructions.

Yesterday I read with sorrow of the ongoing horrors in Uganda, the Lord's Revolutionary Army attacking villages, butchering people young and old, girls and grandmothers. I wonder if the mystic leader of the Lord's Revolutionary Army read the book of Joshua.

I wonder about the faith of this leader, and the faith of a terrorist setting a bomb detonator in the name of Allah, and the faith of a modern day Israeli bulldozing another Palestinian home.

But I can only wonder about others' faith, including Joshua's. I can know only the history of my own faith, including that of an eight year old Southern Baptist, cheering on Joshua as he smote ( read "dismembered" ) another evil Canaanite (read "seven year old girl" ).

I had faith, an embarrassingly blind and unquestioning "faith". Right was right, wrong was wrong....well, no, not exactly. Right was what God' chosen people did, wrong must have been whatever their hapless victims did, although what God's chosen people did would have been terribly wrong if the other guys had done it.

Fortunately, eight year olds do not bother with such complicating considerations. Unfortunately, many adults also do not trouble themselves with such inconvenient complications.

I said I had a kind of "faith" as an eight year old as during Bible reading I cheered on the Israelites, which after all was equivalent to cheering on God. In their victories I gained hope for victories of my own, eternal victories of good over evil ( albeit their differences sometimes indistinguishable ) and by extension to some unimaginable miracle, victory over the bullies that tormented me at school.

I asked at the beginning of this essay "spiritual growth?...or heresy and apostasy?" I asked that in light of the revulsion, disgust, and sorrow I now feel upon reading about Joshua's foreign policy of merciless annihilation.

( I'm trying to transcribe this from handwritten notes almost illegible because of 'Tasha kitty invading my lap and assaulting my clipboard, while loudly purring ).

Undoubtedly many good church-going folks would decry my soft hearted squeamishness as lack of faith in God and unwillingness to commit my life to God's perfect will. But that said, the funny thing is I would swear it feels like my faith, and commitment, have grown since that time of being eight years old.

If Joshua had to cleave six month old Perizzites in half, so be it.

We'll just say Joshua was doing his job. But I know I've got a different job, and in full faith and belief, I can say that invasions and burning and butchering were not, and are not, something in which to take pleasure.

Rights and wrongs of 3400 years ago are not my worry. We need only worry about rights, wrongs, and the Creator's Purpose today.....and we should think twice, and pray more than twice, before extrapolating the genocides of 3400 years ago as excuse today for us to bomb, dispossess, or repress whoever we conveniently label as modern day Canaanites, infidels, gentiles, or heathens.

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So we open the door to doubt, daring to question whether our religious constructs express the perfect will of God, or instead express the perfect Love of a God willing to tolerate our spiritual infancy. Having dared to open that door, are we left with only an empty void of doubt if we dare to walk through it?

Blinding Glare of Ignorance

How little we know.

I just read in the Bible the 14th chapter of the book of John. What do these words of Yeshu (Jesus) mean?! I don't know.

I listen to the announcer on the Christian radio station quote Bible verses, and then expound on what power the verses contain. How would that announcer answer if asked to explain those verses?

In such situations don't many of us simply recite credos and dogma and what we learned in Sunday School?...and we recite it all from rote, not really knowing the meaning of what we say. Or is that just me not understanding, and all the other people quoting Bible verses understand them in profound and personal depth?

I just read an article on quantum loop gravity. Cool stuff! But those boys inventing it don't understand it any more than most of us in the pews understand John 14.

In recent weeks (October 2008) the worldwide economy has collapsed in a messy heap, leaving the "experts" in disarray and conflict regarding what should have been done and what should be done. Sounds to me like the big boys understand economics about as well as I understand loop quantum gravity.

As much as we hate to admit it to ourselves or to others, almost all of us don't really understand squat about much of anything.

Of course we think we understand some things.....which is probably far more dangerous than realizing we actually do not understand.

Look at the impassioned debates people have in recent years about politics and the economy. Those debates unfold with such certainty from both sides. But obviously at least one side in the argument must definitely be wrong. That being a given, do we really believe that the other side is absolutely right?

Our beliefs, science, economics, and faith today bear little resemblance to those dictated by general wisdom only a few years ago. And we dare to think that today's beliefs, science, economics, and faith are right? Such silliness!

I'm reminded of some legally but not quite totally blind friends of mine who deny to others and themselves that they are almost completely blind. That allows them to accomplish some amazing things, and also leads them to some pretty impressive accidents.

Doesn't it seem easier to just admit we are blind, be it literally, intellectually, or spiritually? That need not mean we sit in the dark security of our mental living room and never grope into the surrounding unknown. To admit our various versions of blindness simply liberates us from the dictates of our imagination that so readily fills in the unseen blanks in our understanding.

With our admission of how little we really understand, we open the door to a bright world of adventurous exploration of all that we wish to understand.

It is a step of great spiritual maturity to proclaim, "I don't know!"....and perhaps the wisest thing we will ever say, almost as wise as the silence of a person who attentively listens.

Of course "not understanding" is a cause of no small distress. We desperately want to understand. The unknown is as fearsome as a dark room. We require some foundation, some reference point, some intellectual harbor from which we can launch at least the mundane activities of another day of living.

But we can focus on what we do know, what we know without words or dogma or verses, but what we know in our heart and soul. And we will find that such ineffable knowledge suffices, to a surprising degree. As we navigate through one day after another relying on heart's faith while confessing our intellectual ignorance, we may find that what we do not understand is not essentially important after all. We may find that the knowledge of the heart and soul, though not expressible in mere words or theories or ideas, provides a far more enduring and reliable foundation than any fleeting mental construct, trembling theory, or teetering credo.

We may find that upon turning from the glare of our insistent intellectual understanding, the ensuing darkness of our worldly ignorance makes way for another light, a light of the heart, a light soft, a light gently revealing, a light welcoming our exploration and encouraging our growth.

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Doubt:

The sometimes random, often arbitrary, and usually socially and politically expedient changes in religious beliefs of individuals, nations, and even religious institutions themselves, surely testifies to the innate contrived nature and invalidity of those religious beliefs.

Can we possibly find any reassurance in religious beliefs perpetually changing and unreliable?

Spiritual Darwinism

The growth of human spiritual perception...

Absolutely none of our beliefs have ever been right.

None of them ever will be right, at least not completely right

It is a tragicomic fiasco.

It is birth.

How did we ever progress?

Did we progress?!

Where did the ideas come from? When did Thor and Gilgamesh appear in the common (at least regionally common) consciousness?

Did any one individual concoct those stories?

The growth and spread of humanity's spiritual concepts.....surely that is a most profound and critically important topics.

How does humanity spiritually progress?

The whole historic process seems pretty straightforward. We created gods in our image.

As we explored more and more of the world, we realized that semi-human demigodlings living in trees and rocks didn't suffice to explain and control the really big stuff, so god's needed to get bigger and more powerful, while of course maintaining their petulant, temperamental, violent characteristics with which we could so well identify.

Then it seems that eventually somewhere along the way we realized that slaughter, butchery, and general carnage and mayhem, at the behest of the combating jumbo sized gods of our creation, might not be so much fun after all......

.....so we condensed god into One, which at least took a step toward avoiding tiffs with other gods and expressed our wish to not engage in continual combat,.....at least if we could only get those gentiles, heathens, and infidels converted,......and that God, or his PR people, began to promote peace, tolerance, and forgiveness.

In other words, throughout history we have created gods that fit with our needs as we slowly came to better understand those needs.

Yet somehow along the way, our unrecognized spiritual needs were also being met.

We groped our way along toward discovery of the true God, a God for some reason playing hide and seek with us.

We tried this belief system and that religion, and like our armor, swords, and agricultural practices, along the way we kept making incremental improvements.

And of course, without exception, we were always right.

This by the way is surely one of the most remarkable aspects of evolving spiritual beliefs. We did change, did grow, did learn and did accept new concepts, in spite of always passionately, or more accurately said, vehemently, believing we were already absolutely, unequivocally right.

Accepting a better method for planting a crop, sharpening our sword, or delivering a lethal blow is pretty straightforward. The simplest of inspection of incontrovertible facts promptly convinces us the other guy is eating better, penetrating our armor more easily, or killing more of our tribal or coalition forces than we of his. Visual data and selfish motivation ensure prompt spread of technologies and tactics.

But religious beliefs?!.....Their very nature demands that to even possess religious beliefs we have to convince ourselves they are right, which in the absence of any shred of tangible evidence, means letting those beliefs into our heart and then bolting the door and boarding up the windows.

This is hardly fertile ground for open minded, objective, tolerant consideration of alternative beliefs. Yet somehow religious beliefs have evolved, and we're not sacrificing virgins on top of pyramids anymore.

The criteria for judging sword making, crop cultivation, and military tactics are pretty straightforward. The historical evolution of metallurgy, medicine, and market forces seems in hindsight almost inevitable. "This worked better than that." It's merely technological, military, and economic Darwinism.

But in the face of the manifest bigotry and unthinking denial essential to protect something as vaporous as religious beliefs, what selection criteria allowed this "ism" to dominate over that "ism"?

In asking that, I do not refer to the historic routine of military conquest and violent savagery that stains the pages of history. God's changed names with the changing colors of the latest flag on the parapets. The most devout worshipers of the previous god often as not became the most devout worshipers of the conquerors' god.

Today people still conveniently chuck last year's holy books and places of worship, though today it's more often under the intimidation of new spouse and in-laws than of sword.

But I'm not asking about mere changes of the name to which you sacrifice or bow. I'm asking about profound changes of the very nature of belief, multiple gods become a single God, sacrifices being eliminated entirely, revenge and retribution being replaced by tolerance and forgiveness.

Across the millennia, spiritual beliefs have changed radically, and across the world, those changes have followed similar paths.

Doesn't it make sense that there must be some reason and some criteria? Lacking any objective, measurable, quantifiable criteria for comparison of "effectiveness" of spiritual beliefs, it seems impossible to fully explain the evolutionary selections that underlie spiritual Darwinism.

However, we should be able to make at least some broad, general comments.

Spiritual beliefs, whether in genies, goblins, messiahs, or atheism, arise because of some need of the believer. People seek explanation. People seek an inner completeness of understanding.

In the contests of belief systems, once we eliminate the practical considerations of worldly victory ("the gods supporting their army kicked the tar out of the gods supporting our army, so maybe we should be more open minded about their goofy religion") it seems those belief systems will survive which better fulfill those needs and desires for which we invent belief systems in the first place.

Belief systems that clearly can't fulfill their claims will fizzle out. "The almighty, invincible Moola Moola just got his altar and statue turned to kindling wood by the invading hordes" does not bode well for attendance at Moola Moola's next worship service.

But finally, any surviving spiritual belief system must address the basic, primal, profound need for understanding and fulfillment that led to groping explorations of spiritual topics in the first place. Even if 98% of a belief's adherents are simply innate followers going along with the crowd, even if 98% of the tenets and testimony of the faith are utterly bogus, if that belief system is up against another belief system where 99% of the believers are just social conformists and 99% of its precepts are utterly bogus, then the former religion, that 2% sincere and 2% meaningful religion, will have an advantage in the battle for survival.

Somehow, though deeply hidden behind the statues, well veiled by the smoke of altar and incense, and almost drowned out by bells and battles, it is not to be ruled out that something profoundly relevant is, bit by bit, revealed in the slowly evolving beliefs of humanity.

Even if containing 98% undiluted hooey contrived to accommodate social and political circumstances of the moment, a belief system may still incorporate a kernel of profound truth, revelation disguised, but revelation sought and relevance needed by the human spirit.

The shear tenacity with which humans insist on seeking explanation, whether in positivist atheism or retro-ritual, testifies to a foundation need, a core requirement necessary to our satisfaction.

Such absolutely inescapable drive is as fundamental as the drive for life itself.

As the statistical dictates of survival of encoded organic information inexorably lead to myriad and more complex life forms, so an inescapable and undeniable drive of the human spirit for understanding and connection with a greater Wholeness demands we pursue the spiritual quest.

The ever-changing parade of pantheons of gods within the panoply of belief systems, from Celts to chemists (and make no mistake, science is just another belief system intended to explain our place in a greater wholeness) proceeds in parallel with biological evolution and improving technology. Each involves unbounded exploration of possibilities, each entails ruthless elimination of less effective forms.

It is in this fact that we can look for common threads among belief systems, consistent patterns that belie exactly what it is we have been looking for all these millennia, traits and characteristics that by better meeting our unrecognized needs have allowed certain types of belief systems to flourish, even in the face of attempted extermination.

In this comparative search we can learn about ourselves, discover our un-confessed needs shared with the rest of humanity past and present, and perhaps even find proven elements of belief so consistent among surviving faiths as to consider them to be at least fragments of something we might dare call Truth.

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And when you've had enough of the serious, the profound, the deep and the thought provoking, just when you doubt we'll ever understand the Truth anyway, the Truth and reassurance may come fuzzily pouncing into your life.

Playful Praying

Is it possible to pray while playing with a kitty? What a silly question! What better time to open to the unpredictable gifts of the loving Source! God's crouching surprises await with bright eyed anticipation the opportunities to pounce into our lives. We need only accept a theology of playfulness to allow these blessings entry. They await only our permission to bring unpredictable chaos and living pandemonium into our lives, which is to say, the very essence of God's Creation.

Yes, pray while playing, for surely God must on occasion need to hear something other than the routine praise and worship, supplications and requests, spiritual invoices and liturgical work orders. Laugh with a pouncing explosion of bright eyed fuzziness; let that embrace of a gift of God be, for a change, your daily prayer, holy and joyously reverent.

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Mandaeans

Wow. There's nothing like reading about obscure, ancient, but still extant religions to make you really wonder about the nature of humanity and our relationship to some Creator.

So, the Mandaeans claim to have the original religion, handed down to Adam. They further claim Abraham was a Mandaean. John the Baptist was the most recent Mandaean prophet. Yeshuah (Jesus) was probably a Mandaean. More recently the Mandaeans were protected from religious persecution by the secular regime of Saddam Hussein. And "Mandaean" is such an obscure religious title that my spellchecker doesn't even recognize it.

Their characterizing trait is baptism, lots of baptism, baptism every week, baptism before every major life event. Water is the source of life, they say, and I would say that if you want to argue with them, try going without water in some form for a few days.

Well, hey, from where did the baptism ritual arise?! The Mandaeans have as good a claim to it as anyone. It doesn't seem reasonable that John the Baptist invented it and made it so popular. People had probably already heard of it.

Fact is, though Southern Baptists would be loathe to admit it, baptism bears a striking resemblance to Hindus purifying themselves in the Ganges River.

The religious history of the human race has really become a fixation for me of late. That's a far deeper mystery than mere "nature of existence" and "definition of time".

In recent days I've been editing some of my old writings on quantum mechanics and "interaction as reality". The project to understand these physics concepts seems like child's play compared to getting even the most tenuous grasp on human religious history and its ramifications for the nature of God's relationship with humanity.

I guess it's important to delineate between understanding something like science that can be based on logic and repeatable experimental results versus something that by its nature is profoundly illogical and utterly subjective.

I could wander down that path of exploration of religious history for hours on end, but that could quickly become a self-indulgent exercise in personal curiosity. I suspect that upon wandering far enough down that path I would find it resembles my travels around the world. Once the patterns in the clothing and the chants in the temples are distilled to their essence, a striking similarity becomes recognizable in every village and every city of the world. You begin to see humanity, instead of Berbers, Totoga, and Hmong. (Moroccan, Tanzanian, and Thai respectively )

I can imagine that with enough exposure, in all the various doctrines and theologies a certain pattern will emerge, a pattern of consistent needs and attempts to fulfill those needs. The resulting creative attempts to fulfill dimly perceived spiritual needs must underlie most of the belief systems that to my ignorance seem exotic if not out and out bizarre, but belief systems that provide succor and comfort through the centuries to their adherents.

Spiritual awareness arises throughout all history in spite of not a shred of repeatable, physical evidence or imperative need driven by physical survival. Of all human traits, creations, and institutions, this hunger for the spiritual, with no evident basis in evolutionary roots or environmental imperatives, speaks to something profoundly important.

I read of obscure beliefs and tenacious traditions, and my modern western emotions at first respond quite provincially with a "how can they believe that stuff!" But reminding myself of the loving Source that created this world and created us to be as we are, I am forced to reign in my judgmental tendencies or otherwise I must admit that what I'm actually doing in my criticism is criticizing God for making us so.

I try to seek a more optimistic and tolerant vantage point, and I see humanity in all its diversity seeking something for which it has not a shred of physical evidence. I see humanity starting from scratch in building some fragile models of some ill perceived spiritual reality, and making the attempt with hardly a tangible clue on which to proceed.

I see humanity making this audacious attempt in the face of legions of shamans, charlatans, high priests and prophets who for their own profit and power tirelessly strive to deceive and mislead humanity.

I can begin to see great nobility in this struggle, and surely we should, and God can, excuse our childlike theologies that for now still place liturgy and pantheons above concepts and connection.

It's as if humanity is striving to grow to a whole new dimension, to rise above a mere physical world, reaching for a destiny it senses but can't clearly discern. In this lack of clear, shared vision and dearth of clues lies freedom, for nothing tangible or provable prods or pulls toward some higher plane.

It's as if, in the convulsions of religions, faiths, and doctrines that sweep across the planet and over civilizations, we are watching a birth, a birth into a compelling but never coerced potential, a birth painful as birth must be, and birth in which our spiritual eyes are only just beginning to open.

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Can we really look at all the other wacky cults and beliefs in the world, past, present, and undoubtedly future, and not, though just for a fleeting moment of course, suspect that maybe, just maybe, even our particular mainstream, accepted, obviously right and true, "normal" cul.....uh, faith, just might turn out to be as wacky as theirs?

Cults for Everyone

We hear about the cult, the kids, those strange people, the inexplicable behaviors, and we carefully avoid the realization that we are all members of cults. Some cults and their belief systems are just big enough to be called the norm. From where do these cults, including our own societal, national, majority, "normal" cult arise?

What of the wrenching changes in the lives of the cult members removed from their isolated compounds, forced to see the world in the light our society casts on it? And are the rest of us, in the "majority cult" of mainstream society, immune from such shocks?

How we all long for something stable, reliable, unchanging, and true!....something that absolves us of the responsibility to question, something that obviates the necessity for us to decide.

How eagerly we flock to cults and fraternal orders, how hungrily we ingest ritual and recitation.

Inerrant Bibles, holy texts, prophecies, and scriptures, at least if in our language of choice; or colored pieces of cloth raised on poles; or prophets, preachers, and presidents; these command our unquestioning allegiance.

The leader we follow gets his instructions directly from God, and such surcease and comfort is to be found in following orders and donning the uniform, whether issued by military or marketers, patriarch or popular trend.

How irritatingly inconvenient are the nagging facts that counter holy text, slanderous fictions besmirching our leader, untidy revelations toppling beloved institution.

Usually our religious faith, patriotic fervor, and zealous loyalty can trump intellect, twisting and bending our perceptions of reality in a mental contortionist circus-act that sustains our predilection for blind following and dodges the insistent demand that we pose, and worse, have to answer questions, with their implicit association of personal accountability.

But if any consistency is to be found through the course of history, it is that revelations bring not confirmation but contradiction.

Over and over and over, our various temples do get toppled, our armies do get routed, our leaders do get caught, and text and teacher leave us with questions instead of answers.

We cannot long rest complacent in our faiths and loyalties.

The God in which we would or would not believe allows us but brief times to blindly obey and believe, before wrenching revolutions of heart or circumstance place in our path the bridges we must cross and the forks at which we must choose. Our temples of certain faith and blind loyalty come tumbling down, to reveal the selves we will create by our response to the glaring light of uncertainty that brings the gift of freedom to we children created in the image of God.

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Why We Seek to Understand

How the mind struggles to understand! How we are compelled to construct models and forms, to make comprehensible the gods and universes that direct our fate.

From Moses to Newton, Joseph Smith to Albert Einstein, and every priest, shaman, and graduate student in between, minds stretch to describe the indescribable, and the rest of us hungrily accept the images and equations they offer, desperate to glimpse a reliable truth.

Surely it must be there!.....somewhere, behind the deceptions of our senses. How elusive the Truth, whether due to shyness or a cruel sense of humor, we know not.

Obviously the earth feels and looks flat, obviously it is stable, and celestial bodies go around it,....but no, Truth proves subtler, remaining hidden and disguised until more insightful calculations and sophisticated instruments could ferret it out.

And in this example of earth round not flat and even up and down turned down and up if we but spin the globe, we speak of provable, irrefutable, demonstrable and verifiable truth, yet still it remains hidden to any child until told, still it runs counter to senses and experience.

If even such irrefutable scientific truths are so effectively obscured by our daily experience, with what precocious audacity do we dare to pretend we know the never provable Truths of God and Life, of Creation and destiny, of right and wrong?

When even senses and scientists prove so oft false, what foolish faith would prompt us to entrust our beliefs to fickle heart and boastful prophet?

Yet entrust we must, and believe we do. Each soul seeks a foundation, a reference...the atheist, nihilist, existentialist, and humanist no different from the Baptist and the Buddhist.

How the mind struggles to understand. How hungrily it accepts the proffered paradigms of priests, prophets, atheist authors, and neighborhood gangs.

....and therein we find a truth, consistent and repeatable....

The human mind, every fully functional human mind, can and must function within some reference frame of explanation.

Our universe of personal experience cannot remain a void, for even if our intellect insists that our existence is suspended in void, our mind reaches into that void, feels it, defines it, making even the void and our place in it a tangible reality.

We cannot escape our need to understand. We can however choose how open, how receptive, how challenging, how intelligent, how questioning, how optimistic we will be in pursuit of understanding.

What we eventually come to believe may indeed be limited by what exposure our society offers, what books catch our eye, what people cross our path.

But though the available information and experience with which we shape our understanding may be limited, in the courage we each bring to the search for Truth we will define and sculpt the essence of our soul.

I say that because we can each come to believe only that which we are willing to accept. For example, we cannot and will not believe a Truth that demands love, surrender, or sacrifice if we are not willing to love, surrender, and sacrifice

Our nature demands that each of us try to understand, try to fill in the blanks. That universal fact speaks of a profound Truth. In that imperative to understand and explain, Nature is forcing us to create ourselves, to choose the essence of our being.

Leper's Wisdom

Of course before I can write 'Tasha kitty has to get settled back in after I disturbed her repose on her throne by the door. Across my shoulders she crawls, then finally alights her fuzzy warm softness on my left forearm, as usual, little toes grasping over the far edge of my arm.

From the two giant black Cadillacs parked on the street, it appears the Jehovah's Witnesses are again assaulting our neighborhood. I sit here dreading the inevitable ring on the doorbell. It will probably be the same sweet gentleman in his heavy black winter coat that has visited in years past on wintry mornings.

God bless 'em, but they do drive me nuts. I have tremendous respect for them, for their courage, for their commitment, dedication, and sincerity, but they drive me nuts.

But that's a small price for me to pay if their methods manage to bring some light, truth, and meaning into someone's life in this neighborhood.

I always wonder if they do have any success, but I don't want to ask them the question for fear of discouraging them, and also because I wouldn't expect a straight answer.

In the past I've often tried to have a conversation with them, but their unbending adherence to a defined script always precluded any meaningful exchange. (Mind you, I speak only of the guys that circle my neighborhood. I can't speak about Jehovah's Witnesses in general. )

What would they think of the book I now read, The God Who Would Be Known by John Templeton and Robert Herrmann.

What wondrous thought it offers, about the depths of the cosmos, the marvels of scientific discoveries, and how they all point to a Creator that is present, part of all and all part of the Creator.

That book's commentary goes well with the fifth chapter in the Book of John that I read yesterday. Yeshu ( Jesus ) spoke of Himself, of how the Father gave him the power to judge because He was the Son of Man. On the verses went, mysterious and complex?....or simple and direct....I'm not sure which. Of course for a couple of millennia the most educated theologians have debated the nature of Yeshu. I certainly cannot invoke the quotations and scholarly research of the experts. Yet somehow I feel that fifth chapter of the Book of John ties in very nicely with the science based commentary in The God Who Would Be Known.

Somehow the holy is present in all, in every atom, in every vibrating quantum string, in every geometric twist of space, time, and almost a dozen other dimensions.

But wait! What of the suffering, the harshness of Nature, the abiding cruelty of humanity. Where is the holy in that maelstrom of gnashing teeth, slashing claws, and targeted munitions?

Like I say, complex questions. They are questions that seldom arise at the company Christmas party, though ironically somehow, in ways our minds do not quite comprehend, it is that moment of Christmas in which all the mystery of the holy embedded within the carnal, the perfect revealed in the blood and violence and pain, the presence of Creator's Spirit in the midst of dirt, mud, and dung, finally comes into focus.

Our mind cannot quite comprehend the wonder of it. It's as if it lies there just beyond our mental grasp. At least it lies beyond my mental grasp. But in certain moments it does not lie beyond the understanding of our hearts. There are moments of sublime musical beauty at a Christmas concert, moments of desperate rescue in the disaster, moments of exhausted giving of just a little more to the sick or injured or simply small and young....there are moments when in our hearts, even if not expressible in mere words or volumes, that John 5, and the underlying reason those Jehovah's Witnesses are out on this cold day, and "immanent Spirit", and the "Word was God", all these things become momentarily clear to our heart.

It is perhaps to be celebrated that our heart, soul, and essence can experience something of such profound depth and meaning that words fail, and even the Holy Scriptures only tantalize us with their attempt at expressing this meaning.

Surely that is a far more desirable circumstance than the opposite, to not feel in depths of heart and soul anything deeper and more powerful than what the mind can dissect and comprehend.

I suspect that latter condition is a great underlying source of the misery of modern society. In pursuit of the material and scientific, people have perhaps amputated that ability to personally feel the deep and profound secrets of the Self, the Universe, the Creator.

Certainly many of the most dissatisfied and saddest acquaintances I've known have been those that effectively applied their logical, practical, intellectual scalpels to the mysteries of life, but did not admit entry to feelings of deeper portent that might challenge their mental construct of reality and its foundations.

So we are blessed to wonder in perplexity at concepts of God present in all, of God present in human form, or is God present in all humans, but what about the mass murderer, but didn't God create everything?...but surely we're not separated from God, or did God just set it all in motion and leave us to our own devices, but isn't God Him/Herself revealed in our telescopes and microscopes.....and then in our confusion we feel a hand in ours, or we call to someone as lonely as we, or we volunteer a seemingly pointless service, or we hear an out of tune rendition of a Christmas carol, and though our mind remains as confused as ever, our heart glimpses that Truth bathed in light white and welcoming.

In university lecture halls, Sunday School classes, and prayer filled mosques, confusion and contradiction will reign. In King James and Quran, words will remain perplexing and mysterious.

"All His fullness in Him"..."making peace through His blood shed on the cross"...(Colossians) and countless other lines of verse, script, and scripture will leave us struggling to understand, and leave those who think they understand struggling to convey it to the rest of us, who will nod in knowing agreement while listening to the sermon, then promptly forget it so we won't have to face our abject confusion.

But there will always be the other moments, a newborn's first cry, a child's excited surprise, a friend's unconditional acceptance, a sending or receiving of a shipment of relief supplies, a rustle of fresh breeze through brilliant fall leaves, moments when all the words, theology, and philosophical posturing become trite and irrelevant.

In those moments mystery is dissipated, scattered before the distilled essence of all existence, Purpose, meaning, and Source. In the bright, pure gold of deeply shared tear or laugh, the human wisdom of the ages appears as mere dross.

In such a moment two thousand years ago a leper, shunned by everyone through all his adult years, banishes intellectual confusions and theological controversies, when in amazement he sobs, "He touched me!"

(Thanks to Reverend Steve Baxter for having years ago planted that image of the leper in my memory.)

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PART 4

(back to top)

Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, life does not conveniently afford us the opportunities of time for prayer and meditation and communion. Such (normal) times instead afford us the opportunity, and the necessity, to discern the profound holiness in our daily routines, to discern the Spirit of Source and Creation and Purpose that infuses every molecule and every minute, and to discern the perfection of our place within that Source-Creation-Purpose.

Welcome to The Joy of Cat-box Cleaning.

Hold fast the heart's idyll,

for through the clamoring din of world's harsh noise,

its crystal bell rings true.

Flickers of truth

Glowing in the smoky

Darkness of human activity,

As we pursue the other

Man's daily bread.

A quick flash of light,

Off the diamond of

An unselfish act,

A kind word,

A caring touch.

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Reassurance: sometimes it is the simple reasons to smile that teach the real lessons.

Balloons

As sun breaks horizon's edge each morning, I always smile. It never fails. I can't imagine not smiling in that moment of promise fulfilled.

How destructive to life and the soul our modern work style that denies people that small, natural, daily blessing.

How desperately in modern, unnatural life we need such moments.

On this morning, from the hill I watch with binoculars the massed balloon ascent from City Park. There's something inherently innocent, an instantiation of childhood joy, in balloons large or small.

Almost always sporting exuberant colors, they rise to cast their fates to the winds, helpless, trusting, and vulnerable, with only one single focus for their existence, to bring joy.

The word "aggression" can appear in no context with "balloon".

In gay procession they drift above the city, their unhurried pace a soothing balm to the misery of our frantic, modern lives.

They embark on their early morning mission in the same manner we embark on our life's journey, with no certainty where we will land.

From their lofty overview above our earthbound lives they must attain an unpretentious wisdom.

It would do us all well, I warrant, to emulate their example, to greet with grace the irresistible winds of circumstance, to boldly launch into those winds and thereby surrender our fate to an unknown destination, and while on our drifting way, to bring colors bright and cheerful to others' lives.

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White Sunrise

As is my habit, I indulged in my morning prayer from the hilltop, and as usual, I tried to time my arrival to allow watching that stunning, daily miracle called "sunrise".

We had a "white" sunrise this morning, virtually devoid of color other than a brief prelude of the most wan shade of pink. What unseen, distant events far to east, what subtle variants of dust and moisture and thermo-clines, so dramatically define the beginning of our day?

What unseen events in distant time, what small decisions, policies, emotions, and coincidences swirl in the eddies and currents of circumstance to shape all our days and our life experience?.....and we in turn, what form the tides and ripples, what color the rays, that we shall impart to world and time, to touch another's shore, and light their morning sky.

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Doubts about our nation and society

Obligatory Gluttony

For the first time in the history of humanity, people are encouraged to display absolutely no restraint.

Throughout human history, necessity of limited food and resources, tribal customs, religious strictures, and societal traditions born of centuries of successful survival, counseled restraint. This kept in balance our natural proclivity to pursue destructive excess in following our appetites and lusts.

Now, for the first time ever, the members of society are mercilessly bombarded by admonitions to engage in excess, excess in spending, eating, drinking, behavior, and passions. From waking to sleeping, every visual and aural source of inputs screams at us to not apply any restraint, to consume without remorse, to obey our thirsts, hungers, desires and lusts.

It is perhaps not to be wondered at that modern people have grown grotesquely fat, that violent crime forces us to make fortresses of our homes, that we go to war to pillage more sources of petroleum to slake our unquenchable thirst for big trucks and the latest clothes of synthetic materials and colors. The wonder is that our behavior and consumption are not even more extreme.

For thousands of years priests, shamans, holy books, village elders and family patriarchs and matriarchs delivered their daily and weekly admonitions for restraint, prudence, and temperance.

In the past century, for the first time ever, humanity produced an economic system in which excess is held as patriotic, consumption the norm, gluttony desirable, and lessons of priests and elders have been replaced by manipulation via neural researchers and marketing psychologists

We have banished the voices of restraint and temperance, and in their place unleashed demons to tease and tempt our wants and desires. The pulpit we have replaced with the billboard and spot ad, like children that away from parents egg each other on to ever more foolish and destructive behavior.

As we try to predict what will happen to our society, and we list the developments unique to our times, we usually think of technology, science, food supplies, medical care, population density, diminishing supplies of resources, etc. Those tangible, measurable, material differences do of course play pivotal roles in shaping our future. But seldom considered is the nature of the society dealing with those material differences, the differences in its values and influencing forces from other societies throughout history.

All the statistics of diminishing resources and increasing population must be viewed in the context of humanity that for the first time ever has exorcised all traditional voices of restraint and replaced them with a 24/7 relentless sermon by the marketing media to drive us to ever increasing consumption and indulgence.

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Video Sickness

Today, probably far behind the rest of the modern world, I finally hear about "Second Life", the online virtual world being created by its hundreds of thousands of interacting participants. The weblog discussions asking questions about the relative "reality" of that "Second Life" world, and is its creator the equivalent of its "god", remind me of an experience that illustrated how easily "real reality" can slip past unnoticed. In that real world experience I once again saw that the learning challenged and developmentally disabled clients of the therapeutic recreation group with whom I work, reveal much about all of us, whether developmentally or digitally challenged.

Our therapeutic recreation group went for its annual rafting trip, always a highlight of the summer. I get paired with 19 year old Brian.

Down the canyon we float, rippling water, flocks of geese, snow capped peaks, the strokes in a living masterpiece of Nature surround us, and we are in it all, not seeing it on a screen, but feeling it, smelling it, touching it.

Brian talks on, and on, but only about his video games, "street violence this" and "battle combat that". Naturally I try to distract him from his inner world by pointing out the geese, the side stream, etc., but to no avail. It's as if Brian is not even aware he is floating down a river, his mind remains so preoccupied with his litany of electronics and favorite movies and favorite CD's. Throughout the morning Brian has been unaware of the other people in the group as anything other than objects to listen to his recital of his favorite media entertainments. (Sound familiar?)

So the raft trip goes for the first half. Then we enter the steeper part of the canyon, which from our wonderfully educated oarsman I learn was formed by a sunken graben fault thousands of feet deep in the earth below us.

Placid floating now metamorphoses into whitewater roller coaster.

By the second rapid we all get well doused, with more rapids and soaking to come.

Brian grows quiet. The sharp slap of cold, snowmelt water no longer allows him the luxury of ignoring the reality around him.

Brian remains quiet. Throughout the remainder of the now rollicking ride, his only occasional comment is a sullen "I can't wait to change into some dry clothes".

Brian could be the poster child for the modern life. We have the luxury of being able to ignore real life, to pre-occupy our minds with the games and entertainment, the career and investments, all the trappings of our own synthetic contrivance, even synthetic worlds like "Second Life". Meanwhile, the beauty and majesty of real life flows past, unnoticed and unremembered, to be gone forever.

Of course real life slaps us once in a while, demanding our attention with its traffic jams and market busts, its violent crimes and cancers....and then we notice only the frustration, or pain, or fear, or grief.

Unpracticed at seeing the beauty, not open to the excitement, we see real life only as a rude imposition upon the world of our own creation.

Even as Brian waxed on in soliloquy about his video game accomplishments and favorite movie characters, there was no real joy in his voice. It was the voice I so often hear today, almost with an underlying sense of frantic, as if enough rapid fire descriptions of enough games or shows or characters or songs or movies will somehow make life real.

There's an interesting postscript to Brian's day of rafting though. I had noticed he had a "Calvin and Hobbes" book in his gear bag. Since I consider "Calvin and Hobbes" by Bill Watterson as arguably the highest literary, artistic, philosophical, and social commentary achievement of the late 20th century, I ask Brian the favor of letting me see his book. His response clearly illustrated that Brian is not accustomed to being asked for anything. His consternated expression revealed he was pulled between an aversion to any interaction as intimate as sharing his book, versus the social pressure of how could he say no.

He does let me see the book. I begin chuckling, often guffawing out loud. It turns out "Calvin and Hobbes" is also Brian's favorite book. Brian finally talks about something in common with his listener. We wind up reading together.

Brian experiences the reality of in person, inter-human interaction...................................Brian finally smiles.

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

We seldom doubt the validity of our daily routine, least of all our buying, our drive to buy, our working in order to buy, all the objects and entertainment and possessions we buy. We do not doubt them because our possessions and accounts are tangible, we touch and feel and measure them, and their shininess or Return on Investment provides us reassurance.

It is the intangible, that which we cannot see, that we must doubt.

But do we have the objects of doubt and reassurance reversed?

Paper Reality

How subtle is the difference dividing the solid foundations of reality from the ephemeral contrivances of humanity.

How seriously the mind takes the worries and fears of its own creation.

Reality drifts through the illusions of our making, like the invisible wind moving through a cardboard stage castle, there being no question which is more real and enduring, but no doubt which is more prominent and visible.

We try to climb the cardboard walls to build our lives upon their clearly visible foundations, while ignoring the invisible winds that set our unforeseen course.

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

We doubt the validity of that foreign cultures odd ways of being, looking, celebrating, worshiping, and seeing reality....for in doubting their culture we erect a façade of reassurance by not having to doubt our own.

Saints, gorillas, and dance hall girls.

Holy cow, I'm in the midst of wonderfully friendly, delightfully inebriated Quechua Indians dressed in gorilla suits, accompanied by gaudy go-go girls, all to celebrate some religious festival. "How" you ask "did this come to pass?" Well, whether you're asking or not, I'm certainly asking myself that question.

Earlier today, much earlier, upon arriving in Cusco from Lima, we met Mayke, or more precisely she met us. We're still batting a thousand in making our Peru connections, without which this trip would quickly move from "vacation" to "panic".

Mayke, a friend of a friend of a friend, proved to be a delightful chaperone as well as efficient navigator of the narrow, centuries old streets of Cusco. She delivered us to our surprisingly delightful, two hundred year old accommodations while also delivering a whirlwind of information, advice, and suggestions.

Delightful accommodations or not, I didn't come this far to sit in a room, so after hauling my backpack upstairs and dropping it in the room, I prepare to head into the old, stone streets of Cusco.

Bob and Jane decide they will join me in getting our first exposure to the former capital of the Inca Empire. Step one of our exposure is to learn how to time our walk down the narrow alleyway that houses our hostel so that we can duck into doorways as cars pass.

The Inca and their Spanish colonizers didn't have Humvees in mind when they laid the stone foundations of these buildings, so only the smallest of cars can negotiate this "street", one way in one lane of course. When I say it is just wide enough for a small car, I don't mean a small car and a pedestrian. Hence the need to wedge into a doorway or hug the wall as cars pass, while you also make sure no loose clothing is flapping out where it might snag a mirror.

We have hardly exited the narrow single lane alley when we hear distant music echoing between the ancient buildings. Naturally I have to investigate. A few blocks over, to our delight we find a colorful parade of people in elaborate costumes, ranging from the aforementioned gorilla suits to silver caricature masks with long noses and silver pipes in their mouths.

The raucous procession winds through the narrow streets to a church, the bands and participants break up into a couple of open squares that border the church, beer is opened, meat is grilled, the partying continues.

I wander into the midst of this, strike up an interaction (lacking language I don't think the word "conversation" applies) with some folks in gorilla suits, and I get a lesson in how to differentiate between gorilla suits made from alpaca versus llama wool. I also get to try on a gorilla head, which is great fun, and also greatly dripping sweat on the inside courtesy of the guy that was wearing it.

These friendly folks insist, I mean insist, that we share their communal and continually refilling cup of beer. I manage to fake some sips and strike that difficult tourist's balance between politeness and not catching a local plague for which my office weakened, pasty white body has no resistance.

Bob and Jane feel they should return for our scheduled tourist bus tour. I reluctantly leave my new gorilla friends, but not before learning through another friendly English speaking chap that the jovial parades will begin anew in an hour or so.

I walk Jane back to our hostel, but the day's surprises are not over yet. Cusco's role as spiritual center of the Inca empire still echoes, albeit in nominally Catholic dress, into the present day. For us this becomes more than mere quoted fact from a book as on the way we cross paths with yet another procession, this one a bit more earnest in demeanor. A group of the faithful agonizingly struggle to carry a massive looking saint's statue on a large gold altar, preceded by robed church officials, and followed by guys in ski masks whipping the ever loving bejeebers out of each other with long chords.

I'm gonna leave this to go sit in a tourist bus and look at some old stone ruins?!

To shorten a long and interpersonally stressful story, I make sure Jane gets on her bus, I grab some drinking water (which always entails some thought when traveling), and I start walking the streets of Cusco, listening for music so I can catch whatever other parades are on the loose. Sure, the guide book says don't walk the streets alone, strangle muggings are on the rise, yada yada yada. It's nice of the book's author to add to the sense of adventure.

I find myself back at the church with the gorilla suit guys, the beer still flowing.

Now, I'm the only white boy crazy enough to be here. Later I may hear how I made a bad choice by not going with my friends on the bus tour. By any reasonable standards, they would be right. However, another bus ride away from this real life experience would not have been right for me right now. Having had the good fortune to stumble across this little fete through the streets of Cusco, I have no regrets about letting my friends take their bus tour without me.

So, here I stand, between brass bands playing at top volume, simultaneously blasting two different songs, the same two songs they have cranked out all day long, over and over and over.

I'm as baffled by it as my friends are baffled by what on earth would possess me to come here instead of on the bus tour.

About the time that I'm starting to wonder if that English speaking guy's information was right about the parade starting up again, conch shell trumpets sound. Slightly tanked up, somewhat bleary eyed gentlemen in elaborate traditional costume gather and proceed to take one last sip of the passing beer, after which they stagger in a weaving line toward the church, eventually disappearing through its dark entrance.

I finally recognize these costumes, and especially the red knit hats. These are the same guys on the cover of one of my guidebooks!

I don't have long to wait before the church's bells peel, and keep peeling, on and on, telling us something is about to go down, though I'm clueless what.

Naturally, I wax philosophical. (Don't panic, this won't last long.) Before me here in Cusco, which Incas believed to be the navel of creation, parades the human spiritual condition in microcosm, spiritual progress both prodded and impeded by images and icons. Here symbolized, we see humanity suspended between the opposing forces that move it forward and chain it back, just like the banners now proceeding from the church are suspended, in front the faithful little old ladies in traditional costume, coming right behind them the go-go girls in mini-skirts.

Finally, the hardy, native gentlemen emerge from the church, carrying this afternoon's object of veneration, a figure of a saint or virgin no doubt.

Onlookers cross themselves as the altar passes, a brass band follows playing what anywhere else would be a drinking song, a group of women looking like a cross between 1890 Paris can-can dancers and the staff of an old west brothel march next in line, well, not exactly "march", but gyrate, twist,...we'll call it creative marching.

A troop in Al Jolson black face and fringed Chinese hats waits to join. Dwarves join in (I'm not making this up,) flower petals are strewn from bystanders, by now from this angle I see the altar virgin looks like a store mannequin with a baby doll suspended by a wire, kind of floating out in space near her. I note this for the sake of description, and note it with sincere respect. I've done enough homework before this trip to realize the great personal sacrifice these economically impoverished people invest to ensure the costume and condition of these objects of veneration are maintained in beautiful condition.

The sound of a passing violin and accordion is short lived before the onslaught of another approaching brass band.

Though I'm here in great respect for these people and their traditions, I pray I do not split a dental filling from grinding my teeth to keep from absolutely cracking up laughing. I've reached the point of wondering if this scene is real or should I have not chewed that last coca leaf on the walk here.

As an entire troop of baby gorillas rounds the corner, I'm prone to suspect the latter. This end of the parade is evolving into something out of a Mummer's acid trip. Guys in boots Elvis would have considered gaudy are dancing for their lives, followed by another troop of old west go-go girls whose swinging skirts effectively display their lacy under things. Before I can suppress the irreverent thought, I think, "the saint leading this parade must have been quite a rocker".

I can forget any effort to not laugh. One gorilla's chasing a kid and another gorilla is dancing with a bug eyed dragon insect thing. Gee, too bad I'm not on that tour bus looking at ruins.

Now my chest cavity starts vibrating from a passing base drum being struck with Tai-Kwan-Do ferocity, banners with pictures of the virgin precede another dance team that looks like it got fired from the brothel for bad behavior. They are led by a guy in a bright purple Three Musketeers outfit. On and on it goes. By now a beautiful woman in high cut panties dancing seductively with llama and alpaca haired gorillas seems pretty normal.

Onward the smoking Fatima's entourage marches, toward the cemetery I'm told, the faithful and inebriated paparazzi in tow, me included. Our procession winds through ancient Cusco streets, eventually reaching a large, attractive square in front of an impressive building. Had I gone on the bus tour I would probably know what building it is.

Bystanders light candles in reverence......oops, the crowd has started to run for their lives. This seems like a prime time to "do as the Romans do" and beat feet with them. I turn back in time to see the ignition of an imposing framework of fireworks that would have qualified as a Weapon of Mass Destruction if Saddam Hussein had possessed it.

Concussions hit my chest, the street disappears in a gunpowder gray mushroom cloud, out of which first emerge doggy hind feet which have raced past the rest of the dog in their haste to escape this native Armageddon.

Having not packed my safety goggles for this trip, the shrapnel pummeling my face persuades me to rejoin the fleeing crowd.

Safely removed, I take a small detour from the parade to see what show in the aforementioned square has attracted a crowd. For "entertainment" a potbellied bully verbally abuses a dwarf, eliciting guffaws from the crowd. Lacking the language, in my ignorance it looks like pretty much just another routine day in the town square, circa 850 AD. I leave to catch up with the procession, while hoping the dwarf turns the tables on the bully.

I rejoin the parade, having progressed well past the center of town, now passing Inca walls redolent of urine.

An old Quechua lady works prayer beads under a Donald Duck sign.

As far as I can tell, for at least 6 hours this band has been playing the same song.

The guys carrying the altar look exhausted.

Chaos is degenerating into more chaos as "paraders" get tired and drop out. KISS masks and gorilla suits now mingle with the bystanders, the sidewalk crowd presses forward, further dissolving boundary between spectator and participant. I navigate a sea of beautiful Indian faces, they and the music seeming to lose some of the frivolity as the evening wears on. The dance hall girls just shuffle now; the costume colors and loud music cannot keep the demons of harsh reality at bay forever.

Lest anyone get the wrong impression that I think this parade/procession is somehow silly or meaningless, I point out that I'm writing my notes on scratch paper left over from a job that I'm convinced was an utter waste of time, simply busywork so I could collect a paycheck, a far less honorable activity than the effort and sacrifice these good people contribute to this parade.

As we head further up this end of town, a little gorilla boy conks out, the crowd thins, the young male bystanders' faces look harder. Mayke's warning about the risks in this side of town echoes in my ears. My nerves are fading along with the smiles in this toughening neighborhood. A lot of these faces in this neighborhood carry what to my overactive, paranoid imagination, look like knife-scars.

I finally turn around, letting the slowing parade wend on toward the cemetery without me.

I crash dive back to reality by walking through a closing market, where little girls' backs bend under tables their own weight and the open eyes of severed pigs' heads glassily stare at me.

A street performer demonstrates marshal arts using knives and chains. Bands of pink streak a fading sunset. I drop all my coins into the hats of beggars at the locked church gates and begin walking back to my familiar, if no more real, world.

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

How often do our doubts and frustrations and arise not from evidence or facts, but from within, reflecting more our own self-absorbed cynicism than genuine objective assessment of the situation, blinding us to seeing reassuring Truth and beauty.

Rush Hour

Morning rush hour,

blastin' along,

late again

dang!

light changes,

caught behind

some van type vehicle,

the driver stops instead of going for it,

then reaches in his pocket,

pulls out a comb, and

gently, caringly,

caressingly,

straightens

golden hair

of his

little

girl.

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

Gifts That Don't Fit

I put up the last of the Christmas gifts and "care package" food from my 96 year old mother. I note the aluminum foil carefully wrapped around the edge of a lidless container, wrapped with hands twisted and stiffened by arthritis. I taste the jar of salsa, loyally branded with my alma mater's label, and filled with arguably the worst salsa ever to grace a gift shop shelf.

It dawns on me that perhaps it is all the many futile, clumsy, incompetent attempts to love that are the most endearing.

Love well scripted, gifts guaranteed to fit, outcomes assured to be positive, well understood needs appropriately and effectively addressed, of course we wish our love were always so accurately targeted.

But perhaps it is in the guesswork gift, the blind stab gesture, the token act of useless generosity, the misplaced effort and the unnoticed and unappreciated offer of help that love truly shines. For this is love given without certainty of outcome, gifts given in innocent sincerity purely for the sake of love, given in spite of not knowing if they will fit or they are needed or even remotely desired.

Such gifts are a statement of determination to give, to love, to help, love refusing to be held back by practical considerations, love insistently reaching out into darkness, and thereby casting light and warmth into cold shadows.

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

Much of our doubt arises from fear. In finding ways to reveal our hidden fears and to directly wrestle them out of our way, we are left able to more sharply distinguish between justifiable doubts and doubts evoked by our shroud of fear.

Why climb?!

Another day with my rock-climbing partner yesterday, climbing the perfect lead routes for me ("lead" meaning there is not a rope already in place, so the first climber up has to, gets to, climb by taking the rope up, entailing at least minimal exposure to fall potential). For me such climbing hits the perfect mental and emotional reset button.

It turns off my fear! For a moment, right after an intense lead climb, all the fears abate, that little overactive part of my brain that reminds me that car wrecks and strokes and sudden deaths of soul mates really do happen, that persistent, sharp clawed demon of fear is put in its place.

In no small part I lead climb to stare that evil tormentor in the face, to take it on in a bare knuckle, chains and knives, give no quarter and show no mercy battle for survival.

For indeed, if that fear of stroke, heart attack, car wreck and losing my life partner were to ever gain the upper hand, my life would end. That whispering voice of fear takes enough of my life as it is. How much joy and beauty of the moment do I miss when I think of whether tires will slip, a driver will react, an artery will block, a procedure will prove positive.

How I detest and loathe that fear center of my brain and its incessant rude intrusions into my consciousness.

Haven't wrecks and stroke and losses cost directly enough, without their grisly wraiths drifting before my every waking moment?

I thank the Sustainer of Life for those perfect lead climbs, in which specters take tangible form, when at last I can grip my fingers 'round the cold, pale throat of fear, and in its retreat feel warming life again flow vital through my veins.

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

Look at the great tides of human history, and you could easily come to doubt the worth and meaning of any one individual's contribution to that seemingly inevitable flow. Or worse, what if our contributions really do matter and hence determine our worth, but we abysmally fail in all our attempts to contribute?!

Invention Inevitable

I've been reading in a wonderful book, Masks of the Universe (2nd Edition, Edward Harrison, Cambridge Press, 2003) about the Sophists, Socratics, Platonists, Epicureans, and Aristotelians.

In order, they believed in:

Sophists: it's possible to argue for and against anything, so ultimately there is no absolute truth, leaving us with pleasure and lusts as our only reasonable goal.

Socratics: Socrates countered the Sophists, arguing that argument is not arbitrary; one can find inner reference in the soul.

Platonists: there is a greater Truth to be discovered; it comes from the Mind, the Logos (Word), and is expressed in the soul through the demiurge.

Epicureans: the gods don't play a role, and we can find objective truth in study of the sciences (the philosophy predominant today).

Aristotelians: the world us surrounded by layers of other spheres and dominions. This view dominated through the 15th century.

So, what difference do any of these philosophies make for the person harvesting grain, baking bread, or hauling a load by donkey through cobblestone streets?

I sometimes wonder if the philosopher's role is akin to that of inventors of life-changing technology.

We credit to individuals such as Edison, Bell, the Wrights, etc., the revolutions wrought by light bulbs, telephones, airplanes, transistors, and microprocessors.

Yet while the genius of such inventors did indeed change our lives, had those individuals instead pursued careers as butchers or bakers, would our lives be any different? Isn't it certain that the natural forces of progress would have inevitably led someone else, somewhere else, to the same inventions? In fact, in almost all cases, the inventions might have been claimed under another's name within months, or at most a few years.

Can the same be said of the philosophies and worldviews that over centuries permeate the public consciousness?

We look at our science-based society, logical and stripped of gods, and look to the Epicureans as a seed from which grew this worldview.

Yet in our legal system, political speeches, and sexual mores, doesn't Sophistry predominate?

Doesn't the recent resurgence of spiritualism, meditation, etc., hearken back to Socrates?

And in fundamentalism, isn't the Platonic worldview encroaching into public consciousness under new guise?

Are philosophies as inevitable as light bulbs and microprocessors?

Will sophist hedonism inevitably arise when a society is blessed with adequate resources?

Won't some people inevitably turn to inner spiritual sources, as did the Socratics?

Won't some people inevitably seek connection with higher, external spiritual sources, following the Platonic path?

We see the examples of the ancient Greeks and modern United States, but what about the philosophies of the general populace of Peru 500 years ago, Romania 1000 years ago, Micronesia 2000 years ago?

Do the Sophists, Socratics, Platonists, and Epicureans simply provide well documented names for universal aspects of the human spirit, spiritual aspects that inevitably seek outlet, whether officially endorsed or not?

Is the lifework of Plato and Edison inevitable, even if that lifework were to spring from a different name and place?

If we conclude that the dramatic steps in the progress of humanity were indeed inevitable, does that render Plato and Aristotle, Edison and Einstein, unimportant? And by extension, is anyone's individual contribution to technical or spiritual progress of humanity doomed to triviality?

Down that path don't we find ourselves moving in circles, spiraling back down in resignation to the hopeless decadence of Sophistry?

Perhaps from this line of questioning we should each recognize we have the potential, in our contributions worldly and spiritual, to change the world. We should also acknowledge that we have no right to claim personal importance by our contributions, however grandiose and earthshaking.

The inevitability that someone, someday, would invent light bulbs surely would not excuse Edison from using his genius.

Inevitability no more excuses us from making our best effort to apply our talents, knowledge, creativity and skills in the service of something greater, than the parent is excused from caring for their children just because another relative or social worker might provide care in the parent's absence.

Ironically, the inevitability of invention, the universality of all worldviews, can serve as encouragement for our individual efforts. We can boldly make our best efforts without the pressure of feeling the world depends on our individual success.

If the invention doesn't work, if the theory proves wrong, if the sermon flops, if the brilliant insight never reaches public consciousness, we can still savor the inner peace of having tried our best, ultimately the only accomplishment guaranteed to anyone.

When we turn on a light, we should be every bit as grateful to Edison, his monumental efforts and accomplishments undimmed by the inevitability that someone else would someday have produced the same outcome.

In looking at Epicureans and the marked similarity of their philosophy to the scientific, pragmatic worldview that underlies western society, we should remain fully impressed at the quantum leap in human perspective they made. But perhaps we should less give them credit for shaping our world, and instead marvel at the great dynamic forces that shape human history, trends of which each individual is both shaper and shaped.

It is within the great, seemingly inevitable tides of human history that we find our individual opportunities to play a role, yet each individual role and contribution remains a matter of free choice. Through such choices we play our bit roles in shaping the unfolding drama of history, all roles being bit roles, some simply finding themselves in a brighter spotlight. Through such choices, we play our fully empowered role in shaping the unfolding form of our individual, eternal soul.

In pursuing one's committed, authentic, best-effort, spiritual investment in one's place within the inexorable tides, there arises the great irony. For regardless of successes or failures, goals made or missed, plans fulfilled or discarded, in the process of creating the self and simply playing one's role to the best of one's ability, in miraculous ways surprising and unforeseen, the individual can indeed turn tides, create life-changing contributions, and alter and influence the individual roles of all subsequent players in the unfolding drama.

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

A man smelled a flower today

A man smelled a flower today. He stopped between office buildings, pulled a branch toward him, and smelled its flowers......and gave me the courage to do likewise.

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

We're too busy for philosophy! We're too busy to smell any stinkin' flowers! I doubt the Greeks and that flower smelling guy had a cell phone, e-mail, text messaging, and Outlook calendars telling them what to do all the time.

Life Entanglements

Finally! Writing! At 15:30! (3:30 PM) Where does time go? To life entanglements,

infamous life entanglements,

wrapped like coils of tangling

vines and briars about our goals

and plans and hopes.

Such precious entanglements they are too,

the very threads of life,

weaving together disparate souls,

knots and nets

ensnaring will,

shattering routine;

Meditations interrupted,

schedules disrupted,

a flinch in another's life

jerks a cord in ours.

Entanglements, life entanglements

Frustrating and sustaining,

Exasperating and fulfilling,

their tripping, trapping,

pulling and twisting,

assuring us,

we are not alone.

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

Doubt: Is there no exorcist that can possibly free our modern society from its possession by possessions?

Is There an Exorcist in the House?

I sit in the rocking chair so as to not disturb queen 'Tasha kitty from her regal repose in "her" chair by the glass patio door. But no sooner do I sit down than here she comes, hopping into my lap, purring and purring and purring, to help me write on this morning when most people would say I should invest time in lesson planning for this morning's class. Such pure joy she expresses, head raised, turning this way and that, eyes squeezed closed in bliss, as I pet and scruff her, her motor running, her black hair glistening like Christmas tinsel in the morning sun.

Outside, a stereo percussion concert of woodpeckers fills the neighborhood. A half dozen or so feathered Buddy Rich's (a 1960's big band drummer who sometimes appeared on the Tonight Show). welcomed me down from my sunrise prayer walk.

I am working hard to see the beauty this morning. I need to see the beauty, beauty easy to miss if we let the temporal world possess our conscious thoughts.

I think incidents of possession are alive and well in modern times, more often than not possession by possessions (Symbolically, 'Tasha is now mesmerized by the bright spot on the wall moving up and down as my watch face reflects the morning sun.)

To be possessed of course is simply to have your conscious thoughts and behavior controlled by something external to your freewill. Epileptic seizures, your standard issue Biblical demon, and today's marketers all pretty much fall into the same category: destructive influences that take control of your brain without regard for your welfare.

Yeshu (Jesus) empowered His disciples to cast out demons, but the disciples did not have to face the legions of marketers infesting dark towers in Chicago and New York. The disciples only dealt with one demon possessed soul at a time, some poor, thrashing wretch whose mind and body were not under his control. Let's see the disciples stand in the doorway of a big retail store on Black Friday after Thanksgiving when legions of crazed shoppers do the bidding of their possessing masters. Yes, possession is alive and well, and arguably never before so widespread.

Possession grips us en masse, possession of culture and society as well as individuals, and these consuming, possessing demons have even largely banished the faiths and beliefs that might open our eyes to once again see beauty and regain control of our selves.

So for now, the great paroxysms of consumption and sales remain in control of our daily lives. It is not readily apparent what exorcising power may save us, and we certainly do not want to be saved. But possessing demons inevitably destroy their hosts, which ironically gives cause for hope. As oil runs out, crops wither before the heat, and resources deplete, our possessing demons will lose interest when we are too poor and hungry to follow their whim. Finally free of fads and baubles, our sunken eyes may finally again open to see beauty, and each other.

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

But what about possessions and objects with intrinsic meaning, keepsakes, heirlooms, those dusty old objects that connect us with relatives or the past or history?

There! Don't You See It?!

"There! Don't you see it?!" Over and over through life, in the simplest of moments, I want to cry out those words.

(I write while sitting in summer morning sun on the retaining wall, faint scent of moist, cool goldenrod mixing with aroma of warming green grass. Both kitties have joined me, PC kitty at my side, 'Tasha sniffing my socks.)

Last night's example of "there, don't you see it?!" involved a Public Broadcasting TeleVision program about flea markets....yes, flea markets, obviously a topic rife with profound lessons about the Purpose of life and meaning of existence.

As the program delved into the charm and attraction of flea markets, over and over the focus turned from the...(a chipmunk, whiskers glistening silver in morning sun, sits on the fence above my shoulder, riveting 'Tasha's bright eyed attention.)....unusual objects for sale, and turned to living, human interests.

In asking people why they frequented flea markets, over and over people responded by describing the human stories behind the objects for sale, the history, the family events, the imagined names of original owners.

When not citing the past human stories associated with objects, they cited the present day human stories of the buyers and sellers that frequent flea markets.

So what makes me want to cry out "don't you see?!".

(The chipmunk returns, working up his courage before making a bold dash right in front of all three of us to get from fence to juniper tree.)

These people seek not material objects and trinkets, they crave living connection with other people!

The junk and treasures of the flea market possess little intrinsic worth; they simply provide the telescope with which to peer across time into someone's life.

Flea markets provide a great service and fulfill a human need in providing these corroded, faded, one-way links to another's life. Yet once you perceive that the real reason for the appeal of that rusty saw lies in the image of the sweating father building a house addition to accommodate a growing family, you take a step toward weaning yourself from needing the old, rusty saw.

In a way, frequenting flea markets seems analogous to being hungry and frequenting the dumpster behind a restaurant.

You want real food, real food is there inside for the taking, but you examine scraps and leftovers.

Likewise, real life drama, personal histories in the making, poignant, dramatic, inspiring, and mundane surround us in our friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should not attend flea markets....but as I listened to people interviewed on the program, I saw how easy it is to fill our lives with the clutter and distraction of things and objects.

The objects' appeal may lie in the benign connection to some aspect of another's life, yet the money, time, and dusting that those material objects demand all require withdrawals from the ever dwindling bank account of our life.

Once we recognize that it is our fascination with people and life events that draws us to buy the commemorative pop bottle, maybe we can shortcut the life connection by skipping the dust collector object and going straight to a real life connection event, living an experience from which someone else will someday collect a bottle, or t-shirt, or rusty saw.

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

Some doubts are well justified, and reassurance is to be found in not fighting the doubts but accepting them, in listening to their whispering voice telling us what is unnatural and unhealthy.

No more sterile life

No more computer screen! I can't stand it! At least for a moment give me the natural, give me paper, pen, fuzzy kitty, a violin; no diesel, no flickering screen; give me gravel, not concrete; give me God's breeze, be it hot or cold, but not humming, filtered, conditioned air. Give me voice, not recording; touch not telephone; a ball and basket, not a video game. I need spring water not soda; a person offering real choice, not drop-down menus. Let me explore instead of being directed, let me walk a muddy path in lieu of a virtual tour. No peddles, gears, or 4WD; give me shoes and rope and pack.

I am sick of life cosmetically packaged like a stuffed toy instead of breathing like a panting leopard, and office cubicles are a worldwide abomination of Biblical scale. Divorced from real life, isolated in sterile boxes where flickering screens are supposed to replace hearth and home, challenge and toil, we turn up the volume on the violence and sex just to try to feel anything, we send others to fight our TV wars so we feel courageous, we handsomely pay professional mutants to play our sports so we can pretend we feel like winners.......

While what we need is soil in our hands, friends at our side,

a greeting by name when we enter a store,

and sensations and perceptions that cannot disappear at the push of a button or pulling of a plug.

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

With the reassurance that ultimately time, and only time, will confirm or assuage our doubts, we are free to be present in this moment.

Mistress of Time

Fragile, gossamer, rippling

glistens our delicate future suspended before us,

Stiff and bent and rusted

hang the remnants of our past.

Ever seducing,

beckons the future.

Remorseless departing,

recedes the past.

One fickle, one cold,

these mistresses of time,

steal our affections

from present sublime.

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For all the grandiose philosophy and religion and exegesis, sometimes the sweetest triumph of reassurance over doubt comes not from resolving the shadows cast by the doubts, but from walking out of those shadows into the bright reassurance to be found in the simple delights of a day.

Straw boxes

I'm not quite sure what I'll write about these little boxes. When we came across them while cleaning out Jane's father's house, I could not make myself throw them away. They called to me, out of my childhood past, out of my cynical present.

Boxes of straws they are.

I'll have to get rid of them. I don't want them collecting in my house the way they collected along with dust in his house. For the moment though, I need to try to capture some thought about them before giving them to the church pantry.

King Size drinking straw boxes..... nothing more.....

Perhaps these are the last of their kind. Imagine that. The last Carnival brand straw box with Scoopy the clown on the front, circa 1957 according to the copyright mark.

Carnival straws....who the heck was Scoopy the clown anyway? Just that guy on the straw boxes as far as I know.

How many times did I see that goofy face while getting a straw for a homemade chocolate milk shake? I tell ya', I do remember that name "Carnival". Shoot, maybe the boxes have not changed at all, "Mfg. By National Soda Straw Co., Chicago, Ill." They still used a three letter state abbreviation then. There's something a little symbolic about even that, reflecting the shortening, the quickening, of our times.

Carnival straws, Scoopy the unknown clown, and summer days at the kitchen table.... Always a positive memory associated with those straws. You didn't use them for medicine or vegetables after all, only for something that could be called a treat, on a warm afternoon, like today in fact, except then the house smelled like straw, real straw that is, moist straw in the evaporative air conditioner, straw I had helped my dad install earlier in the spring.

I try to return to my cynical self, looking at the back of the box at the marketing jargon: "make your own hat or purse with Zip-Straw Do It Yourself kits!" (The marketers were already using exclamation points on every statement way back then.) "Smart looking, distinctive styling, shower resistant". They picture a mother-daughter set of hats styled by Yvonne Jordan (her name shown in signature), a name even more obscure to me than good ol' Scoopy.

For real!....they show pictures of stylish women wearing this hat made out of drinking straws! You could order the kit for $2.00. I'll bet dollars to donuts (which was a meaningful statement in 1957) that for your $2.00 you got a piece of paper with instructions and then had to march back to the store to buy cases of straws to assemble this fashion statement.

Surely that bit of marketing deception should awaken my cynical side. If not, the other straw box we found labeled "Sunshine straws", displaying Mickey and Donald as the pitchmen, "for home use", "the Sanitary Convenient way to serve Iced drinks, milk, bottled beverages", surely that should feed my cynicism about greedy marketers contriving "needs" and then targeting the most vulnerable targets by aiming at childish minds and the parents that have to drag their kids down the grocery store aisles.

Yet my cynicism remains dormant today, not awakened by even matching mother-daughter soda straw sun-hats. It's too warm to get riled up about such things (an appropriate 1950's small town expression). Today is July 1st, and as warm and lazy as July 1st should be. I wonder if the company cafeteria could make a Coke float, and put a straw in it?

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Eventually, we are empowered to liberate ourselves from all the doubts, not by finding their resolution, but by creating through our response to them our own deeply personal reassurance.

Dignity

All the struggles.

All the struggles,

all the tragedy,

lives broken,

but not quite,

seldom quite fully broken,

somehow the human spirit,

dirty, disheveled, and bloodied,

picks itself up,

carries on,

In that quiet dignity of the homeless,

all of us ultimately being homeless,

In the head held as high as possible against the crooked spine,

In the professional restraint when receiving the layoff message,

In the cold,

in the abiding cold,

In the loneliness amplified by concrete and asphalt,

In the clinging despair of our own inadequacy,

from somewhere,

comes courage,

to look up,

to pick up,

and to lift up

another.

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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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