Inner Fabric of Beliefs

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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 this 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 consciousness, and finds unity under the self-created rubble of separatism. There is unity within our cellular consciousness, and it is expanding our belief structure. The egotistical thoughts of isolation and superiority are diminishing. Our conscious mind is immersed in a flowing stream of wisdom, and our ego is changing focus. The inner self is constantly reshaping our conscious mind as well as our body consciousness.

As we travel through our own psychological atmosphere, we discover a conscious mind that is transformed by the contours of our inner self. Endless impulses and ideas churn in the consciousness of the inner self. Electromagnetic energy stimulates the conscious mind, and that energy expresses itself in dreams as well as in our focused reality.

Concentrated impulses and ideas become thoughts, and then truths. These beliefs create physical events. Every event we experience is an epic tale. Each tale is packaged in a sideless box of creativity. We are all painters as well as the painting in our unique creative box.

We constantly produce new thoughts and expand beliefs as the self expands physically as well as non-physically. Changes in the self awaken other souls, and the diversity within the awakening colors our canvas of life with brush strokes of unity as well as contrast. The contrast may be filled unexpected colors, but the unity is always wrapped in a rainbow of love.

Alien Intrusions

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

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

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

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

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

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 is considered an expert on Buddhism, but he is much more than that. He is 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 consciousness is always in a state of becoming. It has no precise boundaries in the action of becoming.

Waving To The Soul

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

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

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

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 expression of the inner self unless it conforms to that order. The psyche is naturally creative and explorative, so characteristics that appear as faults have a certain truth about them, and they can be accepted as virtues. 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. In those channels our breath and the wind are felt as one and the same. In that reality we become the noun and the verb as the verb expresses itself as the noun. In that reality nature speaks for man and man speaks for nature.

The Eternal Law

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.

Equator Of Life

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.

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 in his 1841 essay Experience bounces us off the walls of sanity and we find ourselves stumbling along our 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 ritualistic and ignorant past.

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 laws of God. Cooperation is paramount to our being so we push our bisexual nature away from our reality, and condemn those that bring it forth. Bisexual stereotypes shade our perceptions even though the larger pattern of human personhood demands a bisexual affiliation. That affiliation provides a framework where individuals can express feelings, and abilities that follow the natural incline of the personal psyche.

The distortion that results from our psyche blockage begins to accumulate in puberty. We are not educated to understand the nature of consciousness and our psyche. We believe the psyche is a contradictory instead of the foundation for our conscious unconsciousness. 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.

Some of our beliefs are built-in from infancy. They are biologically pertinent. They create some of our life experiences. Other beliefs are learned through associations and influences. Those beliefs along with our core beliefs create a psychic highway of experiences that move us toward unity. Unity is the place where present or past rumors of wrath don't exist. It is the place where great gifts thrive in the art of appreciating as well as giving.

The Soul Circumscribes All Things

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

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

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.

Down syndrome Study

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

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 meditatively, 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 threaten-able and insult-able 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 self responsibility comes crashing through our colored lenses of ritualistic beliefs and judgmental tomfoolery. We are the creators of our reality not the Fallen men who believed that some perverse God 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. God is a thought that serves our purpose. We measure God in a world of measurability, but there is nothing to measure. Our religious beliefs create a God worthy to kill for so we battle to overcome the our own creations. We believe we must be disciplined and reconfigured into a ritualistic fiend in order to be saved.

We are never lost. We are never disconnected from the portion of the conscious mind that is not connected to the brain. That portion of the self may not be obvious, but it exists. That portion exists in a creative brew that overflows with energy.

Beneath our usual awareness the unconscious mind’s eye sees a horizon where the self dances without believing in the shackles of Fallen Men.

Psychic Patterns

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.

Virgin Territory

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.