Know Thy Self, Not What Separate You Pretends to Know. This Unleashes Power Truly.

Brian Steere's stimulating comment on the latest Smoking Mirrors:

"I see Materialism as the reversal of cause/effect by which an illusion of power operates upon and within an illusion of powerlessness.

Source or true Cause is Eternally Indivisible, and yet our human consciousness is a facet of a fragmented disintegrity in which coercive power seems to divide and rule in power OVER Life.

In the wish-attempt to control Life is the reflection of dissonance and disorder which reinforces its own 'foundation'.

The more coercive or fear-defined control is asserted, the more out of control one's self-world experience.

Relinquishing a phoney power allows spontaneous yielding to true harmony of a wholeness of being in resonant relation within all that is presencing itself.

The abyss can symbolize the nothingness of destruction or insanity - but it can also indicate the not-knowing through which Life Knows Itself Truly. For the belief one already knows is the dark lens by which one sees nothing truly.

An unyielding point of view operates 'denial' and wars not with reality but within itself as a denial of awareness of reality - of what is true to the reality that You Are.

To fit or limit oneself to a machine is a chosen condition, but to persist becomes a self-conditioning. But self-definition remains a creative acceptance of true function and not a coercive imposition of power upon powerlessness. Nor a hiding of the illusion of power within a belief in powerlessness."

source permalink

Thoughts arise like ripples spreading and interpenetrating in a shaded, reflecting pool:

The thought of separateness is diametrically opposed to the natural flow, one hundred eighty degrees removed from the viewpoint of Unity.

The more our conscious and unconscious identifications are rooted in this erroneous orientation, the more personal effort our false self must expend to maintain its identity and negotiate a world of external entities, uncertainty, injustice, and existential danger.

This sense of being under threat, forced to respond to demands and attacks, attempting to achieve some modicum of control, with no assurances but those we cling to in our minds as hope-notic self-calming suggestions and beliefs...

makes our psychic and energy bodies curl in on themselves, shrivel and harden, as the flow of natural being is cut off by our misalignment with the native state that is our access key to the Source Field from which we spring. By our resistance to what we feel.

Resisting pain, ignoring or fearing discomfort, blaming the world, translates on the opposite end of the scale to a sense of lacking that which is desired and a hesitance to give or receive Love to the fullest, a fear of surrender commensurate with our addiction to control.

We are indeed at war: at war with ourselves.

The shadow,
all that we have broken ourselves away from,
is the judged,
abandoned,
ignored,
unseen,
forgotten,
and innermost piece of ourselves:

the innocence that we lost touch with
when we slipped into our hallucination
of smoking funhouse mirrors,
forged our protective armaments,
built up our defensive walls,
imprisoned and exiled ourselves away
from free, untainted air
and happy days and nights,
from children's laughter,
men and women's work and play
the elders' guiding wisdom,
communion with the spirits
of our celestial ancestors and future generations,

from brotherhood with animals
with flowers, trees, and birds,
from living skies and speaking stones
and waters clear and bright,

in a land now lost and far away,
a fading memory:
our Home.

That homesickness you feel?

Your heart it is that calls.

Your heart is always home,
and there it waits
so infinitely patient
for you to come again into its arms
so that it might communicate with you
as intimately as it did when you were born,
might see your pupils widen with the thrill of remembrance
as illumination dawns
and you regain the wealth of your Self and give
your whole self back to it with molten pleasure,
bubbling with thanks
and dancing, humming,
singing, drumming,
weeping, sighing
breathing, crying
wholehearted odes upon its sweetness,
glories, ways, and mysteries.

It wants to bathe with you in mutual delight
and teach you of the plenitudes of solitude and silence,
eternal stillness moving all.

It wants to show you, teach you, let you feel
the meanings of everything:
of all events and forms and creatures you encounter,
en la belle langue perpétuel d'amour.

It wants to reward you for the everything that you are,
fulfill its every desire and take you along for the ride,
remind you in a million billion ways
of how beautiful and amazing and perfect you are,
just the way you are.

It wants you to know that you are the Special,
that there is only One Special because there is only One Here Looking
and all that it sees is the One Special—itself—
wrapped in wonders of imagination.

The miracle the heart sees is not that the One heals all—
 for healing is simply in Love's self-abiding nature—
but that the Dream can feel so real and offer so much
to marvel at, enjoy, to feel thankful for.

So many opportunities and possibilities.
Such multidimensional depth,
such seamless synergy
and infinitely complex interconnection,
endless vistas to explore,
such different stories to live through.

So much beauty.

Such horrible, convincing ugliness
that we can feel full range and subtle nuance of sensation
on the scale from agony to ecstasy,
and all of it a dance
'twixt Love in naked action
and that same Love becostumed and beveiled...

... and none of it can ever kill, undo,
or make us more or less
than Love.

Such exquisite fantasies,
such wit and play and mirth.
Such great and rich adventures
and such joy in hard-won growth.
Such exhilarated awe at pulling off the least expected,
most satisfying outcome.
Such kinship, faith,
and confidence and grace.

Such awesome demonstrations
of the lengths that Love will go
for its Beloved.

This Love continuous
sends waves to wash you home
and flames to lick away your sins,
and yet your doubtful mind insists
on spurning, miscreating lies.

Only stop the torture toys,
let echoes fade away.
Return to harmony and live
the life created as a gift
for God's own child, the One You Are,
at one with Father-Mother.

Turn the Power from the Hot Shots / Then Burn the Plot

Welcome again!

Today’s title is a play on some lyrics by Rage Against the Machine. Contentwise, we’re taking a number of cues from the work of John Lash, as a healthy contrast and breath of fresh air. It is my hope that I can always bring something fresh and useful and relevant here, and not get bogged down in self-absorbed complacency. Heaven forbid I contribute to the smothering embrace of dogma, to the insidious fog of the false light that promises salvation and leads to perdition.

John Lash’s mythopoeic and investigative genius, his heroic attitude, his commitment to timeless values, and his love for the spirit of humanity are greatly inspiring. If you’re not yet familiar with his defining work, the reconstructed Wisdom Goddess mythology of the suppressed Gnostic tradition, I suggest listening to “Sailing Across the Gender Rift,” one of his more recent audio recordings, in which the story is revisited for both newcomers and veterans alike.

I’m forced to observe, as I go through my day, all the delinquent, narcissistic currents and tendencies in my thinking and behavior. I am as much a product of the age we live in as the most ignorant Pod Person. I chose that reference because I am composing these words on my iPod, ironically enough. The depth of that irony will become apparent as I explain.

One of the concerns of our time is the sudden, unprecedented proliferation of these mobile devices. It's clear to see, especially if one takes a step back, that the addiction to these devices, and to the simulacrum of reality they so seductively offer, can be neither natural nor healthy, and even poses a clear and present danger to our evolution and our well-being. If you’ve ever used one, you may have noticed the sensations in your body that resulted, especially from prolonged use. (We have been well trained to ignore bodily signals; this is one of the triumphs of the archontic programming we contend with. Paying attention to the way we feel in our bodies is an important part of the awakening process.) My own sense is that of an energetic change, a drain of life force, replacing the invigorating, harmonious, flowing, native vibration with a morbid, chaotic, stagnant, and foreign vibration. Based on that experience, I am not laughing when John Lash makes the assertion that these touch-screen devices are, in fact, a vector for the third stage of what he calls A.I., the ‘archontic infection’, a partial timeline of the progression of which he has sketched out in the latest Nousflash notes.

(I just switched over to my no-frills laptop with separate no-frills keyboard. Much better!)

He also says that the physical touch of skin on screen gives some of our bioelectromagnetic energy over to the matrix of the archons, actually feeding it. This seems unexplainable and therefore improbable to the conditioned rational mind – how convenient that the worship of blind intellect has infiltrated our Western culture to the point of invisible saturation! – and yet the experiential evidence is there, the consistent feeling that one has been sucked of some vital essence, one’s aura depleted, through even less-direct contact with the less-flashy electronic toys, but particularly by the use of these touch screens.

The final effect of this third, terminal stage of the infection, says Lash, is the complete removal of all that is remotely human from our psyche. No originality. No individuality. No independent thought. No creative impulse. No desire for the living immediacy, warmth, and vulnerability of real, authentically human contact. Little by little, the human animal is led to surrender that which makes it human, leaving nothing but an aimless, ravenous beast. A biological vessel now stripped of all meaningful functions of spirit and soul, completely enslaved and controlled. A meat robot, ready and willing to perform exactly as its overlords intend. The end result? A human race made over in the image of the usurping artificial intelligence, inimical to its planetary mother, destroying, violating, and perverting her and its fellow children along with itself.

This legacy is not the intention of Gaia, nor is it set to prevail. There is a spiritual immunity inherent to the Anthropos, the energetic template of humanity as a life form, that ensures that some portion of us, those who so choose, will never submit, never lose.

The way John Lash tells it, as a piece of Gnostic intel, there were fully ten failed versions of the Anthropos experiment prior to the current iteration with its anomalous personal involvement of the Aeon Sophia. These failures came about even without the unanticipated complication of the abiogenesis of the cunning, vengeful archons. Those human strains did not reach their full and highest potential... but could it be that these parasites and their machinations are the very element that will push us to achieve it in concert with Gaia herself? Humanity’s finest hour is at hand, says the Terton. The very worst and the very best that we are capable of coincide.

Nousletter #5, Romantic Individuality, comments on a video of Jim Carrey clowning around on late-night television, displaying the familiar Illuminati triangle but with a lolling tongue instead of the eye. Funny stuff. That clip can be taken so many ways. My honest, direct impression of it was quite sinister. I saw a mass programming event designed to deepen the hypnotic trance while still providing the opening for awakening. The chilling gist of the (seemingly) intended effect is a schizophrenic, simultaneous admission and denial-by-ridicule of Illuminati influence over the entertainment industry. It acts as an inoculation against the truth for those disinclined to seek it. They pull the old fright-tactic / false-comfort game again: “Boo! We are real and we are scary, here we are admitting it in the open! … Haha, gotcha! Funny funny. It’s OK, here’s your security blanket, go back to sleep. Heh heh heh!” The gloating, genocidal, deranged Demiurge and his warm, fuzzy alter ego. Madness; misery begging for company.

The lolling tongue, as explained by John Lash, is a threefold symbol associated with Kali. One: the image of an animal dying of thirst: the spiritual dehydration of the Kali Yuga. We can be led to the Water of Life, but such is our state of disorientation and degradation that few of us are equipped to really drink it. The proliferation of false guides, the blind leading the blind, and of counterfeit sources, really makes this a perilous time in that regard. Only our most dedicated, honest self-inquiry and sincerity of purpose will suffice to bring us into a position to enjoy those revivifying draughts. And yet that spring eternal is as close to us as our very Self, here and now. It is that feeling of overwhelming divine thirst that drives us to make every effort to attain it.

Two: addiction, the unrestrained pursuit of sensual gratification, the oral stage of sexuality. Weak, foolish mortals helplessly give themselves over to all manner of self-sabotaging habits and compulsions instead of making their overarching object of desire the one thing that could free them to really enjoy the pleasures they endlessly run after and also free them from the cycle of pain, relief, and guilt. The total, pure, guiltless, and unattached enjoyment of carnal pleasures is the perfect expression of the infernal (material) polarity of divinity, which, by virtue of its oneness with Spirit, knows the innocent perfection and the proper place and measure of all things. Addictions run rampant in the Kali Yuga. Desire is the motivating force of creation itself. Divorced from living wisdom and love, it morphs into an intolerable curse. The pain of that curse, allowed to run freely through our being with eternal Spirit as the forgiving witness, becomes our road to liberation. Resistance ensures persistence. Full, unflinching, contemplative awareness of the addiction experience, releasing our energetic bonds to it by relaxing into surrender, vigilantly and consistently, will undo the binding spell and make each moment a timeless ecstasy.

Three: the tongue-on-knife ritual of the Kalika warrior. Since our interpreter is the first and maybe the only expert on this esoteric and novel initiation, I will happily defer to his exact phrasing:

But since the Ronda Moment I live continually in an expanded frame of sensitivity about pleasure and pain. I realized then that the non-dual ground awareness, which is pure and total bliss, conjures intensities of pleasure and pain out of sheer hunger for its own beauty. Endlessly ravenous, the current of Divine Shakti crashes, shivers, and melts through every conceivable nuance of so-called emotion, and perfects itself by consuming its own beauty, and being consumed by it, in turn.

The realization that overwhelms mind and body at such a sublime moment does not fade or wane. It just builds and builds, as much as you can handle it, one moment at a time. And gradually, over time, it dissolves the illusion of time completely—there's a Kaliesque paradox for you. The Ronda Moment provided the perfect counterpart to my experience a month earlier, when I underwent the Kalika initiation of Tongue on Knife up on the Ridge. That is to say, I discovered and performed that ritual in the same moment. The cognitive enlightenment that triggered that spontaneous ritual came in a brutal blow of liberating power from my guardian dakini. By her grace, I realized that the root of all addiction is addiction to the pain of not being seen. Even the Divine Shakti, the sourcing power to manifest the Universe, feels the pain of not being seen. And imagine the immensity of that emotion, considering what is to be seen!

The whole text, along with plain info, teases with some profound and tantalizing glimpses....

The fact that one experiences limiting attachments to certain unwanted patterns is not a problem in itself. The problem arises from one’s relationship to the fact of the matter. Time heals all ills – given the right conditions. And if there is no ill to be healed in the first place, then, well....

What if we reframe the addiction as neither good nor bad, but simply another pattern playing itself out? What if we recognize that the same Source that recreates the addiction pattern in every static ‘frame’ of time can also cease to maintain its existence at any time, and that that Source is within our reach – so near that there is no difference and no distance between ourselves and it? What if we honor it all as part of the gift of life, give up the need to prescribe meaning to it, and give it back to Source sanctified by our gratitude for the grace in every moment, as a devotional offering in the trusting attitude of prayer? What if we stop struggling to attain some imagined ideal of non-attachment and simply realize that our inner nature is already at rest, perfectly neutral, while the vicissitudes of life come and go as ever-balanced extensions of that void state in a symphonic dance of the exquisite outworking of a hierarchy of laws? What if we could balance the personal and heavy aspect with sober, grounded objectivity and an unfounded, carefree lightness?

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. What a horrible expression to have wormed its way into our conventional figures of speech. But let’s stick with it here, since we’re talking about ingrained patterns. You can philosophize about it any which way, and still go about performing the actions to separate skin from cat... or you can have a change of heart and let the poor cat keep its skin until Mother Nature decides it doesn't need it anymore. Yeah? And now I’m not even sure I know what I’m saying anymore; isn’t that grand? Somehow I’ve always pictured that cat being alive to start with. Schrödinger, what have you done?

So many addictions and ingrained habits. Some destructive, some indifferent, some ambivalent, and some sublime. I don’t know if it’s worth getting hung up on judging or not judging the difference from a surface-mind point of view. I’ve got mine for sure, along with some I’d gladly be rid of. But I’m content to try to observe, contemplate, accept and forgive. Even celebrate, if I can. If not, no biggie.

Alchemy is always good. If there’s a way you can turn a liability into an asset, you might as well try it. At the very least, (real) forgiveness lets you off the hook from the debilitating effects of guilt.

The earthly cabal’s got its hooks in us almost every way we turn. Same goes for the foreign psychic installation of the lizzies. Some hooks are more voluntary than others. If we’re going to tear ourselves up with anxiety and impotent rage about the ones we feel poking through our flesh, then that’s our business. The Zen-ish approach seems more sane to me. They can’t touch what we are, the part that matters. All they can do is try their best to convince us of their dominion over us, to make us forget that we are so much more than what the straitjacket of society tells us we can be. The more of the truth we know and act upon, the less concerned we need to be over all that. We are not measured by our material success here; we are measured in the realm of measures by the quality of our motives and choices. Then again, the measureless makes us all ultimately equal.

We can see ourselves as victims of the currents that move us and impact on us. We can withdraw our awareness and ignore or deny those currents. We can seek to fight them or change them. We can try to accept them. And / Or, we can inquire into the depths of ourselves to discover the fountainhead of wisdom, courage, and serenity within, whereby we can navigate impeccably as fish do: by instinct. As effortlessly as the infinite. As an open conduit between heaven and earth. As a conscious, connected mind-body matrix moved by the interplay of spirit and soul.

Words, words, words. If you get something out of them, great. That’s more than I even ask. My role as scribe is complete and therewith am I satisfied. Thanks for taking the time.

Peace.

P.S. The Zio-nanny gremlins at our lovely corporate hydroctopus host, Google (“Be Evil”), don’t want to let me embed this video – even though the footage is all familiar, if gut-wrenching, 20th-century stuff – so here is a hotlink for you:

Rage Against the Machine - Wake Up (historical footage)

All Systems Go – I Believe In You

The following lead-in is not a final word, a definitive conclusion, or a higher ground. It is a perspective that may undo the need for personal investment in debates on the subject, while acknowledging the necessity of that debate to occur wherever it may arise.

So many religions, so many philosophies. Who’s right, who’s full of shit?

Confirmation bias is a mighty complication. Subjectivity makes one person’s savant another person’s idiot. How are we to know which ideas to follow and which to leave by the wayside?

I’m going to steal one of Matt Kahn’s riffs here. He says one of the games universe plays is “I Told You So.” You start with a belief, and universe plays it out for you on the screen of your reality: affirmation, confirmation. Then you, the center of your subjective universe, can have the satisfaction of saying, “See? I told you so!”

It’s easy to see how this lends itself to self-reinforcing, stagnant, mutually incompatible belief systems. Fortunately for those who get tired of the strife that that engenders, universe has an antidote: another game called “Hmm, Now That’s Interesting.” Letting crisis catalyze the needed shifts within you, you change your stance toward new information, get past the identification with particular beliefs, and become open to new ideas, at best without even a need to prematurely adopt or reject them. You go from rigid pedantry to an adventure of discovery.

But old habits die hard. We can still get caught up in the “who’s right, who’s full of shit” dichotomy, keep trading up to newer and better beliefs to confirm and defend, or finding thought leaders to raise up and tear down, publicly or privately.

The realization that each one of us is on a unique, tailor-made journey – intertwined with the journeys of all those with whom we come into contact – takes a lot of the pressure off: there’s less of a proselytizing / condemning savior complex and more of a mutual respect and support dynamic. What works fine and appears true for the other person right now may not be at all what you need or see at the moment and vice versa, in which case simple recognition of that fact can suffice. If you do engage in discussion, then regardless of the similarities or differences in your viewpoints, you can help the other person to correct or expand or balance their view, and they can do the same for you – provided there is a common ground of respect and openness.

All lines of inquiry lead to truth. All paths of development bring fruition.

I love encountering new ways of being, new viewpoints and information. All of it simply adds to the delightful richness of my experience, and some of it is even practically useful for me. As much as the heart revolution reveals the rightness of our path and every other path, the following of that singular, silky thread of the personal path is still a matter of honest effort and discernment, in which any and all of our faculties of mind, body, spirit and soul can and will be called forth and tested.

I often recall the message in the words of Polonius: “This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

All systems go. All roads lead home. Systems come and go. Home is where the heart is.

Dvaita, advaita. Paradox. No contradiction – only complement.

Form glorifies the formless. The One sanctifies the all. The transcendent truth informs and contextualizes the cosmic dance of thought, providing sanity to the sensual and making sense of insanity.

We do what life calls us to do, no more and no less. The role we play, whether as pawns or conscious participants, in the dance of life, is our raison d’être. When our being embodies the causeless nature of the Now, we can call upon and partake of the power of intent, the eternal first cause: the Will of the I Am presence. That should be incentive enough for anyone experiencing divine discontent to strive forward in the earnest pursuit and application of perennial wisdom.

All systems go. You are the thread you must follow. Go, and don’t look back. It’s a heck of a ride, but you’ll make it through. There is no other possibility. So: choose peace, choose certainty. Choose Love, and it will thrill instead of terrify. Feel fully and you will give the greatest gift – appreciation and abandon – to the infinite aspect of your being that made it all just for you.

“You can’t go wrong, you must go right – it’s Willy Wonka’s Wonkavite!” The fountain of youth is your willingness to take each moment as it comes, your ability to bring forth the freedom contained in your innermost being.

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the essence of things not seen.” Even if you feel inadequate to the task, fear not. Your infinite aspect has it all in hand and is even now guiding your every thought, feeling, and movement.

These are reminders, gently appearing before you, inviting you to take them into your awareness. It is good that you read these words. It is impeccably sublime, imperative, and inevitable that they henceforth become part of the path that lies behind you, so that you can face whatever lies ahead of you. Remember if you wish, forget if you must, but know that you always have what you need.

I believe in you. How about you?

JE SUIS LA VIE

It’s been a rough few days. My dear wife has been suffering from a highly virulent seasonal flu, coughing up sputum and going through rolls of toilet tissue. She’s also been running a high fever. Her condition has been such that I have had to be by her side almost continuously, given that her personal assistant has also been down with the flu. My friend Teemu came over to help out last night and mentioned the following text, seen on a sign outside the local Pentecostal church:

JE SUIS

LA VIE

He said it was like the perfect answer to the media’s recent campaign to divide people into different camps with the viral slogan, “Je suis Charlie.” ‘Viral’ is right: it’s a sick way to think. In the name of ‘solidarity’ with the ‘defenders of free speech’ (no argument with the principle, only with how it is being used), the public are called to identify with a name that psychologically symbolizes the wronged, the killed, the victim of the past. To take a stand, not actually for anything real, but against an imagined threat. We are asked to put on the role of the accuser, to take a moral stance of righteous indignation and condemnation.

I’m no apologist for Mohammedan fundamentalism. Or militant Christian zealotry. Or Jewish supremacist fanaticism. As John Lash elucidates in his update, There Are No Shades of Freedom, these three monotheistic religions have been exploited as vectors for a virus of the mind, a soul parasite that some call Wetiko, others psychopathy or the archontic influence. Typical symptoms include authoritarianism, subjectivity of thought, an atrophied conscience and intuition, and distrust toward the world in general and the free inner nature in particular. But what is it that speaks when we hear this adversarial voice of fear?

We hear the thought that thinks separation is real. This thought cannot conceive of love except as an exclusive, particular, limited thing. A weak, soft thing in a hard world, creating only vulnerability. The idea that if we united ourselves in a freely-flowing web of mutual love, we could overcome any obstacle to our true heart’s desire individually and collectively, seems like madness and impossibility, a nice dream but only delusion after all, to this child of the primal thought of separation; the unconscious, unliving, abortive offspring of Shiva and Shakti; the insatiable ghost of envy and hatred toward all life; a semblance of life without the spirit of life, animated only by the energy of the thought that impels and sustains it.

This thought dwells within me. And if you are seeking the same truth I seek, then it dwells within you as well. For if it did not, we would have no need to seek for what we already have: the perfection of our Divine Being.

It is not required for us to speak of spirituality, to read books or blogs, or to even have a concept of ourselves as being spiritual seekers. All that is needed is a willingness to bring the darkness to light. To come closer to what we really are, to embrace an absolute freedom that does not differentiate between right and wrong, better and worse. We have all possibility within us. Only if we are open to meeting the darkest parts of that field of possibility with the light of our innermost heart to illuminate the way, only then can we make friends with our feelings of fear and sensations of pain. Then they are our guides, showing us the next thing to accept and forgive, so that it passes through us without resistance, released out of our field of vibration by the resolving power of Love.

“Je suis la vie.” An expansive, heart-opening statement, open to all possibility. Je suis, I am. Take away but the letter i and you get Jesus, the name of a man. Take the living ‘I’ out of being and you get only a specific form among forms. This is the trick that mind plays on itself.

We are here, as the Adam of myth, as namers of God. We are given the power to express divinity. When we misuse that power by believing and expressing falsehood, we make that falsehood our god and become like our false god, creating a world reflecting that false god’s nature back to us. When we replace our falsely self-identifying thoughts and beliefs with self-illuminating truth, with a way of being that is predicated on neither belief nor non-belief, knowing nor unknowing, we are released from the tyranny of the divided and divisive mind of duality into a pure spontaneous flow of being that springs from our Home Source in the living unity of Light. Then even our human form naturally attains ever more faithful congruence with the nature of the true God, becoming less and less limited in all the qualities and attributes of that divinity.

Love evolves. Fear devolves. This is well explained in the article titled Moral Evolution by Norman D. Livergood. We have nothing to fear from fear when we surrender it and ourselves to the service of the purposes of Love. Then it is only a player in the dynamic of eternal growth – not a hungry, consumptive, cancerous type of growth, but an organic, balanced, intelligently ordered growth producing only more and more expressions of limitless divinity.

We need not deny God by perceiving lies to be true, or by making compromises with lies, or even by attacking lies – giving legitimacy to the primal lie. We need only abide in truth, for the God that cannot be denied lives within us. When we see things as they are while seeing what they appear to be, we see God as God is while seeing what God appears to be: unity in diversity, the self-evident truth cloaked in awful, awesome mystery.

It is a truly divine gift to really, viscerally perceive the innocence of the eternal Christ nature of all that we encounter in life. Life is our mirror. Let us honor it as that, and embrace the opportunities it presents us with in every moment to know ourselves more deeply through loving relationship with every form, sensation, and thought that comes into our awareness. This is the way, the truth, and the life. Some call it dharma, some call it the Tao. It is the working of the One sacred heart.

In Om shanti Om, I leave you now. Have faith. The journey is not what it may seem. We are going Home, helping each other on the way whether we know it or not.

Much love,

William

Esoteric vs. Exoteric

The search for truth happens on many levels. When we think we’ve arrived, we soon find that there’s another level yet to the mystery. It is layers upon layers upon layers. It is common to use the word ‘esoteric’ to describe layers of knowledge not generally accessed, i.e. known only to a few. Besides missing the point, this is a trivial and useless definition as we go forward, because in this time, those boundaries keep getting pushed as more truth percolates into previously endarkened sections of the minds of the human populace of Earth.

We still tend to speak of those that are awakening versus those who remain asleep. Apocalypse is not about letting us sleep. It’s a summing up. It’s a test. Which truths can we assimilate and act upon, how well, how fast, and how consistently? This is one level of what apocalypse means. There is not one soul on this planet that is not going to be awakened to the degree that awakening is possible. It will happen. Our deepest traumas and fears will be triggered. Our weaknesses will be exposed. Our blind spots will be shined upon and we will see everything we’ve denied. This process is unstoppable. The best course of action is to go along with it! Not hard to get when it’s laid out like that, but when it’s you and your life, for real, it’s a challenge. The going along, the letting go. We are all being challenged to our utmost ability.

Realizations have a way of sinking in. They actually do that in a literal way: first you get the surface awareness, then a deeper understanding, and then a little deeper, and deeper still, and so on, until, finally, a visceral, felt sense of it goes right to your core and leaves no room for uncertainty or ambiguity or forgetting. Every time it goes deeper, it gets fuller. Layers. In the case of certain items on our own personal agendas of self-realization, these layers seem to go on forever – whether due to the extreme depths, or, most likely, to the fact that we have some attachment that gets in the way of the lesson sinking in and so we just keep on getting hammered.

There’s no question that one’s quality of life is greatly improved the more truth one is able to accept. I’m talking about the inner quality of life, and inner truth. Outwardly, shit happens and will continue to happen until such time as there is nothing left in us that calls for any more shit. Inwardly, it’s all about attitude. What is your stance regarding the shit? Do you see it as mere shit for the sake of shit, fucking shit, or do you understand that there’s a purpose behind it? That’s inner truth. The more you get it, the more you align yourself with the force and intelligence behind all that seeming shit, and you realize, over time, that everything did indeed happen for very good reasons, and went much better than you would have made it go had you been in charge.

You are incompetent to direct your own life. You do not know, the way the ineffable knows. Unless and until you do (which you never, ever will as a manifest being), the best thing to do is to surrender to that higher, unknown wisdom that really does know what’s best. This is extremely hard to get! We are so wrapped up in our inflated sense of self-importance and insisting on being right and knowing what we think we know, when in fact we do not know. We are as little children. (Often badly behaved ones at that – screaming to have our way, rebelling against our parents, who are much wiser than us and love us unconditionally, but also have the task of raising us into something much more than we are now: our true selves.) It would behoove us to start to acknowledge that.

Have trust. Be that little child. Ask for help. You will get it. The ineffable’s job in regards to you is to shape you into that which you were meant to be, that ecstatically full, free and perfect expression of divinity that is uniquely you. In fact, you already are that, outside of the illusion of time.

One could say that this viewpoint doesn’t appeal. For whatever reason. One might rather think in terms of a perfect anarchy that somehow works out in the end, just to wipe out the annoying God factor and keep the happy ending. Well, that’s really just peek-a-boo. Not being willing to see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Besides, anarchy just means “no rulers,” which is appropriate for mature, sovereign beings. “No rules,” on the other hand, is a child’s fantasy, license to do as thou wilt with no regard for anything outside the self. To use the word anarchy in this context is just an obfuscation, sexing up the concept of mindless, directionless chaos housing only mini-Gods and their personal aims – hardly compatible with any hope for a happy ending.

The real esoteric truth is the inner knowing (and faith in lieu of knowledge to come, for us still on the way there) of the fundamentals of being, the laws of the universe, and the purpose of creation. These are mysteries that cannot be put into words. Yes, there is a need for words. Words help us conceptualize, they point the way, they structure our thinking, they define that which would otherwise be nebulous and hazy. But they are only words. Symbols. Reality is what is real, what our senses tell us, the manifest creation that is the outer end of the divine polarity, spirit and matter.

We must engage both ends. Esoteric and exoteric. They serve each other. This is why, in my opinion, we must seek both the inner and the outer aspects of truth. The inner is the key, the Holy Grail. But we cannot avoid the outer, inasmuch as it relates to our path. We cannot navigate with our eyes closed. That goes for both spiritual and temporal things. And both of these are inextricably, exquisitely, connected.