Short Sleeves Insights

Where Nothing Is Done

2012-01-31T06:06:00.000-06:00

Less and less do you need to force things, Until finally you arrive at no-actionWhere nothing is done, nothing is left undone…The Master does nothingYet… leaves nothing undone.

Lao-Tzu was a philosopher and the father of the Tao. He understood the expansion of nothing. His thoughts about spiritual reality have been translated, dissected, and respected by humans for the last 2,500 years. No one is really sure what his view of nothing was, but it’s safe to say that the nothing that Lao-Tzu mentions contains the energy of consciousness without physical attributes.

Consciousness and nothing are truths. These truths extent beyond our physical dimension; they are constants, which cannot be destroyed or eliminated. These truths are true in all dimensions. Our truths are flexible and always changing. Truths in this dimension are beliefs that are firmly rooted in the absolute, and above questioned. But we always question them as we expand in awareness.

Everything is true to the believer and those beliefs continue to mutate as the consciousness of each believer continues to express and experience the essence of being physical. In that process, beliefs continue to be flexible and expedient to the believer.

Basic beliefs like religion, science, sex, relationships, perception, the senses, duplicity, physical creation, emotion, and truth, create our reality. Beliefs are like a birdcage that holds birds or influences. The birds can be called sub-beliefs. The birds or influences within the birdcage are expressed as beliefs about ethics, politics, marriage, drug use, laws, taxes etc. Those influences create other truths in our mass reality. When we focus on specific birds or influences, we discover other birds hiding behind the birds we recognize. Those beliefs also play a part in creating what we experience.

Our human experience is based on a complicated individual belief structure, so each individual experiences truth in their own way. When we begin to focus on our birdcage of beliefs, as well as the birds that mix and mingle in that cage, we realize that we are creating what we experience.

In our belief system nothing is void, blank, inert, unconscious, and empty. But in other realities, nothing is a truth that holds other truths. It is present in all dimensions, and aware of itself and all there is. The energy of nothing links physical and non-physical consciousness together in a plethora of actions. It is the force that does without doing in our reality.

Reality Is Being Remodeled

2012-01-27T06:30:00.000-06:00

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell, the 20th century educator, philosopher, and myth aficionado, wrote those thoughts in his 1988 book, The Power of the Myth. When we think about Campbell’s thoughts, we realize that the meaning of life is not as important as the awareness of life itself. Meaning rests in the awareness of each experience. Experiences are the manifestations of thoughts and beliefs.

Seeded within those thoughts and beliefs are choices that contain a plethora of probabilities. Within those probabilities are links of consciousness that manifest energy. The intensity of that energy is measured by our inner feelings, and those feelings are the measuring sticks for our experiences.

In this segment of linear time, we are creating new experiences that are beyond the confines of our focused reality, and the shift is the source event that is altering our pool of probabilities. The basic construction of our reality is being remodeled; it is not being destroyed. The physical expression of our emotions and sexuality will remain the same, but how we engage other aspects of their design is being tweaked.

We are becoming simultaneously more aware of what we are doing, and what we are feeling, and we are expressing those feelings not for gain, but for what we want to innately feel. Our choices are becoming more comfortable, and they are presenting new tones of consciousness in the probabilities we choose. That energy generates a stronger focus on the process within our experiences, and outcome is not as important as the engagement of the process.

In other words, we are painting each experience with a goal-oriented brush, but we are so involved with the process that we play down the outcome. We are more concerned with our creation, and the process of creating rather than what each experience will become. We are listening to the alternate selves that are guiding us through the shift, and we know the outcome will be what we expect.

The meaning of life is in the process of creating the experiences that expand the awareness of our essence, and the expression of our multiplicity.

Fraying Attachments

2012-01-23T07:08:00.000-06:00

It is wonderful to moveTo a new place every day.It is wonderful to flowWithout ice and mudEverything my friends, Is gone with yesterday.All the words are gone.Now is the time to say something new.

Rumi, the 13th century poet and mystic, delivers an important message with those words. The self is constantly moving in and out different realities as we focus on one. The creative genius of consciousness is transforming our belief system constantly. We are gradually recognizing the multiplicity of the self, and sensing some aspects of our genuine self. Our genuine self has been covered by a tangled web of attachments and associations. But these self-created beliefs are fraying, and we are beginning to see beyond them. Our new age shift is all about discovering, exploring, and expressing our genuine self.

In the present shift, our passions are becoming less goal-oriented in terms of receiving thankless self-gratification. We are beginning to pay more attention to the energy we are projecting, and the energy we are reflecting. The way we react to those reflections is changing. We are slowly sensing what we have rather than what we don’t have, or have not expressed physically. Our desires are changing the way we create our reality. We are more aware of the type of energy we are projecting, and how we react to that energy. We are feeling other aspects of self in this now, and those aspects are changing how we feel about what we are creating.

Outward expressions as well as inward feelings are more acute in this shift. Our thinking or translating process is becoming less distorted, especially when it comes to old associations and attachments. There is less separation between what we project and what we reflect, which means what we create outside is a product of our inner genuine self.

Instead of concerning our self with what is right, or wrong, or what we should do or not do, which are all goal-oriented thoughts, we are now interested in who we are and what we want to express. We are interested in exploring the self, and want to know why we want to explore it.

New explorations are not about right or wrong because there are no past associations attached to our inner discoveries. These discoveries are new within the perspective of what is known, and that perspective is seeded in the genuine self.

We are dipping our toes into an expanded ocean of awareness, and we are embarking on a new journey of discovery in that ocean. This new adventure is creating new ways to interconnect with other. We are beginning to embrace our interconnectedness, and appreciate it for the support it gives us.

The Self Is Not Singular

2012-01-19T07:08:00.001-06:00

The Wait

It is life in slow motion, It's the heart in reverse, it's a hope-and-a-half: Too much and too little at once.

It's a train that suddenlystops with no station around, and we can hear the cricket, and leaning out the carriagedoor, we vainly contemplatea wind we feel that stirsthe blooming meadows, the meadowsmade imaginary by this stop.

Rainer Maria Rilke, one of Germany’s beloved poets, was born in Prague in 1875. His spiritual poetry and physical journey through time are lesson in awareness. Rilke believed there was something more to him than the self woke up every morning, and his mission was to identify that something. He used a fluid blend of thought and words to achieve that task. Rilke’s poems have their own life and death, their own birth and discovery, and their own silence. The silence is the vibration of neighboring realities. Those realities are filled with the wisdom of a cricket's voice, and the magnificent of a meadow filled with blossoms of consciousness.

To know different aspects of the self, we must stop our train of thoughts where there is no train station. We must stop our motion in the middle of our own projected tracks, and listen to the nothing of silence. In that place, we find a subtle invitation, and we sense the self’s multiplicity. Once we accept that invitation we immediately embark on a heightened journey of awareness. We discover that the self is not singular experiencing a physical life of duality; it is an endless number of selves that intersect and connect as individual and mass events unfold from our pools of probabilities.

Life is a joint-stock company and the board of directors is alternate selves that experience the probabilities that develop from our choices. We live in the complexity of consciousness just like a beach filled with grains of sand. And, just like the beach, part of us lives in one world, and other parts thrive in other worlds. We are never too much or too little, and like the wind we are exactly what we need to be in order expand our beach of consciousness. Endless blooming meadows of consciousness align with elements our essence in infinite patterns. We express our individual pattern using intents, desires, and purposes. Our metaphoric symbols create one reality, and we focus on it.

These symbols originate in our dreams, and immaculately other selves manifest. We feel a cricket vibrating in our own silence, and know that our physical life is but one life. That life is lodged between the hairs of the cricket’s legs.

Ritualistic Manner

2012-01-16T06:33:00.002-06:00

A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been “blasted with excess light.” The trances of Socrates, the “union” of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and the Quakers, the illuminations of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment has, in innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner.

Everywhere in history religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church, the revival of the Calvinistic churches, the experience of the Methodist, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay The Over-soul explains that every individual has the energy of the universal soul within them. The energy to create is the natural expression of the universal soul. We tend to discount what we create unless it is recognized by a group of peers. We believe confidence rests in the thoughts of others, and that belief is the cornerstone for religious and political control. We discount Individual creations unless they have special ritualistic attributes. These exceptional expressions are viewed as spoon fed epiphanies from a judgmental God that we worship in a ritualistic manner.

Personal impulses, which are transformed into thoughts, are experienced in rituals. Those thoughts interact with different projections, reflections, associations, and influences. So our beliefs form a ritualistic manner.

Ritualistic events create conformity, and conformity restricts the expansion of our belief structure. Rituals are separatist acts that turn our focus to a specific channel. While we experience these events, we immerse the self in a hierarchy of acceptance, so we believe nothing outside of that accepted channel. We try to eliminate diversity and destroy beliefs that challenge our ritualistic state of mind.

Rituals are products of the psyche. The psyche forms events like the ocean form waves. These psyche waves splash out into our mass psychological reality, and create individual events.

Rituals become accepted channels for knowing even though the atoms and molecules that create those channels do not understand these events. But, they cooperate fully in this vast venture, and that makes these event real and palatable.

The separation that exists within physical consciousness is fueled by rituals as well as our projections and reflections. Even in our ignorance the psyche and the soul still mingle with the universal soul and mind. Every quality and intensity of consciousness contains molecules from the stream of consciousness, and those molecules manifests through the doors of our personal belief structure.

The blended self exists within the universal soul even though the stymied enthusiasm experienced without ritualistic behavior is viewed as a tendency towards insanity. Insanity may be considered uniqueness in self-expression, or a quest to experience more of the self in the world of the psyche. In that world, religious rituals, and senseless salvation are individual beliefs that actuate the personal expansion of an individualized self.

Commonwealth of Convenience

2012-01-12T08:36:00.001-06:00

As anyone knows who has been part of a movement, a demonstration, a campaign, or a strike, struggles undertaken for the most limited and prosaic goals have a way of opening the most profound and lyrical sense of possibility in their participants. To experience even briefly a movement’s solidarity, equality, reciprocity, morality, collective and individual empowerment, reconciliation of individual and group, is to have a foretaste of the peaceable kingdom… Once we have experienced solidarity, we can never forget it. It may be short-lived, but its heady sensations remain. It may be still largely a dream, but we have experienced that dream. It may seem impossible, but we have looked into the face of its possibilities.

Ronald Aronson in his 1995 book Beyond Marxism reminds us that dreams help create our physical experiences. We dream and create, but we forget our ability to do so. Joseph Schumpeter, the mid-century Harvard economics professor, said that our dream of a perfect democracy would eventually lead to some form of socialism. In his book, Capitalism Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter said that there is a creative destructive factor innately association with capitalism.

Schumpeter’s dream of socialism is far beyond the social concepts of Marx, and his successors. It is a system described by William Morris in his 1884 book, Justice. Morris explained his dream system this way:

What I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all — the realization at last of the meaning of the word commonwealth.Commonwealth is a familiar word, but most of us have no idea what it means. Morris defines it in terms we understand. A commonwealth is a utopian state where all individuals take responsibility for their actions in one way or another, and each person helps expand the system in a unified way.

Liberals and Conservatives want to experience a commonwealth of convenience that doesn’t make waves in their established and comfortable system. Both parties negate the true meaning of a people’s commonwealth. They fight against a people’s commonwealth using jaded words and iconic symbols that have little intrinsic value. They use prejudice and judgmental mental ovens filled with partial truths to produce half-baked results, and then take no responsibility for their inept results―it’s always the other party’s fault. They consider the people and their needs after they conform to the political lobbyists that control them. The tail of government is wagging the people, and the people lick the bones of a disintegrating system.

Perhaps it’s time to expand our constitutional power, and elect a group of social reformers who know the meaning of commonwealth rather than politicians who are shackled with the chains self-serving conformity and redundant thinking. Reformers are people who are not motivated by the fear that engulfs this wasteful system. They are not afraid to be part of a system that encourages and cultivate a stable commonwealth that serves the good of all.

When we look responsibility in the eyes, we see that most candidates stand on a platform of superficial change. They become pawns in a high-powered political party game that condones conformity, and ignores the voice of the people. Independence becomes dependence, and responsibility is shrouded in a veil of economic chicanery.

The book, Living Behind The Beauty Shop tells the story of how one man and his family change the dynamics of social, political, and economic life. Perception Farms is a commonwealth built on second chances and self-responsibility. Perception Farms gives people a chance to experience the real meaning of utopia.

Living Behind The Beauty Shop is about a Middle Tennessee boy who understands that greater reality where the psyche is able to communicate with the self that is experiencing other dimensions. The boy, Mase Russell, is living with Down syndrome. He is considered disabled in our normal reality, but he is far more enabled and connected than we are to that stream of consciousness that flows through all of us. He is able to communicate with other aspects of the self while dreaming, and he accepts his dream experiences as real. He is even able to remember those experiences and express them in his own way. His family begins to sense that his disability is a challenging gift not a sentence of suffering.

His family is like any other family. They experience the typical dramas that we all create in our waking reality. His grandfather, Warren Russell is a wealthy business man that lives on his family’s 2000 acre farm in Leipers Fork, Tennessee. The farm was a land grant given to his triple great-grandfather after the American Revolution. Warren and his wife Claire considered the farm their rite of passage until they both experienced a near-death experience on a trip to Florida in their Cessna. After the accident Warren decides to donate 1000 acres to a non-profit foundation he formed called Perception Farms. Perception Farms is a self-sufficient community off the grid that gives the homeless a fresh start.

His daughter Cindy realizes that she’s gay after she marries her college sweetheart. She returns home from California and finds an ex-nun, who is now called Margie, at one of Perception Farm’s fundraisers. Margie discovered her true sexuality when she was in the convent. They become partners and decide to have a child using the sperm of their friend Alan Sutton, a well-educated and athletic individual who works in the shoe business. Baby Mase is born with DS and the story follows his life and the experiences of the family as he becomes an accomplished poet and artist.

Years later, Mase finds Mischa Eddington who is another Down syndrome artist, in a local college art class, and they develop a close relationship. Together they watch members of the family experience the pains of getting older. They offer the family another perspective about that aging process. The family realizes that Mase and Mischa chose to be born with Down syndrome in order to help others see that there are no boundaries or limits in physical life unless we put them there through our beliefs and perceptions. They show us that other realities are just as real as our waking reality.

When we consider that consciousness does not have a beginning or an end in the non-physical world we can better understand that the people we call disabled or homeless are actually teachers who choose to experience life in extraordinary ways. They teach us that putting limits, judgments, and sterilized beliefs in action is the art of separating one aspect of the self from other elements of the psyche.

When that happens, we find ourselves living in the beauty shop of life, which is filled with exterior self-serving nothingness.

Collective Traumas

2012-01-09T06:47:00.001-06:00

The Global crises we face today are unique in many ways, not only in their scope, complexity, and urgency, but also in that for the first time in human history each and every one of them is caused by humans. They are creations of our individual and collective behavior and can therefore be traced, in significant part to psychological origins: to our individual and collective beliefs, greed fear, fantasies, defenses and misperceptions. Our global problems are global symptoms, and the state of the world reflects the state of our minds.

Roger Walsh wrote those thoughts in his 1984 book, The Psychology of Human Survival. Global issues are front and center in the thoughts of millions of people around the world. Finding a solution for global warming, starvation, repression, and an assortment of other social and political issues is complicated, or at least we think it is. We try to solve these issues using the same thinking process that created them. We search for solutions from science, religion, and other external sources, and as we do, we begin to realize that these collective traumas teach us something about the nature of consciousness.

Our beliefs are catalysts for physical action. We want to wage war, destroy, and conquer what we fear and don’t understand, but those actions only create more of what we focus on. The more we push against these perceived enemies, the more we experience them. Resistance is the oil that keeps us frying in our own greasy perceptions. The world is a collective environment, and it is created by individual and mass impulses. Impulses are manifested non-physical energy. We catalog impulses in our physical beliefs system, and they become part of who we are.

Consciousness expresses energy using different qualities, organizations, and diverse forms in order to experience physical reality in some way. The chaotic world we experience is the result of a great merging and mixing of consciousness, and a continual exchange of non-physical information, which results in an open-ended exploration of physical possibilities. From that non-physical consciousness concoction, mass and private events emerge, and we experience physical life using choices, perceptions and desires.

There are many kinds of consciousness, and they combine in an endless fashion. Our consciousness is not one thing; it is a conglomeration of different aspects of consciousness that swamp together to form an identity. Our individual consciousness mixes with other forms of consciousness in several ways. That process creates a sense of individuality as well as other psychological realities, which we do not focus on. We count on products of consciousness like religion, science, and cultural tendencies to triumph over our self-created environment, but they only form a mosaic pattern filled with the cut-glass of our beliefs. Our beliefs hide the messages that are transmitted by our psychological environment, and that sets a worldly stage where perceived events of all types occur. That stage shapes mental events, and expands the nature of our consciousness.

A Tool of Awareness

2012-01-05T06:38:00.001-06:00

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted must sustained inquiry.

Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, wrote the 2005 bestseller, On Bullshit. Frankfurt’s small book packs a powerful awareness punch. There is an element of bullshit incorporated into our truth belief structure, and we use it in everyday communications. It’s one of those hidden belief birds that fly around our belief birdcage. Bullshit helps create our perceptions and experiences. It’s easy to use, and we do an excellent job of camouflaging it, but it’s not hidden in the messages we send to other people. We all pick up bullshit vibrations quickly.

Bullshit remains in our consciousness. We use it to answer questions that we know nothing about, or may only know a little about. That routine continues, and we add more bullshit to those thoughts, which comes from other thoughts, and we develop a healthy form of skepticism. We are skeptical of our physical ego and transfer that skepticism to others and label them. Others may accept that skeptical transfer, or they may send it back in the form of an argument. Skeptical messages vibrate back to us in the form of verbal or non-verbal conflicts. Arguments affect our core beliefs in some way. Bullshit is energy that expresses itself in a cycle that continues to multiply in a variety of forms. Bullshit may not be false, as Frankfurt points out, but it is an exaggeration of an impulse or a group of impulses. Bullshit paints an attractive perception where none exists.

We all are skeptical to a certain degree. We tend not to believe answers from questions that we ask each other, because there is an element of bullshit in those answers. Beliefs as well as truths are flexible, so we pick fragments of truth out of an answer, and believe those fragments, while other elements of the answer are discounted and ignored, but all answers are filed in our body consciousness.

So in one sense, bullshit is really a tool of awareness that helps close a perceived gap in conformity. We want to conform even though consciousness is innately individual in its perceptual organization. Events are not built one upon the other. They are built out of each other in a profusion of creativity, and bullshit can be a main ingredient in that spontaneous expansion. The objective consciousness chooses which aspects of truth to experience as well as how to experience them, and those aspects become aware objective events.

Consciousness mixes and merges in an open-ended exploration of possibilities, and from that action private as well as mass events emerge as truths to experience. These events are packaged in time sequences and only some of them manifest physically. The events that do manifest are earth-toned conscious events filled with emotional, psychic, and psychological qualities. They are accepted or repealed by our beliefs, loves, intents, and purposes. Bullshit is woven in our truth belief structure so it plays a pivotal role in identifying the nature of our awareness as well as our quest to conform. The events that manifest from our awareness and conformity become life experiences.

Servant of the Intuitive

2012-01-02T08:13:00.001-06:00

The Guest House
Darling, the body is a guest house;Every morning someone new arrives.Don’t say, “O, another weight around my neck!”Or your guest will fly back to nothingness.Whatever enters your heart is a guestFrom the invisible world: entertain it well.
Evert day and every moment, a thought comesLike an honored guest into your heart.My soul, regard each thought as a person,For every person’s value is in the thought they hold.
If a sorrowful thought stands in the way,It is also preparing the way for joy.It furiously sweeps your house clean,In order that some new joy may appear from the Source.It scatters the withered leaves from the bough of the heart,In order that fresh green leaves might grow.It uproots the old joy so thatA new joy may enter from beyond.

Sorrow pulls up the rotten rootThat was veiled from sight.Whatever sorrow takes away or causes the heart to shed,It puts something better in its place.Especially for one who is certainThat sorrow is the servant of the intuitive.

Rumi, the 13th century Sufi mystic, explains how we expand in awareness as we travel through time. That is the nature of all consciousness―it continues to expand. Our emotions hang on fragile branches of the self, and they fuel our expansion. Wisdom beats on the door of our body consciousness, but we turn the volume up on our belief CD, and ignore the essence that guides us through our self-created storms.

Beliefs are changeable thoughts that carve experiences for us to perceive. When we allow wisdom to move through those experiences we sense a consciousness or what some of us call Zen, and it wraps itself around our impulses. Bursts of unexplainable energy propel us to expand, and connect to other aspects of the self. We can call these aspects other guests. These guests arrive from a place where time and space hang on the tip of an impulse. We name these new friends experiences of the body and mind, and we begin to own them physically. We define the self using these friends, and add a touch of truth which lingers from our perpetual connection to the stream of consciousness. We are injected with a sliver of God potion, and it begins to boil in the manifestations of our own choices.

Choices and the probabilities still mark our sensitive ego with emotional images, but the growing awareness of another group of selves begins to swallows us, and we psychically swim into an abyss of knowing where time follows its own pattern. In that non-physical place, we see the self dressed as a servant of the intuitive. That self empowers the physical self, and it begins to regard resistance as a vehicle of expansion.

Inner Fabric of Beliefs

2011-12-30T06:53:00.000-06:00

I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it profitable t our lives. That it is good for as much as it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth, for we are the better for possessing it. But is it not a strange misuse of the word ‘truth,’ you will say, to call ideas also ‘true’ for this reason? Let me now say only this, that truth is one species of good, and not as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.

William James in his 1906 essay What Pragmatism Means serves up a massive meal when he touches on truth and good. Our beliefs do lay the foundation for these words, and they mean different things depending on the consciousness that is creating them in their experience. Creation is a word that has certain esoteric qualities within it. The physical events that manifest from the impetus of our creations arrive like rocket ships from another dimension.

Thoughts swim in and out of our system of physical consciousness, so we barely notice some of them. The events associated with these thoughts appear and disappear in a similar manner, but they all make an impression on our physical reality. We attract our thoughts, and our thoughts attract us on a psychological level, and they trigger our perception mechanism. Our intent and our beliefs are main attractions in this process. In order to become physical, probable events must meet certain criteria. Time and space slots must be aligned with the psychological intensities of our desires, intent, and beliefs.

All physical events are born from non-physical forces that exist outside of the space context. There is a library of probable events that is organized for us, and they wait for our energy to trigger them. They may be activated in the dream as well as the waking state, but the purpose, desire, and inspiration usually are the main activation ingredients. True and good are associations we make when we experience these events.

All physical events are formed in accordance with our feelings, purposes, intent and beliefs. We are not aware of the fact that our inner world makes events real in our physical experience, and our physical self makes them true according to the inner fabric of our beliefs.

Pot of Servitude

2011-12-26T06:29:00.002-06:00

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

George Bernard Shaw in his 1903 work, Man and Superman lifts a mental shade from our social thoughts, and we begin to see the power we have inside of us. Personal responsibility is the key to responsible political behavior. That seems like an understated solution to our social and political debacle, but in this reality the only change that produces a change in our social and political system is a change in our belief structure. We expand our beliefs about physical truths constantly, but overlook that fact due to our educated ignorance about the nature of consciousness. We are caught in a dual party political web that hinders us from seeing anything, but that web.

Shaw also said:
As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

We are forever moving towards a better understanding of the political and economic structure we created in our image. We create pockets of separation between our innate awareness of political and economic improprieties in order to experience the contrast that stimulates personal expansion. Contrast is the tool we used to better understand the nature of the self as well as the political system we helped create. Within these pockets are bundled up wrappers of self-righteousness, which infects our social expansion. These wrappers of human half-truths vacillate in a man-made pot of servitude.

Our elected political leaders use that pot to control our expansion, and shade our innate responsibility to be united in our diversity. When we vote for a particular party and candidate, we give those leaders much more than our responsibility, and then expect them to give us what we want in return. What they give us is head shaking empty expectations that are filled with the system’s sameness.

Our political leaders say and do the same thing every at election time, and expect us to conform in this pot of servitude by voting for change. Change is the battle cry of each candidate, and we buy into it because we believe that they are acting responsible, but they lack the tools to effect the change they believe they want to achieve. They live in a separated world of drama and name calling, which is fuel by the greedy system. They give up their responsibility and ours to a system that fosters half-truths and misconceptions.

Political leaders live in a false state of utopia where sameness is the measuring stick for acceptance. They don’t know how to unite the country in the spirit of true change because the system is ridged in terms of beliefs.

Ronald Aronson in his 1995 book Beyond Marxism wrote:

As recent students of utopia have articulated, vigorous utopian thinking sketches models of a peaceable kingdom, points us toward society’s repressed possibilities, enables us to see more clearly actual tendencies, both positive and negative, strengthens our grounds for rejecting existing social forms, reactivates lost dreams and longings, and encourages political action.

Political utopia is not a stationary place where perfection rules― it is an ever-changing state of mind where personal and social responsibility fuels the kingdom. That means voting for true reform not just voting along party lines. Parties were established to accent separation in a time when conflict was the norm. That norm is not our norm.

The main ingredient in establishing political utopia is electing representatives that want to instigate social reform and revamp the system, rather than becoming part of the empty political and economic machine that is fueled by this broken system.

The book, Living Behind The Beauty Shop describes a utopian type system that represents the meaning of a people’s commonwealth.

Living Behind The Beauty Shop is about a Middle Tennessee boy who understands that greater reality where the psyche is able to communicate with the self that is experiencing other dimensions. The boy, Mase Russell, is living with Down syndrome. He is considered disabled in our normal reality, but he is far more enabled and connected than we are to that stream of consciousness that flows through all of us. He is able to communicate with other aspects of the self while dreaming, and he accepts his dream experiences as real. He is even able to remember those experiences and express them in his own way. His family begins to sense that his disability is a challenging gift not a sentence of suffering.

His family is like any other family. They experience the typical dramas that we all create in our waking reality. His grandfather, Warren Russell is a wealthy business man that lives on his family’s 2000 acre farm in Leipers Fork, Tennessee. The farm was a land grant given to his triple great-grandfather after the American Revolution. Warren and his wife Claire considered the farm their rite of passage until they both experienced a near-death experience on a trip to Florida in their Cessna. After the accident Warren decides to donate 1000 acres to a non-profit foundation he formed called Perception Farms. Perception Farms is a self-sufficient community off the grid that gives the homeless a fresh start.

His daughter Cindy realizes that she’s gay after she marries her college sweetheart. She returns home from California and finds an ex-nun, who is now called Margie, at one of Perception Farm’s fundraisers. Margie discovered her true sexuality when she was in the convent. They become partners and decide to have a child using the sperm of their friend Alan Sutton, a well-educated and athletic individual who works in the shoe business. Baby Mase is born with DS and the story follows his life and the experiences of the family as he becomes an accomplished poet and artist.

Years later, Mase finds Mischa Eddington who is another Down syndrome artist, in a local college art class, and they develop a close relationship. Together they watch members of the family experience the pains of getting older. They offer the family another perspective about that aging process. The family realizes that Mase and Mischa chose to be born with Down syndrome in order to help others see that there are no boundaries or limits in physical life unless we put them there through our beliefs and perceptions. They show us that other realities are just as real as our waking reality.

When we consider that consciousness does not have a beginning or an end in the non-physical world we can better understand that the people we call disabled or homeless are actually teachers who choose to experience life in extraordinary ways. They teach us that putting limits, judgments, and sterilized beliefs in action is the art of separating one aspect of the self from other elements of the psyche.

When that happens, we find ourselves living in the beauty shop of life, which is filled with exterior self-serving nothingness.

Significant Events

2011-12-23T06:12:00.003-06:00

Let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action; and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from out of the blue, or a ‘stunt’ self-imposed by our intellect, can account for itself by excellent practical reasons.
The importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of fact is a thing too notorious. The possession of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions.

William James in his 1906 essay, Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth shines a light on truth and we begin to shake our head in wonder. Truth is a vacillating concept that conforms to individual beliefs so matters of fact change as we become more aware of the diversity that exists within the psyche. That contrast is pertinent since factual events are built on significances and associations which are familiar to us.

An aspect of our consciousness is focused on individual truth, so we can consider the self a unique and peculiar aspect of the whole, which is on a quest to experience total self-awareness. Individual consciousness experiences reality through its own characteristics, and the whole expands during those events.

We stamp the universe with our own conscious imprint, which is significant and valuable to the consciousness within the universe. We attract events from the universe that are suitable to our nature, and then stamp them with our individuality. Significant events happen in patterns, and when we become aware of them they become cause and effect. Those events can be considered heavy-duty significances and truths. Our habits and associations are tools that help us physically feel these significant events.

In the psyche these significances exist all at once, and they can be tuned into physical awareness at any time. Emotional intensities manifest certain events, and they become a truth until some other event or association expands that significant occurrence. Truth is not chaotic. It maintains its structure through an ordered sequence of significances. They are kept separate in this reality, but are combined in an overall actuality.

Significances are truths that manifest from certain biological, psychological, and physical activity in time and space. When individual conditions match our specific individual consciousness we experience truth in a pragmatic sort of way. Those truths give us reasons as well as the desire to expand the self. In larger terms, we are aware of all the activities that create significant events, but they may not become physical unless certain codes are activated in the psyche that creates intent, drive, and emotional intensity.

Temperamental Vision

2011-12-19T05:54:00.001-06:00

We hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters; some of us are easily talked out of them, and end by following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of the most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be. But the one thing that has counted so far in philosophy is that man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of man’s beliefs.

William James in his 1906 lecture The Present Dilemma in Philosophy opens the door for contrast, and rationalists and empiricist come waltzing through the breezeway of our closed-ended beliefs, and make a triumphal plea about how it is in this reality. Facts and principles are catalogued and emphasized in one way or another in order to make the contrast easier to dissect. We crave facts and principles, and design reality around them even though there are other truths that surround this life we call our reality. Those truths are popping up like well-done wheat toast in a toaster, and we are constantly searching for the butter and jam that will make them palatable.

The ability to experience dreams and create in that multidimensional state is one truth that is not defined adequately by physical facts. Legions of scientists are trying to methodically make sense of this empty state of time and space. Dreams are a reality where things appear and then disappear with ease, and where we can express ourselves in the most direct fashion without physical contact. The fact that the dream reality represents our origin is still a principle that is covered by our cultural, religious, and scientific beliefs. Even our language is a barrier that creates a roadblock for this factual interstate where the language of the psyche is the primary communication tool.

Even when we remember our dream experiences, we discount them, and label them invalid. We are taught not to trust our dreams, imagination, or our innate feelings because they are not accepted as factual. But in dreams we are creators of facts. In the dream reality the tyranny of the fact world is melted down, and the psyche works its magic. While we are awake we deny several portions of the self so our intellects and our field of psychic activity are caged in a zoo of ignorance.

Our impulses come from this hidden dimension. These impulses are the foundation for our technological prowess, as well as our physical creativity. The dream world is the invisible cement that binds us to the organized physical world. Our creative impulses are the energy behind our thoughts, perceptions, and language, but we partially block them by our strong short-sided temperamental vision that forms from our limited beliefs.

We are waking up and entering another area of the dream world, which absconds psyche time and reworks it into a kaleidoscope of creative energy. Dreams are the workshops of consciousness. Dream workshops are revealing pertinent information about our transformation from ape-like ritual seekers to creative life engineers.

The book, Living Behind The Beauty Shop demonstrates the power of dreams and how they can change our waking reality.

Living Behind The Beauty Shop is about a Middle Tennessee boy who understands that greater reality where the psyche is able to communicate with the self that is experiencing other dimensions. The boy, Mase Russell, is living with Down syndrome. He is considered disabled in our normal reality, but he is far more enabled and connected than we are to that stream of consciousness that flows through all of us. He is able to communicate with other aspects of the self while dreaming, and he accepts his dream experiences as real. He is even able to remember those experiences and express them in his own way. His family begins to sense that his disability is a challenging gift not a sentence of suffering.

His family is like any other family. They experience the typical dramas that we all create in our waking reality. His grandfather, Warren Russell is a wealthy business man that lives on his family’s 2000 acre farm in Leipers Fork, Tennessee. The farm was a land grant given to his triple great-grandfather after the American Revolution. Warren and his wife Claire considered the farm their rite of passage until they both experienced a near-death experience on a trip to Florida in their Cessna. After the accident Warren decides to donate 1000 acres to a non-profit foundation he formed called Perception Farms. Perception Farms is a self-sufficient community off the grid that gives the homeless a fresh start.

His daughter Cindy realizes that she’s gay after she marries her college sweetheart. She returns home from California and finds an ex-nun, who is now called Margie, at one of Perception Farm’s fundraisers. Margie discovered her true sexuality when she was in the convent. They become partners and decide to have a child using the sperm of their friend Alan Sutton, a well educated and athletic individual who works in the shoe business. Baby Mase is born with DS and the story follows his life and the experiences of the family as he becomes an accomplished poet and artist.

Years later, Mase finds Mischa Eddington who is another Down syndrome artist, in a local college art class, and they develop a close relationship. Together they watch members of the family experience the pains of getting older. They offer the family another perspective about that aging process. The family realizes that Mase and Mischa chose to be born with Down syndrome in order to help others see that there are no boundaries or limits in physical life unless we put them there through our beliefs and perceptions. They show us that other realities are just as real as our waking reality.

When we consider that consciousness does not have a beginning or an end in the non-physical world we can better understand that the people we call disabled or homeless are actually teachers who choose to experience life in extraordinary ways. They teach us that putting limits, judgments, and sterilized beliefs in action is the art of separating one aspect of the self from other elements of the psyche.

When that happens, we find ourselves living in the beauty shop of life, which is filled with exterior self-serving nothingness.

Closet of God

2011-12-15T05:59:00.003-06:00

To the well-born child, all the virtues are natural, and not painfully acquired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous. Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, which obeys the same law. Those who are capable of humility, of justice, of love, of aspiration, stand already on a platform that commands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For those who dwell in this moral beatitude already anticipate those special powers which men prize so highly.

The lover has no talent, no skill, which passes for quite nothing with his enamored maiden, however little she may possess of related faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment, we have come from our remote station on the circumference instantaneously to the center of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a slow effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay The Over-soul gives us a peek at the world within the psyche. He touches soft spots in our belief structure, and we find ourselves in a state where conventional and practical sanity disappear. There is another state lurking beneath our accepted framework, and it is far different than we allow ourselves to imagine. We condone real events in time, but they change radically through the ages. People in ancient times believed that Gods roamed the earth and fought battles on land as well as on sea. Those people were considered sane. Their mental framework was different than ours, but it was accepted as real.

We accept certain portions of physical reality and discount other portions that form in the corridors of our dreams. The energy within our dreams continues to form events that turn into some sort of physical experience. Dreams are the eyes of the psyche and the closet of God where we package our waking reality from elements that are rooted in our psychological reality. We are immersed in and are a part of pure energy, which is created in every moment. Our physical universal system is being replenished by the second.

Our psyche is part of that closet where energy is drawn into to the self and out of the self in individualization. This psyche behavior is performed by the psychological pulses that interact with the electrons in our world. We experience events, which are physical as well as non-physical. These events exist at once and are connected to the dream state. We only fit a small portion of these probable events in our space-time framework so only a fraction of them occur physically.

We are all well-born children in the dream world where probable events are chosen with great distinction and discrimination. We organize our experiences in a creative mixture that tells the conscious mind a story, and it is constantly being rewritten as we open the closet door a little wider. As the door continues to swing open, we sense a springboard where all events emerge from interweaving probabilities, and we name that springboard― life

Egotistical Splendor

2011-12-12T06:16:00.001-06:00

You can spend the money on new housing for poor people and the homeless, or you can spend it on a football stadium or a golf course.

Jello Biafra’s statement is a wake-up call that sends a buzz saw message through the minds of avant-garde religious and political leaders as well as the faithful that politely address, but then blatantly sweep the homeless issue under the carpet of economics. Sure, we do need football and golf, but we also need to reinvent the way we perceive our society. Society is a joint stock company and everyone is fully vested in its future. Everyone plays a role by fulfilling desires and creating experiences that raise awareness, and that process expands our consciousness. Homelessness is an experience that raises awareness, but we generally ignore it until it happens to someone we know or to us. Homelessness is a product of choices and those choices become a reality.

Biafra is a punk rocker and a leading figure in the Green Party, and he, in his own way, makes us pop the top on some of our deep rooted social behavior and priorities. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty says that on any given night in the United States, 700,000 to 2 million people experience homelessness. Putting a face on the homeless is easy to do— they look just like any one of us. Some reports say that 7 out of 10 people are one paycheck away from being homeless. Almost everyone knows or has a friend that knows a homeless person.

No culture is immune to homelessness. About 50% of the homeless population is African-American; 35% is Caucasian; 12% is Hispanic; 2% Native American, and 1% is Asian. Single men make up about 44% of homeless population; 13% are single women; 36% are families with children, and 7% are unaccompanied minors. At least 30% of the homeless stay that way for more than 2 years, even though 44% of the homeless population works.

What is the invisible catalyst that catapults some of us into the pot holes of poverty and homelessness? Statistics show that 66% of homeless people are addicted to drugs and alcohol, and 16% are considered mentally ill. But, drugs and alcohol don’t create homelessness on their own, but they can help instigate and prolong it. Mental illness is not a major homeless catalyst either, but typecasting, misunderstanding, and then ignoring or giving up on certain mental menaces certainly can produce the experience of homelessness.

The homeless cut themselves off from mainstream society, and enter a reality filled with fear and despair. No one wants to be homeless, but some people innately expect it using a non-physical sense, and the question that everyone involved with eliminating homelessness asks is—why? One answer may be the non-physical energy that is part of the individual psyche. The non-physical psyche is always in play physically, and some of us allow it to manifest in the form of homelessness in order to experience the separation of the self physically.

No one wants to objectively experience homelessness, but they do in order to physically feel the consequences. They are contributing to the expansion of consciousness by making us aware of the contrast that exists in our fearful state of egotistical splendor. The quest for ego satisfaction in this world of dualism is the catalyst for homelessness.

The pressure to perform and to be a part of a society that considers itself a special form of consciousness, which is detached from other life forms, also contributes to homelessness. Believing we are a separate form of consciousness fuels separatism and promotes judgments. We try to control what we fear through our social structure, and the end result is our own form of homelessness.

There are several physical factors that contribute to the homeless experience. Foreclosures, addictions, eroding work opportunities, globalization, the decline in US manufacturing, erosion in the value of the minimum wage, and low-paying service sector jobs all play a role in changing our economic reality in several ways, but these factors don’t necessarily produce homelessness in everyone.

Some folks argue and say homelessness is a personal experience based on poor choices, and those unfortunate souls must figure it out their life on their own. We tend to fear the homeless; they look too much like the self we see in the mirror each day, and that’s the motivation that keeps the homeless motor percolating. A good example of that fear is on display in churches across the United States. Churches sit empty four or five days a week while the homeless sleep in conditions that are not acceptable for our house pets. Our places of worship and the groups that control them neglect to appreciate the value of homelessness when it is embraced.

There are some caring church people that give a helping hand by serving meals and donating clothes or starting a temporary shelter, but those fixes are not fixes—they are band aids that cover the potential mortal wounds of homelessness. There are government programs that also try to help the homeless by using some of the same tactics, plus educational courses are introduced into the governmental and social mix to help the homeless understand how they got where they are.

Most of the homeless know where they are and how they got there. What they need and want is to start over and experience traveling around the economic board of life in a different mental vehicle. They need the kind of help that comes from our subjective self, not the self that is dressed in egotistical splendor. One of the messages locked in the vice of homelessness is to look fear in the face, and then embrace and accept it.

We bury the subjective aspects of the self in church, and want our objective self to be accepted so we conform to certain beliefs and participate in specific rituals that make us feel a sense of unity. We block out other valid beliefs and maintain a lifestyle that is filled with faith, but this vacillating faith picks what is right and wrong based on control and fear, and we find the self sinking in a world of judgmental senselessness. The result is a mass reality that doesn’t understand the nature of the self and the energy of consciousness.

The solution to homelessness is right under our egotistical noses. We must accept them as counterparts that need a fresh start and a sense of unity. If religion is what it says it is, the faithful must open their minds and accept the homeless as aspects of the universal self. If government agencies what to help they can help establish self-contained homeless communities where the homeless can help themselves, and begin to experience physical life in another way.

A model of a homeless community exists and is brought to life in the book, Living Behind The Beauty Shop. The concept is not new; it has been forgotten and the time to remember what we all can do to turn homelessness into an understandable experience is now.

Living Behind The Beauty Shop is about a Middle Tennessee boy who understands that greater reality where the psyche is able to communicate with the self that is experiencing other dimensions. The boy, Mase Russell, is living with Down syndrome. He is considered disabled in our normal reality, but he is far more enabled and connected than we are to that stream of consciousness that flows through all of us. He is able to communicate with other aspects of the self while dreaming, and he accepts his dream experiences as real. He is even able to remember those experiences and express them in his own way. His family begins to sense that his disability is a challenging gift not a sentence of suffering.

His family is like any other family. They experience the typical dramas that we all create in our waking reality. His grandfather, Warren Russell is a wealthy business man that lives on his family’s 2000 acre farm in Leipers Fork, Tennessee. The farm was a land grant given to his triple great-grandfather after the American Revolution. Warren and his wife Claire considered the farm their right of passage until they both experienced a near-death experience on a trip to Florida in their Cessna. After the accident Warren decides to donate 1000 acres to a non-profit foundation he formed called Perception Farms. Perception Farms is a self-sufficient community off the grid that gives the homeless a fresh start.

His daughter Cindy realizes that she’s gay after she marries her college sweetheart. She returns home from California and finds an ex-nun, who is now called Margie, at one of Perception Farm’s fundraisers. Margie discovered her true sexuality when she was in the convent. They become partners and decide to have a child using the sperm of their friend Alan Sutton, a well educated and athletic individual who works in the shoe business. Baby Mase is born with DS and the story follows his life and the experiences of the family as he becomes an accomplished poet and artist.

Years later, Mase finds Mischa Eddington who is another Down syndrome artist, in a local college art class, and they develop a close relationship. Together they watch members of the family experience the pains of getting older. They offer the family another perspective about that aging process. The family realizes that Mase and Mischa chose to be born with Down syndrome in order to help others see that there are no boundaries or limits in physical life unless we put them there through our beliefs and perceptions. They show us that other realities are just as real as our waking reality.

When we consider that consciousness does not have a beginning or an end in the non-physical world we can better understand that the people we call disabled or homeless are actually teachers who choose to experience life in extraordinary ways. They teach us that putting limits, judgments, and sterilized beliefs in action is the art of separating one aspect of the self from other elements of the psyche.

When that happens, we find ourselves living in the beauty shop of life, which is filled with exterior self serving nothingness.

The Burden of Beliefs

2011-12-09T05:18:00.003-06:00

We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that which is measured from the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such is the love of the universal and eternal beauty. The emphasis of facts and persons in my thought has nothing to do with time. And so, always, the soul’s scale is one; the scale of the senses and the understanding is another. Before the revelations of the soul Time, Space, and Nature shrink away. In common speech we refer all things to time, as we habitually refer the immensely sundered stars to one concave.

And so we say that the Judgment is distant or near, that the Millennium approaches, that a day of certain political, moral, social, reform is at hand, and the like, when we mean, that, in the nature of things, one of the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other is permanent and connate with the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay The Over-soul dips us into an ocean filled with natural concepts that drip with head-shaking truth. Some of our thoughts have no age, and others make us older than we are. We are so focused on external events we forget the beauty that is within us. That beauty is buried under heavy debris, and that debris is set in motion by our belief system. The psyche, which contains the soul, is a manifestation of pure energy in a unique form. Our vocabulary automatically puts information about the soul and the psyche in understandable form, but that information is a partial account of who we are.

Pure energy has such amazing pattern-forming propensities it becomes a conglomeration of energy gestalts that go beyond our current understanding and vocabulary. Even the smallest unit of pure energy has such a propelling force that it can form all possible variations of itself. Pure energy with a weight of nothing can hold within itself the creation of matter even though it has no mass. It has the impetus to create a plethora of universes. It is the hand of God as well as God itself, and we humanize it in order to get our thoughts around it.

Pure energy cannot be destroyed, and is always in a state of creation, which means it is constantly expanding at every point simultaneously. Our psychological activity gives us a hint of the power contained in the individualization of pure energy, and our cells ring the bell of creative evidence, and prove that we are freshly created at every point in linear time.

The psyche deals with activity we can’t directly perceive, but that activity is responsible for the events we do perceive. Judgment day is drenched in mythical romance and time is bottled in linear form. Our social, moral, and political beliefs are like sand on a wind-blown beach. We celebrate our external and the fugitive beliefs, and they bring us the precipice of a fictitious death while our psyche continues to be a permanent variation of itself, which fuels the life of the soul without the need for time, or the burden of beliefs.

Sideless Box Of Creativity

2011-12-05T06:34:00.002-06:00

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely—but, by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature, and can then draw him at will in every attitude. In a certain state of thought is the common origin of very diverse works. It is the spirit and the fact that is identical. By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of awakening other souls to a given activity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay History digs into the rich dirt of awareness and finds unity covered under the rubble of separatism. There is unity within our cellular consciousness, and it is bubbling up and expanding our belief structure. The chains of isolation and superiority are rusting, and our egos are being dipped into the flowing stream of wisdom that jars our synapses and restructures our DNA. We are being bombarded by psychic energy that opens channels filled with unique probabilities.

As we travel through our own psychological atmosphere, we discover a self that is transformed by the contours of an interconnected mind. Our antiquated small range of knowing is filled with misconceptions and frivolous rites and rituals that support fear in our self-created religious state. Every event we experience is an epic tale that’s packaged in sideless box of creativity. Every lifetime is contained in all other lifetimes since time has no meaning in the corridors of the psyche. We are all creators in this box, and we become portraits of our beliefs.

We dream and create physical events and experience them in order to give meaning to physical life and all the various probabilities that churn in the consciousness of the soul. Probabilities stimulate the mind with natural inquisitiveness, which creates dream-like episodes that become physical reality. Dreaming is art in the highest form. We all are proficient dreamers and creators of the structured games, which are vividly played in our waking reality.

We constantly produce spontaneous activities that make us unique in the unity of consciousness. The power of awakening other souls is what we all do, even though we harness the self in fear. But, our artistic aptitude is coming to the surface in this age of transformation. We are beginning to understand that a probability is a drop of paint that reinforces the diversity that creates the unity within the physical painting of life.

Alien Intrusions

2011-12-01T06:18:00.002-06:00

There is no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take a single step that would bring them there. A man is bit of Labrador spar, which has no luster as you turn it in the hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practiced. We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of having intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall any form of man who is not superfluous sometimes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1844 essay Experience gently ties a bright ribbon of awareness around our thoughts and we nod our heads in agreement. Man does stand on the brink of an ocean of thought and power in this physical reality, but rarely dips his feet into the warm waters of consciousness to feel the wisdom that empowers him. We pick and choose what side of our mind we want to show the world, and we allow the brain to dissect these electromagnet impulses so that they conform to our select belief structure.

We forget that any fact we encounter is the tail end of a distinct type of creativity, which brings facts into existence so they conform to our perception of reality. Other facts are discredited and discarded that are vital to understanding the nature of the self.

Our cellularly tuned consciousness creates our mental workshop where innate energy and power spark perceptions and experiences that fit into the known present as well as other perceptions that circularly float outside the realm of our belief system. These perceptions continue to operate in the dream state. They intersect with our waking state and create physical experiences that we may or may not recognize. We call these events miracles or abnormalities that baffle or disrupt our rigid belief system. We give them labels and call them unreal, incredible, unnatural, or sinful, and superfluous.

Our thinking resides in our cellularly attuned consciousness where direct cognition operates in a circular fashion. We tap into one segment of this inner process and believe we are unable to touch the other aspects of self. They are alien intrusions in our belief system. Our focus consciousness blocks out a large part of the self in the waking state, but in the dream state we experience these other alien qualities of our consciousness. We remember only the tail of these dreams even though these aliens explode in our mental atmosphere and spark images with surreal vitality.

Psychological puddles filled with alien intrusions form and then tickle the brain until we sense a crack in our beliefs. The puddles ripple outward, and they eventually become the ocean where we baptize our ignorance.

Greater Scheme of Being

2011-11-26T09:43:00.003-06:00

The spirit knows its own way, and what we can do is to rid it of all the obstacles our ignorance has piled before it.

D.T. Suzuki in his work, History of Zen, explains the origin of Zen Buddhism in China. He opens a window of wisdom for us so we can sense the spirit’s nature, which is the epitome of freedom and emancipation. The fruit of freedom and the nectar of emancipation are hanging in front of us, but we tend to look beyond these gifts in order to experience the contrast that sets expansion in motion. Expanding the complete self is not a vivid thought since we only use a small portion of the self in this reality.

Our educated ignorance feels like the old Berlin Wall. We build a wall around the focused self. This self is rooted in self-serving and limited perceptions of our psyche even though the psyche is a composite element that contains the spirit, soul, and mind. We are bound by the shackles of time and roped to the moving force of fictitious beliefs, which create a mental landfill of toxicity. We live in a world fill with multitudinous small deaths and births which take place in the body as well as in the psyche. We forget the circular motion of our expanding being when we are focused on linear time. Cause and effect are the result of logical thought, but logical thought has no business in the spiritual aspect of the psyche so there is no spiritual cause and effect that can be translated in terms we can understand.

Our cells know the aspects in their environment that impact the changing condition of the physical body. The psyche has a similar kind of awareness when it comes to psychological environments and events. The awareness of undetected probabilities and actions in the waking state seem to have no connection with us even though we are related to them in the greater scheme of being. But, in the playing field of the dream reality we remove all our perceived physical obstacles so the spirit can function freely. In this multiplistic reality, our psyche merges in time as well as out of it so we can experience emancipation in both realities.

Our conscious spirit sits on the invisible, unspoken, and psychological language of the psyche. We don’t have to physically define the spirit, but we should accept and appreciate it for its relentless expanding energy.

Manna That Feeds The Soul

2011-11-22T08:14:00.002-06:00

The notion of God however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast. And those poets like Dante and Wordsworth, who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse.

Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism—not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter’s inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.

William James in his essay, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered does hit the beach of life with some powerful sand churning thoughts. Life is too busy to absorb all the information that flows through the universe. The rate of that flow is too much to process, but we do manage to process a small sliver of it. The God represented as a man is etched into the foundation our genetic pool, and we build a liquid world around it. We organize and perceive certain kinds of information in this world, and we form a contour of beliefs and events that shape our reality.

Our conscious knowledge sits on an invisible, psychological language that offers inner support for the conscious happenings we experience. This inner language is built on psychic organizational units that form events. Events are spoken components in living form. They emerge from the psyche, which is a non-physical mass of cordellas. The psyche forms events in the same way that the ocean forms waves, but our events are not confined to the surface of our reality—they are splashed out into the mass psychological reality. The effects of these events expand the psyche and they emerge like spoken words and impact our awareness.

All of these metaphysical facts fall into a pit of nonsensical gibberish to the materialist who believes that everything must be verified by facts, which for the most part are half truths. The spiritualist may accept the psyche as the instigator of events and experiences, but may not understand how all of that makes any difference in a world where exterior motivation is the manna that feeds the soul.

Moral order is something that we all have an opinion about, but most of us don’t dig deep enough into the self to recognize that moral order is the fruit of the psyche where the soul, mind, and spirit produce a Zentopia of personal as well as mass events. When we identify the self using specific beliefs we limit our personal moral order, but we still continue to expand the psyche. The fascinating aspect of the psyche is the fact that it is experiencing several selves in spontaneity and each one is different. Just like a sentence where the beginning and the end are know simultaneously, our psyche uses the circular knowledge of religion to point us in a direction that creates life events worth experiencing, as well as non-physical events that are precisely poised to expand our beliefs structure about God.

Energy Enriched Reality

2011-11-18T05:23:00.001-06:00

Let me pass to a very cognate philosophic problem, the question of design in nature. God’s existence has from time immemorial been held to be proved by certain natural facts. Many facts appear as if expressly designed in view of one another. Thus the woodpecker’s bill, tongue, feet, tail, etc., fit him wondrously for a world of trees with grubs hid in their bark to feed upon. The parts of the eye fit the laws of light to perfection, leading its rays to a sharp picture on our retina. Such mutual fitting of things diverse in origin argued design, it was held; and the designer was always treated as a man-loving deity.

The first step in these arguments was to prove that the design existed. Nature was ransacked for results obtained through separate things being co-adapted. Our eyes, for instance, originate in intrauterine darkness, and the light originates in the sun, yet see how they fit each other. They are evidently made for each other. Vision is the end design, light and eyes the separate means devised for its attainment.

It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of this argument, to see how little it counts for since the triumph of the Darwinian Theory. Darwin opened our minds to the power of chance-happenings to bring forth ‘fit’ results if only they have time to add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness. He also emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue an evil rather than a good designer. Here all depends upon the point of view. To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker’s organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer.

Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the Darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose against mechanism, of one or the other. We know now they are both. Without nature’s stupendous laws and counterforces, man’s creation and perfection, we might suppose, would be too insipid achievements for God to have designed them.

William James in his 1907 essay, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered brings the lava of religion to a boil with his thoughts about nature and man. The question of evolution and man’s place in the scheme of nature has been a hot topic for centuries. We like to separate our humanness from nature, but when we take a closer look, we see that nature is an extension of our consciousness. The qualities of humanness and nature manifest from a stream of consciousness where all consciousness flows in a tub of probabilities. Quantum mechanics shows us that our reality is based on probabilities.

The vision of us as creators is blasphemy to some. There’s a God out there somewhere and we are always putting words in his or her mouth. But when we pull the controlling powers of religion out of focus, we realize that this God figure is in nature as well as in our psyche and our psyche is in God as well as in nature. They can not be separated, but religion does a good job by fueling a reality full of guilt and contrition. Western as well as Eastern religions are pushing the envelop of separation to the point where God is a two-headed judgmental figure that has distinct likes and dislikes. We project our beliefs about separatism into this reality, and we find ourselves caught in guilt-ridden mental masturbation. God has turned into an extension of our ego and is dipped into this fear based reality as a savior. In certain beliefs God is a diabolic savior that chooses between good and evil even though man is the creator of these dualistic choices.

We ignore the fact that we live in the psyche in almost the same way we live in the world. There are many languages and substances and a master essence, which we can call God in our psyche. This psychological reality is filled with interconnected consciousness and everything in this energy enriched reality is in a state of expansion. The energy within our interconnected consciousness never denies the validity or the expansion of what we consider God.

All life forms are consciousness and manifest from our non-physical cellular attuned consciousness. The purpose of physical consciousness is expansion and physical reality is the playing field for that expansion. The players are different, and yet they are the same. Consciousness is not limited by our distorted concepts of what it is. Each of us is part of a living God, which shows us the meaning of life through the incredible diversity in nature.

Restless Facts

2011-11-14T10:49:00.003-06:00

The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contended silence of the universe will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. ‘Imperishable monuments’ and ‘immortal deeds’ death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is, be better or be worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect.

Those thoughts were expressed by Arthur James Balfour, the 1st Earl of Balfour, who served as Prime Minister of the UK from 1902 to 1905. Our thoughts about the nature of our world have changed dramatically over the last one hundred plus years. The notions that thoughts die, and energy decays, or consciousness has an end are in the same category as the earth being flat. Balfour’s beliefs were commonplace back in those years, and people experienced those beliefs using the turmoil they created during the 20th century.

Negative thoughts move slower than positive thoughts, so remnants of those antiquated and guilt-ridden beliefs still linger in this era of self awareness. We are more than our fear-based ancestors thought we are, and the universe, especially the universe within our consciousness, is far more extensive than science and religion claim they are. A greater field of perception, which springs from our imagination, is revealing itself. We now sense a different framework, and it is ready to be experienced. The flower of innate truth sits on a stalk in an opening region of consciousness, and as it opens we realize that we dwell in more than one reality at a time.

In our dream reality, the psyche brings new facts into existence. Reality and imagination are synonymous. Without one there wouldn’t be the other. Facts are beliefs that give us guidelines for our perceptions, and they allow substances to react differently, which means they vibrate slower or faster depending on the associations within the beliefs. What may be a fact in one moment may not be a fact in another moment. Balfour thoughts helped glorified negative expression, and other natural impulses and emotions were blocked in the process.

Physical life is not about finding the nature of the self; it’s about creating and then expanding the essence of the self. There are no signs of a butterfly in a caterpillar. That transformation is a metaphor for the self. The alteration of antiquated facts is part of shift in awareness. Beliefs are guidelines that help us experience the physical world. Our first belief is about the self, and when we close the separation that exists within the self we alter our awareness, and we begin to trust our dreams, feelings, and imagination. We give our intellect wings, and the psyche static we have been receiving begins to unravel restless positive facts about the nature of the expanding self.

Understated Reality

2011-11-11T06:35:00.002-06:00

When Zen unconditionally emphasizes one’s immediate experience as the final fact on which it is established it may well ignore all the scriptural sources as altogether unessential to its truth.

D. T. Suzuki in his 1927 essay Doctrine Of Enlightenment gives us a juicy tidbit to sink our mental teeth into, but our teeth never touch anything but the nothingness of a thought. Suzuki was considered an expert on Buddhism, but he was much more than that. He was able to describe Zen using our primitive language, and that in itself is a monumental achievement. Zen is an aspect of consciousness. Consciousness is the energy that fuels as well as experiences this physical reality.

Our physical life implies a source where the physical originates. Suzuki called Zen the act of doing without doing, which is a function of the psyche. Zen is non-physical energy that functions between the creases of the mind, and fuels it with high-test awareness. Zen and consciousness are always in a state of becoming. They have no precise boundaries in the action of becoming. They are inseparable and reach out in all directions. They touch the eternal validity of a greater reality where we and all forms of consciousness exist as a whole as well as a part.

The trick in perceiving this ultra-summa energy is not in trying to find it— the trick is being it. There is a quality of consciousness that exists in between the pauses in our awareness, and when that consciousness expresses itself we experience nothingness which is filled with relentless energy. We mark the universe with the identity of our essence, and that mark continues to expand the nothingness of our psyche. A language develops from this nothingness, and it is translated in our private perceptions. We live in our psyche, the same way we live in the world. Our world has many languages, but they are all connected by the characteristic pauses and hesitation that are the vehicles for our sounds.

The unknown portions of our psyche worlds have been perceived as gods through the ages. The psyche and God are so interconnected and inseparable in our language that any attempt to separate them causes confusion as well as disbelief. When we deny the validity of Zen and other aspects of our consciousness we deny the importance of our identity, and the validity of God. They exist as one within the other and cannot be separated.

Waving To The Soul

2011-11-07T06:58:00.002-06:00

When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakespeare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every tie he touched his mother earth, his strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and, in conversation with nature. The power of music, the power of poetry to unfix, and as it were, clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus.

The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations of form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran. And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact, because every creature is man agent or patient Tantalus is but a name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1842 essay History stokes the fire of thought within us, and we experience the burning coals of remembering. We are alive because of our psychic, spiritual, and biological substructure, but we don’t adequately comprehend any of those innate structures. We are what we are because of the existence of what we are not. Our greater reality is measured in terms of intensities, and our psyche puts us together in different ways. Time is not marked in the psyche, but the consciousness of all forms of life blend there and form inner rhythms which manifest as adjacent identities. These subspecies of consciousness operate in a trans-species fashion.

Our biological body is a blend of mineral, plant, and animal consciousness, and it maintains its stability because of the give and take of the materials of the earth, which is another quality of consciousness. We are part of the world and yet we are ourselves, just like our psyche, which is part of other worlds that contains other identities besides the one we think of as our own. We contribute abilities and experience in this focus, and help form our mass reality, and that process expands our psyche. Our thoughts are energy that ripple outwards in ways we don’t comprehend, and interact with the experiences of others and form world events.

Our various identities are psychic environments not physical ones. They mix and then merge with each other, but still maintain their own focus. They interact without physical restrictions. Even though we are just a portion of our psyche, our identity is inviolate. It is never annihilated or submerged in another identity. It has its own integrity and follows its own focus and knows itself. We are Antaeus, Proteus, and Tantalus as well as other identities that hang on the vine of the psyche like grapes that continue to move through their cycle of life.

We explore these other selves and grow from that experience, but the psyche or the soul never exists as finished products like our ripened grapes. Like the grape vine our physical life implies a non-physical one. Each identity has an eternal validity within the greater reality of the psyche, and when we focus on the pauses in our inner language we can theoretically contact any of those identities. There are no impossibilities in those realities since all identities occur at once. Those worlds are full of energy, and it is always waving to the soul.

Precious Myths

2011-11-03T05:30:00.002-05:00

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that “poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.” All the fiction of the Middle Ages explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of the birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in the right direction.

The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavor of the human spirit “to bend the show of things to the desires of the mind.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay History points our thoughts to a target that seems to vacillate within the corners of the mind. All the myths and stories of the past tell us what we already know, but have forgotten. Various aspects of consciousness merge in this temporal reality, and we perceive an individual reality we call our own. We develop a language of symbols as a substitute for direct cognition in this time-space world. Words and symbols created from our thoughts express our choices, probabilities, and experiences, and they act as protectors as well as communicators. Thoughts are non-physical energy that continues to move endlessly through the stream of consciousness.

Objects are symbols and visual perceptions. They give us a sense of realness in the outside world of learning. There are gaps in our awareness, and they are filled with data, but we ignore those messages in order to focus on our separated reality which is filled with metaphors. We try to find the self that is embedded in the myths of God in this world, but all we find are manmade laws that separate, control, and limit our beliefs about the nature of the self.

We take the existence of the psyche on the same faith as we take God, and continue to try and find the ‘self’ that is buried deep in the crevices of our sub-consciousness. But,consciousness is never ‘sub,’ and it is always conscious of itself. Consciousness is energy that manifests in order to expand.

That energy is filled with regions and patterns as well as qualities that interact with each other. All these qualities form myths from the distinct aspects of the limitless nature of consciousness. Our psyche forms our personal myths from other regions of our consciousness. The psyche and God are unknowns in our language because they do not conform to our temporal limits and restrictions. Our language imitates in a very limited way the realities that exist within our psyche myths.

We do sense the qualities and patterns that make us who we are, as well as the sheer unutterable uniqueness that makes us a part as well as the whole in the stream of consciousness. The psyche and the self are in a constant state of expansion, and are always becoming as our awareness of self manifests. We are always becoming more than we are, but we can’t keep up with this psychic and psychological activity in this physical life since our focus is experiencing our individual desires tangibly.

Our precious myths are painted with the paint of the psyche, and the nectar of consciousness, and we live them in our physical experiences in one way or another. We live the myth of God, and become an aspect of that belief. God runs through our psyche like water runs through this world; ever-changing and limitless in the quest to be. The energy of the psyche is always in motion and has no time limits.

Rhythm Of The Silence

2011-10-31T06:34:00.001-05:00

Similarly our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of several souls, which are substances, but again not wholly in their own right, for they are modes of the still deeper substance ‘spirit.’ Nominalists according adopt the opinion that substance is a spurious idea due to our inveterate human trick of turning names into things. Phenomena come in groups and each group gets a name. The name supports the group, and scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate.

William James in his third lecture to Lowell Institute in 1906 instigates thought about thought. If thought does not adhere or cohere with something else it is abandoned in some pragmatic schools, but the bare cohesion of thought is enough to create a crack in our rigid belief structure about the nature of the self. We look at a world of substance through our eyes as well as the eyes of others, and create a reality based on beliefs. We become a cohesive group that creates what we believe and discount all other groups that do not conform to our sensitive motivations.

In substance, language has nothing to do with words. Verbal language emerged when a portion of the self forgot its identification with nature. Nature became a separate substance, and we had to express our emotions in a physical way. Language began as man tried to express love for the natural world of which he was a whole part, but a forgetful one.

Emotional magnificence is the substance that gives each person the ability to release their emotions, and that energy is experienced through nature’s changes. Weather conditions and emotions are a cohesive substance. Our inner condition cause exterior climate changes, but this bare cohesion is not recognized as a valid substance. Our inner sounds act like layers between our tissue and coat our molecules, and they serve as exterior models that produce body rhythms. The substance of language is only meaningful because of the rhythm of the silence that creates it. Meaning comes from the pauses between the sounds as well as the sounds themselves. The breath’s integrity is a by- product of the give and take between the cells, the tissue, and the expression of our molecular competence.

The substance of our language is the result of an inner communication that is too fast for us to follow. It involves subjective as well as corporal realities, and it has meaning on several levels. Language does follow our perceptions, but the sound structure beneath our language does not. The substance of common sense is rooted in a group of thoughts that form from the objective language of the now, and it is molded so it conforms to accepted beliefs that give reality substance. That substance is separated expression that continues to expand as our belief system expands. The rhythm of silence continues to move us through several realities, and we continue to become homogenized spirit substance as we as an individual identity in the process.

Primary Testimony

2011-10-27T06:14:00.002-05:00

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world—as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances.

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a low strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forebear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance breaks the bottle of self-serving, egotistical virtues and they float around our mind. They are naked in a puddle of thoughts about the self, and how it conforms to the established charade of doing good in order to receive something tangible in return. Our system is based on take and give rather than give and then give again. Our expectations overpower our truth, and virtues become the bartering chips for penance and forgiveness. We seek the world’s opinion. That opinion is filled with fear and control tactics that keep us from feeling the value in being what we are—whatever that might be.

This world exists because of spontaneous order. It grew spontaneously and developed an objective order that does not allow the identification of a self that expresses truth instead of apology. The psyche is naturally creative and explorative, so characteristics that appear as faults have a certain truth about them that can be accepted as virtues. Consciousness is energy and the primary aspect of being, and each portion of it contains our whole essence. It is much more mobile than we believe, and it can mold itself into various elements of truth. Portions of the identified objective consciousness can mix, merge, and form alliances with fragments of truths, and we identified these fragments as whole virtues, and we use them as measuring sticks for worthiness.

Consciousness flows through interrelated channels of awareness that connect all physical matter, which has manifested from thought. Tuning into those inner channels opens the self to the basic language of virtue, which starts with the love of self. The language of the psyche is filled with virtue that forms a channel though which our consciousness flows. In that channel we experience a direct cognition where what is known is known. Our breath and the wind are felt as one and the same, and our actions are the virtues that connect us. In this reality we become the noun and the verb as the verb expresses itself as the noun. In this reality nature speaks for man and man speaks for nature.

This kind of emotional magnificence motivates our private emotions, and they are released in the form of natural virtues that activate the molecules and stimulate the cells, so our expression is one of primary testimony and assurance.

The Eternal Law

2011-10-23T07:45:00.002-05:00

Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, — but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.

If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest and mine, and all men’s, however long we dwell in lies, to live in truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance. We have a tendency to forget that humanity deals with several predominant themes at various points in linear time. The nature of politics, religion, the family,our personality, and the arts are interwoven into these themes so human consciousness has been experimenting with an arbitrary division between the subject self and the perceiver. As a species we consider ourselves separated from the rest of consciousness that exists within this reality. We encouraged male-ego characteristics thanks to the Western world’s Greek and Roman heritage. God is masculine and competitive so we are living a Greek tragedy of sorts, and our family, political, and religious beliefs mirror that tragedy.

Nature represents our feminine aspects. Our unique kind of consciousness wanted to release itself from that image. We had to pretend to dislike and disown elements of our source in the same way that a adolescent wants independence from the family. That break occurred as the Greeks and the Romans developed gods and goddesses. Animal gods began to disappear and as a species we divorced ourselves from nature. Our myths changed and we altered our reality to reflect them.

As a result we only see in nature what we want to see, and we develop a model of nature that conforms to our beliefs. Love and devotion are seen as female characteristics and organizations like the state and church are seen as male. We believe each has a place; the male is the ego and the psyche is female.

Now is the time to expand those beliefs, by closing the division between science and religion. Religions have an intuitive base, but science considers intuitiveness illogical, because it stems from what is considered the female psyche. When we begin to unify, expand, and create a new sense of what our sexuality represents in terms of the psyche we move into another aspect of our expansion process. Einstein used his emotions, intuition, and intellect and tapped into his male and female self and world beliefs changed, even though a large portion of his work was used for manipulation and control purposes.

The eternal law leads us to the exploration of the self where our conventional beliefs are changed. We discover our psychic and psychological identity that is both male and female. In that framework the seeming opposites are transcended and we find peace in the psyche, but that peace my not be released in normal life unless we discover that truth is not an element of separation—it is the foundation for our subjective eternal law.

Simultaneous Multiplicity

2011-10-18T06:49:00.001-05:00

The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry—a narrow belt. Moreover in popular experience, everything good is on the highway.

The mid-world is best. Nature as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics, Gentoos, and Grahamites, she does not distinguish by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law, do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, not punctually keep the commandments. If we be strong with her strength, we must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is his 1841 essay Experience bounces us off the walls of sanity and we find ourselves walking, albeit shakily, along the equator of life. We place one thought in front of another believing that we on the highway of righteousness and redemption only to discover that those preconceived notions are remnants of a past that is filled with ignorance and rituals.

Our beliefs are so structure that our identity is solely dependant on our psychological and biological sexuality. We function using manmade laws and call them God’s because cooperation is paramount to our being. We push our bisexual nature away from our mid-world, and condemn those that bring it forth. Sexual stereotypes shade our perceptions even though the larger pattern of human personhood demands a bisexual affiliation that provides a framework where individuals can express feelings, and abilities that follow the natural incline of the personal psyche. Our innate biological possibilities are not activated, and psychic and spiritual growth is stymied. The growth of our physical structure in this state prompts the overgrowth of certain cells and we experience dis-ease.

The distortion that results from psyche blockage begins to accumulate in puberty, so we are unable to understand the nature of the self. We paint the psyche as a contradictory element of our physical being instead of the foundation for our mid-world. The psyche is a bank where all beliefs are drawn. There are no clear-cut characteristics that belong to one sex or another in that bank. That would lead to a pattern that is to rigid for the development of our species.

Our beliefs are built-in from infancy. They are biologically pertinent and they are transmitted so we act in one way or another. But we feel a greater personhood within us; it is that thin layer of awareness that vacillates between our rooted beliefs. That is the place where our Zen zone creates another highway where everything is good and acceptable, and where the self is known for its simultaneous multiplicity.

The Soul Circumscribes All Things

2011-10-14T07:40:00.002-05:00

The Soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay The Over-soul gives us the opportunity to examine the words we use to describe our reality as well as the self. It feels like we are locked in a moving capsule filled with time, space, and matter that vacillates with our vision of sanity. Sanity, like any other word, is a description or a symbol of how we perceive the self. Emerson thought we stuff eternity into an hour and stretch an hour into eternity, and we do achieve those feats and usually don’t accept them as real occurrences.

There are aspects of our consciousness that are beneath our usual awareness. These aspects are unknown channels of information. Those channels help us anticipate events and it enables us to experience our conscious goals and beliefs. When we allow the self the freedom to explore these shaded areas of the psyche we find other realities that are not restricted by time and space. We inhabit and interact in them in another form.

In that vacuum we realize that the psyche is not male or female; it is a repository of characteristics that operate in patterns with male and female elements. These patterns can be put together in a plethora of ways. Our personhood existed before our sex. Individuality gives meaning to our sex, not the other way around. The soul is both male and female in our terms, and it is the meeting place for innate consciousness. The spirit or the soul does sport time as the psyche cooperates with the physical elements of earth, and individualization occurs that is human as well as divine.

In those terms, lesbianism, homosexuality, and heterosexuality are valid expression of man’s bisexual nature in this reality, since the psyche chooses what to experience in any point in time. If only man-female relationships operated in this time and space there would be no bond strong enough to forge families together. Antagonism between males would be too powerful and the competition between females would be too severe. Basic bisexuality gives the species the leeway necessary to prevent behavior that would restrict social commerce and creativity. The basic sexual nature of the soul allows us to experience our individual abilities, which lays the groundwork for the future. Sexual qualities are part of our nature, but they don’t define it. The soul circumscribes all beliefs including sexuality.

Closed End Thinking

2011-10-11T05:39:00.002-05:00

Hope is the only good god remaining among mankind;
the others have left and gone to Olympus.
Trust, a mighty god has gone, Restraint has gone from men,
and the Graces, my friend, have abandoned the earth.
Men’s judicial oaths are no longer to be trusted, nor does anyone
revere the immortal gods; the race of pious men has perished and
men no longer recognize the rules of conduct or acts of piety.

Theognis of Megara the 6th century BC elegiac poet wrote those thoughts to dispel the myth that Pandora’s Box only contained all the evils in the world and all that was left in that jar-box was Hope. Theognis seemed to think that the jar contained blessings rather than evils. He said foolish men, not Pandora, opened the jar and all the blessings were lost forever. Hope did remained, and it promised all of us the good things that escaped from the box.

We tend to accentuate the negative and play down the positive. The ancient world was filled with negative thoughts about the nature of man, but within the cracks of those thoughts buds of positive energy kept blooming. Our myths are a foundation for our beliefs, and our belief in the nature of sexuality is our mark of distinction. Sexuality is a strong energy so it becomes the focal point for beliefs about the self. Sexuality is filled with evil according to some religions, but the evil we perceive within it is rooted in myths not in the psyche of man.

The Greeks liked to use myths to create a sense of good and evil, and the gods were the catalyst for these highly creative stories. Fear was and still is a control mechanism. Our beliefs about sexuality and evil reach into the depths of time and we are convinced that the self is evil. Weeding out thoughts of evil is an internal process; evil sits on the banks of time and muddies the water of goodness. Our association with good is based on merit, which means clearing the murky mud of negativity using external means rather than introspection, and that can be a difficult task.

We are scared to explore the inner territory of time. Fear is the captain of most of our inner exploration, and insanity seems to be the first mate. We put a lid on one aspect of consciousness, and only allow a trickle from the stream of awareness into our closed end thinking process. In that closed reality we believe it’s safe to make nuclear bomb for protection, but we discount our ability to use dreams as a method of manipulating daily life. We accept disasters, viruses, and wars, but we belief it is not right to be consciously aware of other portions of the self that have the potential to solve those issues.

New impulses are suggesting that we lift the lid from our normal consciousness, which is filled with myths and the distorted perceptions about a ribbon of evil that waits to tie us in a bow of despair. We are expanding and bringing other levels of reality into focus, and these realities can be inherently believed and utilized just like our ancient myths and rituals.

A Little About The Book and Down Syndrome

2011-10-06T05:35:00.001-05:00

A Natural Choice

It may be normal, darling, but I’d rather be natural.

Truman Capote wrote that thought in his book, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The difference between normal and natural could be a matter of debate, but physical life is measured in normal not naturals, especially when it comes to human expression.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention one in every thirty-three babies is born with some sort of birth defect. The CDC also reports 1 in every 691 babies is born with Down syndrome. That means almost 7,000 babies are born every year with Trisomy 21, and we label them Down syndrome babies.

Over 350,000 people in the Unites States are living with Down syndrome and since they don’t fit into the norm we call ‘acceptable’ we label them disabled. Disabled means a lot of things. Webster’s dictionary defines it as a condition that weakens and destroys or it renders people legally incapable. The World English Dictionary defines it as lacking one or more physical powers that allows people to walk or coordinate movements as well as perform certain functions that require average mental performance.

The word disabled automatically sends a red flag up the pole of awareness in the minds of some folks. People are judged for what they can’t do rather than what they are capable of doing. Disabled people are put in a box of sympathy and wrapped with a bow of pity. Our sensitive emotions overrule natural common sense. We isolate them and build walls around them that only innately sensitive and natural people penetrate.

People living with different physical challenges are feared; we are not educated to understand why these brave souls chose to experience physical life in a truly unique way. Just like the masses, which we call normal, they are connected to a non-physical stream of consciousness that every religion describes in a plethora of ways. But, that connection becomes distorted by our egos that separate the self from the inner self.

In that natural inner stream there are no words that describe choices made by individual consciousness. There is only an assortment of connected aspects of consciousness that have the desire to express their awareness physically. When that awareness is manifested physically, we experience it in the massive explosion of unique forms that cover the surface of the planet.

All we have to do is look around us at this natural expression and we become aware that our consciousness is more than we believe it is. Some experts are discovering that Down syndrome, and other physical challenges are subjective choices, and those choices are manifested objectively.

Other scholars believe that children and adults living with Down syndrome or other disabilities come into this physical world to teach us something we forgot about ourselves when the ego took control and said we are a ‘normal,’ and a separated consciousness. Everyone who spends time around a person living with Down syndrome and other challenges experiences an aspect of innate knowing that is hard to ignore. That knowing is natural and it is dipped in complete love.

But, why would a person choose to live with Down syndrome or other issues in a world that offers material luxuries to those that conform mentally and physically to our judgmental systems? The answer may lie in what Quantum physics is unraveling in this world of multiverses. We all may live separate but connected lives in more than one reality at a time, although that fact is hard to swallow when our ridged beliefs about religion and science are reinforced by our own ignorance.

Physicists explain that we actually do live in more than one reality at a time, and in each of those realities we appear and act differently. We are able and generally do communicate with these other selves, but we are trained to ignore the messages since we believe there is only one of us experiencing physical life.

The notion that children and adults living with Down syndrome and other disabilities may be closer and more connected to these counterparts and realities is gaining credence in the distorted world of normal. When disabled children and adults tune out the normal world they may be communicating with those counterparts with a portion of the mind that may not be registering in the normal brain since it’s overloaded with the desire for physical worth.

Some researchers believe that people living with disabilities are much more aware of their multiplicity, but can’t express it physically. They do however express that fact by their actions. There is a bubble of love surrounding disabled children and adults, and every time we interact with them tiny bubbles of that love permeate our own separatism so we can sense the connection we have with them and with all form of consciousness.

The nature of the self is like the nature of all other forms of consciousness. The self is non-physical energy before it becomes physical. Disabled humans don’t move as far away from that energy, but normal people do.

The New Zealand author Vincent O’Sullivan in his story, The Next Room summed up our normal actions this way:

If you’re different from the rest of the flock, they bite you.

What we fail to realize is we’re disabling another aspect of our self when we label another member of our flock as incapable. In more ways than one, they are much more capable than we remember, and innately more competent than our normal inflated egos.

My book, Living Behind The Beauty Shop is about a Middle Tennessee boy who understands that greater reality where the psyche is able to communicate with the self that is experiencing other dimensions. The boy, Mase Russell, is living with Down syndrome. He is considered disabled in our normal reality, but he is far more enabled and connected than we are to that stream of consciousness that flows through all of us. He is able to communicate with other aspects of the self while dreaming, and he accepts his dream experiences as real. He is even able to remember those experiences and express them in his own way. His family begins to sense that his disability is a challenging gift not a sentence of suffering.

His family is like any other family. They experience the typical dramas that we all create in our waking reality. His grandfather, Warren Russell is a wealthy business man that lives on his family’s 1000 acre farm in Leipers Fork, Tennessee. The farm was a land grant given to his triple great-grandfather after the American Revolution. Warren and his wife Claire considered the farm their right of passage until they both experienced a near-death experience on a trip to Florida in their Cessna. After the accident, Warren decides to donate 500 acres to a non-profit foundation he formed called Perception Farms. Perception Farms becomes a self-sufficient community off the grid that gives the homeless a fresh start.

His daughter Cindy realizes that she’s gay after she marries her college sweetheart. She returns home from California and finds an ex-nun, who is now called Margie, at one of Perception Farm’s fundraisers. Margie discovered her true sexuality when she was in the convent. They become partners and decide to have a child using the sperm of their friend Alan Sutton, a well educated and athletic individual who works in the shoe business. Baby Mase is born with DS and the story follows his life and the experiences of the family as he becomes an accomplished poet and artist.

Years later, Mase finds Mischa Eddington who is another Down syndrome artist, in a local college art class, and they develop a close relationship. Together they watch members of the family experience the pains of getting older. They offer the family another perspective about that aging process. The family realizes that Mase and Mischa chose to be born with Down syndrome in order to help them as well as the others that are familiar with them see that there are no boundaries or limits in physical life unless we put them there through our beliefs and perceptions. They show us that other realities are just as real as our waking reality.

When we consider the fact that consciousness does not have a beginning or an end in the non-physical world we can better understand that the people we call disabled are actually teachers who choose to experience life in extraordinary ways. They teach us that putting limits, judgments, and sterilized beliefs in action is the art of separating one aspect of the self from other elements of the psyche.

When that happens, we find ourselves living in the beauty shop of life, which is filled with exterior self serving nothingness. Mase and Mischa live behind the beauty shop of life and they try to share and explain that aspect of life through their thoughts and deeds. They appreciate life as they know it and the life that all of us believe is only available through death. They show us that all there is, in this physical world, is the now and the eternal love that surrounds it.

Creative Destruction

2011-10-04T06:07:00.004-05:00

He who will not economize will have to agonize.

Those words were written by Confucius over 2,200 years ago. Confucius was not a religious leader or the founder of a political party; he was a social philosopher and thinker. His philosophy was based on sincerity, personal and governmental morality, justice, and correctness in social relationships. Confucius believed in strong family loyalty. He believed that a strong family bond was the basis for an ideal government. The family in his mind was a group of relatives, friends, and associates that took responsibility for themselves and had the desire to develop and share the common good.

His golden rule, Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself, still applies to social and personal prudence, but our democratic system has altered the meaning of that rule. Our own version of capitalistic Creative Destruction has eroded the Confucius rule. Economic erosion is gaining momentum and the world tastes the bitter pill of agony because of it.

Joseph Schumpeter, the 20th century Austrian-American political scientist and economist coined the phrase Creative Destruction in his 1942 work, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Schumpeter wrote:

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. And this evolutionary character of the capitalist process is not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes and by its change alters the data of economic action; this fact is important and these changes (wars, revolutions and so on) often condition industrial change, but they are not its prime movers. Nor is this evolutionary character due to a quasi-automatic increase in population and capital or to the vagaries of monetary systems, of which exactly the same thing holds true. The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.

Our global hybrid capitalistic system is also creating some of the agony we feel about our economy. This hybrid system is based on several fabricated economic structures, which are put in place by political appointees, not the people, and that creates waves of uncertainty. We are caught in mounting waves of rhetoric that is filled with inflated political egos and those waves have been pounding our economic system for decades. Each political system recognizes the waves. They try to push against their own creations in order to reshape them in an acceptable image, but that resistance only distorts the waves and they grow in strength and the economy suffers. Schumpeter put it this way:

We are incessantly revolutionizing the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, and incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .

Schumpeter goes on to say: that the success of capitalism leads to a form of corporatism which fosters values that are hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals. The social climate needed for entrepreneurship to expand does not exist in advanced capitalism; it is replaced by socialism in one form or another. The trend in government is to elect social democratic parties of one stripe or another using its own survival tactics.

He continues by saying: the collapse of capitalism from within develops when democratic majorities vote for restrictions that impact entrepreneurship and thus destroy the capitalist structure. Schumpeter disputed the idea that democracy was a process where the people identified the common good, and politicians incorporate it into the system. He says it’s unrealistic, because of the people's ignorance and superficiality; they were in fact manipulated by politicians, who set the agenda. That fact makes the 'rule by the people' concept both unlikely and undesirable once the political machine gains power.

We have a hard time understanding that we are the creators of our dualistic world of creative destruction. We must constantly recreate the self and democracy in order to effectively function as we change from a debt based mentality to a positive cash flow reality. That means accepting where we are and where we have been, and then moving to where we want to go using personal and governmental morality, sincerity, correct social relationships and family loyalty.

But, our family loyalty has been fragmented by the actions of our own political system. The tail is wagging the dog of regulatory democracy. We are the dog and the politicians are the tail, but the tail has developed its own rules for survival, and those rules conflict with the golden rule.

Perhaps it’s time for a new Know Nothing Party that knows nothing about the politics or religious separatism of a democracy, but knows everything about the virtue of fulfilling one's responsibilities toward others. It is time to develop a moral system that is based on understanding and empathy for others, rather than so-called divinely ordained rules. That system of democracy will champion our vision of taking the agony out of economizing by giving the people a true voice in their own creations. Politicians could then return to the family and function effectively in a blended form of creative destruction.

www.livingbehindthebeautyshop.com
hal@shortsleeves.net

Down syndrome Study

2011-10-03T15:49:00.004-05:00

This week I'll be sharing thoughts about Down syndrome and my book. I'll return to posts about the nature of consciousness the week of the 10th.

Down syndrome Study Finds Families Are Happy

Having a child with Down syndrome may come as a surprise, but it’s a good experience, families are reporting in a trio of new surveys.

Researchers surveyed more than 3,000 family members and people with the chromosomal disorder across the country for what’s believed to be one of the largest looks at life with Down syndrome. The findings, which will be published in three articles in the October issue of the American Journal of Medical Genetics, offer a rosy picture.
The vast majority of parents said they have a more positive outlook on life because of their child with Down syndrome. And, nearly 90 percent of siblings indicated that they feel like they are better people because of their brother or sister with the developmental disability.

Nearly all of the survey respondents with Down syndrome said they were happy with their lives, themselves and their appearance. Only 4 percent said they felt sad about their life.

“As international discussion is mounting over the new prenatal tests, family members have now had their say about life with Down syndrome,” said Susan Levine from the disability nonprofit Family Resource Associates, who worked on the study alongside researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “And, more importantly, the people with Down syndrome themselves have clearly stated that they consider their lives valuable.”

Researchers did acknowledge that the survey population could be a slightly biased one since all respondents came from families that are members of nonprofit Down syndrome groups. Nonetheless, they say the findings are valuable since they offer the “largest and most comprehensive portrait of life with Down syndrome to date.”

Original article was written By Shaun Heasley for Disability Scoop (www.disabilityscoop.com) on September 22,2011.

The Shackles Of Fallen Men

2011-09-28T09:11:00.002-05:00

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorted lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us.

Nature, art, persons, letters, religion,—objects, successfully tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery, and make them wait on his guest at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street, shoppers or barkeepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is threatenable and insultable in us.

Tis the same with idolatries. People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind’s eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name hero or saint.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1844 essay, Experience opens a door of awareness and the light of responsibility comes crashing through our colored lenses of ritualistic beliefs and judgmental tomfoolery. We are the creators of our reality not the Fallen men of some perverse God that picks and chooses good over evil. We do the picking and we create the evil as well as the good. As Emerson mentions God is an idea, a thought that serves our purpose. We measure God in a world of measurability.

Unfortunately, certain elements within our religious beliefs have lodged a wicked self into the crevices of our emotions so the need to be disciplined and reconfigured into a ritualistic fiend becomes the norm. Our emotions trigger our memories and they organize our associations. Emotions are generated by beliefs, and attach themselves to certain brain waves and our body consciousness so we can experience past and future events in the now. The expansion of consciousness comes from dreams and alterations in objective beliefs. Beliefs make us what we are and what we experience and we can expand our consciousness and bring other realities into focus and we can experience them without experiencing an excessive amount of emotional trauma.

Even though other qualities of our consciousness are not vivid, there is a sense of clearness; a sense of knowing and feeling of consciousness that draws us back to the self that remembers its essence. Beneath our usual awareness the mind’s eye sees a horizon where the self dances without believing in the shackles of Fallen Men.

Capitalistic Patterns

2011-09-23T08:34:00.002-05:00

Since we are dealing with a process whose every element takes considerable time in revealing its true features and ultimate effects, there is no point in appraising the performance of that process ex visu of a given point of time; we must judge its performance over time, as it unfolds through the decades or centuries. A system—any system, economic or other —that at any given point of time fully utilizes its possibilities to the best advantage may yet in the long run be inferior to a system that does so at no given point of time, because the latter’s failure to do so may be a condition for the level or speed of long-run performance.

Joseph Schumpeter the Harvard economics professor is talking about Capitalism in his thesis, The Process of Creative Destruction, but his words also apply to how we view our beliefs about the self. We believe that the self is a fixed physical being that uses all possibilities to the best advantage, but that self is only one aspect of our psyche, and we use it in a very prejudice way. All our experiences are organized according to our beliefs. The definition of conscious indicates our prejudice belief about the nature of consciousness.

The mind is a psyche pattern and we use it to form as well as interpret reality. But we just use one tiny pattern in the psyche to create that reality. That pattern continues to expand through the decades destroying some influences that impacted beliefs, and establishing new associations that add to our inner pattern. We also have the ability to use minds or the psyche that seem invisible in time. These minds organize reality in a different fashion. We are constantly going through a form of creative destruction in order to know the self.

When we use other elements of the psyche in this moment of now we become fully aware of our reality and comprehend it directly. Elements in this sense are impulses received from other qualities of the self. They influence what we believe in some manner. True personhood is rooted in the acceptance of these impulses as aspects of the self. The ancients achieved this goal, but there is no evidence that they existed so we believe we are the first to evolve into a higher version of the self. That perception is based on our belief in ordinary conscious organization.

Ordinary conscious organization is one of many organizations used by the psyche. These organizations can be compared to different art forms. Art forms don’t deal with time as much as they deal with emotions and our associative process. For example, cellular comprehension deals with probabilities in the future as well as the past so at that level time does not exist.

The belief in a wicked self is fueled by religious beliefs and that belief stops many people from exploring the inner self. The belief in sin prevents any direct experience that will give them the evidence needed to enjoy the experience that’s rooted in their own inner creative destruction process. We block our associative process using the notion of sin, which is fear of self, and that keeps us in a capitalistic type mentality that sees force and power as the means to spiritual as well as economic freedom.

Psychic Patterns

2011-09-19T09:41:00.002-05:00

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works; and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest, which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the books of all age

If anyone will but take pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the chain of affinity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, History reminds us that nature manifests physically in order to teach us something about the self. The consciousness of nature has incredible beauty and an awesome imagination that keeps creating new examples of what our inner world is like. It shows us our multiplicity as well as our innate beauty. The delicacy, strength, and expansion found in nature are expressions of a quality of consciousness that has the desire to be physical without restrictions.

When we are in touch with our psyche we experience direct knowledge. Direct knowledge is comprehension. In dreams we experience direct knowledge in a different way, and that way is much more similar to nature’s way of expressing the self.But our indirect knowledge may or may not lead to physical comprehension. The psyche functions using associative processes and those associations are tied together with emotional experiences, which defy time. Nature does not express emotion the way we do physically, but it does express it through an innate associative process. In our psychic areas all patterns of knowledge, civilizations, cultures, sciences, religions, personal and mass accomplishments, and arts and technologies exist in a timeless emotional pattern that run counter to many of our accepted core beliefs so they may appear super-normal to us.

At birth there is a pattern for a complete adult body in place, and in nature a similar pattern exists. The private psyche is aware of that pattern so there are certain probabilities and inclinations present in our biological structure, which are triggered by our intents and desires. We usually believe that this information comes from outside of the self, but just like an rose or a hibiscus, our beauty comes from the psychic patterns that express themselves as they move through different regions of consciousness. We are more like that young dogwood sapling, or the blooming lotus than we realize, and we are much more transparent than amoebas that enjoy the essence of a single cell.

Observable Patterns

2011-09-15T07:25:00.002-05:00

Analysis, whether economic or other, never yields more than a statement about the tendencies present in an observable pattern. And these never tell us what will happen to the pattern but only what would happen if they continue to act as they have been acting in the time interval covered by our observation and if no other factors intruded. “Inevitability” or “necessity” can never be more than this.

Joseph Schumpeter, the 20th century American-Austrian economist,and Harvard Professor wrote those words in the prologue of his thesis called Can Capitalism Survive. Schumpeter believed that Capitalism eventually leads to Socialism, but those thoughts will be addressed in future essays. The theory is Capitalism undermines the social institutions that protect it, and inevitably creates conditions that make it impossible to survive.

Schumpeter talks about observable patterns and how they change based on the elements of consciousness that interact with them. The laws of our grander existence supersede the physical conditions that create some of those patterns. We are between lives and in lives at once, and we believe that the physical patterns only affect the life we accept as real. Those patterns do reach into other existences because no system is closed, especially our psychological system, so a sort of bleed through occurs. Experiences bleed through psyche frequencies, and patterns and behavior that respond to those patterns change.

When this happens, we find ourselves questioning the truth lodged in the antiquated beliefs that have limited our definition of self awareness. Our inner reality is the creative source for our physical one, but some aspects of our physical reality are inviolate at their own level. The surprises and enchantments that develop from this mixture gives consciousness the ability to explore other regions of awareness that lie just below the surface of these vacillating patterns.

Various dimensions of the psyche are meant to be experienced in whatever degree we choose. They can’t be defined in simple terms, but we can be aware that observable patterns are learning tools that direct us to other regions of consciousness where those patterns take shape. But we are too rigid and autocratic in our beliefs about the self, so we set up dogmas that only contain a certain amount of data, which we consider acceptable.

The system then loses the flexibility that gave birth to the patterns. Inevitability and necessity are the terms used to describe our educated and prejudice physical perceptions that keep us separated from observing and experiencing what we think of as unreal patterns, but those patterns are just as real as our reality.

Gestalt of Wisdom

2011-09-09T09:05:00.002-05:00

There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and obstruct. The mind is one, and the best minds who love truth for its own sake, think much less of property of truth. They accept it thankfully everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with any man’s name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from eternity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, The Over-soul is reminding us that there is a greater knowledge within us that speaks even though we don’t listen. We are caught in a web of educated pandering that separates us from other aspects of the self. Our waking reality is the result of a precise organization. Within that organization reality is viewed from slightly different focuses, which function with certain ranges or frequencies. We are tuned into one radio station most of the time, but static from other stations that are functioning just as freely intermingle with our frequency, and we experience other qualities of consciousness.

We form certain focuses and ignore others that are organized in a different fashion. As Emerson points out we are educated to ignore and obstruct these realities in order to fit the mold of normal. But just like the Internet, we can switch to another place in spacelessness, and sense the self experiencing another frequency. The brain is capable of operating on a number of frequencies. Those frequencies play on the senses in a manner that conforms to the data being transmitted. Dreams confirm that fact.

The boundaries we set are our own. There is no man or man-god that approves or disapproves when or if we connect to the essence within us. We carry our cultural beliefs to the point of addiction, and filter out truth and replace with a controlling truth that keeps us in a world of rites and rituals. We experience this primitive behavior in order to recognize the gestalt of aware energy where our true energy resides. That energy is ever-changing and inviolate simultaneously. Our individuality is never destroyed for our existence floats like notes that spew sound along certain frequencies in orchestrated awareness. We play our own melody and change it constantly as the psyche expands.

To the psyche our death has already occurred and our birth has not happened. We exist in a gestalt of wisdom where our essence supersedes the belief in a limited life.

Virgin Territory

2011-08-30T05:14:00.001-05:00

I have one jewel shining bright,
Long buried it was underneath worldly worries;
This morning the dusty veil is off, and restored is its luster,
Illumining rivers and mountains and ten thousand things.

That verse is just one of hundreds of verses written about Satori or enlightenment. Iku, a disciple of Yogi, who was the founder of the Yogi branch of the Rinzai School, wrote that one in the 11th century. Satori is a new world of value where the old way of believing is abandoned and previous knowledge is immersed in a pool of oblivion. It seems our own desires and intent plays a role in this awakening. Inventors may receive Satori from the future and an archeologist may receive it from the past. Inner knowledge merges smoothly with the present so we seldom recognize the point where it originates.

We all have access to this inner data. Awareness never comes exclusively from exterior circumstances. The psyche experiments with probable actions in the dream state and mass dreams provide an inner vehicle for global actions. We all know intuitively that our experiences matter, and there is meaning in them regardless of their obvious obscurity. Each of us senses a private purpose, but those thoughts are filled with frustration because our inner goal is not clearly known.

We all have a history before birth just like the earth has a history before we were born and there is a voice within all of us that continually says “I am important and have a purpose even though I don’t know what it is.” We don’t know what it is because we look outwardly to find it, but the inner validity of the psyche or soul cannot be found there. We only see the effects not the cause.

Satori brings us back to the land of the psyche, which is the virgin territory within all of us. No territory is the same, but there is inner commerce between territories. They are a plethora of environments in this inner no-space that takes various shapes. Different portions of the psyche have their own “laws” and their own geography. Time is squeezed out of shape so we carry our own time on this inner journey, which can run backwards as well as faster or slower as the psyche tunes into other realities than are hidden from our corporal biological structure.

The reality of our own being can only be defined by the “me” that exist in a state of Satori, but that definition is only a reference point; it is not a complete definition. The specialists and gurus can only explain your psyche to you when they forget they are specialists and deal directly with the private psyche where all specializations come from. The psyche is not a thing. It has no beginning or end and it can’t be touched or seen. Trying to describe it is useless with a language that identifies physical experiences rather than nonphysical ones.

The psyche is a group of shinning jewels that are buried under unnecessary worldly worries, and Satori is the discovery of one of those jewels.

Stream of Perceptions

2011-08-25T05:59:00.001-05:00

Life delineates itself on the canvas called time; and time never repeats: once gone, forever gone; and so is an act: once done it is never undone. Life is a sumiye-painting which must be executed once and for all time and without hesitation, without intellection, and no corrections are permissible or possible. Life is not like an oil painting that can be rubbed out and done over time and again until the artist is satisfied.

With a sumiye-painting, any brush stroke painted over a second time results in a smudge; the life has left it. All corrections show when the ink dries. So is life. We can never retract what we have once committed to deeds; nay, what has once passed through consciousness can never be rubbed out. Zen therefore ought to be caught while the thing is going on, neither before or after.

D.T.Suzuki in his 1924 essay,Practical Methods of Zen Instruction explains something we all know. Physical life works just the way Suzuki describes it. We can’t change time and we certainly can’t change our experiences. Of course we only see less than half of our entity so the part of us that is living outside of the limits of time and space are able to change the sumiye-painting we call life, but that fact is not validated by the ego.

We paint life with perceptions that change the activity of atoms. Each particle in the atom is perceptively aware of all the other particles and they respond to the stimuli they receive from other atoms. In the entire act of perception there is oneness between the perceiver and the objectively perceived event so the entire act has its own electromagnet reality and the event becomes electromagnetic motion.

During the initial process of perception the ego takes a back seat as the inner self reaches into the pool of consciousness and a reshuffling takes place. Impulses that create thought are received by the ego, which dilutes them in a bath of beliefs. Those thoughts become physical perceptions, but a psychological bridge is constructed between the inner self that exists without the limitations of time and space.

Our personalities are not static concepts. Our entity is eternal, but it does grow and change as we perceive. It makes decisions and it uses the physical body for some development, so we are always becoming. We are all portions of an event that is taking place in the universe. Our consciousness mixes with other portions of consciousness and portions of our perceptions become their perceptions. Our identity is part of other identities that function in their own fashion.

Each of us operates as a particleized being which in itself is inviolate, but on another hand is ever-changing in a stream of perceptions. Consciousness or Zen is caught when the ego stops making arbitrary designations of necessity in that stream. The ego wants to be an independent structure, but it is part of a greater whole that knows itself.

Shallowness of Character

2011-08-21T07:52:00.001-05:00

Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality; it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul. Even when religious consciousness is awakened, most of us lightly pass over it so as to leave no marks of a bitter fighting on the soul. We are thus made to live on the superficiality of things. We may be clever, bright and all that, but what we produce lacks depth, sincerity, and does not appeal to the inmost feelings. Some are utterly unable to create anything except makeshifts or imitations betraying their shallowness of character and want of spiritual experience.

D.T.Suzuki wrote those thoughts in his introduction to Essays in Zen Buddhism, which was published in 1924. We are a quality of consciousness living in a self-created reality of limitations in order to know the fringe as well as the whole of consciousness, but we don’t remember what consciousness is so we continue to ignore the gestalt formations and manifestations that percolate within us. Consciousness forms patterns of identity and they move faster than the speed of light.

These patterns act as psychological particles or they can operate as freewheeling identities that act as waves that flow through other identities. They form endless combinations and psychological gestalts that function as psychological particles in time and space while other portions function outside time and space. These elements of consciousness represent the unconscious aspects of the species, which become particleized in physical existence.

There is a psychological atmosphere that surrounds the earth, and our mental and psychic journeys move through this medium. There are rhythmic waves in the atmosphere that are more intense at certain times so the ordinary meets the extraordinary in a rhythmic dance of unity. We might call this experience an awakening or a religious experience depending on our perception of that inner sense. All consciousness has aspects that communicate with all realities. We are just becoming aware there is more to us because the psychological atmosphere is opening up and our egos are putting the shallowness of character aside and creating an image of self that has more depth and sincerity. This self is a blend of several other aspects of consciousness that moves through different psychological planes.

The Ripples of Creativity

2011-08-17T07:07:00.003-05:00

In liberated moment, we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible; the elements already exist in many minds around you, of a doctrine of life which shall transcend any written record we have. The new statement will comprise the skepticisms as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in, and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs.

William James in his 1844 essay Experience makes us stop and think about our old beliefs, rituals, and ceremonies. The old belief that we are victims of the Fall of Man is breaking up as we realize the true nature of the self. There is no God that expects forgiveness. We are creators of our physical experience and we can either flow with the stream of positive energy that vibrates through our cells or we can sit on the bank of that stream and use our antiquated beliefs as anchors that swirl that energy around us as we resist it.

The inner self is aware of the integrity of its identity, and gradually it is pulling the anchor of ego out of the mud of being a victim to the fresh clear water of knowing that any God knows itself through the flesh. Reality is breaking ground and bubbles of a new reality are breaking through the stream and surfacing. We are teachers as well as students and people love to teach people who love to learn.

The true teacher in us allows us to learn from within. The beta waves in our brains are increasing as the delta, theta and alpha waves support them. Inverted beta patterna are forming and they are accelerating our consciousness so our creativity as well as latent innate activity produces a different aspect of consciousness, which straddles other realities and the life we call limited. Concepts and beliefs fit together in patterns and our heightened sense of self reveals other elements of truth that have been covered by the algae of distorted material and controlling doctrines.

Any perception is action. Perceptions change what they act on and in that process they change the self. The slightest perception change alters every cell within the body so the most minute action is felt everywhere. Remembered information about the self automatically blends, intermingles, and is enmeshed with the entire physically structure of the personality, and we feel the ripples of our own creativity.

Sense of Unity

2011-08-12T10:02:00.002-05:00

Our different purposes are at war with each other. When one can’t crush the other out, they compromise; and the result is again different from what anyone distinctly proposed beforehand.

William James shines a light of awareness on our limited perceptions about the diversity that exists within our non-unified teleological world in his 1907 essay, The One and the Many. There is innate purpose in all species and within all species there are specific values to be fulfilled in terms of physical awareness. That purpose is a hot topic especially when religious and political beliefs come prepared for mental as well as physical war. The purpose of all life is to know itself in the flesh and to create an energy that expands its own consciousness as well as the consciousness of the all.

But, some people have a passion for nonbeing. They deny their sensual life and speak out against desires while they immerse themselves in an extraordinary desire to lose the physical aspect of their consciousness. They vibrate in a cosmic masturbation pool where they massage their psyche until an orgasm of nonphysical surrender and excitement manifests within one aspect of the self. They find this self in a universal hot tub that washes all the impurities of individuality as well as creativity away in the bubbles of bliss, which they say is a forever state of oneness.

Thank God that some sort of God managed to disentangle itself from this self-created psychic oneness. Thank God that some sort of God managed to diversify and create millions of different forms of physical consciousness that explode and multiply from the inside out and from the outside in. Thank God that some sort of God had enough love for its own individuality to impress the greatest and the smallest and least and the most with its own unique being.

Is our body appearance an untruth in this world of changing truths? Or, does it partially express the nature of the inner self? Should we not do what we want to do and trust the self we are? We do feel the innate desire to be alive in physical form through the cells that exist within our own creation. The God of all religions knows itself through this flesh regardless of how that flesh is designed.

We design that flesh for different purposes and we do create the contrast we experience from the desire to experience those purposes. All flesh is a gift, and without the ability to express that gift physically, consciousness would not expand. Individuality is the badge of Godhood. We should all wear it with purpose, and experience it immersed in a physical and non-physical sense of unity.

New Vista

2011-08-07T09:16:00.002-05:00

There is no real separation of the qualities and their subject; for fire cannot be conceived apart from its form and heat. Before the body there will be nothing embodied, so the qualities there will be no subject; how, if it was originally free, could the soul ever become bound?

The body-knower (the soul), which is unembodied, must be either knowing or unknowing; if it is knowing there must be some object to be known, and if there is this object it is not liberated. Or if the soul be declared to be unknowing, then what use to you is this imagined soul? I maintain that the absolute attainment of our end can only be found by transcending the dualism of soul and body of subject and object of that which knows and which is known. There must be a certain turning away in one’s ordinary course of life; there must be an opening up of a new vista in one’s spiritual outlook.

D.T.Suzuki wrote those thoughts in his 1927 essay, Enlightenment and Ignorance. Suzuki was a Professor of Buddhist Philosophy and the 20th century’s leading authority on Zen thought. He was not a monk or priest; he was a scholar, and was honored in every temple in Japan. Suzuki lectured on consciousness more that he lectured on Buddhism. Consciousness, which can be called Zen, engulfs all religions. Suzuki understood that. Zen and consciousness are one just like the body and soul are one in knowing the spiritual multiplicity that exists within all of us.

We are wave formations and within the waves there are several identities that function freely, just like water molecules that form ocean waves. We are all religions and all cultures in our wave of multiple realities, but we focus on one in order to fulfill our desire for value fulfillment. Our souls are also fulfilling value using our other identities that have different beliefs. The force of our wave is the combined force of all identities that function in several realities. When we turn our focus away from this reality we are able to sense the new vista Suzuki talks about.

Within this structure, our entity organizes these personalities and at times directs their activities, but each one never relinquishes its free will. Each identity has its own self-conscious part that knows its origin. We actually attain our end before we pursue it. There is no separation between the qualities that exist within our inner world and the ‘me’ that is the physical subject, but our dualistic reality expresses separation in order to expand the wave.

We can experience more of the wave, but in order to sense the more we must see the self as an independent structure that gives the wave its foaming energy and the desire to be part of the overall action of this energy instead of perceiving only portions of it that seem reasonable and limited.

A Corner of One Reality

2011-08-01T07:01:00.002-05:00

Things exist in kinds, there are many species in each kind and what the ‘kind’ implies for one specimen, it applies also for every other specimen of that kind. We can easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular, that is, unlike any other fact and sole of its kind. In such a world of singulars out logic would be useless, for logic works by predicting of the single instance what is true of all its kind. With no two things alike in the world, we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our future ones. The existence of so much generic unity of things is thus perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean to say ‘the world is one.’

William James in his 1907 essay The One and the Many sprinkles a little magical mental dust on our thoughts about the nature of unity. Wisdom has the innate ability to show us what is inside of facts so some sense of being within our species can be translated into a reality. Some facts can lead us away from true knowledge, and as history shows us that is certainly the case when it comes to our beliefs about unity.

There is no such thing as non-living matter. There is simply the identification of characteristics that we consider life or what we call conditions of living. Consciousness through its intent explodes into matter and that matter expresses its own creativity. Unity can be expressed by saying the creator is within its creations they become another aspect of consciousness that are gifted through innate creativity. The environment, which is another element of consciousness, can form a species and species can form the environment. Life as we know it began spontaneously in a number of species at the same time.

Electromagnetic energy units exist within all units of consciousness. They exist below the range of physical matter and they respond to emotional intensity. These units eventually form physical objects. We know ourselves through our creations. We live in a corner of one reality where the spirit meets the flesh and we form a bond of unity through our diversity. Diversity is the badge of our individual consciousness or godhood. We are constantly creating and we strive for value fulfillment by experiencing our own creations. That value fulfillment is attained by accepting the wisdom and experience within the flesh rather than denying it. Unity recognizes as well as creates the diversity within all species.

A Natural Choice

2011-07-28T05:49:00.002-05:00

It may be normal, darling, but I’d rather be natural.

Truman Capote wrote that thought in his book, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The difference between normal and natural could be a matter of debate, but physical life is measured in normal not naturals, especially when it comes to human expression.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention one in every thirty-three babies is born with some sort of birth defect. The CDC also reports 1 in every 691 babies is born with Down syndrome. That means almost 7,000 babies are born every year with Trisomy 21, and we label them Down syndrome babies.

Over 350,000 people in the Unites States are living with Down syndrome and since they don’t fit into the norm we call ‘acceptable’ we label them disabled. Disabled means a lot of things. The dictionary defines it as a condition that weakens and destroys or it renders people legally incapable. The World English Dictionary defines it as lacking one or more physical powers that allows people to walk or coordinate movements as well as perform certain functions that require average mental performance.

The word disabled automatically sends a red flag up the pole of awareness in the minds of some folks. People are judged for what they can’t do rather than what they are capable of doing. Disabled people are put in a box of sympathy and wrapped with a bow of pity. Our sensitive emotions overrule natural common sense. We isolate them and build walls around them that only innately sensitive and natural people penetrate.

People living with some sort of physical challenge are feared; we are not educated to understand why these brave souls chose to experience physical life in a truly unique way. Just like the masses, which we call normal, they are connected to a non-physical stream of consciousness that every religion describes in a plethora of ways. But, that connection becomes distorted by our egos that separate the self from the inner self, which vibrates in natural love.

In that natural stream there are no words that describe choices made by individual consciousness. There is only an assortment of connected aspects of consciousness that have the desire to express their awareness physically. That awareness is manifested physically, and we experience it in the massive explosion of unique forms that cover the surface of the planet.

All we have to do is look around us at natural expression and we become aware that our consciousness is more than we believe it is. Some experts are discovering that Down syndrome, like other physical conditions, is a subjective choice and that choice is manifested objectively.

Other scholars believe that children and adults living with Down syndrome come into this physical world to teach us something we forgot about ourselves when the ego took control and said we are a ‘normal,’ and a separated consciousness. Everyone who spends time around a person living with Down syndrome experiences an aspect of innate knowing that is hard to ignore. That knowing is natural and is dipped in complete love.

But, why would a person choose to live with Down syndrome in a world that offers material luxuries to those that conform mentally and physically to our judgmental systems? The answer may lie in what Quantum physics is unraveling in this world of multiverses. We all may live separate but connected lives in more than one reality at a time, although that fact is hard to swallow when our ridged beliefs about religion and science are reinforced by our own ignorance.

Physicists explain that we actually do live in more than one reality at a time, and in each of those realities we appear and act differently. We are able and generally do communicate with these other selves, but we are trained to ignore the messages since we believe there is only one of us experiencing physical life.

The notion that children and adults living with Down syndrome may be closer and more connected to these counterparts and realities is gaining credence in the distorted world of normal. When DS children and adults tune out the normal world they may be communicating with those counterparts with a portion of the mind that may not be registering in the normal brain since it’s overloaded with the desire for physical worth.

Some researchers believe that people living with Down syndrome are much more aware of their multiplicity, but can’t express it physically. They do however express that fact by their actions. There is a bubble of love surrounding DS children and adults, and every time we interact with them tiny bubbles of that love permeate our own separatism so we can sense the connection we have with them and with all form of consciousness.

The nature of the self is like the nature of all other forms of consciousness. The self is non-physical energy before it becomes physical. Down syndrome humans don’t move as far away from that energy, but normal people do.

The New Zealand author Vincent O’Sullivan in his story, The Next Room summed up our normal actions this way:

If you’re different from the rest of the flock, they bite you.

What we fail to realize is we’re disabling another aspect of our self when we label another member of our flock as incapable. In more ways than one, they are much more capable than we remember, and innately more competent than our normal inflated egos.

Objective Agreement

2011-07-23T09:26:00.001-05:00

Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading—leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important. True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from eccentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking. The untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification; but all roads lead to Rome and in the end and eventually, all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences somewhere, which somebody’s ideas have copied.

William James in his 1906 essay, Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth does make sense of some of our senselessness. Leading from impulses and ideas creates physical truths and they are put together and form the foundation for reality. Those blocks seem solid until others ideas manifest between the blocks and we discover that our objective truth is a partial expression of another whole. It seems we automatically mix influences and associations with these ideas and a reality of contrast manifests.

We believe our concepts and actions are the result of a random pattern or they are a culmination of religious doctrines that have been etched into our ego. But,the leading process as James explains is a product of the creative energy within us. Source energy is constantly spewing out the ash of truth using our own active volcano of consciousness. That ash is constantly offering us parallel developments and we incorporate that energy in our time perception.

All physical manifestations are the outside structures of inner structures that lead us to our own value fulfillment. As James points out, all these inner structures lead us to the same place, which is freedom from the self- created contradictions that produce the partial truths.

We seem to be separated from everything and we clash in the effervescent water of our own perceptions, but beneath these temporal perceptions there are interwoven electromagnetic patterns that interact with each other. These patterns eventually produce a verifying process as we move through time. Our objective agreement with the self is to become aware that all ideas originate in the stream of consciousness where we create and experience those creations.

The Spacious Present

2011-07-17T11:04:00.002-05:00

The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself.

Before the immerse possibilities of man, all mere experiences, all past biography, however spotless and sainted shrinks away. Before the heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have no history; no record of any character or mode of living, that entirely contains us. The saints and the demigods whom history worships we are constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet pressed on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade.

The soul gives itself alone, original, and pure to the Lonely, Original, and Pure who on that condition gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. Then it is glad, young, and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stones fall by a law inferior to, and dependant on, its nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay, The Over-soul brings another reality into focus that has been hidden under the blankets of religious, social, and political authorities. The soul is not limited by the authority of man, but man is limited by the belief in religious salvation and authority. Man has created a stage of illusions and has wandered away from the nature of the soul. We are lodged in the fear of a separated consciousness where authority rules the awareness of self.

The mind and soul do not take up space, but their value gives power to the brain. Our power is on auto-pilot thanks to ideas of space where emptiness has to be filled. True inner space is vital energy that’s alive and possesses the ability to transform and form all existences even the existence we call our camouflage reality of religious authority.

The mind and soul exists in the value of psychological reality where all consciousness exists. The main attribute of this value is spontaneity in the spacious present. The spacious present has the quality of duration as well as the quality of expansion, which is not connected to space expansion. The laws that exist in our camouflage universe do not exist in our inner universe, but the laws of the inner universe apply to our physical universe. Value fulfillment is one of those laws and all consciousness follow it. Energy transformation, durability, and spontaneity are the three other laws of the soul and the mind.

All consciousness exists in the spacious present in simultaneous harmony, and in a spontaneous manner with durability and needs nothing to worship. It only needs appreciation to expand in awareness.

In this realty, the theory of evolution and the theory of biblical creation might agree with their own systems and justification, but in the inner reality they are thoughts created by man’s quest to label himself within the limits of space and time. That label is a partial description of the self since life bursts apart in all directions just like the soul and the mind. The stream of consciousness is not like our physical streams; it follows its own spacious present.

State of Ignorance

2011-07-12T12:36:00.001-05:00

Ignorance prevails as long as the will remains cheated by its own offspring or its own image, consciousness, in which the knower always stand distinguished from the known. The cheating, however cannot last, the will wishes to be enlightened, to be free, to be by itself. Ignorance always presupposes the existence of something outside and unknown. This unknown outside is generally termed the ego or soul, which is in reality the will itself in a state of ignorance.

D.T. Suzuki is his 1926 essay Enlightenment and Ignorance throws a spotlight on the separation within the self. Separation puts beliefs in categories and experiences in action. We are educated ignorant egos that prance around different stages of reality and search for the unknown that is firmly squeezing us with energetic awareness.

We have a tendency to believe that thoughts fall off a cliff in the mind. We usually can’t hold thoughts in consciousness for very long, unless we make them beliefs, but those other thoughts that are not beliefs continue to manifest in other realities. We experience them in those other realities, but we forget them in our state of ignorance.

The true dimension of the divine we so desperately seek is unendurable for any one consciousness so the splendor that exists within it is infinitely dimensionalized. Worlds spiral outward, expanding in each moment of a cosmic breath.

Separation of worlds is a necessity so individual and mass comprehension continues to expand at a rate where the infinite is multiplied in microseconds. Past and futures and other forms of time not recognized manifest in the process. Each is a reality with its own potentials and no form of consciousness however small is ever lost.

In that framework the past and the future exist in probable worlds. Each experience creates new questions just as a writer creates new stories. We travel to new positions with the psyche constantly and we set out on new psychic pilgrimages through unknown realities within our own consciousness and experience them in some way. Thoughts that disappear create a stage where all probabilities manifest in some way.

The splendor of this reality and the creations of consciousness in physical form are just one slice of the infinite possibilities that exist within the framework of awareness, which is consciously expanding in our ignorance.

Ordinary Consciousness

2011-07-08T09:27:00.002-05:00

If enlightenment were just this seeing or having insight, it would not be so spiritually enlightening as to bring about a complete riddance of evil passions and the sense of perfect freedom. Intuitions could not go so penetratingly into the source of life and set all doubts at rest and sever all bonds of attachment unless one’s consciousness were thoroughly prepared to take in the All in its wholeness as well as its suchness. Our sense and ordinary consciousness are only too apt to be disturbed and turn away from the realization of truth.

D.T. Suzuki in his 1926 essay Enlightenment and Ignorance explains something about consciousness that were are not trained to recognize. There is an aspect of our consciousness that is always flowing in the stream of awareness where all physical experiences develop. We ignore this stream or we label it as something outside of ourselves. Our beliefs are rooted in separation not in wholeness.

The belief in separation alters the main line of probabilities. Christian theology teaches the end of the world in certain terms with a grand God coming to reward the good and punish the evil-doers. That system allows for no other probability. Others see the world as a great disaster and man finally ruining the planet. There are others that see peace and expansion. The interesting fact about those thoughts is they all exist somewhere in reality. But, there's another group that believes another dimension of selfhood exists where consciousness is fully explored, and the potential of each soul is uncovered and experienced. That is a facet of some sort of reality as well.

All these beliefs hint at the degree of separation that exists in ordinary consciousness. We have been taught to focus and believe in one self. The huge differences we see in the beliefs of others are rooted in the fact that we are meant to judge our physical reality. We are meant to realize that our experiences are the materialization of our thoughts, feelings, and images that the inner self forms and then manifests.

In order to experience other dimensions we must sense the greater power of our objective feelings and thoughts. We think we destroy, but we don’t destroy anything. We might imagine we can annihilate a reality, but we only assault it as we know it. All realities continue to exist in some form, but our ordinary consciousness is conditioned to be disturbed. We turn away from inner truth and feel the end of something is coming based on our beliefs, which are influenced by objective associations. We still have a partial awareness of a greater self or religion would not exist in this reality.

In Practical Talk

2011-07-03T12:58:00.001-05:00

In practical talk, a man’s common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from eccentricities, his gumption, to use the vernacular word. In philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. Were we lobsters, or bees it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these of apprehending our experiences. It might be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories, unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those which we actually use.

William James in his essay Pragmatism and Common Sense reminds us that we have become so hypnotized by a one-level thought process that anything outside of that level seems impractical as well as not real. We believe events happen and are beyond our control simple because we’re out of touch with the inner self. As James points out lobsters and bees never disconnect from the consciousness that forms the events they experience.

We view ourselves as pawns of fate so the idea of probable action seems like complete nonsense. Events seem inevitable and when this thought process is carried to excessive lengths it looks like we have no hand in our reality. We become victims in our self-created prison. There is an unknown reality or several unknown reality and our psychic, psychological, and spiritual essence functions in those realties and from them our physical experiences manifest.

This inner all-pervasive reality begins to present itself as we grow more responsive to it and accept our inner environment for what it is— Real. There’s no need to mediate for hours, or give up your day job, or study your own thought process with such focus that you ignore other activities. It simply means we are aware of our own expansion and become aware of our ability to self-create physical experiences. That means closing the separation that exists between the ego and the inner self.

When we begin to sense who we really are, we realize there are different species of selves just like there are different species of worlds. In practical talk when we identify with only one level of our thought process, our other thought processes appear alien. We feel threatened by them and we fight to uphold our ideas of selfhood.

One leaf does not threaten the existence of other leaves and the plant is not threatened by its foliage. Nature shows us our own multiplicity, but we are too conditioned and firmly rooted in our belief structure to understand the real nature of the self.

Harmonious Notes

2011-06-27T10:56:00.000-05:00

Harmonious notes always result from the sympathetic resonance of two or more chords. And what Zen does for us is to prepare our minds to be yielding and appreciative recipients of old masters. In other words, psychologically Zen releases whatever energies we may have in store, of which we are not conscious in ordinary circumstances.

D.T.Suzuki in his introduction to Essays in Zen Buddhism brings the silent notes of the unconscious to the main stage of reality and those internal sounds vibrate in truth. Suzuki calls the consciousness that exerts the energy that makes us aware of our unawareness Zen, but that term is just that. It’s a description of the indescribable, which has many names and terms that try to paint a visual picture of the part of us that chooses to be invisible.

Our invisible structure is rooted in this unconscious energy, and it is more conscious that we realize. We are hypnotized by our own beliefs, which is a one-level thought process. Anything that surfaces outside of that process seems impractical as well as unrealistic. We are so disconnected from our own root system that we convince ourselves that the events that happen to us are beyond our control. We are out of touch with our inner world so we never catch the seconds where these decisions are made.

Suzuki explains than fact using elements of Buddhism that relate to this unknown reality. The energy of consciousness or Zen is always waiting to become physical if only for a second once we allow this non-physical energy to manifest. When we allow that process to occur we move to new areas of the self that recognize the platform of probabilities that develop as other dimensions of selfhood are explored.

The psyche yearns for an ideal civilization and we compose one from past as well as future memories. We then live our experiences to create one, but in that process we forget the Zenness within us. Our Zenness harmoniously resonates with the notes in the stream of complete consciousness.

Tomorrow’s Wisdom

2011-06-23T06:27:00.001-05:00

Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step in the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

It is not the part of men, but of fanatics or of mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for short a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes to-day are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, to-day. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as I they were real: perhaps they are.

Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too sot and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know, is a respect to the present hour.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1844 essay, Experience. Emerson had the ability and the sense to see today for what it is and tomorrow for what it can be. There is infinity in each moment and infinite versions of the self in a moment, but we only focus on one. Various scales of awareness contain their own infinities no matter how finite they appear.

The blueprint for reality is firmly set on a platform of probabilities and each probable system has its own set of blueprints. There are no inner images of perfection in these blueprints since in a sense the blueprints change. We all carry a set of blueprints that are designed to bring about the most favorable version of the focused self in the probable system we are aware of. Within the vast inner mind of the species is a set of these blue prints which can be considered working plans or probable actions.

The next millennium appeared invisible to Emerson but he wrote about it because he accepted his role in it in a probable self sort of way. Emerson had the ability to focus on more than one reality at a time and he created probabilities from his own set of blue prints. He moved through probabilities like we move through space. He didn’t calculate how to do it or for that matter he didn’t explain how he did it. Like walking from one end of the street to the other he just did it.

We are the recognized result of all the decisions we have made in this life up to this point. We are not affected or diminished because other official selves are experiencing the choices we did not make and then choosing, alternative versions of reality. Our species has many characteristics and abilities that go unnoticed because we don’t accept them as part of our spiritual or biological heritage. They become latent and invisible until we expand our awareness and recognize the blue print of probabilities that exist within us and begin to manipulate them.

Like Emerson we can experience far greater dimensions of this blue print of probabilities when we realize that we are denied tomorrow’s wisdom only because we believe time is a closed system.

There’s Infinity In Each Moment

2011-06-20T06:59:00.002-05:00

Harmonious notes always result from the sympathetic resonance of two or more chords. Zen is an experience actual and personal, and not a knowledge to be gained by analysis or comparison. In other words psychologically Zen releases whatever energies we may have in store, of which we are not conscious in ordinary circumstances.

D.T. Suzuki wrote those thoughts in the introduction to his 1927 work, Essays in Zen Buddhism. At first glance his thoughts dabble in a world that is foreign; a world of ethnicity that is shrouded in Eastern religious beliefs. But, Suzuki was fluent in five languages so he had the ability to translate Chinese and Japanese thoughts about Zen into understandable English.

We really don’t spend a great deal of time worrying about the experience or the meaning of Zen. When we do experience it, we call it by another name; one that might drawn a better image of what happens when an innate light bulb turns on by itself, and we sense an inner aspect of the self living through the experience. Just like physical races our psyche races mix and produce energy that’s not definable.

We rely on religion to interpret these surreal thoughts since it is the only tangible belief that deals with non-physical energy in a sane, but distorted way. We physically live to experience manifested thoughts. When we make important decisions, we arouse all portions of the psyche and within those portions Zen thrives. Zen never rests on our platform of probabilities, which we call the reality of time.

The definition of Zen as Suzuki explains is ‘no-thing’ or ‘not a thing is.’ When we sense this force of consciousness explode within us, our reality expands and we touch a portion of the psyche that quietly sits in our multiplicity. We usually identify it with something outside of our physical self.

Our inner world has a psychological infinity that reaches into the past as well as the future. Our true identity reaches into all probabilities even the ones beyond the future and past. In that timeless pocket of the self Zenness speaks, and it tells us there’s infinity in each moment.

The Wind Blows And The Grass Bends

2011-06-14T15:12:00.002-05:00

If your desire is for good, the people will be good. The moral character of the ruler is the wind; the moral character of those beneath him is the grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends.

Confucius said those words about 2,300 years ago. He believed that government should be based on self responsibility. Confucius’s Theory of Zhengming does make sense. Actions and behavior of people should correspond to their innate truth. It seems we have lost that connection through the years, and our government’s debacle demonstrates that fact. Our ego fragments our subjective consciousness, and we cling to the fear of separatism.

Plato lived about one hundred years after Confucius. He wrote about the Noble Lie, which explains that separatism in his work, The Republic. A Noble Lie seems to be a partial foundation for our political system today. Even though religion and politics say they are two distinct things, and should not mix, a version of the Noble Lie has infiltrated our political arena and has turned it into behavior that does not correspond to the language of subjective consciousness.

The Noble Lie was Plato’s way of bringing the behavior and the beliefs of the rulers into the daylight of distorted truths. Plato didn’t believe that class structure was the work of God although he expressed those thoughts in The Republic. He said God filled everyone’s soul with gold, silver, and iron, but the working man and the farmer’s soul had less of those elements, so the ruler soul was the guardian. Rulers controlled the people using God, which is the foundation of religion. Our current educational system teaches the same thing.

The Noble Lie has changed over the years, but in essence it has remained to same. We believe God is a separate entity that sits in judgment and must be worshipped in order to achieve social status as well as religious salvation. Confucius’s Theory of Zhengming states governments should not turn individual self responsibility over to a God that is a supreme and separate individual that controls politics, the weather, and the food we eat.

Confucius is remembered for his famous statement: Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself. That thought was been incorporated into all religious thought, but it is not practiced by governments so our language does not conform to innate truth. We elect governments based on Noble Lies, which are half truths and distorted beliefs.

Plato said: Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and it dispenses a sort of equality to equals and unequal’s alike.

Our democratic system has stretched the meaning of equality so it no longer means equal. We dispense a sort of equality that contains our own version of the Noble Lie, and that equality is filled with judgment and a behavior that doesn’t conform to our inner truth.

Perhaps it’s time to conform to our own zhengming theory. The thought of using moral character, self responsibility, and a connected consciousness in politics as well as religion might take us to a place where the wind blows and the grass bends in agreement.

Raison d’etre

2011-06-09T08:00:00.001-05:00

Zen has nothing particularly to offer as its own; for its raison d’etre consists in its being a spiritual experience and not in its being a special system of philosophy or of certain dogmas conceptually synthesized. We have Zen only when the Mahayana Buddhist speculation is reduced to actual things of life and becomes the direct expression of one’s inner life.

D.T. Suzuki in his 1927 essay, History of Zen explains a little about Zen as well as the differences between the Chinese beliefs about Buddhism and the Indian concept of the religion. As Suzuki points out Zen is not a religion or for that matter a thing; it is the expression of nothing as we untangle our thoughts about spiritual experiences and physical reality.

The expression of nothing or what the ancient monks call ‘no-thing’ is a burst of awareness that grabs the focused self and deposits it into a vat of emptiness where all things exist. That emptiness is not empty; it is filled with energy that changes the psyche so it vibrates with the silence that connects the music of being. The psyche we recognize as significant is scattered through the emptiness of Zen and when we allow a fragment of it to bleed through we automatically sense our multiplicity.

When we get to a point where we simply begin to allow this bleed through to occur amazing changes develop in this reality. Men of Letters who cared less about carpentry suddenly begin to do their own home repairs. Doctors become farmers, and politicians discover their spiritual presence. The creativity of the psyche allows us to connect worlds that we say are not real, and we sense the Zenness that swallows the ego.

The direct expression of one’s inner life is a menagerie of expressions that manifest as we awaken to the Zen in all of us. On the tip of every eyelash sits a cell waiting to express itself in order to experience the excitement of being physical. That is the true raison d’etre.

Inside Dimensions of Consciousness

2011-06-04T11:13:00.001-05:00

The art of life has a pudency, and will not be exposed. Every man is an impossibility, until he is born; everything impossible until we see success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism, that nothing is of us or our works, that all is God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writings come by the grace of god, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral, keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man, but I have set my heart on honestly in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied by the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach me much that the days never know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, Experience is explaining the nature of this focused reality. Awareness comes in with lightning speed, but is absorbed in slow motion. The years are the result of days, which rely on hours, and hours are entangled in moments, which is where the spirit meets the flesh. The inside dimensions of consciousness can not be identified, but are obvious with each blink of an eyelash.

Each individual carries unlimited creativity, but that energy is compacted and contained in boxes of beliefs that are riddled with distortions and contrite senselessness. We play our beliefs over and over again using one melody and expect to hear different music. Different music is playing within the psyche that fires the vitality within us, but we choose to believe someone or something is responsible for our own responsibility.

We look for change when we create political tomfoolery and governmental hypocrisy. We dip ourselves in self appointed waters of redemption while the change and the confirmation we so actively seek is firmly embedded in the our will to be.

To some extent we can access the incalculable results of life if we focus on the families of consciousness that exist within us. Each latent portion of the self contains the essence of the whole so the vital force of the Eternal is the composition of the pauses and the silences that exist within the self. The whole self teaches what the focused self already knows, but we believe everything is impossible until we see our innate designs manifest physically.

A Jigsaw Puzzle Of Awareness

2011-05-30T10:10:00.002-05:00

Locke and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion of spiritual substance. I will only mention Locke’s treatment of our personal identity. He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says so much ‘consciousness,’ namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of soul-substance.

But Locke says: suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should we be any the better for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different souls, should we,, as we realize ourselves, be any the worst for that fact? In Locke’s day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished.

William James in his 1907 essay, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered brings the mental juices to a simmer with Locke’s 17th century thoughts about consciousness and God. He believed that one was distinctly separate from the other and he also believed that the soul was a religious football that could be thrown between the goals of lightness and darkness. Those ideas are beginning to boil and unity is beginning to come to the surface.

Consciousness and God are in the same stream with the soul. That stream is filled with other aspects of consciousness that express life physically as well as non-physically. The soul is not confined to one physical individual; each personality carries traces of other consciousness so there is a world of consciousness, which is a jigsaw puzzle of awareness in which each identity no matter how large or small has a part.

The soul is not a unit that is definable. It is an undefined quality which cannot be broken down or built up or destroyed, but it can change affiliations and organizations as well as characteristics and still remain itself. Those remembered moments of life are the expression of counterparts that bleed through the psyche and manifest as reincarnational lives. The soul exists in all of those counterparts as a whole as well as part of a greater being.

Contrary to what Locke believed we are not instruments being played by some God sitting in judgment and then rewarding or punishing souls; we are the composer, the symphony, and the audience. We are classical musicians as well as rockers and rappers’ moving through the vibrations of consciousness, and our performance does not contradict the performance of any other form of consciousness.

Our symphony is not only based on physical expressions; it's based on the silence between the notes, which highlights as well as frames the notes. The soul and the psyche exist in more that one place at once just like an apple which can be found on a tree, on the ground or on a table. We are capable of endless notes and each note is capable of endless creative variations.

Distorted Image of Selfhood

2011-05-19T09:50:00.004-05:00

In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer craves a particular commodity; anything less than all good is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance. The fact that we are surrounded by miracles is not the result of luck or the worship of some exalted human that has been put on a pedestal of faith by humans who want to control and deceive. Prayer is sensing the stream of consciousness that exists in all life and realizing we all make our own reality.

Michelangelo and Da Vinci roamed the centuries and used the prayer of consciousness to connect to the genius within them. Their genius shows us what we are, yet we feel separated and tainted by religious convictions that are tainted with brush stokes of half truths. We live cut in half by the belief in one reality, yet we function in several simultaneously. We rub senses with the God we fear, and we crucify ourselves with the concept of sin. The potential within the prayer lies in our own creativity and if there are nightmares connected to that process we will waken from them as the awareness of the self expands.

We learn from the fear that exists within the prayer, and we begin to push into the self and find dimensions of being that exist, but we believe they are reserved for the God of challenges. From the fear we discover our own divinity, which gives our humanity meaning, and through our own innate compassion we learn to expand in awareness. We begin to understand that prayer gives humanity its meaning. Our soul within the cells continuously forms realities that are rooted in the divinity of our multiplicity.

Prayers exist as patterns in a stream of consciousness that mixes and merges and then separate in order for us to discover that we are a manifestation of our own souls. Just like a group of cells that form an organ in the body, the soul forms a group of selves that experience the miracle of one reality and the pleasure of functioning in other realities, which we choose not to focus on in this particular and distorted image of selfhood.

Slowness of Nature

2011-05-14T06:33:00.002-05:00

Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk, in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the slowness of nature which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for total worth of man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Friendship talks about being a friend by trusting in the self and by playing with the spirit, but our vision of the spirit has been distorted by our desire to blend in and conform to a ridged world of biased rules, regulations, and methods of discipline.

We keep searching for ascended masters and gurus to keep us in line and point the way to spirit, but in that process we lose sight of our own creativity. We become so dead serious we can’t even play mentally. We view spiritual development as a goal that must be attained through hard work, but the spirit does not need that hard work to know itself. Plants don’t work at developing their potential. They aren’t beautiful because they believe it is their responsibility to please humans.

We would not be alive in our limited terms, if we didn’t imagine ourselves alive in a given moment in time. Play is one of the most practical methods of survival for individuals as well as for species. Play provides needed rest from our distorted concepts about selfhood. Discovery comes from imagination and play; not stressful work and conforming disciplines.

Seriousness and unrelenting hard work distorts the nature of our spirit because we don’t drop our guard long enough to sense what spirit is. That wall of resistance prevents one aspect of consciousness from freely intermingling with another so we miss the Zenness of being. We become so intent on maintaining one reality we lose it by denying the creativity in playfulness.

We search for soul mates with pompous seriousness without understanding what the soul means. The soul is firmly rooted in the spirit within all that is so we’re not one part or a half of a soul searching for another part.

Emerson concept of friendship begins with the self and the psyche. The psyche is like a plant sending out seeds of itself in all directions. Each seed grows into a new plant in new conditions, and these new plants send out seeds to create new variations.

Plants use their innate creative ability to find soul mates that play in their own reality while appreciating the reality of others. That is the nature of spirit. Our Spirit and consciousness realizes the slowness of nature even when the ego is unaware of that friendship.

Teflon Type Thoughts

2011-05-10T12:56:00.000-05:00

Expertness in philosophy is measured by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate perceptive epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come.

Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows They don’t just cover his world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial or what not. At any rate he and we know offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of ‘whack’ and have no business to speak up in the universe’s name.

William James in his 1906 essay, The Present Dilemma in Philosophy explains the nature of human expression. Our cells retain the knowledge of all their affiliations and our consciousness is capable of the same thing. No knowledge exists outside of consciousness. Consciousness passes on information through living vehicles whether they are physically materialized or not.

Consciousness is always individualized, but not necessarily in our accepted terms. Ancestral experience is coded information that is used within a particular reality to express the validity of our identity, but that identity is a small part of the total that is expressed in the character of the universe. Concepts of selfhood would disappear if we allowed any subjective experience to intrude in our objective sense of self.

Our absent self is the portion of our existence that we do not perceive or accept objectively, but we continue to search for it through the philosophy of others, but that philosophy exists within the cells as well. The cells and the mind maintain current information about this absent self and philosophy develops that opens the door of doubt. From the doubt an outcrop of luxurious awareness creeps into the jealous and prejudice folds of the ego.

The absent self is not absent to anyone or anything; it is saturated in a reality that coats the ego with the teflon type thoughts that eventually begin to stick to our fragmented physical self.

Unrecognized Compartments

2011-05-05T11:35:00.002-05:00

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the wildest vistas. It ‘bakes no bread’ as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the contrasting effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much more than professional.

Williams James in his 1906 essay, The Present Dilemma in Philosophy writes about the clash of human temperaments. Temperament is not recognized reason; it is personal reasoning that creates conclusions. Philosophers usually live on the ledge of one reality and step through other realties in order to express a wholesome approach to identifying the psyche as well as the self. The temperament of a philosopher includes reason that has not been verified or accepted. There is a certain radical idiosyncrasy to it that touches the soul when we realize that the soul is the life within all that is.

We grant soulhood to our own species as if souls had sizes and graduations. We believe they are an exclusive part of humanity, but that is the separatist approach that has got us in this tub of ignorance, which has partial compartments of beliefs based on our limited view about the nature of life itself. We put cells in one of those compartments and never really pay much attention to them until they are damaged or destroyed.

When we think for a moment we realize that each cell in the body has a soul, and the course of each cell in the body is not predetermined. Cells are cooperative, especially when they form the structure of a body; that is the structure they chose to experience. Cells aid our existence, but that aid is in the framework they have chosen. They have the ability to reject certain elements in their existence, change their course, and even form new alliances. They have a great amount of freedom within the framework we call our reality.

Our cells are conscious, but conscious in a different way. Each one possesses a consciousness and a consciousness of the self. There are different kinds of selfhood and an infinite number of ways to experience self-awareness. Each kind of life has its own qualities that can’t be compared with other types of life, but they are all valid and recognize the self and its own consciousness.

The soul is not a unit that is definable. It cannot be broken down or built up, destroyed or expanded, but it can change organizations and affiliations as well as characteristics while it always remains the same. The cells show us those traits through their soul, even though we can’t put their soul in one of those compartments. The soul's history is in the future not in the past.

Stream Of Our Ignorance

2011-04-30T14:09:00.001-05:00

Enlightenment or the dispelling of Ignorance is not an act of the intellect, but the transforming or remodeling of one’s whole being through the exercise of the most fundamental faculty innate in every one of us. Mere understanding has something foreign in it and does not seem to come intimately in life. Enlightenment, which is born of the will, wants to see itself and to be in itself.

D.T. Suzuki in his 1927 essay, Enlightenment and Ignorance adds a bit of spice to our so called “normal,” thoughts about enlightenment and ignorance. The intellect has nothing to do with triggering awareness, but it does catalogue it once it appears. There’s a great deal of energy dedicated to understanding enlightenment, and as Suzuki points out there is a foreign element in it that does not necessarily conform to accepted beliefs.

The inner senses have a strong affinity with the properties of the earth, so in a sense enlightenment is always present in the psyche, but buried under the compartment we label ego. Creatures without that compartment can easily follow their own identity, which is a form of enlightenment beyond the limits of physical form.

Perhaps the best way to identify this innate awareness is to watch the new flowers bloom in the same place every spring. We believe that those flowers are the same each and every spring, but enlightenment explains that they are different and will be different when they bloom next spring. We measure and catalogue them with the intellect, which uses time to explain the nature of their reality, but the flowers were enlightened before they bloomed.

Reality is a platform of probabilities, and there are many platforms and a plethora of probabilities, which manifest as reality in time. The manifestation of these probabilities produce the experiences we call life, but there is a foreign element in those experiences because time multiples within itself. When we look at time we see its exterior, and when we experience time we perceive its exterior.

Creativity is endless and the psyche is the source of that creativity. The psyche, from which this creativity springs, is free of the picture of reality that we have chosen. One aspect of our consciousness accepts this given picture of the world, and we use that picture as a frame for the life we experience within it.

The cells within the body form a pattern for the atoms and molecules to express their being. The cells maintain their position in the body more or less, but the atoms and molecules within them are constantly changing. The overall pattern of the body continues, but our consciousness follows a certain line of development, which is its own.

That development is a product of enlightenment. Just like the roots of flowers that know the best conditions for their growth when they reach spontaneously for the most filling probabilities for development, our consciousness turns on the enlightenment switch, and we reach for a reality filled with expanded probabilities. Enlightenment then sees itself, and is itself in the ever changing stream of our ignorance.

Full Blown

2011-04-26T12:06:00.001-05:00

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simple the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance explains the self in simple terms, but those terms get lost in the day-to-day events that shape individual expansion. Consciousness stands on its own, but is connected and aware of all of its parts just like the mountain is aware of the rocks, grass, cliffs, and rivers that make it a mountain. The self is like a mountain that senses other aspects of itself, but puts them in another reincarnational state of existence in order to perceive itself as the top of the mountain of selves.

The self is like a mountain, and the rock layers that form it are like past lives. We are not any part of those past selves, even though they are part of the history of our being. The past is in its own space and time, and exist simultaneously with our present lives just like the strata of rock exist simultaneously with the mountain even though those rocks existed in what we term the past.

What happens at the top of the mountain in terms of experiences affects everything below it so everything that we experience affects these other realms of selfhood. There is a constant interchange even though the conditions are different. Conditions in the valley are different than the conditions of the foothills, but every experience in each has an impact on the other.

The validity of each aspect of the mountain is important, and each aspect focuses on its own reality at its own level. The self has a history, which is constantly changing with each thought and action. Like the mountain we have a history of the present which is ours, but not ours; history does not control us since we can alter it with our thoughts.

The action of each self like the rose and the mountain is satisfied and satisfies the nature of consciousness by being full blown in every moment of existence. Full blown is the art of recognizing the nature of the self as it exists now without comparing it to the other flowers that surround us.

Multiplistic Counterparts

2011-04-20T10:48:00.002-05:00

When a moment in our experience, of any kind whatever, inspires us with a thought that is true, that means sooner or later we dip by that thought’s guidance into the particulars of experience again and make advantageous connection with them.

William James in his 1907 essay, Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth digs deep into the channels of the mind and finds a road drenched with creativity. It’s not the only road or channel that’s exposed, but it is an essential one when it comes to understanding how experiences manifest. Inspiration is a product of impulses that stimulate thoughts, which become perceptions and experiences. Impulses are true at the entry point of thought, but become distorted once they intermingle with preconceived beliefs.

The natural acceptance of non-physical impulses is the beginning of a particular story or experience, but it is not the complete story. Believing that we are one self that does not contain other selves is an example of a true impulse that has turned into a distorted view of selfhood. The distortion is fueled by religious and scientific inconsistencies that we accept as true, even though our own innate knowing is rooted in multiplicity.

The psyche distributes counterparts of the self with different features and characteristics in different aspects of time. Every experience affects other counterparts so there is a constant interchange of energy that manifests in some way in this and other realities. Like the properties of the earth, which distribute themselves in a specific fashion and then change, the self does the same thing. All physical matter is connected in any particular time so all experiences of each self contribute to the challenges that fuel the expansion of consciousness.

As James points out, all that's necessary is to take advantage of our self connections as well as other connections. Our consciousness looks at the world and fulfills a position that no other form of consciousness can fulfill, and we call that experience within a limited existence. But, existence or the self are not limited when impulses are lived through the expression of our innate self and its multiplistic counterparts.

Measure of Right

2011-04-16T06:46:00.002-05:00

Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance does explain the first step in any accomplishment. That step is an innate part of the nature of nature. Self-reliance is the foundation that fuels desires and awards achievements. It is the basis for our society and yet we toss it aside, and worship icons of politics and trumpeters of religion. We give up our self-reliance in order to conform to the distorted nature of fragmented truths, and non-essential doctrines that bind rather than the release the self.

The identity of the self is hidden behind moralistic tomfoolery that caters to economic power and egotistical bantering. There is no floor to the self and no boundaries set above it. There is no place where identity stops so there are many realities to explore. The self has many strands of consciousness and each strand has its own viewpoint about the nature of its reality as well as the reality of the other strands. The self mixes and merges, but maintains its own identity. The soul as Emerson describes it is a multitudinous identity that is inviolate, but changes with the expansion of self-reliance.

Power is the awareness that a transforming self flows through every aspect of the complete self. Each self is poised and orbits around the nothingness that exists within the layers of consciousness. The self is a mountain. All the parts equal the mountain, but each layer is an individual self-reliant self that express the complete self through experiences and awareness. Power is the measure of right where there is no right; there is only awareness of connected multiplicity.

Inviolate Nature

2011-04-12T11:43:00.002-05:00

If thou comest for the faith stop all the hankerings. Think not of good, think not of evil, but see what at this moment thy own original face doth look like, which thou hadst even prior to thy own birth.

Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Buddhism, said that to a monk who was pursuing him and questioning him about leaving the monastery after a personal enlightenment experience in the 7th century. There is an innate something buried in those words that bounces off the walls of rationalism and finds refuge in an unknown reality. The original self is this face that has no form. In other words, pure identity has no form. We speak of one body, one self because we are only familiar with one aspect of the whole self.

Identity is composed of pure energy, which takes up no time or space. The identity is inviolate, but it does expand and change organizations and even combines with other identities in the same way that cells do. Our consciousness and its consciousness merge, so we are composed of a multitudinous individual consciousness that form tiny physical particles within it. These particles are constantly in motion even though the body remains itself. We retain our sense of permanence even though that permanence rides on constant changes. The identity relies on those spiritual, physical, and psychic changes.

Just like the cells the identity is always changing; forming and unforming in a symphony directed by strands of consciousness. Our identity is composed of counterparts that may live in the same century or they may straddle other centuries in order to experience the challenges that exist within perceived time and space. Each counterpart is part of the original self, which is the face that contains all the energy of each individual particle.

Like a mountain, which is multitudinous consciousness composed of rocks, trees, grass, and hills, we ignore our independent counterparts until we become aware of the changes that form our own identity, and impact it in a psychic or physical manifestation. Once aware of these identities they still retain their own individuality and inviolate nature, but changes take place in our identity.

Poetic Verse

2011-04-08T09:31:00.003-05:00

I know not how it is that we need an interpreter, but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility with the sun, and stars, earth and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service.

But there is some obstruction, or dome excess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions on us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1844 essay, The Poet is highlighting an important self-inflicted belief about the self. We believe artists are special, and we are empty of creative expression. We find genius in the thoughts of others, but dismiss the genius within the self. Connected consciousness does not discriminate or judge. We have our own free will and write a story about the self and live it creatively in order to experience the waves of emotion that signal the presence of another story.

Music is language. Painting is language, and most of all thought is language that creates the experiences of cellular and non-physical expansion. Forms, colors, shapes, and shadows contain the consciousness of creativity, and we are connected and participate in this display of contrast and challenges so we recognize the far greater expression of selfhood that waits to be utilized. But, time is the culprit that spoils the expression, since we feel there is only a limited amount of it.

The self can achieve all mental, physical, and biological activities without feeling a sense of worthlessness when we consider that we all have a deep psychic and biological connection, and each one of us paints part of the world picture in a slightly different and sometimes strange way.

The people living in any century experience certain challenges that are the result of private challenges. Those challenges are best worked out with a certain kind of individual framework. Time is meant to be utilized as a method of focus; a divider like a room divider that separates purposes rather than furniture. Each brush stroke in this world painting is a creative work of art that is connected in a unique relationship; like the cells have with one another. This individual creativity is for the fulfillment of the self at a given point in our self-created reality.We always use it in our own poetic verse.

Psychic Pool

2011-04-04T08:05:00.003-05:00

Mathematicians can solve problems with two variables. On the Newtonian theory, for instance, acceleration varies with distance, but distance also varies with acceleration. In the realm of truth-processes facts come independently and determine our beliefs provisionally. But these beliefs make us act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or into existence new facts which re-determine the beliefs accordingly. So the whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double influence.

Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The “facts” themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.

William James in his 1906 essay, Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth does shake the tree of knowing, and several shadows scatter and stick to the cob webs of the mind. Truth, as we know it, is not absolute. Truth changes with thoughts that become beliefs. What James understood and believed in the 19th century are now facts that may or may not contain truth. They simply are. From their existence new thoughts uncover fragments of truth, and we piece these fragments in a limited order so we can experience them physically at moments in time.

The existence and characteristics of invisible particles is a good example of future truths that are waiting for beliefs to discover them. These particles defy our knowledge about space and time so it’s hard to believe them, but if we focus on them as real we discover that these invisible particles play a fundamental role in our dream reality. Objects and people in a dream appear and disappear. We innately deduce the existence of these phantoms, but never directly encounter them.

These quarks as some physicists call them actually rule in another reality, but are latent in this one. Our dream images demonstrate their existence. These quacks or consciousness units can be in two places are once just like we can in dreams; that fact has confounded us for centuries since we believe objects stay where they are suppose to be in what we call reality. That reality is only half a reality since we believe dreams are not real. But, the unknown or original self straddles realities and truths dip in and out of them in a creative display of objective as well as subjective consciousness.

The fact that we all come from the same psychic pool and seed members of the races at any given time is another future truth that will know itself when our beliefs catch up with it. Our families of consciousness will appear as a truth we always knew when our beliefs about the self expand. Our individuality does come first so these families and psychic pools of truth are now truths for some of us. We all are here to remember that our world view is nothing more than our own personalized interpretation of the universe that has latent invisible particles that create the basis for our own truth.

Invisible Particles

2011-03-30T09:44:00.002-05:00

The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Friendship opens the door of imagination and a whole series of impulses coming dancing from the shadows. We live for friendships; we live to be close to something, to be united in thought and action, and we never fully understand why. The desire to see others as aspects of ourselves is an innate quality. Mental impressions of any kind are not simply written or imprinted in this reality; they have a greater dimensionality.

Physics tells us that waves appear as particles under certain conditions and particles can act like waves. Subatomic particles can also behave like waves sometimes. It is only when they act like particles that we perceive them at all. Many of these invisible waves and particles can be in more than one place at a time, but that fact is hard to understand in a world where objects stay where they are meant to be.

Each appearance of these particles is a self version of them since we alter them just by observing them. We don’t believe it, but the human particle can be a wave and be in more than one place at a time. The appearance of our physical consciousness is a version of our original self that as itself never appears.

An electron for example is track or a trace of something else. The appearance of the trace particle is called an electron. We never see the invisible consciousness units (quarks) that are the structure for the complete electron. Our original self is like the electron. It straddles realities dipping in and out of them in a creative display of versions of the self. The original self takes on properties of the system where it appears and the characteristic that are native to that environment.

When the physical self enters this three dimensional reality from an inner reality the energy waves carrying it break not in just one particle, but into a number of conscious particles. They spread out from the point of contact and form individual lives. Our vision of living in other centuries is actually a manifestation or a remembrance of these counterparts that are creative versions of the original self.

Emerson’s concept of personal relationships and friendships of the soul are by-products of our desire to know the complete self, which we do, but don’t remember. Friendships give us an energy connection that brings us closer to identifying more than one self. We put everyone in our physical lives to pull our psychic structures together so we can experience a form of the complete self.

A Pivotal Reality

2011-03-27T07:14:00.002-05:00

For I now notice that there is a considerable difference between these two; dreams are never joined by the memory with all the actions of life, as in the case with those actions that occur when one is awake. For surely, if, while I’m awake, someone were suddenly to appear to me and then immediately disappear, as occurs in dreams, so that I see neither where he came from nor where he went, it is not without reason that I would judge him to be a ghost or a phantom conjured up in my brain, rather than a true man.

But, when things happen, and I notice distinctly where they come from, where they are now, and when they come to me, and when I connect my perception of them without interruption with the whole rest of my life, I am clearly certain that these perceptions have happened to me not while I was dreaming but while I was awake.

Rene Descartes in his sixth meditation from his 1641 work, Discourse on Methods and Meditations on First Philosophy does show us how beliefs create the reality in a given point in time and space. The fact that we look into the mirror of the psyche in the dream state and see the reflection of our thoughts, fears, desires, and beliefs is not part of 17th century awareness. Dreaming is a practical activity and a natural cooperation exists between the dream state and the waking state.

We tend to forget that dreaming is part of life. Our dream experiences represent a pivotal reality like the center of a wheel. Our physical wold is just one spoke in that wheel; we are united with all of our simultaneous existences (all spokes) in the dream reality.

A growing number of people realize that the self is a multitudinous, not singular. Dreaming verifies that fact. Beliefs put that realization in terms we can understand in a time-space sequence; the belief about reincarnation sees the self traveling through the centuries and moving through the doors of life and death in other times and places.

The basic nature of reality shows itself clearly in the dream state since we experience ourselves on many nights undertaking different roles simultaneously; we even change sex, social position, nationality, age, and religious alliances. We still know our self as our self even though counterparts of the self manifest as we dream. We speak of races and cultures and within those cultures exists our counterpart selves that are spokes on that wheel.

Each self has a free will and chooses an environment as a physical experience in time and space. Those involved in a particular point in time are working on specific problems and challenges. Races don’t just happen and cultures don’t just appear. The self actually divides itself and materializes in the flesh of several individuals with entirely different backgrounds. People living within any given century are related in terms of consciousness and identity although we don’t understand these biological and spiritual connections.

In dreams we experience aspect of these selves so they are not ghost or hallucinations. They are other aspects of the self that choose their own framework according to the intent of consciousness. In this fashion we work out problems and overcome challenges in the dream state since our independent consciousness is free to travel without the restrictions of our limited time-space reality.

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A Shadowy Order

2011-03-22T09:50:00.002-05:00

Yet, ever since my youth, I have made this judgment without any reason for doing so that a star affects my eyes no more than does the flame from a small torch. And although I feel heat as I draw closer to the fire, and I also feel pain upon drawing too close to it, there is not a single argument that persuades me that there is something in the fire similar to that heat anymore than to the pain. On the contrary, I am convinced only that there is something in the fire that, regardless of what it finally turns out to be, causes in us those sensations of heat and pain.

And although there may be nothing in a given space that moves the senses, it does not therefore follow that there is no body in it. But I see that in these and many other instances I have been in the habit of subverting the order of nature. For admittedly I use the perception of the senses for signifying to the mind what things are useful or harmful to the composite of which it is a part. And to that extent they are clear and distinct enough as reliable rules for immediately discerning what is the essence of bodies located outside us. Yet they signify nothing about that except quite obscurely and confusedly.

Rene Descartes in his 1641 sixth meditation from, Discourse on Method and Meditation on First Philosophy is trying to put the order of nature in terms that can be objectively understood. There is nothing in a fire but a flame of consciousness that manifests to experience a distinct part of our reality. This consciousness is in the structure of our reality because we put in there in order to feel and sense another aspect of consciousness physically. The fire expands awareness just like our thoughts and feelings, which give off shadows. We call them hallucinations that are quite valid.

They play a strong part in physical reality as well as in dream reality. These shadows alter the perceived environment and another level of reality manifests. They are not passive and their shape is not dependant on their origin.

These shadows, like the oak tree that casts a shadow on the ground, move freely with the tiniest movement of the smallest leaf. But, its freedom to move is dictated by the motion of the oak. Not one oak leaf shadow will move unless its counterpart does.

In dreams these shadowy thoughts are free to pursue any direction and there is a creative give and take between the shadow and its counterpart. In this physical reality these shadows are also dependant on our focused thoughts as well as our beliefs about such things.

Regardless of the shape of the shadow our beliefs will dictate what the physical senses feel. There may be and are other forms of consciousness within these shadows, but out limited thoughts about the order of nature keep us in a confused and obscure state of awareness. We gradually sense this shadowy order using contrast, and from that awareness the shadow manifests as the counterpart expands.

The Truth of Self

2011-03-18T13:28:00.002-05:00

Accordingly, it is this nature that teaches me to avoid things that produce a sensation of pain and to pursue things that produce a sensation of pleasure, and the like. But it does not appear that nature teaches us to conclude anything besides these things, from these sense perceptions unless the intellect has first conducted its own inquiry regarding things external to us. For it seems to belong exclusively to the mind, and not to the composite of mind and body, to know the truth in these matters.

In his 1641 sixth meditation from his work, Discourse on Method and Meditation of First Philosophy Rene Descartes is explaining how the senses perceive nature and that nature is a combination of everything bestowed on him by God. Reality does imply a structure of sorts and within that structure are assortments of perceptions that find their way into a belief. The world as we know it is limited by our perception of it; when perceptions expand the world does too. There is no better example than the senses of new born baby. The senses begin to pick up vibrations and little by little those vibrations become stronger and awareness of self expands.

Descartes 17th century thoughts are considered partial perceptions in the 21st century. Perceptions in the 19th century were limited by thoughts about the self. The truth of self unfolds as awareness expands.

Perceiving the self as a plural has always been a topic of conversation in all ancient cultures, but the realization that nature is teaching us about our multiplicity is still an esoteric thought. But, all one has to do is look at the consciousness of a bird or a tree and see the multiplicity within that consciousness. Each species looks the same, but when they are brought in focus each counterpart within the species is different just like the counterparts that exist in the self.

The self is a multidimensional aspect of consciousness. There are counterparts and varieties of consciousness that manifest for the fun of it; for the joy of it, and for the expansion and growth of it, as well as for the difference in it, and the desire producing value of it. Every form of consciousness in nature manifests to know itself in physical form in order to expand the truth of self.

The Imaginary Point of Awareness

2011-03-14T10:03:00.001-05:00

For it is surely no imperfection in God that has given me the freedom to give or withhold my assent in those instances where he has not placed a clear and distinct perception in my intellect. But surely it is an imperfection in me that I do not use my freedom well and that I make judgments about things I do not properly understand.

Nevertheless, I see that God could easily have brought it about that, while still being free and having finite knowledge, I should nonetheless never make a mistake. The result could have been achieved either by his endowing my intellect with a clear and distinct perception of everything about which I deliberate, or by simply impressing the following rule so firmly upon my memory that I could never forget it: I should never judge anything that I do not clearly and distinctly understand.

Rene Descartes at the end of his fourth meditations from his 1641 work, Discourse on Methods and Meditations on First Philosophy does make a point about the nature of separation. We look and try to find subjective solutions with objective thoughts and a great divide manifests in the process. Instead of realizing that we are capable of receiving finite knowledge from our stream of consciousness, we create another entity that exists outside of that stream.

The concept of an unknown reality that contains special places filled with judgmental overtones is certainly creations formed by beliefs about religion. Science has distorted beliefs about this unknown reality as well. Science tries to find the subjectiveness in all things using proving objective tools so the foundation for the work leaves out the most important ingredient.

Religion creates this unknown reality using subjective concepts, which are separate from each individual in order to control the image of this reality. Exploration of this unknown reality can only be achieved when we leave our accepted facts about the nature of the self and expand them to include that infinite consciousness that has been the topic of debate, controversy, and war for hundred of centuries. We must expand our level of awareness to an imaginary point where the spirit meets the flesh. There we find the neurological messages that contain the substance of subjectivity.

At that point we do not dissect, criticize, and analyze; we creatively unite, and build. It is there where Descartes concept of God exists in its true form. It is the Zen like motion of no motion that flows through every cell in our universe without judgment.

A Battleground of Thoughts

2011-03-10T09:11:00.002-06:00

What I believe must be considered above all here is the fact that I find within me countless ideas of certain things that, even if perhaps they do not exist anywhere outside of me, still cannot be said to be nothing. And although in a sense, I think them at will, nevertheless they are not something I have fabricated; rather they have their own true and immutable natures.

Rene Descartes in his fifth meditation from his 1641 work, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy touches on an aspect of the self that we all know, but ignore. The thoughts we think all have truth and exist somewhere in the consciousness. They are experienced in some form at some point. Some of those thoughts manifest physically while other thoughts manifest in other dimensions or in probable selves, which may or may not be experiencing this time-space reality at the same now point. In that sense they do have their own true and immutable nature.

Consciousness is always conscious of itself as well as its integrity and validity so there is really no such thing as unconsciousness. We called our latent thoughts subconscious thoughts since they don’t manifest in the same way, but we do know they exist at least for a moment of awareness.

The world view of any person is connected and exists within the stream of consciousness that functions without time so these views or thoughts continue and can be tapped into by personalities that open themselves to them. There are varieties of consciousness that focus on specific views of reality, which contain experiences that others exclude.

We all have certain pet ideas that follow the path of certain beliefs and they become the structure for the reality we know. Other concepts or thoughts don’t fit into that structure and we develop a good vs. evil mentality about them, which forces us to create a battleground of thoughts which manifest as living projections.

We become the enemy in the self-created battle between different aspects of the psyche. Descartes thoughts about God represent his battle with the self and that energy manifested as two forms where one is pitted against the other even though they come from the impulses created by the same consciousness.

Reality implies a structure; a group of accepted beliefs about the nature of the self and its self-created world. It is possible not to structure reality; we do it all the time in dreams. Within those dreams there are truths and immutable messages from the consciousness that show us we are living in more than one reality at the same time.

Nashville Adventuresome Novel Creates Quite a New Century Buzz

2011-03-06T08:16:00.001-06:00

Press Release
~*~*~*~*~

March 3, 2011
Nashville Tennessee
IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Living Behind The Beauty Shop ISBN# 978-0-9778130-4-9

Nashville Adventuresome Novel Creates Quite a New Century Buzz

Lightning Source a Division of Ingram Book Company released Living Behind The Beauty Shop an Adventuresome Novel by Hal Manogue today and the reaction has been better than anticipated. Leslie Sullivan Client Services Coordinator for Lightning Source said the first fifty copies were printed and shipped ahead of schedule.

The book is Manogue’s first novel, but he is no stranger to book publishing. His esoteric poems and essays are popular all over the world. Living Behind The Beauty Shop is centered in the Nashville area during the 89s, 90s, and the new millennium. The story follows the lifestyle of one family. Each person in the family impacts society in a unique, but understandable way.

Some of the pressing social issues that influence beliefs about the nature of reality in the 21st century are addressed in the book. Homelessness, the shoe business, Down syndrome, sexuality, and eco-friendly solutions to pending social dilemmas are addressed in an out-of-the-box sort of way.

Yvonne Perry CEO of Writers in the Sky writing services and editor of the book had this to say about the story:

Living Behind The Beauty Shop will open your eyes to new possibilities about what can be done to help homeless humanity become a productive part of society. It will show appreciation for racial and sexual diversity and present ideas about how we can protect our environment and conserve precious natural resources. Additionally, those who know someone living with Down syndrome will appreciate the sensitivity and positive light shone upon the unique individuals who have chosen a chromosome mishap as an Earthly path to lead others to enlightenment.

Living Behind The Beauty Parlor is available on Manogue’s websites: www.livingbehindthebeautyshop.com or www.shortsleeves.net. The book is also available online and in book stores. The Kindle version and eBook version will be available next week.

Psychic Spontaneity

2011-03-03T06:57:00.002-06:00

But indeed it is also the same “I” who imagines; for although perhaps, as I supposed before, absolutely nothing that I imagine is true, still the very power of imagining really does exist, and constitutes a part of my thought.

Rene Descartes in his 1641 fourth meditation from, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy is trying to observe his subjectiveness using objective thoughts. The power of imagination is rooted in our subject consciousness. It creates the manifestations that become true and real. Not everything that’s imagined manifests in this reality, but those thoughts do manifest in other realities. Thoughts always manifest somewhere since they are energy that is set in motion by the consciousness.

We only focus on one dimension and even when that focus is directed to imaginary thought it will only manifest when we allow it too. We do have a blocking mechanism that tells us to believe only what appears objectively. Those other impulses that are blocked by our unawareness eventually manifest and we experience them in some way, but we may not recognize those manifestation.

A good example of this blockage is our beliefs about our own cells. Our cells are eternal even though they exist in this dimension for a period of time. Energy is eternal in all forms so thoughts create not just our focused reality they create other realities that we can experience once we jump over our three dimensional hurdle.

There are psychic conventions that help organize experiences. Our exterior conventions force us to conform to accepted ideas, so our inner conventions are force to conform to preconceived prepackaging that inhibits remembering the multidimensionality of the self. Conventions are the result of stratified and rigid spontaneity. When they become a system of order the original spontaneity disappears.

That results in psychic customs as well as physical ones like religion and psychic dogma that direct the ego consciousness to follow a certain focus in a certain dimension. A private interpretation develops of the reality that is in focus, but there are many others to experience when psychic spontaneity reappears.

The Image and Likeness of Our Focused Thoughts

2011-02-26T11:27:00.001-06:00

But the mere fact that God created me makes it highly plausible that I have somehow been made in his image and likeness, and that I perceive this likeness, in which the idea of God is contained by means of the same faculty by which I perceive myself. That is, when I turn the mind’s eye towards myself, I understand not only that I am something incomplete and dependant upon another, something aspiring indefinitely for greater and better things, but also that the being on whom I depend has in himself all those great things, not merely indefinitely and potentially, but infinitely and actually, and thus he is God.

Rene Descartes in his Fourth Meditation from his work, Discourse on Method and The Meditations on First Philosophy is actually hitting the religious head with a resounding nail that can wake-up the dead if there was anything that was dead. The only thing that needs waking up is our ego consciousness that wanders through physical life thinking it’s separated from the other aspects of consciousness.

The God that Descartes objectively describes is another portion of the self that is connected to the stream of consciousness that flows through all consciousness. Just like a drop of water that becomes one with the ocean our consciousness can be a drop as well as the ocean. We are the God we seek. We are infinitely and potentially whole, but we create an outside image of this wholeness and call it God. That’s okay. Millions of us do it and will experience that wholeness in our own individual way when we pull ourselves out of the movie of physical life.

Our psyche is a multidimensional television set where many programs are operating, but only one is in focus. Even though we focus on one, all the other dimensions are latent in that one. There are coordinates that connect all of them. There is a give and take that’s visible between one program and another so the action in one affects the action within the others.

The psyche contains other programs with other plots; other world situations and environments. We can walk out of one program and into another, but we must know the other program exists before we can experience them. In a sense all programs are portions of one program.

The reality we are experiencing is on our dimensioned screen, but there are portions of the other programs not showing on that screen. They are not lined up linearly, but are contained within the focus in a completely different way. What makes sense in this focus may not in another. All of our thoughts and actions exist in a significant manner in this dimension which we perceive, but in dreams these thoughts and actions become self-propelling. Energy is never lost. The energy within our thoughts does not disappear or dissipate; that energy becomes reality in other dimensions.

So the energy we place on this separate God is not lost; it becomes energy in another dimension where the self absorbs it. The self becomes the image and likeness of all of our focused thoughts.

Truthful Subjectivity

2011-02-22T08:27:00.001-06:00

Therefore I must now ask myself whether I possess some power by which I can bring it about that I myself, who now exists, will also exist a little later on. For since I am nothing but a thinking thing or at least since I am now dealing simply and precisely with that part of me which is a thinking thing if such a power were in me, then I would certainly be aware of it. But I observe that there is no such power; and from this very fact I know most clearly that I depend upon some being other than myself.

Rene Descartes in his third meditation from his 1641 work, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy did lay some fertilizer on the beliefs about God that continue to expand in linear time. Descartes wanted to prove that there was a supreme being made in the likeness of man and that being controlled his actions and thoughts. There was no other explanation that made sense to him since he only used his objective thoughts to describe his own subjectivity. His rock-bed reality made all other thoughts about other realities that exist in and around the self inconceivable.

We have neurologically blinded ourselves for centuries so we only accept a certain range of neurological impulses as true reality, but our subjective consciousness is innately aware of many valid versions of reality. We identify one small portion of the psyche and consider it our greatest part, but it’s flawed by beliefs about God which are shaped by the egotistical doctrines of man-made religions. There is nothing outside of the psyche. The psyche is built on a framework of consciousness units that function uniquely within the universe of each individual consciousness.

All realities emerge from the psyche. Our reality is within the term psyche itself where a plethora of realities are created to fuel the natural growth and development of a personality existing in this time-space dimension. That personality seems to operate blind in some individuals while in others accomplishments and challenges are know and expected. An unbalance or contrast is set-up by a personality that has not accepted the challenges and the potential for expanded development. Distortions manifest that directly impact expansion, but these challenges still provide a framework for pursuing desires and goals.

This built-in impetus provide clues; point of reference and when they are strong enough to provide greater comprehension that constructs new framework, the old framework seems limiting and is discarded. The concept of God and the perception of an external perfect being is not framework that has to be discarded. It is framework that is expanding as we become aware of other aspects of our psyche and the consciousness units that continue to change how it perceives not only our focused reality, but the realities that exist within and around it.

Old world inhabitants may scorn this idea of a god that has no shape or form and is an aspect of our own consciousness, but when we realize that these old beliefs are portions of our own psyche that have not reach a level of awareness that assimilates expanded knowledge we begin to appreciate our multiplicity for what it does in this physical reality.

Too much inner spontaneity at any given moment in linear time creates unknown experiences that are interpreted by the ego consciousness as myths, folklore, or fantasies, but at some point this spontaneity manifests as truth since it originates in our own truthful subjectivity.

Blocked Portions Of Subjectivity

2011-02-17T09:34:00.003-06:00

But perhaps I am something greater than I myself understand. Perhaps all these perfections that I am attributing to God are somehow in me potentially, although they do not yet assert themselves and are not yet actualized. For I now observe that my knowledge is gradually being increased more and more to infinity. Moreover I see no reason why, with my knowledge thus increased, I could not acquire all the remaining perfections of God. And finally, if the potential for these perfections is in me already, I see no reason why this potential would not suffice to produce the idea of these perfections.

Rene Descartes in his 1641 work, Discourse on Method and Meditations On First Philosophy skates on the thin ice of religious blasphemy by insinuating that God like qualities exist within him. Three hundred and seventy years have pasted since he wrote that work and an overwhelming amount of people consider these thoughts blasphemy. Beliefs about the nature of God are deeply rooted in myths, folklore, religious mind control, ignorance, and forgetfulness.

The belief that God is perfect and infinite helped Descartes perceive a God that is separate from the finite self that exists within a body. Descartes judged God to be perfect. According to his beliefs an objective being cannot be produced by a potential being that doesn’t conform to the idea of perfect. We are taught to believe we are not perfect for a several egotistical reasons.

The expansion of our belief system is producing the realization that portions of our consciousness are focused on a specific reality while other aspects of the self are always wandering without tuning into any precise reality or frequency. Different worlds are experience every night in the dream state, but unless our consciousness is tuned in with precision we cannot perceive them clearly. Descartes idea about the self is a good example of how one self knows the future in other realities while another self is locked into the beliefs of this physical reality.

The human psyche is a supernatural radio that picks up all the stations at once. The physical self is just one signal on one station and it’s tuned into one frequency, but there are a plethora of other stations to experience. The overall reception of these different stations depend on the wiring and inner workings of the psyche.

The inner workings exist apart from the stations they are meant to be pickup so these stations of consciousness exist apart from the supernatural psyche. The psyche makes the radio and adds new connections and stations as it expands. There is constant interaction between all the stations and there's an incredible amount of creativity within this process so all the actions of one station affect all of the other stations.

Because of the specific poise of our consciousness we believe we are outside of these stations and attribute them to a higher power. Intrinsically the psyche contains all the stations and the realities that are experienced. We use different focuses to bring other aspects or frequencies into focus at some point in linear time. Simply by altering attention within certain beliefs we bring those frequencies into focus. Descartes did that, but relied on his beliefs about religion and science and blocked them, even though he experienced them subjectively.

The Expanded Creativity of the Psyche

2011-02-13T10:25:00.001-06:00

If the objective reality of any of my ideas is found to be so great that I am certain that the same reality was not in me, either formally or eminently, and that therefore I myself cannot be the cause of the idea, then it necessarily follows that I am not alone in the world, but that something else, which is the cause of the this idea, also exists.

But if no such idea is found in me, I will have no argument whatsoever to make me certain of the existence of anything other than myself, for I have conscientiously reviewed all these arguments, and so far I have been unable to find any other.

Rene Descartes touches on some metaphysical concepts in his 17th century work, Discourse on Methods and Meditations on First Philosophy. His third meditation digs into ideas and impulses and he tries to identify where they come from. He believes that not all of his ideas about the objective reality come from the self he calls me. He believes there is a power outside of that self that is initiating ideas, which are foreign to his own limited beliefs and perceptions.

The concept of multiply selves eludes him since his work is focused on establishing a God who orchestrates an objective life for him. That belief is not new, but the method of verifying the existence of such a figure is done with objective tools instead of subjective senses.

The concept of objectifying inner data using one’s own subjective inner consciousness is becoming part of our physical environment. Quantum physics is showing that there are other aspects of consciousness that give thoughts and ideas roots using a codified system. This system provides a framework where we agree to objectify certain inner data individually as well as en masse. An idea whose time has yet to come means there’s not enough energy connected with the idea to propel it outward into the physical world.

In the dream state and in other realities ideas and impulses are immediately experienced. There is no energy or time lag. The psyche is presented with its own impulses, which are instantly reflected in dream situations and in other reality experiences that are out of our daily focus.

Descartes ideas about where his ideas originate are based on his beliefs about the self and about the nature of the God he believes exists in another state or reality, but those ideas actually represent and reflect his own private intents and purposes using his focused psyche. There are other layers of the psyche that have expanded and that aspect of the self experience other dimensions that can create the sense that there is something more in the self. Those experiences have been called by many names.

The God-like aspect of the self is connected to the expanded creativity of the psyche and once we sense it our objective world view of God changes from a separated and fragment entity to the reality of multiply selves connected to an expanded consciousness.

The Essence of Our Zenliness

2011-02-09T08:26:00.002-06:00

While reading the introduction to D.T. Suzuki’s 1926 book, Essays in Zen Buddhism I was compelled to substitute the word consciousness for the word Zen in two particular paragraphs in that piece. I discovered that the word Zen is interchangeable with the concept of inner consciousness, which is the foundation for all physical experiences. Here are the paragraphs and as I write them I sense that the very act of expressing them without objective thoughts stimulates the unfettered action of the consciousness behind the words.

In a word consciousness has its own way of pointing to the nature of one’s own being, and that when this is done one attains enlightenment, in which all the contradictions and disturbances caused by the intellect are entirely harmonized in the unity of an expanded order.

For this reason consciousness never explains but indicates, it does not appeal to circumlocution, nor does it generalize. It always deals with facts, concrete and tangible. Logically considered consciousness may be full of contradictions and repetitions. But as it stands above all things, it goes serenely on its own way. It does not challenge logic; it simply walks its path of facts, leaving all the rest to their own fates. It is only when logic neglecting its proper functions tries to step into the track of consciousness that it loudly proclaims its principles and forcibly drives out the intruder.

It’s clear that the intruder in our daily scenarios is the ego consciousness which has the ability to experience separation in order to remember the unity of Zen or consciousness. Inner consciousness never forces itself to be recognized; the ego consciousness exerts the force and becomes the intruder.

The internal pulling of consciousness brings expansion to the ego and it is expressed in several ways. Life is experienced or the “The Way,” as Lao Tzu put it is rooted in the multiplicity of our consciousness.

Joint Cooperation

2011-02-05T09:40:00.001-06:00

But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills refuses, and that also imagines and senses.

Indeed it is no small matter if all of those things belong to me. But why should they not belong to me? Is it not the very same “I” who now doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands something, who affirms that this one thing is true, who denies other things, who desires to know more, who wishes not to be deceived, who imagines many things even against my will, who also notices many things which appear to come from the senses? What is there in all of this that is not every bit as true as the fact that I exist. For it so obvious that it is I who doubt, I who understand, and I who will, that there is nothing by which it could be explained more clearly

Rene Descartes in his third meditation from his work, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy is hitting the human nail on the head in terms of defining a fragment of his consciousness. He explains how the mind and body are independent but need each other in order to make sense of individual existence. The body cannot exist without the mind, but the mind does exist without the body. Body consciousness follows the stream of inner consciousness and creates an ego consciousness which Descartes identifies by describing aspects of it.

Consciousness exercises itself using innate abilities that cannot be expressed through physical manifestation alone. The neurological structure of the brain cannot capture all the nuances of consciousness especially since it travels faster than the speed of light.

The structured framework of physical existence needs a specific platform filled with experiences which we accept as real and valid. Inner consciousness along with body consciousness makes that platform or focus possible. Physical reality clicks on and off; we only perceive it the waking hours, but the inner work that makes this platform possible is done in the sleeping or dream state.

The meeting of body consciousness and inner consciousness requires intense focus so extraordinary manipulations are required; perceptions must be fine-tuned in physical terms and even when they are limitations occur. Cellular comprehension is not tuned-in by the normal conscious self and the free-wheeling aspect of the expanded self is hidden as well. A disengagement process must occur so each aspect of consciousness can regenerate.

Our material reality is formed by joint cooperation. Impulses and ideas become objectified and become part of the physical environment. This provides a framework of inner data at any given point in space-time. The airplane objectifies the inner data of flying and Descartes objectifies his existence in that 17th century period, but he still exists today; he is functioning in unison with another aspect of his consciousness.

Escaping the Prepackaging

2011-02-01T10:47:00.001-06:00

The mind is proved to really distinct from the body, even though the mind is shown to be so closely joined to the body that it forms a single unit with it. All errors commonly arising from the senses are reviewed; an account of the ways in which these errors can be avoided is provided. Finally, all the arguments on the basis of which we may infer the existence of material things is presented not because I believe them to be very useful for proving what they prove, namely, that there is a real world, that men have bodies, and the like, but rather because, through a consideration of these arguments, one realizes that they are neither so firm nor so evident as the arguments leading us to the knowledge of our mind and of God.

Rene Descartes is his 1637 work, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy is explaining something we all know, but forget about the self. We have chosen a certain type of consciousness that identifies with the body and flesh for a certain period of time.

Other types of consciousness choose other forms to express and expand in any particular dimension. Our earthly experience contains knowledge of the existence of more than one body, but we focus on the present one even though bleed thru experiences occur. We call these experiences by other names, but the cells remember those body experiences and comprehend them in cellular consciousness terms.

These self created experiences are lodged in our body consciousness. The mind, as Descartes explains, is distinct from the consciousness units that are connected to secondary activities that function in another aspect of space and time, butthey are well aware of how those activities impact the present as well as the future. The reality of each day is anticipated by the cells and the body is prepared for it although we overlook these precognitive projections. A “future life” grows out of the present mindset just like a tomorrow grows out of today.

We are taught not to trust this self; the ancient truth that there is something more perfect than us expresses a distorted self-validity that requires a God-like figure to worship. Descartes found that figure using his six meditations, and he put his beliefs in what could be proved scientifically as well as what he believed to be true about the self.

That mind-body connection is the fence that contains thoughts that manifest matter and our language prepackages those ideas into certain patterns. Escaping the prepackaging is a task, but we have the ability to accept our consciousness for what it is, which is best described as the energy that travels faster than the speed of light as it expands in the awareness of a stream of consciousness, a mind, and a self-created body.

The Inside of Facts

2011-01-27T08:29:00.001-06:00

But eventually I am forced to admit that there is nothing among the things I once believed to be true which is no permissible to doubt and not out of frivolity or lack of forethought, but for valid and considered reasons. Thus I must be no less careful to withhold assent henceforth even from these beliefs that I would from those that are patently false, if I wish to find anything certain.

I will accomplish this by putting aside everything that admits of the least doubt, as if I had discovered it to be completely false I will stay on this course until I know something certain, or, if nothing else, until I ay least know for certain that nothing is certain.

Rene Descartes wrote those thoughts in his first and second meditations which are part of his 1637 work, Discourse on Methods and Meditations on First Philosophy. The interesting element in Descartes thinking is his thoughts about the self and how that self is related to the God that was an external force to be reckoned with at that time. Certainly those thoughts continue today although many people are doing what Descartes describes as the permission to doubt instilled beliefs and educated guesses about the body, the soul, and consciousness.

Descartes approaches the fact that he exists in more than one form in a very methodical way. He senses that truth is relative to the believer and there is uncertainty in truth as well as in all beliefs if one gives oneself the opportunity to identify them.

The unknown reality which Rene wants to identify is usually dismissed using various hypotheses about the characteristics and nature of consciousness. We forget that the world as we know it is the result of a complicated set of consciousness coded sequences which are locked into one another and are dependant on one another in a variety of ways. The world and universe are perceived using the sequential codes that we are aware of, but when we alter one of these codes we intersect with another aspect of this space-time continuum and discovery that we limited ourselves by the beliefs that create individual truths.

Much of our inner life is overlooked because we focus on the exterior pattern of events even though the inner world is the only connection for those events. The objective reality only makes sense because the subjective inner world gave birth to it. We only see the topmost portions of these exterior events so our perceptions, beliefs, and truths are limited by our self-inflicted separation.

Descartes in his 17th century awareness thought that putting aside these exterior events would reveal an aspect of the self that was considered to be something else outside of the body and mind of each individual. He discovered that certainly nothing is certain since probabilities, perceptions, beliefs, and truths include probable selves as well as probable realities where inner consciousness shows the inside of facts and the realities that emerge from them.

Rooted In Our Multiplicity

2011-01-23T09:30:00.003-06:00

While reading the introduction to D.T. Suzuki’s 1926 book, Essays in Zen Buddhism I was compelled to substitute the word consciousness for the word Zen in two particular paragraphs in that piece. I discovered that the word Zen is interchangeable with the concept of inner consciousness, which is the foundation for all physical experiences. Here are the paragraphs and as I write this I sense that the very act of expressing them without thoughts stimulates the unfettered action of those words.

In a word consciousness has its own way of pointing to the nature of one’s own being, and that when this is done one attains enlightenment, in which all the contradictions and disturbances caused by the intellect are entirely harmonized in the unity of an expanded order.

For this reason consciousness never explains but indicates, it does not appeal to circumlocution, nor does it generalize. It always deals with facts, concrete and tangible. Logically considered consciousness may be full of contradictions and repetitions. But as t stands above all things, it goes serenely on its own way. It does not challenge logic; it simply walks its path of facts, leaving all the rest to their own fates. It is only when logic neglecting its proper functions tries to step into the track of consciousness that it loudly proclaims its principles and forcibly drives out the intruder.

It’s clear that the intruder in our daily scenarios is the ego consciousness that has the ability to experience separation in order to remember the unity of Zen or consciousness. Inner consciousness never forces itself to be recognized; the ego consciousness exerts the force and becomes the intruder.

The internal pulling of consciousness brings expansion to the ego and it is expressed in serveral ways. Life is experienced in those ways as consciousness continues to expand. That expansion or the “The Way,” as Lao Tzu put it is rooted in our multiplicity.

Lands of the Mind

2011-01-18T12:01:00.001-06:00

Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purist sky.” You will not remember,” he seems to say, “and you will not expect.” All good conversation, manners, and action, come from spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methods are salutatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1844 essay, Experience expresses the thoughts of the 19th century in a unique as well as eloquent way. Life is a series of surprises and we do thrive by creating casualties. Our experiences are credited to a higher power that sits in a special place outside of this reality. The name and the physical acts we perceive are considered sacred; we are baptized in the waters of ignorance and dress in the clothes of the judgmental. We forget that we pulsate to the beat of flowing consciousness that infiltrates our cells and anoints our forgetfulness.

Our cells are always making choices between alternate courses and probable actions. Each choice presupposes probable acts that are capable of actualization in this reality. Tiny innocuous decisions come up each moment and alter reality in one way or another.

We forget we can choose between health and illness; between focusing on the mental more than physical, and the physical more than mental. We can cause our cells to change their self-image and heal minor wounds as well as our intent to be well. The intent is conscious, but the means is not and that is the God that Emerson writes about. The intent comes from the stream of consciousness that is constantly flowing through the cells and molecules.

There are “Lands of the Mind,” with different civilizations that function in their own geography and personal culture. Each civilization of cells has their own history and inclinations. Consciousness is hidden in the brain as well as in all the other organs, but the archaeological memory of man continues to pulsate in the private psyche of the body consciousness.

Consciousness operates in a code system which is beyond count and the systems helps direct particular types of focus which develops a variety of significances. The system is composed of light and molecular constructions which are extensions of electromagnetic ranges which are completely unknown, but are recognized by other life forms.

We don’t remember or expect to sense these secondary systems in our limited beliefs about the nature of our God, but inch by inch we are becoming aware that the casualties we create are the steps we initiate to remember other aspects of our consciousness.

The Gauntlet of All Other Truths

2011-01-14T08:34:00.003-06:00

Spiritualistic faith in all of its forms deals with a world of promise, while materialism’s sun sets in a sea of disappointment. Remember what I said of the Absolute: it grants us moral holidays. Any religious view does this. It not only incites our more strenuous moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful moments and justifies them. It paints the ground of justification vaguely enough to be sure. The exact features of the saving future facts that our belief in God insures, will have to be ciphered out by the interminable methods of science: we can study our God only by studying his creations. But we can enjoy our God, if we have one, in advance of all that labor. I myself believe that the evidence of God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

The truth of God has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths have straightened themselves out together.

William James in his 1906 essay, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered has a lot to say about truths and the nature of beliefs. God certainly is at the root of most beliefs systems; we continually search for guidance as well as comfort from this human inspired entity that we create to worship and to judge. Worshipping and judging as James points out are human traits that we pass on and attach to this God that floats somewhere above our reality.

For centuries religious rituals have been a solid fixture in every social culture and even though cultures have progressed and expanded their belief systems, religious rituals are still the focal point of connecting to God. James has a different belief about God; he believes the consciousness called God exists within him as well as in every other form of consciousness. He confirms that fact by studying his creations as well as the creations of every aspect of consciousness that express life in physical form. Each form of consciousness is self-aware although they are not self-aware in the same way as humans.

The inexhaustible creativity within the cells themselves reaches deeper into the stream of consciousness than our biological and spiritual beliefs allow. That’s why the materialism’s sun sets in a sea of disappointment.

The inner dynamics of the psyche understand the essence of the self and the units of consciousness within that essence far surpass any 21st century computer. The molecules and atoms within the cells carry a memory of all forms of consciousness, which means the physical and non-physical forms they have been part of, so they are always working with probabilities as well as comparing probable actions fuel by genetic information.

Conscious intent activates an inner mechanism which changes the behavior of the cells and that intent impacts the collective intent so the goals of the species do not exist apart from individual goals. Life is the awareness of the future development of the species, and that development is rooted in what James describes as the inner personal experiences manifested physically or what some call Zen. It is where the truth of God has run the gauntlet of all of our other truths and exists without the limitations of religion.

Foreword:Living Behind the Beauty Shop

2011-01-10T11:42:00.001-06:00

For several years, I’ve enjoyed knowing and working with Hal Manogue because his books, poems, essays, and other forms of writing offer such profound spiritual insight. The story you are about to read may be fictional—although based on real places and celebrities in Nashville—but the premise that we are simultaneously living multiple lives is something many metaphysicists have believed for quite a while. Scientists are beginning to explore this possibility and while they cannot prove it to be true, they cannot disprove it either. I’ve referred to myself as one who wears many hats or multitasks as if trying to do everything at once. This makes the concept of multiple consciousnesses as described in Hal’s work seem probable—especially when we stop to consider that in this life we are currently living, we perform multiple roles and have many identities or self labels: writer, doctor, teacher, parent, student, adult, child, sibling, driver, and so on. Does your life as a mathematician end when you leave the classroom at 4 p.m. each day? Are you no longer an athlete when you put on an apron and prepare a meal? Do you stop being an activist just because you engage in teaching your puppy a new trick? No, of course not. We are still all these things. However, we may not remember our other realities while focusing on whatever role we are playing at the present moment.

We’ve all had a spark of creativity or an idea that came on like a light bulb. We’ve all felt led by our inner voice or sensed guidance from our intuition. Who’s to say that these impulses or thoughts are not from our expanded self or an aspect of consciousness from another dimension? Then, there’s the sleep-time world of our dreams where anything is possible. What if, like Mase’s poetry reveals in Living Behind the Beauty Shop, the life you live while awake is only one aspect of who you are? What if you connect with your expanded consciousness when asleep? Definitely something to consider.

While you don’t need to believe in parallel universes, reincarnation, or multiple consciousnesses in order to enjoy this book or its characters—whom I’m sure you will come to love—the story will open your eyes to new possibilities about what can be done to help homeless humanity become a productive part of society. It will show appreciation for racial and sexual diversity and present ideas about how we can protect our environment and conserve precious natural resources. Additionally, those who know someone living with Down syndrome will appreciate the sensitivity and positive light shone upon the unique individuals who have chosen a chromosome mishap as an Earthly path to lead others to enlightenment.
Fact or fantasy? You decide.

~ Yvonne Perry, editor of Living Behind the Beauty Shop, owner of Writers in the Sky Creative Writing Services (WritersintheSky.com), and author of More Than Meets the Eye, True Stories About Death, Dying, and Afterlife (deathdyingafterlife.com) and The Sid Series ~ A Collection of Holistic Stories for Children (TheSidSeries.com)

Is Being Homeless an Inner Consciousness Choice?

2011-01-05T13:21:00.002-06:00

The exact number of homeless people in America is shrouded in secrecy. At last count there were almost 1 million homeless living minute by minute in a world with no hope. A few people help feed the homeless and help shelter the homeless, but most people don't give the homeless a second thought. Warren Russell a shrewd business man decided to give the homeless a reason to live and his story changes the face of homelessness.

Follow the Russell family through the eighties and into the 21st century and marvel at the impact that one family has on the homeless issue. Living Behind the Beauty Shop is a story about being consciously aware that all life has value. The realization that thoughts are energy becomes apparent as the story unfolds. Warren Russell’s thoughts turned an old Southern farm into a thriving community where the homeless rebuild their reality using the inner tools of self-appreciation and unity.

Visit www.shortsleeves.net to read more about homelessness and the story.

Is Being Born with Down syndrome an Inner Consciousness Choice?

2011-01-02T10:32:00.001-06:00

One in every one thousand babies is born with Down syndrome. Why? Is it a choice? Do these babies come here to teach us something? Are these babies able to experience more than one reality, but can’t express that fact? Mase Russell was born in this reality to answer some of those questions.

Born with a mild case of DS, Mase is able to express more than one reality in his art and poetry. He brings new awareness to the physical challenge of being a Down syndrome human.

Living Behind the Beauty Shop takes on a voyage to another world where consciousness expresses itself in diverse ways. Mase believes a part of us lives in that dimension and his compelling expressions make us all think twice about who we really are.

For more information about DS Visit: www.shortsleeves.net

The God Fire in Our Individual Consciousness

2010-12-31T08:33:00.002-06:00

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may god fire the heart with his presence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, The Over-soul weaves in and out of the mystery of God like a tiger lunging for meal in a galloping herd of prey. The God we worship is indeed the God that we become. There are multitudinous levels of consciousness that thrive in the value climate of our psychological reality. Various beliefs are formed and they are diverse and alien. Beliefs create images that lurk in myths as well as the imagination. People become what they perceive the self to be and wallow in thoughts of a God who abides by traditions and the rhetoric of religions.

Emerson understood that consciousness is like an ocean. As temperatures in different depths change, the color changes as well as the flora and fauna that thrive in their own value climate. We too experiences quality changes as our value climate expresses the distortions and limitations of our outer senses, but our inner senses are not distort. They inhabit our psychological value climate and see through the camouflage of our physical patterns as well as the flow of our distorted patterns and beliefs.

Our camouflage patterns follow the basic rules of our inner universe but reflect them in a distorted and convoluted manner. When we concentrate on and plunge into our inner value climate we dive below our own beliefs and look up and see a foundationless, floating group of beliefs that are enriched with shifting illusions caused by the wind of a non-egotistical will. When this value climate is experienced the most minute to the most gigantic spectrum of knowing becomes the god fire in our individual consciousness.

Deep in the Roots

2010-12-29T11:50:00.001-06:00

The mind is ordinarily chock full with all kinds of intellectual nonsense and passional rubbish. They are of course useful in their own was in our daily life. There is no denying that. But it is chiefly because of these accumulations that we are made miserable and groan under the feeling of bondage. Each time we want to make a movement they fetter us, they choke us, and cast a heavy veil over our spiritual horizon. We feel as if we are constantly living under restraint. We long for naturalness and freedom, yet we do not seem to attain them.

Being so long accustomed to the oppression, the mental inertia become hard to remove. In fact it has gone down deep into the roots of our own being, and the whole structure of personality is to be overturned. The process of reconstruction is stained with tears and blood.

D.T. Suzuki in his introduction to Essays in Zen Buddhism is describing what we all believe is vital to a successful physical life. Without intellectual nonsense and passionate rubbish our reality would be a flat line of complacency that has a beginning and an end and both appear at the same point. This necessary group of thoughts and experiences is the catalyst for expansion, but that expansion is manifested in time segments which flow into our probable reality from a pool of consciousness.

We inherently possess pools or separate pockets of experiences where information from the inner self is collected and stored. This information is processed before flowing into our official pool of consciousness where thoughts become experiences. We innately have a selectively significant attribute that creates a reality using innate and learned beliefs to sense our own being, but that being is choked by our self-induced limitations. There are ways to dip into our side pools of consciousness and by pass the selective process and experience other realities physically.

Suzuki calls this pool dipping Zen or seeing into one’s own self nature, but the name is not important unless religious beliefs dominate this process of internal dipping. The pools contain past as well as future probabilities so we can pick up strands of our own consciousness and incorporate them into our physical reality. Explaining this process to the ego consciousness makes this process easier. Expansion does not need tears and blood to physically manifest unless we choose that path.

Deep in the roots of our own being is the natural freedom of expansion and we decide how and when we will experience those roots physically. Just like a tree that chooses to break in half and still grow we choose to break in half in order to grow.

Baptized In the Fire of Our Creations

2010-12-27T10:20:00.002-06:00

If the mind remains in a state of fixation, there will be no occasion for it being awakened to the truth of Zen. The state of ‘Great Doubt’ as it is technically known, is the antecedent. It must be broken up and exploded into the next stage, which is looking into one’s nature or the opening of Satori (enlightenment).

The explosion, as it is nothing else, generally takes place when this finely balanced equilibrium tilts for one reason or another. A stone is thrown into a sheet of water in perfect stillness, and the disturbance at once spreads all over the surface. It is somewhat like this. A sound knocks at the gate of consciousness so tightly closed, and it at once reverberates through the entire individual. He is awakened in the most vivid sense of the word. He comes out baptized in the fire of creation. He had seen the work of God in his very workshop. The occasion mayt be reading a stanza, or seeing something moving, or the sense of touch irritated, when a most highly accentuated state of concentration bursts out into a Satori or enlightenment.

D.T. Suzuki in his 1926 essay, Satori explains how awareness lurks under every aspect of our self-created reality and explodes when the self is ready to experience it physically. Creativity has a private and secret side; a private nature that can illuminate choices and probabilities when it is not restricted by limited vision or the challenges that we continually create.

There are illuminations and comprehensions that develop which cannot be verbalized when a problem or challenge is manifested. Unpredictable fulfillments come from what appears to be a problem and achievements are experienced even when original issues are not solved. A level of understanding manifests; the errors we believe created the problem are actually creative food for the expansion of awareness. We are baptized in the fire of our creations and unforeseen probabilities now enrich as well as change our physical reality.

Suzuki calls this experience an act of Zen or looking into our own self nature using our joint realities physically. The nature of a multidimensional self creates an explosion like the stone that disturbs the peaceful stillness of water drops. The water like the self is never still; it changes its expressions in the every flowing stream of consciousness.

A Minute Consciousness Capsule

2010-12-25T10:05:00.001-06:00

Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive times they made only the most incipient distinctions in this line. Men believed whatever the thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with their realities inextricably. The categories of ‘thought’ and ‘things’ are indispensable here; instead of being realities we now call certain experiences only ‘thoughts.’ There is not a category, among those enumerated, of which we may not imagine the use to have thus originated historically and only gradually spread.

William James hits the vacillating nail of reality on the head with those thoughts from his 1906 essay, Pragmatism and Common Sense. The sense of separation rings true in our waking reality, and the union of consciousness is discounted in our dreams. Our boundaries of awareness expand in the dream reality and our inner senses operate freely in a world without physical matter. We travel without moving and see without eyes. The fact that both worlds exist in the same place is lost in a limited belief system which focuses on one aspect of the self.

The dream reality is the foundation for widening conscious comprehension. It is a pulling together or a minute consciousness capsule that enables the self to enter other energy fields. The astral body has been a belief for thousands of years; it is another type of energy capsule.

Thought as we perceive it then is created through the union we have with consciousness. Impulses sent from realities that exist within our world of energy capsules are catalyst for physical experiences as well as dream experiences. History it seems is a fruitless word, but an important word that makes sense of our own creations although all those creations have been experienced in many realties in the past as well as in the future.

There is no category to label dream experiences, but it is realistic to say that they reside in fancies, which are as valid as our self created ego consciousness.

The Wind of the Mind

2010-12-21T13:32:00.001-06:00

The Buddha is your own Mind, make no mistake to bow (to external objects). “Buddha” is a Western word, and in this country it means “enlightened nature”; and by “enlightened” is meant “spiritually enlightened.” It is one’s own spiritual Nature in enlightenment that responds to the external world, comes in contact with objects, raises the eyebrows, winks the eyelids, and moves the hands and legs. This Nature in the Mind is the Buddha, and Buddha is the Way, and the Way is Zen.

D.T.Suzuki in his 1926 essay, Satori is explaining Zen and Buddhism in terms we all can understand regardless of our religious beliefs. In fact, his explanation sums up the teachings of all the worshipped sages over the years. The Way is in our own mind or consciousness and when we use it in tandem with our objective focus our world becomes a truly unique place.

The inner validity that is within the self forms the integrity of the physical body as well as the integrity of the social body. The inner self functions for the good of itself as well as the good of society. The individual good is society’s good and that action represents spiritual and physical fulfillment or enlightenment.

The inner universe of the self is the true frontier of discovery and exploring it illuminates the private aspects of reality as well as the experiences of the entire species. The ability to be aware of the unknown reality of Zen as Suzuki describes it is our natural state of being. In the cradle of Zen we meet our religion face to face and discover the unity of consciousness.

The names or labels we use for external worship become immaterial because the experience is not about worship; it is all about oneness within the emptiness of consciousness. That emptiness is filled with the bubbling voice of Zen that has nothing to hold on too, but the self that floats in the wind of the Mind.

Something Unknown is Doing We Don’t Know What

2010-12-17T10:13:00.002-06:00

Enlightenment vanquishes Ignorance lying at the root of birth and death and laying fetters of every description, intellectual as well as effective. And this vanquishing of Ignorance cannot be achieved except by the exercise of one’s will power; all the other attempts, especially merely intellectual, are utterly futile.

D.T. Suzuki wrote those thoughts in his 1926 essay, Enlightenment and Ignorance. Ignorance is not lack of knowledge it is a subjective choice that outlines the blueprint of physical life. Within the outline of ignorance is an ever-flowing cycle of awareness that manifests physically in accordance with this innate impulse to connect with what we create physically. Those creations become the contrast needed to fill in the outline.

The blueprint for individual reality is an unknown because we think in terms of consecutive time so we assume that there must be an egg or a seed that produces a reality for consciousness. The seed or egg carries the future of reality in our ignorant state of thought, but the idea of first does not exist in the vast field of knowledge flowing in the stream of consciousness. That stream is not limited; it’s only our beliefs about the stream that create limitations. Inner knowledge is real, valid, and accessible at any moment since an inward reality creates an inward sequence of events that manifest as objective effects.

Scientific “workable” objective facts tend to enhance the ignorance since the facts are framed in certain vibrational frequencies. These facts prejudice thoughts about the nature of consciousness so immediate ego-based thoughts become the perceived blueprint of our consciousness.

That blueprint is just one aspect or effect of consciousness not consciousness itself. It is an intellectual attempt to know the something unknown that is doing we don’t know what, which is the basic element of ignorance. That something is actually consciousness units expressing physical life in an active and awareness producing way. Consciousness units expand the whole stream in the vastness of our inner reality.

Bound By Its Own Limitations

2010-12-13T07:22:00.001-06:00

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve. If the mind is petty, small, narrow, limited, however great and complex the problem may be, the mind approaches that problem in terms of its own pettiness... Though it has extraordinary capacities and is capable of invention, of subtle, cunning thought, the mind is still petty. It may be able to quote Marx or the Gita, or some other religious book, but it is still a small mind, and a small mind confronted with a complex problem can only translate that problem in terms of itself, and therefore the problem, the misery increases. So the question is: Can the mind that is small, petty, be transformed into something which is not bound by its own limitations?

Jiddu Krishnamurti was a 20th century writer and speaker on philosophical and spiritual issues. He constantly stressed the need to reconnect with the inner self and he emphasized that this unity cannot be brought about by any external entity, be it religious, political, or social.

We are taught that we are in our body and our mind is in the brain. We perceive our world through our senses and consider what we perceive to be reality. That reality is coated with beliefs that create the experiences we call life and we rely on external entities to confirm the legitimate aspects of those experiences. The mind develops a playing field filled with rules, regulations, and restrictions and we fence our self in a closed network of judgmental beliefs that hinder out innate freedom to be one in our multiplicity.

A few simple exercises reveal that we are not in our body; the body is within our consciousness and the mind is within our consciousness as well. In fact the world and universe we perceive is in that same consciousness. Everything is in an ever-expanding consciousness. We are an individual drop in that ocean and that drop can change the course of a wave or the ocean. When we become aware of our own self-imposed limitations we free ourselves and a transformation takes place. The separated self bound by controlling perceptions imposed by a mind that creates through others is transformed through inner self-created awareness.

Transformation of self created fragments is an ongoing process and it happens in different ways and in different space-time sequences for each consciousness unit. When limitations dissolve through enlightenment new awareness manifests and eventually what is known in oneness becomes what is known in fragmentation.

Where Strength is Born

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And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

If any man considers the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.

Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportions to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually.

Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance speaks about responsibility in terms of recognizing the self and its connection with the god stuff we worship in others. The 20th century Indian philosopher and teacher Krishnamurti had the same thoughts:

This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

Truth as we see it is only a fragment from a dangling perception of self. We fear this fragment along with all the other fragments that we create from the separation of self within the stream of consciousness. Our universe is a mass shared dream; a dream that presents reality in a certain light. This dream is meaningful as well as creative, but in order to understand it we must go to another level of consciousness where separation blends into the oneness of no space time. It is there within the clear channels of consciousness that we stand outside of this dream and experience the self as god.

Science and society does not comprehend this inner reality until the individual chooses unconsciously to open the gates and allow inner commerce and communication to manifest. This inner meeting place offers answers, solutions, and complete blueprints of every experience of consciousness. It is where strength is born and where we become whole in the ever-flowing stream of god stuff.

Krishnamurti explained that place this way:

And to take such a journey we must travel light; we cannot be burdened with opinions, prejudices and conclusions - all that old furniture ... forget all you know about yourself; forget all you have ever thought about yourself; we are going to start as if we knew nothing.