Spirit Pages (continued)
L2) The mind as it reaches for materiality experiences the fearful experience of death and the idea that the identity can be destroyed. In fact, death can be said to be itself symbolic of the idea of consciousness annihilation that is the very essence of material consciousness.
If this is the case, however, why is it that we seek out and grasp at physicality at all? It is because we do not grasp at annihilation but at the various �fruits� that hang from this poisonous tree.
Success, at least as we define it, is victory over others. When athletes run a race or compete in any manner, there is a process of elimination and ultimately only one winner. It is through bringing painful defeat to the other competitors that an athlete �succeeds� in his or her profession. It is an act of harm against another.
Although this seems like an extremely negative take on sports and most athletes want to win more than they want to harm others, the difference is moot. Regardless of their motivations, the end result of their success is the defeat of the dreams, in some case the lifelong dreams, of their competitors.
And so it is clear that while victory is sweet for the victor, it is terrible for the defeated. And yet it is natural for an individual who sees him or herself as separate from God to seek out victory in many different arenas. In reaching for this fruit they will taste defeat and humiliation and occasionally success and even total victory. They will continue to seek out victory until it no longer seems that sweet to them.
Also, individuals seek out power and the ability to shape the world without God�s Will running everything. The freedom from conscience and self-reflection, to act as one wants to free from some overriding authority is a chief desire of identity separate from God. It isn�t a case of hating God so much as it is a desire to be �free� and self-defined.
However, this fruit of the tree is bitter as well, as many other people live in the same space expressing their own �freedom.� And as these freedoms clash and compete, one lives in a state of perpetual war and conflict. Ultimately we come to no longer crave this kind of freedom. We want the freedom of being happy and having our desires fulfilled. We become tired of fighting over every last scrap of freedom.
The identity separate from God wants to engage in illusions. It wants to be able to create its own reality to supplant the existing one. It wants to be able to deny reality and to turn away from the truth. It wants to have the freedom to define reality for itself and even for others. In this way the individual separate from God seeks to play God.
But, it is impossible to replace Truth, because it is what makes Heaven what it is. The perfection of the Truth demands that anything that is not the Truth must be different from it, and so it is filled with imperfection, not to punish it but simply because perfection is an attribute of the Truth and so imperfection must be an attribute of fiction.
In even the most successful case scenario of living in illusion and contradicting Truth there will be suffering and longing unfulfilled. Even if you are worshipped, popular and wealthy, your heart will still gnaw at you for a deeper fulfillment that can�t be defined. Between the erotic highs of your experience there will be flashes and glimpses of great pain and despair that will beg to be answered. Truth is the only thing that can satisfy this desire and end this suffering.
And so we will continue to pick these poisoned fruits from the tree of consciousness annihilation. But when we finally have run our course in our desire to be separate individuals from God, we will become part of God consciously and we will see the error of our previous approaches. God was not punishing us; rather, we made choices with preset consequences that came automatically out of those choices. Annihilation of consciousness and death were never real. We cannot be destroyed; what we are is eternal. Now we can return in peace to God, working out the final fragments of our individuality separate from God and fulfilling its desires.
L3) The state of the identity in the physical illusion is that of being trapped between the murky and underdeveloped experiences of the past and the absolutist, cold, immoveable vision of the self it sees in the future.
One feels like losing one�s humanity and the other feels like imprisonment and a future without hope. Time is merciless with us in the physical experience. It takes, removes, breaks, decays and damages without the need to repair what it has done. Friends die, skin sags and features fade. Beauty erodes, governments falls, plans evaporate and dreams go unfulfilled. This is the nature of the beast.
The past haunts us, with every misdeed and misspoken word hanging in our memory, never to be removed. The past taunts us, showing us our own ugliness and misshapen personality. We see our humiliating defeats and how we harmed others. We see our embarrassments and failures, locked in our mind for all time. The pleasures and positives that we hope to remember instead become blurry and flat, lacking their original joyful content and becoming dull and lifeless in our mind. This is not universal for all memories, but a definite trend for some. The past shows us what we never achieved and what we lost as well.
The future is likewise hateful, promising us unseen pain and harm that is yet to befall us. And, the worst is always yet to come, with some grisly death awaiting us, along with possibly disease, misfortune, harm, loss and watching these losses visit others.
In the middle, in the present moment, we are stuck between these two hells, constantly waiting for the next painful thing to come along. We know we cannot escape our past and that we will never know any peace as long as we can�t change how we see it.
When we achieve our state of being in God again, we will see that time means little to nothing. We have all the positive things we have ever done and experienced, as well as all our dreams and desires, right at our fingertips forever.
Every past joy is not dulled by the faults of memory but can be relived in gleaming detail in the first person, with all the impact that it had in the first place.
The future is just a stream of as-yet unexperienced joys and fulfillments for us. The guilt and pain of the past is washed away as well as we see that we were never really this false being. It is like waking up from a bad dream and realizing that it was all ephemeral.
We have never sinned or hurt anyone. We did not harm ourselves. In fact, pain itself is gone from God�s consciousness and is meaningless to it. Our experiences in God are pure fulfillment and pleasure with no possibility of pain. Our desires are fulfilled immediately and completely successfully.
All beings are part of God, so their behaviors are synchronized perfectly under God. As one wants, the other wants and the two are brought together at the same time by their mutual wanting. One cannot be deprived of the other. In this way everyone is completely fulfilled.
In experiencing our fulfillment we become actors in the fulfillments of others, or activities, comings and goings being perfectly timed. Nothing is left unfinished or unfulfilled.
Time is an eternity of fulfillment under God. We look back with amusement at our ridiculous lives before, and yet we treasure the positive memories we generated and we can develop these stories into their fulfillment in God to take them with us. Nothing needs to be left behind.
And even though we are all equal under God, we get to keep our individuality or individualities that we developed through various lifetimes in physical experience. This becomes a vital part of our perfection.
And so, time is perfected in God and its true nature is finally revealed there. And timelessness exists there as well, as the place where time ceases to mean anything to the individual who is no longer focused on things and activities but chooses to loose him or herself in the peace of God. This kind of experience exists under God as well. God is about infinity, freedom and choice.
L4) Pouring Mouth
Ideas ceaselessly pour out of being at all levels of identity. Being constantly generates a vast stream of new ideas. At any point in time, all of creation, all of what we see is entirely a series of ideas that seem to be giving birth to new ideas. These new ideas are in no way �new� at all, but are time and context dependent and so must come into being only at a certain time and in a certain manner.
When I say that these ideas are not new, I mean that they exist in Spirit, where time is personal, but are born in God where time has no meaning. In this sense we must acknowledge that all ideas that are �new� must come from a timeless place, be born from the one idea of materiality and then be seen in context of their appearance in time as being new. But, their newness is as illusory as their materiality.
Even non-material ideas are not new, but new versions of them are being explored all the time and this �newness� entirely comes from our being locked into one timeline.
As ideas flow into each other and are �born� and �die� over time, we see their shifting forms displayed metaphorically by our minds in the world around us. We see architectural styles, religions and cults, systems of government, styles of dress, philosophical developments, scientific breakthroughs, medical breakthroughs and sociological and cultural developments in thought and self-expression. Freedoms are gained and lost, insights made and forgotten and the mistakes of the past repeated.
Ideas in relationship to one another is the fabric of the world. And it is this shifting fabric that expressing all things that are new. By new I mean that in the world of a single timeline all things that appear are new and unique in some way, an expression of new and unique ideas, not that these ideas are new in Spirit, because newness is meaningless in Spirit except for any individual person�s timeline.
In Spirit and in the world, it is a fabric of individuals that you actually are seeing. But even more honestly it is correct to say that you are seeing only your own mind. The world is not here to be fixed, it is here to be exactly as conflicted as it appears to be. This is the place where conflict and pain happen. This world will never be a utopia because that is neither its nature nor its purpose.
New ideas constantly pour out of this world because they are necessary to evoke the necessary timeline filled with change as well as filling the evolutionary nature of reality as well. But, because the physical experience is not reality in any sense, it cannot be said to be a place where many true ideas flourish. Rather, they must insinuate themselves discretely in-between the lies that make up most of the fabric of physicality.
Because physicality is a lie and the truth has such a small role here, then it stands to reason that it is difficult to find an exit from physical reality. But this difficulty only comes from one�s own desires. For, the mind presents the world it wants to see and when the mind no longer wants to see a physical world but God�s world instead, that is all that it will see. No external force is putting this on us; it is our own will and desire that binds us to the world.
The world, being what it is, is a place of misunderstanding. As such, the ideas that are born from this world seem to represent progress in understanding but for the most part only flesh out the lie even more rather than leading us to the truth. For example, scientific breakthroughs seem to be enlightening and certainly help us live in this world, but their ultimate result is to harden our belief in this world as being �real� and seduces us into accepting this world as both desirable and inescapable.
So, the proliferation of ideas in this world only seems to serve this world, but this world serves its own escape by creating endless pain in constantly new and various forms that constantly teaches us to give up on it and return to God. Each new idea is just a fragment of a larger lie, which in turn serves a larger truth. Everything serves truth because it is the only thing that really exists. That is just the nature of reality.
We are not consciously aware of even a tiny fragment of the new ideas that are constantly being generated in us and around us. Our so-called lives are just a stream of consciousness with a beginning and an end. We will return to the truth because every idea serves the truth. The ideas that we embody in this world will give birth and take flight, evolving and moving forward in time in constantly new and different forms, giving birth to new forms and so forth and so on.
Exercise: Idea World
In this exercise we will seek to experience the physical world as a conglomeration of ideas. We will feel and understand these ideas and what they mean. We will experience our environment as a sort of liquid made of consciousness in the form of molecules of ideas.
Let�s begin by getting relaxed and comfortable. Keep a pen and paper handy to write down notes. Begin by imagining yourself sitting in a waiting room, like the one at a doctor�s office. You get up from your seat and walk through a door into a laboratory. Here you will sit down in front of a large microscope. This device allows you to see reality as it is, as a conglomeration of ideas.
Look into the eyepiece and allow what you see to completely encompass you. You see single ideas like bubbles, pushing and moving about in seeming chaos. But underneath this chaos is an implicit order of things that rules the movement of each idea.
See ideas merge and then separate. Ideas constantly combine with other ideas to form new ideas. Ideas also constantly are giving birth to new ideas simply by being.
Notice that physical space here is meaningless. The size of your body or the physics that bind the world here are not expressed in a one-to-one manner. Instead, spatiality here is expressed in terms of the relationships between ideas at any one moment.
You will also see that one idea may encompass many ideas, while being itself encompassed by other ideas and so forth. The complexity of the relationships between ideas cannot be adequately expressed three-dimensionally.
Notice the fabric of ideas that rumbles along, in a current that seems unending. These ideas are fragments of a single larger idea that makes up physical existence. The shape and form of that fabric is entirely predetermined and it has no chaotic or free-willed elements.
Focus in on thoughts about Spirit. See that these ideas have an energy that is absent in the others. Ideas about Spirit tie themselves to levels of being that are far beyond what we know, to higher realms of being, including Spirit itself. Ideas like this that transcend the physical idea are not just part of the fabric of physicality, but are in fact also part of the fabric of Spirituality, the idea that consumes physicality and returns it to God. By thinking about Spirit you are literally tying yourself to Spirit and Spirituality in its entirety. This in turn moves you along a swift current back to God.
L5) Mirror Room
Physicality mind ceaselessly attempts to describe mind, while mind ceaselessly resists all attempts at categorization; in this way the physical self is presented with a world made solid and barrier-like as it represents the mind fighting back against the lies being directed at it by self as it tries to limit mind.
The actual �fight� if you will is nothing more than the natural reaction of something real to being examined. Fiction generates fiction, which is in essence nothing more than resistance to the truth. So, efforts to find the truth of the fiction of the world you see through physical means ends up being fruitless. You are doomed to generate simply more and more questions and no real answers.
Although science is to some degree successful, the most fundamental questions will always elude explanation by science. This is because reality is not physical. So, it is the form and shape of the inquiry that determines that the answers must fail to give real and fulfilling explanations. Science gets what it wants to get, more data and more information, more power and more equations.
But, the dolling out of power that comes through scientific advancement is nothing but a distraction. The basic issues remain unanswered and scientific forms of inquiry will forever be doomed to failure to generate answers to these questions.
What is reality? How does it work? We can only learn about illusion through the illusory eye looking through an illusory microscope at an illusory world. We can search for fresh baked bread in the heart of a nuclear reactor but never find it there. The problem is where we are searching. As long as we only trust our senses to give us information, we will not follow deductive reasoning to the spiritual answers we need.
Psychology must fail, if not now then later in creating �sanity.� First of all, sanity is not possible in an insane world. Rather, we can have poise and balance for a period of time, or get rid of neurotic habits. We can overcome split personality or learn to manage our depression or even banish it completely. But the basic pain that lies behind these tactics will not work forever. Whatever pain we banish will return in a new form. We cannot find any final kind of peace in psychology.
Just as we go to a doctor to receive medical treatment when we are injured, it is likewise sensible to get psychological treatment when we need it. But we must also realize that we are simply moving around the problem into new forms. Suffering will pursue us relentlessly because it is rooted in our own unforgiving mind. And it is through this unforgiveness that it will always seek to punish us and no degree of suffering will ever eternally satisfy it. Rather, we must offer it peace and rest and the promise of escape, an escape it will never believe in until it receives it.
God must be the one to return sanity to the world because God is the area of consciousness where all sanity lives. Sanity cannot come from an insane place. Likewise, sanity for our individual self can only come from becoming part of God, or I should say, regaining that oneness. We do this by attaining Liberation. When we achieve Liberation, we know that part of our mind is permanently sane. This sanity we have obtained is rooted in forgiveness.
Whereas before this we came to understand Spirit and appreciate its sanity, it is only in attaining Liberation that we consciously enter into Spirit. And, it is only through the process of reaching farther into our identity inside God that we achieve compassion, not as a goal or a wish but as an actual conscious state of being.
From this point forward, the compassion we embrace will be what releases us. And, the compassion we reject will be what propels us back into suffering mind separate from God. We must learn to want compassion for all, ourselves and others, total and all-embracing. It is in the actualization of this wish that we are Liberated from suffering.
When we act in the world and attempt to �set things right� for ourselves, either by buying this, cleaning that, making this or destroying that, making friends, joining causes, saving the environment, advancing our career or training for a new career, we are always in some manner or another attempting to deny the nature of the world, which is feral and vicious.
Our tactics will not ultimately work, although they might improve our lot in life and we may be glad that we pursued them. We cannot change the nature of physical existence by denying it. We cannot clean up a monster, shave its fur and dress it up in a suit and tie. At the end of the day, it will show its monstrous qualities through the harm it does to you and others.
When you get a high-paying job, you sluff off your poverty onto other people. You may not see it that way, but no matter how fast you run, society and the world simply do not work. Suffering will catch up with you in this life or the next. It isn�t that you are a bad person, but that your mind separate from God hates itself and will continually hate you as well as others until Liberation is achieved.
Psychology, sociology, career advancement, science and so many other �isms� are attempts to gain access to the pot of gold that is the issue of how to live life to the fullest. But, each smiling face, full belly and bulging wallet that can attest to this success must also face each new day with fake smile, feeling the weight of psychic distress and instability, fear and pain, loneliness and disappointment that must accompany �success.�
In the end, and by that I mean the end of the person�s spiritual advancement, they will have to face the fact that they are burned out on the suffering that life has to offer. They cannot turn their back on the suffering of others either, or attempt to outrun it through success. Rather, the individual must give up, declare defeat and lay themselves at God�s feet, asking to be let back into the Kingdom. This isn�t because God is cruel and wants us to be humiliated, but because we must reach a point where we are, in our mind-freedom, willing to give up on physical experience and return to Spirit.
Spirit returns to our consciousness at the rate that physicality loses legitimacy for us. So, it is essential that we give up on physicality and declare it to be a thorough bust. But, even when we are consciously willing to do this, although this is a great step forward, it is life itself that must strip our last layers of attachment from us. But for each step of progress we make in giving up on the world, we will get a permanent increase in our identity within God. And this will be our peace, our paradise, our refuge from the pain of the world. And, it will grow and grow until it entirely describes who we are. Then Final Liberation will be ours.
L6) Wall of Downward Arrows
The physical mind cannot accept an unlimited mind, so it cannot interact directly with it, but deals with it entirely through symbols that appear to represent a blockage or loss of knowledge, when in fact they represent the physical mind�s refusal to accept an unlimited world.
The person who is not yet liberated will not be able to wrap their mind around higher concepts to some degree. These concepts will remain elusive, not because they are stubborn and pig-headed in their beliefs, but because they cannot release the world sufficiently to use their mind in that manner.
If you are holding a coin in your fist, you cannot grab the dollar on the ground without pocketing or in some way securing the coin, otherwise you will drop it. In the same way, the death-grip that mundane mind has on physicality is based on its strong desire to experience it and uphold the illusion of it at all costs. Mind knows what it wants. Therefore higher knowledge is an anathema to the mundane mind.
Symbols are the bread and butter of reality separate from God. That means that everything we experience as an external reality is in fact an internally generated symbol. You can take anything you encounter in the physical world, be it a thing or person or event and make associations that come to mind when thinking of it and these will give you insight into what that thing, person or event represents. We gave up direct experience when we entered into a world of perception.
Even in Spirit, which is part of God, we cannot have direct experience of others, although our experience of them is much more direct than it is in the physical world. Here we experience even a deeper degree of symbolic externalization of our thoughts and feelings and there are deeper layers of misunderstanding in-between individuals.
Language is a symbol that represents communication. In Spirit we can communicate without the need for language through direct expression of our emotions, an empathic and direct sharing. This is profoundly more enlightening than any conversation we can ever have with a person.
A person example I experienced may help illustrate this point. Years ago I was working for a bank and I was in North Carolina for a training seminar. When I returned home, I unpacked and went to bed. My last dream of the night was that my grandmother was in her nursing home, my whole family was there and there was a huge storm that was coming that was going to wipe out the whole nursing home.
In physical life my grandmother was 104 years old and lived in a nursing home in Maine. In the dream, she was able to walk out of the nursing home and hide under the trees and bushes on the edge of the property. I had to crawl behind her because there was some barrier that I could not cross that wouldn�t allow me to stand up. I desperately wanted to comfort her. As I crawled up next to her, she was sitting under a tree. She looked rather wide awake and lucid. I reached out and she grabbed my hand, and in that moment I felt her whole being at once. I can only say that it was like being plugged into her and knowing her whole being immediately.
I felt that she was ok, but somewhat surprised at how bright and clear everything was. She had been very out of it for years. Now she was clearheaded and fully awake. I felt like I knew her better in that moment than I had ever known her in my whole life. That kind of direct connection is impossible to fake.
So, if we go beyond even Spirit and this kind of direct communication, we have experiences that are beyond perception. This means that there is no symbolic language standing between one individual and another, direct connection is possible. Here, love is the only language and it communicates ideas that go far beyond anything we can even imagine. Here true love and connection are achieved in each moment.
