Tuesday, December 29, 2015

The Dream World: An Excerpt From The Book Black Orchid Night

"Our physical reality is the focus of our energy and our attention. But, understand, sleep is not a byproduct of our wakeful life. You might say the dream world is a shadow image of your waking world. It functions according to the possibilities within it, just as we carry on according to the possibilities inherent in our physical world. We are just as awake while we’re sleeping. When we are in the dream world, most of our energy is focused on that world. Our awareness is turned in another direction, so to speak. Only a small amount of energy is available physically. That energy sustains the body while we sleep.”

“Now, we remember only vague and disconnected portions of our dreams, so they appear to be meaningless and chaotic. The ego censors most of the information within our subconscious. The censoring process is important for most people, but some of us are equipped to handle the censored information and focus on it."

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Dreams: An Excerpt From The Novel Black Orchid Night

“Dreams have a personal validity to them. Your dreams are a byproduct of your existence. Your dreams contain concepts that will, at some point, transform your field of physical knowing. So your dream world is not a shadow image of reality. It is its own reality. You experience certain dreams to understand that developments are possible because they have matured in other perspectives, which are not tied to time.”

Thursday, December 10, 2015

We Are Such Stuff

As Shakespeare pointed out we are such stuff as dreams are made on.

We achieve so many things while dreaming, but we don’t remember most of our accomplishments. For centuries, our dream reality has been a victim of antiquated beliefs and religious misconceptions. Hence, our dreams are shrouded in mystery. I’ve been studying the dream reality for the last seven years, and I’ve discovered some interesting facts about our dream experiences. The first fact is we don’t understand the complete nature of our consciousness, so we say, “It’s only a dream.”

But dreams are not meant to be tucked away on the discount rack in our consciousness. We don’t realize it, but we ignore part of ourselves in order to function physically in the ongoing expansion of the human species. We believe we are built that way. We fail to see we are in the process of becoming what we already are, and we certainly overlook the undeniable fact that dreams set the tone for that becoming.

Dreams exist in levels, just like this reality. Our wakeful levels of reality are measured in time sequences, but there is no time sequence in dreams, so it’s difficult to make sense of them and put them in order. Dreams have their own sense of order. On one level, dreams mix wakeful experiences with other probabilities, and we experience a mish-mash of dream events. On another level our conscious beliefs and innate beliefs are homogenized, and we experience people, places and events in unusual ways. These dream levels help us with insights and artful expressions. On another level, we enter the spacious presence of consciousness where all experiences are formed.

These dreams experiences are a variety pack filled with waking probabilities that we lay out for physical manifestation. Some are manifested; some are not. Once we enter the fourth level, we wander through the hallways of consciousness and tap into the pulse of the soul. In this hallway, more levels of our dream reality are experienced. We live life as the soul lives it. We are the soul and all its counterparts. This consciousness journey takes us to the reality of the soul. In dreams, the ego is dormant. We free ourselves from our waking focus, so we have the ability to function without a body as we wander through these vast never-ending dream realities. Our body remains in one place, but we still sense the sensations created by our body.

We remember some of these levels as we travel though them while dreaming. There are endless levels, and an endless amount of no time to experience them. Our dreams never end. We just move in and out of them, just like we move in and out of this reality. The interesting thing about dreaming is we sense that we don’t just live one lifetime. We begin to realize how it feels it to live in multiple lifetimes.

Lucid dreamers have the ability to remember portions of dreams, and some of these dreamers also have the talent to dream at will. These people are not different than any other person in terms of psychic gifts or supernatural powers. What these people have is an open channel to other realities. They allow their consciousness to move multidimensionally using practice, a knowing attitude, and an open-ended belief structure. We all could remember where we go in dreams if we used those inner gifts. We rarely use them by objective design, but we always use them subjectively.

Black Orchid Night is the story of one of these lucid dreamers. She accepts what she experiences in dreams as another form of reality. Her waking world becomes a schoolroom filled with a new set of choices and probabilities. The lucid dreamer in this story discovers the connection we have with each other no matter what segment of the social ladder they represent. We all have been nasty characters, lonely and depressed individuals that make some really bad choices. The dreamer in this story is surrounded by the anguish of family dynamics and associations that can be considered sleazy and harmfully narcissistic. She begins to understand that she is more than one body and brain in one particular time. She finds another portion of herself living as someone with different skin color, and in a different time period. She realizes that skin color and ethnic backgrounds are choices that produce lesson for soul expansion. She interacts with this particular counterpart, and that connection influences present moment choices for both individuals.

It’s not necessary to believe you are more than one individual in order to be another individual. We are wired that way by our multidimensional soul. We will still function and expand from the action of the soul regardless of our ignorance. Our mission as individuals is to experience our desires and expand from them. We are part of the creative activity I call the soul. The soul doesn’t reincarnate. Reincarnation implies time. The soul creates without time. What we experience and what the character in this story experiences is one incarnation of the many incarnations that the soul expresses for creative expansion.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

The Appearance Of Character

A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the association from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity to their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circumstance, and not of principle. The vice of our leading parties in this country is, that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in 1844. Politics and Politicians haven’t changed much over the last 171 years. America has been kidnapped by its laws and the men that design them. Americans are the fish that follow the bait and never take a bite. The Sharks dressed like legal eagles swoop down and fill the water with their rank undigested disparities.

We have a vote, but we have no idea what or who we vote for. We put faith in God, but God has no vote in a world where truth is covered by a film of flickering fantasies. Our priorities have no position in a system that honors itself more than the people that created it. There is no justice where there is no truth. Truth is locked away in the basement of antiquated beliefs.

Emerson knew what the solution to our political problems were 171 years ago, but he wasn’t a lawyer, judge or politician. He was just a man that knew the truth.

Hence, the less government we have, the better, - the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.

That which all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, - he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favourable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.


Sunday, November 22, 2015

The Force Of Imagination

The concepts that connect and separates people is the power of an idea and the force of imagination.

We find ourselves using the power of our ideas when we discuss patriotism, political affiliations, and family loyalty. We instantly color our world with the force of our imagination and as we do we realize how different our ideas and imagination are. Those aspects of consciousness are highly individualized, but they can be influenced. We fail to see the importance of imagination even though it forms the world we experience as well as the mass world we experience. Imagination changes how we perceive ourselves. The combination of imagination and beliefs structure our subjective experience as well as our objective circumstances.

Thanks to imagination we feel we are part of a plan, but that plan is based on the ideas we have about that plan. Our history and our ideas about our history are formed by the ideas we have in our imagination and we then project them into the physical world. The battle we are experiencing with radical terrorists is a product of their efforts to squeeze their ideas of truth into a framework of beliefs that is too small, and this distorts and bends their beliefs into uncompromising dogmas.

We could say the rapid rise of radical fundamentalism is an over compensation for ideas that have existed in the Western world for centuries. The laws and standards set by the imagination of Westerners are unacceptable within the framework of the distorted beliefs of terrorists. Terrorists believe in an authoritarian religion that must rebel against scientific and religious intellectualism. Terrorist see the world in black and white, good and evil and those associations give the elastic world of Western ideas a foothold in their imagination as they attempt to accept literal interpretations of intuitive realities.

By accepting literal interpretations, the terrorists further limit the channels where their psychic abilities flow. The imagination is creative, so it is always seeking expression. Terrorists would rather believe in man’s sinful nature rather than the fact that every person is inherently good, and an individualized portion of the divine.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

The Cause Of Right

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

Roger Walsh wrote those thoughts in his 1984 book, The Psychology of Human Survival. We live in a world filled with greed, fantasies, misperceptions and fear. We watch those thoughts become real, and we own them. We bring them into our mental laboratory and mix them with our beliefs. The mixture that results from brewing this concoction of thoughts creates perceptions that are hybrids of the truth. But we call them truths, nonetheless.

We like to mix fear with our religious beliefs as well as our political beliefs. We challenge God to take sides while we fantasize and defend how God will act. Collective religious beliefs seasoned with fear and greed are hybrids that are designed to promote power, not faith. Faith is buried under the umbrella of violence and hatred, and “in the name of God” becomes the victory cry. We tear the fabric of faith from God, and attach it to our human misperceptions then we kill to honor those misperceptions.

We like to say we live in a world of hatred and fear. A world where one religion tries to eradicate another in order to worship a just and noble God. Whatever we call that God becomes our war badge, and we use it show our allegiance to the cause of right. But our cause of right has no right. Our cause of right reflects our belief in the religion of fear, not the religion that knows that the cause of right is really self-inflicted torture.

Friday, November 6, 2015

The Caring Game

It is by caring about things that we infused the world with importance. This provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it marks our interests and our goals. The importance that our caring creates for us defines the framework of standards and aims in terms of which we endeavor to conduct our lives.

A person who cares about something is guided, as his attitudes and his actions are shaped, by his continuing interest in it. Insofar as he does care about certain things, this determines how he thinks it important for him to conduct his life. The totality of the various things that a person cares about, together with his ordering of how important to him they are, effectively specifies his answer to the question of how we live.


Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton, wrote those thoughts in his 2004 book, The Reasons of Love. We all infuse the world with elements of importance. But we don’t consider some of the things we care about important because what we care about is overshadowed by the mass cares that are projected into our fragmented reality. We try to conduct our lives caring about what others care about, and, for the most part, we accept our position within that framework as one of the main goals in life.

When we allow the mass cares of our society to trump our own cares, we become pawns in a treacherous game. In that game, our emotions override our insight. We give up a portion of the self, and we allow others to tell what we care about.

We play this caring game in politics, in religion, in social circles, and we even play it within the self. We find the importance of others more appealing than our own importance, and we become desensitized by our lack of self-caring. We live to express the false cares that influence our decision making. We find ourselves electing politicians with hidden or ridiculous agendas, and religious leaders that prey on the fear and the unknown within the psyche.

We play this caring game to learn something about the self. We learn that we are more than one. We live to care and to recognize the duplicity that exists in that one.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Dreams: Another Valid Reality

Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the Darwinian fact’s 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. It was as if one should say “My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery.” We know that they are both: they are made by machinery itself designed to fit the feet with shoes.

Theology need only stretch similarly the design of God. As the aim of a football-team is not merely to get the ball to a certain goal (if that were so, they would simply get up some dark night and place it there), but to get it there by a fixed machinery of conditions: the game’s rules and the opposing players; so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make men and to save them, but rather to get this done through the sole agency of nature’s vast machinery. 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 wrote those thoughts in his 1906 essay, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered. The God word, as James points out, has been used to confirm a vast number of facts and truths. As space exploration continues, the reality of this entity or collections of entities continues to expand in our awareness because of its multiplicity. Awareness is the rudimentary force of being that continues to flow in an endless stream of energy. We physically experience that flow in the boundaries of time and space.

Our mental enzymes function in a focused environment, but they also function in other states of consciousness. There are complex grids and connections in which consciousness finds itself, and in those energy streams awareness expands. One of those energy streams is very active in our dreams.

In dreams, we are absorbed by what we call God. We are also encapsulated by our soul in order to sense the distinct aspects of God. But we don’t believe that we can actually experience God in dreams. Our belief system is distorted by doctrines that serve physical time. Our belief system functions on misinformation in order to make sense of our inability to focus on more than one reality at a time.

But in our dreams we are able to move freely through the stream of energy that touches every aspect of us and some of the aspects of the entity we call God. When we begin to treat dreams as a valid reality, some of the mysteries we take on faith will be revealed for what they are. They are just brief stops on the bank of the stream of energy.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

The Universal Library Of Knowledge And Wisdom

Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Each revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Hasdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind’s power and depravation as what has befallen us.


Emerson wrote those words in his 1841 essay, History. But those words are more than words. They are perceptions that arise from the world of dreams and innate experiences. Emerson believed that everything physical starts as a thought, and he believed those thoughts are rooted in the universal library of knowledge and wisdom.

Most of us don’t believe we are connected to such a place. We like to believe the hall of wisdom is a separate place that we have to earn to enjoy. But both of those beliefs are shaded by the perceptions of men with hidden agendas. Those agendas also originate in the universal library. The universal library is not a place, and we are never separated from it. This sanctuary of thought is a key part of the energy that exists within us. It is one of the actions of consciousness. Consciousness is not a place or one person. It is a characteristic of energy manifesting as thoughts, life forms and things.

We say this conscious wisdom center is universal and it is, but it is constructed individually. Each form of consciousness uses knowledge and wisdom differently in order to expand in awareness. We use Earth as our individual expansion field, and we assume different roles to increase our awareness of our complete self. The self that never left the library of knowledge and wisdom. So nothing is new in our expansion field. All we experience has been experienced before. The only element that is new is our awareness of knowing what we already know, and the wisdom to accept that knowing.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Dream Perceptions Only Become Real When We Remember Them


It is the growing conscious of a new power in the mind, which enabled it to judge things from a new point of view. Ever since the unfoldment of consciousness we have been led to respond to the inner and outer conditions in a certain conceptual and analytical manner. The discipline of Zen consists in upsetting this artificially constructed framework once and for all and in remodeling it on an entirely new basis. The old framework is called Ignorance and the new one Enlightenment.

D.T. Suzuki wrote those perceptions in his 1927 essay, Satori. The word satori means awakening, and it’s safe to say that human consciousness is awakening to the fact that our physical life is divided into two distinct realities. The first reality is our wakeful reality. We experience our perceptions in that reality, and we create an individual sense of worth because of those perceptions.

Everyone sees and feels their reality differently, but we try to blend our individual realities into one big one, and in the process all hell breaks loose. That hell is a combination of perceptions that conflict with each other. The result is a mass reality filled with the aftershocks of our quest to merge perceptions. Perceptions are the fuel that keep the fire of hell burning in our wakeful world.

The second reality that we live physically is the dream reality. In that reality, we don’t merge individual realities and create the fire of hell in our consciousness. We do the opposite in dreams. We experience what some religions call heaven. We travel through different regions of consciousness and absorb the knowledge that floats through all of them.

In dreams, we prepare our wakeful reality for what can come from our perceptions, but we ignore that preparation most of the time. We live the life of the soul in our dreams and celebrate the union that exists within all consciousness. Perceptions in dreams form a different world, and that world is uniquely individualistic. The dream reality is rooted in our individualism, and our physical reality is rooted in our mass perceptions. And the odd thing is, individual dream perceptions only become real to us when we remember them.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

The Ever-Changing Truth Can’t Be Explained

The whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflexion, we assume to mean the simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality, proves hard to understand clearly. There is no simple test available for adjudicating offhand between the diverse types of thought that claim to possess it. Common sense, or corpuscular philosophy, ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical or idealistic philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave some dissatisfaction.

It is evident that the conflict of these widely differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth, for at present we have no definite notion of what the word may mean.


William James in his 1907 essay, Pragmatism and Common Sense gives truth a run for its money. Are the truths we learn really true? Or are those facts and fables loaded with the partial convictions, the prompt associations and the past influences of the people that express them? Our beliefs are filled with these altered truths, and they become pliable in our box of beliefs as that box expands to accept other perceptual truths. We don’t usually dissect the truths in our belief box. We massage them with imaginary confirmations and exalt them with vocal acceptance. They are the foundation for our perceptions and the walls of our reality. These truths we call true cause happiness, pain and uncertainty, and the nature of our physical image changes as they change.

We experience truth in dreams, but we don’t acknowledge that truth. We dream in fables and change experiences in order to rearrange truth in our dreams. We are closer to the truth in dreams, yet we move away from it because it seems foreign and uncomfortable. Our wakeful box of beliefs trumps truth in dreams, and we thank God for that ability. But God is the truth in dreams. We try to disconnect from our dreams because the vision and the feel of God is only available in death, and death, according to our box of beliefs, is the end of life.

In some dreams, we try to empty our box of beliefs, but truth helps us keep those fabricated truths. We keep them because we know our box of beliefs can’t be emptied completely, and the ever-changing truth can’t be explained.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Dabbling In The Expected Unexpected

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance tells us that there is no perfect leader. There is no magnificent deed that will solve our self-created misery. Humans are wired to experience their own creations and the creations of others. Many of those creations are self-serving, ambitious attempts to control the practical force that is within us. We lean and beg for relief from men that serve no one except themselves or men that expect their lineage to be honored regardless of the consequences. We worship the isolationists that yearn to separate rather than discern. We kneel down in front of self-righteous lawmakers that speak of God as if that entity needed to express convictions and confirmations. We follow these basket-weaving charlatans away from the truth and find ourselves deeper in the mud of fear.

We do all these things to feel them with our emotions and our soul. We want to stand on the cliff of fear and then ask for a shared parachute that opens in an array of choices. As we float freely through the contemptuous air, we rearrange our mind’s vacillating baggage that we so desperately want to call real. There is no comfort in our beliefs, no vindication in our methods, but we push them into a consolidated box of perceptions. Our illustrious perceptions renovate our life and expand our soul while we continue dabbling in the expected, unexpected.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Free-Floating Desire

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, The Over-soul addresses the mystery of God in a way that most of us can’t accept because we are tied to the beliefs that restrict our awareness. The God we worship is the God of controlling fables and misinformation. In dreams, we sense the actual creative action, but since God is not an object and doesn't just display one form, we don’t know how to process the behavior of this source of all energy. There are multitudinous levels of consciousness that move freely in the value climate of our psychological reality especially in dreams.

In dreams, we move from region to region in a vast oasis of energy. The oasis is filled with diverse as well as esoteric energy. Dreams move us through one oasis after another in the action of our consciousness. As part of that action, we cross the boundaries of limits and push the throttle of our mind to the sub-floor of all existences, and intermingle with the source of our soul. Our soul expands from what we contribute to it in the vastness of the dream reality. That expansion gives the soul a free-floating desire to continue to expand in the presence of all its counterparts of which we are one.

The expansion is the voice of what we could call God expanding along with the soul. There are no physical emotions, influences or associations attached to that expansion. The only ingredient is the influx of energy freshly brewed from our fire of value fulfillment and desire. That fire is the fueled by the presence of being, and the absence of religious rhetoric and traditional brain-washing.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Body Less Journeys

Do we ever understand what we think? We understand only such thinking as is a mere equation and from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the manner of the intellect. But beyond that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols that are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him from earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche.

It is possible to live the fullest life only when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. It is a question neither of belief nor knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with the primordial images of the unconscious.


Carl Jung the 20th-century Swiss psychiatrist, and founder of analytical psychology wrote those thoughts in his 1936 book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. We only understand the data we perceive. Perceptions are rooted in social and religious data, as well as a plethora of other beliefs, but there are other primordial images that exist within the psyche, and we experience some of them in dreams. Those images may not be in harmony with the ego’s perceptions, but they are in harmony with the various realities we experience in dreams.

We don’t understand what we think in dreams. Dreams are a mishmash of thoughts and experiences that don’t seem real, but they are as real as the experiences we have when awake. When we enter dreams, we have a mission, albeit, a hidden mission. Our mission in dreams is to have experiences while the body consciousness is realigning its energy. These body less experiences give us a chance to “feel” what it is like to function without a body.

We take many journeys without our body. We condition the self to use our physical experiences without being physical, and the result of these journeys is nothing short of amazing. Dreams help us enter realities after we leave the body permanently. Without dreams, we would only know what it’s like to be physical. Dreams remind us what it “feels” like to be eternal.

Sunday, August 9, 2015

In Dreams Consciousness Is The Actor And The Observer

In the beginning, which is really no beginning. The will wants to know itself and consciousness is awakened and with the awakening of consciousness the will is split in two. The one will, whole and complete in itself, is now at once actor and observer. Conflict is inevitable, for the actor now wants to be free from limitations under which he has been obliged to put himself in his desire for consciousness. He has in one sense been enabled to see, but at the same time there is something which he, as observer, cannot see.

D.T. Suzuki the most respected 20th century expert on Far Eastern philosophy wrote those words. Suzuki is talking about the entrance of consciousness into a specific reality. Whenever a reality is entered by consciousness, there are other aspects of consciousness that continue to function in other realities. Dreams are an example of that compound and complex existence. We are all actors in our dreams, and we are also observers. Our consciousness splits into aspects of itself at will. One aspect is free of limitations and another, the observer, wonders why there are no limitations. Both of those aspects of consciousness are aware of every experience as actor and observer, and consciousness absorbs each one. One aspect absorbs the acting role, and the other absorbs the observing role.

If we look at dreams as a reality that has no beginning, we find clues about consciousness itself. We begin to understand that consciousness is not a thing. It is the energy behind all things, and in all things. It is able to form physical elements, and transform the irony within those elements. Consciousness enters dreams and becomes the subject, verb and object as well as the dangling participle that makes no sense but captures all sense. Consciousness forms the physical world and becomes what we want it to be. It is the producer, director, cameraman, writer, actor and audience within that world. It is the main attraction that introduces all other attractions, and we form experiences about it, and within it.

Our consciousness in dreams sets the tone for our physical consciousness. The actor and actors in our dreams give our observing physical consciousness the chance to become an actor that knows that the art of observing is just one role in a series of value-fulfillment achievements in that reality.

Friday, July 31, 2015

Diverse Psychic Enzymes

From the conception the increase, From the increase the thought, From the thought the remembrance, From the remembrance the consciousness, From the consciousness the desire.

From the nothing the begetting, From the nothing the increase, From the nothing the abundance, The power of increasing, The living breath. It dwells with the empty space, and produced The atmosphere which is above us.


Those thoughts come from the Māori, a New Zealand culture that dates back at least 3,200 years. The Māori sensed the power of their subjective consciousness. They developed a story of creation from that sense, and it became a belief. The belief was an expression of their dreaming subjective consciousness. Māori beliefs were expressed through rituals and acts of worship. Acts of worship turned into a religion that could be experienced.

The Māori of New Zealand used their dreams to create their religion. Most religions worship a non-physical entity that originated in the mass subjective consciousness within dreams. The impulse to physically create forms in dreams. When we look at the various beliefs around the world, we realize they are similar because the basic premise comes from the consciousness that exists in the dream world. The basic premise being there is something more to us than our physical being.

Like the atmosphere above us, dream consciousness saturates our perceptions. We don’t recognize that saturation, even though our dreams continue to reinforce our choices. Our choices become the experiences that expand our non-physical personality as it meanders through our dream reality. Creative action expresses itself through our beliefs. All beliefs are rooted in the diverse psychic enzymes that exist in the action of consciousness.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Cornucopias Filled With All Realities

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe, the American writer, poet, editor and literary critic wrote that thought. Our physical life is divided into two very distinct realities. One of them we call real life, and the other we call dreams. We put a lot of effort into our wakeful reality, but our dream reality requires no effort. In order to experience dreams we move our consciousness to another functioning reality. In our dream reality, we experience a world filled with mental enzymes that are not contained in time. We sense the self as it is or will be, but it always remains the same. The self in dreams never dies it just wakes up.

Our awareness in dreams is not governed by rules and structure. Awareness is alive without boundaries, and it expands without regret. Our physical awareness expands as we experience each tick of the clock. We focus on the clock instead of our awareness, and that creates the means to the end we expect but try to avoid. In dreams, there is no end, no clock and no expectations. There is only awareness of other realities that do not conform to our physical expectations.

We enter different dreams each night. Each one a life. Each one filled with awareness. We give ourselves a taste of our world after death and wonder why. Then, we wonder why not. Dreams, like death, is much more than one reality. Dreams and death are cornucopias filled with all realities.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Hidden Difference

I don't take your words merely as words. Far from it. I listen to what makes you talk; whatever that is; and me listen.

Shinkichi Takahashi, one of Japan's most prolific poets, was born in 1901 in the fishing village of Shikoku. His book Triumph of the Sparrows is Dadaism and surrealism poetry at its finest. The self-educated poet knew a lot about words. Words are filled with beliefs, perceptions and emotions. Words are not merely words as Takahashi points out. Words deceive us, relieve us and transform us. They sit in our minds and wait for the opportunity to give us something we need to express or need to know. What makes us use words to talk is the hidden difference that Takahashi called Zen.

Western minds don’t understand the word, Zen. The meaning of Zen is lost in the word. The word, Zen creates conflict, peace and mystery depending on our belief about it. Zen doesn’t exist in the word, but it transforms itself into the word. Zen becomes physical when we think about whatever it is. The word becomes part of us like all words do.

The hidden difference that makes us talk can be blocked by the words we believe to be true. Truth is a word that expresses an association with a belief. That energy is enough to block what we listen to. We only hear the word not what makes it talk.

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

The Game Board

Activity governed by a specific set of rules is a game. This is no to imply that all of our activities are just trivial and frivolous; rather, the word is used with its widest possible connotation: our social activities are games in the sense that they depend upon rules which in turn always rest upon certain distinctions. Draw a distinction between the all-saving God and the all-sin-full man, and this will lead to a rule that man can be saved only by getting in touch with God; this is the Religion Game.

Draw a distinction between valuable success and humiliating failure, and this will lead to a rule that to be valuable one must avoid failure; this is the Competition Game. In a word distinctions lead to rules which in turn form games.

The point of all of this will be glaringly obvious if we now ask a simple question: what happens if we draw inappropriate distinctions? Straightforwardly, an inappropriate distinction can lead to contradictory or paradoxical rules which in turn can lead to self-defeating and frustrating games.

A society built on such self-defeating games is an ideal breeding ground for neuroses and psychoses. That is, the distinction, rules, and games of a society can themselves be concealed contradictions and paradoxes, so that trying to act upon them places the double-bind on us all, for this type of game has rules that insure that we will never win the game!

Ken Wilbur’s 1977 book, Spectrum of Consciousness, explains how our thoughts and beliefs create the game board of life. The distinctions we form within our thoughts and beliefs create the rules of the game.

If our distinctions are inappropriate, the rules can be distorted, but we still believe them to be true. Our distinctions and the perceptions that form from our beliefs dominate our reality.

We would not follow a certain religion if we perceived it to be fake, but the distinction of it being a religion might convince us it is not fake. We get caught in the paradox of conflicting associations that fill our belief structure.

In the game of life, we expand from each distinction and learn from each perception. We tune into our core beliefs and understand the paradox of not understanding. Our beliefs are compounded by objective influences as well as subjective suggestions.

We move through the game board and pass through each moment to feel the value of physical distinctions and the rules that create a game we always win even when we don’t realize we are winning.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Creases Of The Soul

He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine and even early Rome are passing already into fiction.

The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thence forward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London, Paris and New York must go the same way. “What is History,” said Napoleon, “but a fable agreed upon.” This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay.

I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands; the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras in my own mind.


Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1842 essay History. Facts turn into fiction as time moves through our minds. It’s hard to distinguish between fact and fiction because we like to turn fiction into facts. Writers write facts, but those facts are covered in the unique flavor of fiction. Fiction is an assortment of facts turned inside out to express possibilities. Experiences are composed of endless facts. Some of those facts become beliefs; some become lies. We judge facts and label them.

Our beliefs create a snapshot of the reality we call factual, but within our beliefs there are kernels of fictitious growth. Our reality is a mindful experience as well as a physical one. The mindful experience is registered in the creases of the soul. In those creases, fact and fiction are the same. In our physical experience facts rule until they fade into the fiction we call history.

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Slavery To An Unknown Mind

The Chinese world-view depended upon a totally different line of thought than the Western view of a mechanical universe externally ruled by a political Monarch and Creator. The harmonious cooperation of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior authority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were all parts in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic pattern and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own natures. Modern science and the philosophy of organism, with its integrative levels, have come back to this wisdom, fortified by new understanding of cosmic, biological, and social evolution.

Joseph Needham, the British academic was known for his research on Chinese culture. “Needham Grand Question” was why China was overtaken by the West in technology and science despite its early successes. He believed that Taoism and Confucianism played a role in slowing the pace of Chinese scientific discoveries.

Chinese philosophical concepts focused on self-responsibility and unity within the self. The Western world immersed itself in inventive separatism. Western cultures are united in the diversity that exists in fragmented beliefs of others, not in the internal dictates of their own nature.

From our fragmented beliefs, our Western culture developed a system of knowing that was controlled by a force outside of us. This force evolved into a political and judgmental monarch that ruled with a firm external voice of a church. The slightest misstep can cause eternal damnation, but complete compliance means future rewards. These rewards are not specific in nature. They are promises filled with esoteric thought. The rewards and the punishment are self-inflicted, but we believe they are the work of this multi-purpose being that supports approval and vindictiveness.

The Chinese never adopted that philosophy. Hence, their political system is different. Their family structure is different, and the way they perceive their reality and the universe is different. The Chinese system is not better or worse than the Western system. It is a system that allows restricted freedom of mindful self-expression. In Western culture our system promotes slavery to an unknown mind. In China, they recognize the mind.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

The Bond Of True Friendship

Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural of processes of leading, realized in rebus( actuality) and having only this quality in common that they pay. They pay by guiding us into or toward some part of a system that dips at numerous points into sense-precepts, which we may copy mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in the kind of commerce vaguely designated as verification.

Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth, strength etc., are names for other processes connected with life and also pursued because it pays to pursue them. Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.

Our belief that yon thing on the wall is a clock is true already, although no one in the history of the world should verify it. The bare quality of standing in that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true that possesses it, whether or not there be verification.

You pragmatists put the cart before the horse in making truth’s being reside in verification-process. These are merely signs of being, merely our lame way of ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas already has possessed the wondrous quality. The quality itself is timeless, like all essences and natures. Thoughts partake of it directly, as they partake of falsity or of irrelevancy. It can’t be analyzed away into pragmatic consequences.


William James, in his 1907 essay Pragmatism’s Concept of Truth explains how truth is a vacillating concept that forms an energetic response from us. We protect our truths. But what we protect most is the verification of truth. That fact is obvious in the struggle to accept same-sex marriages. Church leaders say there’s no truth in gay and lesbian unions, and they verify their position by quoting the Bible or man-made laws of the church.

The church faithful believe the truth that exists in the Bible. They believe in church laws that claim marriage is for a man and a woman and beliefs become truths. But those truths are verifications of constructed truths, not truths that are innately rooted in consciousness.

We base our lives on truths that are designed by the perceptions of others. We don’t search inside of us and feel the truth of being one with all that exists in this particular time sequence. We are truth advocates, but we allow half-truths to rule our decision making, and we allow them control our choices.

Real truths are innate truths. They are subjective verifications of what we already know to be true. We already know that marriage is not part of a government license. Marriage is a contract between two people that want to share life’s challenges together. Friends of the same sex form similar contracts every day. The contract of marriage takes that bond of true friendship to another level. Marriage is an innate truth, not a religious or political one

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Footprints Of Fools

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.

It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers─ under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.

And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work and I shall know you. Do your work and you shall reinforce yourself.


Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance explains self-responsibility and how easy it is to put it in the hands of others. When we allow the crowd mentality to rule our decision making, our creative expression is lost in the footprints of fools. We become fragments of sensibility in the wind of confusion. Life becomes a tug of war that nobody wins. Our energy waits for approval and as it does it stagnates in the fluids of mass confusion. We float from promise to promise like a leaf that has left the tree of life for a place in the dirt of censored traditions.

Our institutions have become cults that worship greed and irresponsibility. Religions fight each other to gain the favor of a God that has no favorites. Our political system rots in the bowels of lawyers that corrupt the will of the people with the stench of half-truths and fictitious fears. We sit in the pews of terror and see ourselves looking into the mirror of justification and revenge.

The solitude of self-responsibility waits for us to cross the threshold of creativity, and be the housekeeper that is no longer sweeping up the distorted rituals of life. Our solitude brings us in line with our subjectivity where the footprints of fools vanish in the vastness of the art.

Friday, May 1, 2015

The Infinite Mind

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson opened his 1841 essay, History with that statement. The mind is a hidden treasure. We know we have one, but we don’t know where it is. Emerson thought the individual mind is connected to an infinite mind. He said the infinite mind is filled with wisdom, and we tap into that wisdom to produce the knowledge that serves us in our particular time sequence. The infinite mind straddles time sequences and disperses its wisdom as needed. The need for wisdom is created by the sum of its parts. As the knowledge flows through times so does the awareness it brings with it. We capture that awareness in our individual mind and the infinite mind expands in the process.

We could call the infinite mind God, but we don’t, because it has no face, or characteristics that are familiar to us. We could say that mind is inside of God, and that would sound right since that association gives us the comfort of familiarity. So, if that is the case, then Emerson’s thoughts make sense. Everyone has a connection to the mind of God. We all have the ability to tap into the mind of a saint, the genius of an Einstein or the madness that exists from the distorted associations produced by others.

We use our mind to experience the knowledge that has been used in other time sequences by other minds. We just tweak it to conform to our beliefs. We are a whole part of a gestalt that continues to offer us what we want to know, but the issue is, we don’t know what we want to know. Immersed in that paradox, we create experiences, and from them we add more knowledge to the gestalt. But in that process we also add the gestalt to our mind.

Friday, April 24, 2015

The Time Void

The void is what I call the space where everything exists before it is formed. It is as if you had an image in your mind of a figure, and then you carved the figure out of wood. Before the wooden figure emerged, the idea of it was in your thoughts. It is the same with everything that exists; an image of everything exists in the void before it was created. An image is fully formed, including all of its states of change, from its birth to its seeming death, all at the same time.

Fu Hsi, the mythical emperor of China, lived over seven thousand years ago. He created a mathematical model of the universe with all its conditions and changes using 64 six-line figures which he called Kua. We now can these figures hexagrams. His knowledge was put in a Chinese book known as the I Ching

Two hundred years ago, German mathematician Joseph Leibnitz created a numerical system containing zeros and ones. That system is known as the binary system. The binary system is the language of computers. At some point, Leibnitz read a copy of the I Ching, and he started to compare Fu His lines with his binary system. When he substituted his zeros and ones for the broken and unbroken lines of the ancient Chinese system, they were identical. The language that computers use today was around over seven thousand years ago, but it was in a different form.

The point of the story is; nothing is new. Wisdom has a way of re-inventing itself into knowledge that fits the energy expressing it in a particular moment in time. If Fu Hsi came up with his version of computer language at his moment in time, it also was used before his time in a different way. The stories of primitive man may be only one story of human evolution. Other stories of man’s incredible creations existed thousands upon thousands of years ago if we measure them using time.

As Fu Hsi points out, all those creations existed in a non-physical form before they were physical. Creation is a simultaneous act of energy that expresses more than the sum of its parts. Other parts exist in a reality where time has no meaning. Those parts are the action of an infinite consciousness that moves through the time void and expresses awareness.

Friday, April 17, 2015

The Noble Lie

God fills everyone’s soul with gold, silver, and iron, but the working man and the farmer’s soul has less of those elements, so the ruler’s soul was the guardian.

Plato described the concept of the Noble Lie that way. Plato, the illustrious Greek philosopher, wrote about the Nobel Lie in his work The Republic. He developed the theory of the Noble Lie to bring awareness to the separatism that existed between the rulers and the common people. The rulers controlled the beliefs of the people, and they used that perceived truth to get what they wanted at the expense of the people they served.

The Noble Lie has gone through a metamorphosis through the years; political and religious leaders don’t use gold, silver and iron as the ingredients to control the masses these days. They use money, half-truths and bigotry to get what they want, when they want. Nothing is more sacred to them than the reincarnated Noble Lie.

The world is divided. Fragments of the Noble Lie seep through every political system in the world. The moral compass of confused nations point toward religious tyranny, which is a form of political bunkum that is arranged and tucked neatly in the arms of a perceived creator.

In every lie, there is a hidden truth. A nugget of awareness that opens the door of choices. We can change the Noble Lie, to the Noble Truth, but we have to understand it first. We must see that we are a part of it. A big part of it. Because we are a big part of it, we have the ability to identify the half-truths and transform them. We can direct the money toward the Noble Good, and make it work for the will of the people. We can accept the bigotry and switch it to informed discernment, which is the right of acceptance within the freedom of diversity.

Our political and religious rulers are our creations. We can mold them into a unified, just and forward thinking group if we bury the Noble Lie in the sand of complete awareness. The complete awareness of who we are and how we are connected.

Friday, April 10, 2015

The Wise Silence

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the Eternal One.

And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in any hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1841 essay The Over-Soul. Emerson believed that the soul spreads itself into this time-space reality and then experiences life in a variety of human forms. He understood that everything is related, and we are part of the whole that connects all consciousness. The wise silence that injects us with the energy we project into this reality has limitless boundaries and infinite ways to express those boundaries. The nature of the force we call God is whole in every part of consciousness, and part of every whole of consciousness. We do see our world in pieces, but each piece represents a whole part of the wise silence within it.

Emerson started the 19th century Transcendental Movement to bring that message to the religious righteous of his era. He believed the consciousness within the consciousness of Christ was the catalyst within all of us. All consciousness has wise silence and the impetus to express it. But we express our inner silence in different ways in order to feel the different values within it. Value Fulfillment is a path of knowing. We learn how to listen to our wise silence as we add value to our life. Within that value is the chatter of other parts of our soul.

Friday, April 3, 2015

The Infinite Point Of Now

The conventional self is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I’m doing now.

I am also what I have done and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost the more real “me” than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is.


Alan Watts, the British philosopher, wrote that those thoughts in his 1957 book The Way of Zen. We find ourselves in a conundrum when it comes to knowing who we are. We are the past and we do celebrate parts of it, but we also vilify other parts based on our selective memory of our experiences. We are the present as we piece together perceptions that define our now, but those perceivable pieces vacillate through several experiences. The pieces don’t stop moving until we look back at them.

We are the future. Our future is the unexplainable now that waits for us to move through the duration of objects until we reach the pinnacle of our projections. When we reach that pinnacle, it changes to the present, but the present becomes the past, as we stand in the now. We are part of an elastic reality that jets us through the energy of consciousness. This energy deposits us in the infinite point of now. We never leave the now or the memory of our memory of it in the future.

Friday, March 27, 2015

Perceptions

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception.

David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, wrote those thoughts in his 1741 work Treatise of Human Nature. Hume is explaining an acute action of the mind when he talks about perceptions. Perceptions can be truths as well as untruths, but we accept them all as facts. They become a piece of our knowing. We use perceptions to dissect our experiences. In that regard, they become influences that direct our emotional and physical behavior. Perceptions rule our actions, and we wait for confirmation from others to continue those actions.

Actions are our direct response to perceptions. Action is energy, so our perceptions are filled with the power of energy. We can build, destroy and complicate situations using a single perception. That perception will linger in our brains until another one enhances it or replaces it. Changing perceptions is not easy. We guard our knowledge even if it has been tainted by faulty associations and influences. We have been taught to be right, and think right, so we rely on our perceptions to confirm our conformity. We even mold our perceptions, so they conform to the perception of others. Their vision of right influences our vision, even when their vision is colored with emotions and fear.

We don’t travel inside of our perceptions and see the infinite field of choices within the mind. We usually pick one or two choices and live them. But this infinite field inside the mind is where realities are molded. It is where the self projects the self into every physical scenario. When we begin to observe the self within our perceptions, the perceptions change. We sense more of who we are. Our cognate sense begins the action that guides our perceptions and the choices within them.

Friday, March 20, 2015

Imagined Dreams

The path of experience is nowhere settled. There is no one road that does not have avenues to another. There are deep veins of probable actions ever available to you at any given time. Your imagination can be of great value, allowing you to open yourself to such courses; you can then use it to help you bring these into being.

In your mind see those probable abilities or events taking place. As you do, the intensity of your desire brings them into your experience. There are no boundaries set about the self.


Jane Roberts wrote those thoughts in her book, The Unknown Reality. Imagination is a powerful tool. In our imagined dreams, the world and the elements within it are moving toward a preconceived goal. We imagine life as it can be, not what it is. We sense our power-based laws falling into a pit of contempt, and the lawmakers that enforce them are dripping with the sap of self-incriminating Botox. The boundaries of the mindless power merchants are shrinking in fact-less fiction. And as they do, the individuals within us become responsible for these self-created dreams.

In these imagined dreams, we are responsible for creation. The laws within these dreams conform to several roads that drift in and out of probable actions. We accept each road and follow every course until a beacon shines in the inner sanctuary of peaceful realism. In that sacred place, we live to imagine more, and we dream endlessly to become what we are.

What we are in these dreams is just a spark in the fire of time-motivated, truthful proficiencies. These innocuous truths signal nothing, but another stop in the endless journey to feel the moral and immoral actions of our soul.

Friday, March 13, 2015

Sneerful Insanity

Life is a series of punctuated conscious moments. Much like the frames of a motion picture on a reel passing through a projector create an image and then vanish, our awareness of life also passes from instant to instant.

Every action we take involves this kind of on-off movement. Each time we raise an eyebrow in incredulity, or flare our nostrils in a sneer, a large number of mental events occur. As we listen to an untrustworthy politician's speech, not all of our neurons, muscle fibers, skin patched, and nerve endings want to go along to produce our incredulous sneer.

In a society of sneerers, your sneer is expected. You have learned well how to sneer. You have watched your peers sneer. You have learned just how to hold your head, to flare your nostrils, and to condescend. The society of sneerers could conceivably encompass a whole country! In such a country perhaps sneering becomes an accepted, expected norm, and if we lived in that country perhaps our normal expression would be sneerful. Thus our faces become the face of a nation. Not only that, but our way of speaking may be shaped by our faces, our expressions literally shaping the very way we utter a word.

What would have to occur to create a shift from a sneer to a grin? Simply awareness and intent would do it.

Fred Alan Wolf Ph.D. wrote those thoughts. We live in a world of duplicity. A world where associations like right and wrong, good and bad influence our beliefs in one way or another. We want to be on the side of right and good, but as we work toward those goals, we find those associations have elements of bad and wrong interlaced in them.

There is a sneer in our laughter and pride in our prejudice. We travel the road to justice on a broken wagon filled with past expectations. Our sense of comradery is infused with morsels of doubt, and our vindictiveness is salted with a beaker of remorse.

We forget that this world is a fraction of our life and snippet of our purpose. We treat our emotional wounds with the ointment of redundancy and heal in the arms of our sneerful democracy. We do all of this to feel our sneers, our laughter and our beliefs. We are purpose- filled warriors. We fight to do what we do never knowing what we are doing. And in the final act of surrender, we sneer at love and then fall in love with the sneerful insanity of it all.

Friday, March 6, 2015

Enlightenment

Enlightenment we can thus see is an absolute state of mind in which no ‘discrimination’ takes place and it requires a great mental effort to realize this state of viewing all things ‘in one thought.’

In fact, our logical as well as practical consciousness is too given up to analysis and ideation; that is to say, we cut up given realties into elements in order to understand them; but when they are put together to make the original whole, its elements stand out too conspicuously defined, and we do not view the whole ‘in one thought.’

And as it is only when ‘one thought’ is reached that we have enlightenment, an effort is to be made to go beyond our relative empirical consciousness, which attaches itself to the multitudinosity and not to the unity of things.


D.T. Suzuki, the 20th century’s most well-known authority on Zen, wrote those thoughts in his essay Enlightenment and Ignorance. Our practical consciousness takes us on a journey that has many stops. These stops are filled with thoughts. We don’t always know what we think since there is a confused state of awareness between the stops.

We call these stops experiences in our reality, and we use them to touch the enlightenment within them. Enlightenment is the vacillating, indescribable fence that contains all the stops and experiences within the action of consciousness. Enlightenment is not a thing or a place. Enlightenment can’t be taught or lost. It can’t be bartered or sold. But it can be the action we sense as our practical consciousness adjusts to the speed of no-thought.

How we reach and sense, this action of consciousness is our choice. We don’t need to meditate or run off to a monastery and fast for life. But what we must do is accept our self as a whole part of the whole of consciousness where enlightenment freely roams.

Friday, February 27, 2015

The Hour Without Minuteness

The hour is striking so close above me,

So clear and sharp,

That all my senses ring with it.

I feel it now: there’s a power in me

To grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real

Without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

And they come towards me, to meet and be met.


Rilke wrote the Book of Hours between 1899 and 1903. The book was published in 1905, and the poem above is the first poem in the section called The Book of a Monastic life.

Rilke’s message is a simple but complex one to understand. The hour Rilke talks about has been the topic of religious discussions for centuries. Is the hour real, and is our beholding of it real? The answer lies in our becoming.

Becoming is an interesting thought. We are becoming in awareness. A veil is being lifted from our senses, and our minds ring with the creative act of feeling. The realness of the moment is reinforced by the hour striking our perceptions. Time mails the envelope of sanity to a grave-site, and the postmark on its face is stamped with the memory of an hour. The hour without minuteness is buried within the hours. Those hours scream for more until our becoming pulls on the faceless hands of hours and we feel the power. That feeling ripens the hour of that which we already are.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Our Religious Wave

The notion that somebody literally made the world─ that is what is known as artificialism. It is the child’s way of thinking: the table is made, so somebody made the table. The world is here, so somebody must have made it.

There is another point of view involving emanation and precipitation without personification. A sound precipitates air, then fire, then water and earth─ and that’s how the world becomes.

The whole universe is included in this first sound, this vibration, which then commits all things to fragmentation in the field of time. In this view, there is not someone outside who said, “Let it happen.”


Joseph Campbell shared those thoughts with Bill Moyers and then wrote them in his book The Power of the Myth. We do make God in our image. Then we say, he made our world and everything in it. He made the universe and all universes, but we don’t really understand the how and the why of all those makings. God is the be all and do all in our two-thousand-year-old religious wave. If we buck the wave, we buck God. God didn’t say that. Our religious leaders said it for him, her or it.

We talk to God in prayers and with our positive intentions, but God doesn’t always give us the answer we expect. We don’t usually expect much since our religious wave has us covered in sin. Sin is another myth made by men who profess to know what God wants. Obviously God doesn’t want. He has made everything according to our religious wave.

But, as Campbell points out, all this fuss about God is just that. The makings, the fixings and the sin are all man-made myths to make the wave hit the shore of artificialism. There is a better definition of God. God is the eternal expansion of awareness through individual consciousness. Every form of consciousness is expanding in awareness. The universe, the world, man, animals, insects, the air, space and so on. Everything is and has consciousness. Consciousness is the infinite energy within energy. The religious wave has hit the shore of artificialism, but it is in the process of expanding the awareness of its individual consciousness.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

The Nest Of Angels

Jonathan Seagull spent the rest of his days alone, but he flew away out beyond the Far Cliffs. His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.

He learned more each day. He learned that a stream-lined high-speed dive could bring him to find the rare and tasty fish that schooled ten feet below the surface of the ocean; he no longer needed fishing boats and stale bread for survival. He learned to sleep in the air, setting a course at night across the offshore wind, covering a hundred miles from sunset to sunrise. With the same inner control, he flew through heavy sea-fogs and climbed above them into dazzling clear skies . . . in the very times when every other gull stood on the ground, knowing nothing but mist and rain. He learned to ride the high winds far inland, to dine there on delicate insects.

What he had once hoped for the flock, he now gained for himself alone; he learned to fly and was not sorry for the price he had paid. Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom, fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thoughts, he lived a long fine life indeed.


Richard Bach opened the eyes of readers back in 1970 when Jonathan Livingston Seagull was published. Opening our eyes and seeing is a morning task that starts another day, but we rarely see the beauty of within that task. We are so immersed in the influences and associations of previous days we fail to fly solo as we wake and address each new day. Our sense of beauty is a diluted form of reality where conformity covers our inner awareness.

Paying attention to the creative act of opening our eyes can start a process of knowing that usually waits between the dark shadows of fear. If we pull ourselves out of our fixated bed and wash the cobwebs of objective intoxication from our thoughts, we begin to sense the art of flying. We fly solo into the far reaches of consciousness and we intermingle with clouds of wisdom. We see and sense what we never see as we open our eyes each morning.

Absorbing that wisdom is our birthright. It is our badge of connected individuality. It is the birthplace of the soul and the nest of angels.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

The Consciousness Of No Mind

Zen is what makes the religious feeling run through its legitimate channel and what gives life to the intellect. Zen does this by giving one a new point of view of looking at things, a new way of appreciating the truth and beauty of life and the world, by discovering a new source of energy in the inmost recesses of consciousness and by bestowing on one a feeling of completeness and sufficiency.

That is to say, Zen works miracles by overhauling the whole system of one’s inner life and opening up a world hitherto entirely undreamt of. This may be called a resurrection. And Zen tends to emphasize the speculative element, though confessedly it opposes this more than anything else in the whole process of spiritual revolution, and in this respect Zen makes use of phraseology belonging to the sciences of speculative philosophy.


D.T. Suzuki in his book, Practical Methods of Zen Instruction is explaining Zen in terms we Westerners can understand. The word Zen is used to describe all sorts of acts, things and situations these days, but most of us don’t really understand what Zen really is or how it works. Suzuki spent his lifetime teaching Buddhist philosophy, and is still regarded as the 20th century's most knowledgeable professors of Zen Doctrine. He called his some of his work "The Doctrine of No Mind.”

We all have Zen and the qualities that display its energy. In fact, Zen is creative energy. The Western word for Zen is consciousness or in religious terms, the soul. Consciousness encompasses all things, so Zen is in all things. When we allow the ego to blend with our subjective consciousness, we are in the state of Zen. However, Zen is not a state; it is the awareness of being one with all things.

The dilemma we face is how do we achieve the blending of our ego and our subjective consciousness or soul? Mediation has been used for centuries to achieve this euphoric awareness, but meditation is not the only way to sense the wholeness of Zen. The main way we can be in the zone of wholeness is to allow consciousness to express itself through the ego.

Our consciousness is energy, and it is always expanding. Zen is the creative action of the soul. There is no mind and no ego in Zen; we do without doing. Do without doing means, there is only the energy of creative oneness in our physical actions.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Conscious Objects

Some people look at their lives and think something like this: "Oh God, what did I live for? Isn't it terrible that I'm going to die? Life was black when it started, bleak when I was here, and it's going to be black again when life ends! What's it all for?" In my view, this blackness and despair has been designed into God's system.

We may not completely believe or even remember this design in this moment, but we have actually created all of it. The "me" that created it is not the person, the personality that identifies itself as Fred, or Martha, or Sam- that's not that person I am speaking about. It's the greater essence of "I," this deeper presence, the working of consciousness itself that is in me, in you, in everyone. That I, working through this body, is the same I that is reflected in the archetypal images of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Krishna, all of whom remind us, and continue to remind us, of our true essence. These beings are reflections or representations of our own identification with our greater, deeper I self.


Fred Alan Wolf wrote those thoughts in his book Dr. Quantum's Little Book of Big Ideas. He has a point. We bring negativity into our lives in order to learn from it. Without contrast, there would be no growth. We do live in a self-created reality filled with duplicity of consciousness. Everything in this reality is measured in the consciousness of time. Time is the duration of objects. Without the consciousness of time, there would be no objects. Objects must be surrounded by the consciousness of space to exist in this reality. Time and objects become one consciousness just like the self that creates and the self that experiences.

We create the life we experience to expand the consciousness of our soul or the “I” Dr. Wolf uses as a reference. We create conscious objects that conflict in order to achieve expansion. Sameness in religion, spirituality, and blended preferences are ego-driven attempts to override the intentions of the “I.” In order to expand our consciousness and the consciousness that exists around us, we must express the highs and the lows of being human. The only perfection is the non-perfection and constant expansion of the consciousness we call our internal “I.”

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Eternal Wizardry

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket and the naked Indian whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows a little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory, libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christians?


Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay Self-Reliance shakes the cobwebs out of our over-the-top mind quest to have more and to be more. We believe that our beliefs are the only thoughts that count in our ascension to the unknown land of eternal wizardry. We fail to see the eternal wizardry of being content in the moment. We cast our ego into the storm of materialistic chauvinistic racism. >br>
Our politicians flounder in a sea of narrow-minded righteousness, and our religious gurus continue to battle the Satan created by their separatist teachings. We float in a mass of soggy mental seaweed, and can’t sense the floor of knowing that the seaweed uses for nourishment. We blame others for sickness and criticize the system for holding us captive in a senseless dream we created for ourselves.

All this self-created contrast justifies our existence. All the pain we inflict on our self and others verifies our search for awareness. All the hatred we fling on the tips of our verbal arrows becomes boomerangs for the non-physical energy. Non-physical energy is creative activity, and it expands from the experiences of its counterparts. As a counterpart of non-physical energy, emotionally experience in order to sense the eternal expansion of consciousness.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

The Merry-Go-Round Of Objectively Painted Circumstances

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception.

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, wrote those thoughts in his 1741 work Treatise of Human Nature. Hume does make us sit up and take notice of what we really do all day long. We fill our lives with perceptions that stem from beliefs, associations, and influences. One perception leads to another. We find our self on a merry-go-round of objectively painted circumstances that scream for some attention. Soothing our desire to function as taught, we sift through our circumstances and color them with a judgmental brush.

That judgmental brush is filled with the separatism that lurks under the covers of our religious righteousness. For the last two thousand years, we have experienced a religious wave, which infiltrates every fiber of our ego. We battle each other in the name of an almighty being that we created in our likeness. The battle rips us into segmented apostles that claim victory while we impose pain on those who do the same to us.

The merry-go-round of our circumstances is showing us that religion, as we know it, is reinventing itself. Religion in the very near future will not be a separated perception where the just kill the just. It will be a unified enabler. Our faith in the supreme will be accented by our self-awareness, and our perceptions of life will change. That change will not be just about religion, politics and values. It will be first and foremost about the nature of our consciousness.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

A Carp Scientist

When I was a child, I used to visit the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. I would spend hours fascinated by the carp, who lived in a very shallow pond just inches beneath the lily pads, just beneath my fingers, totally oblivious to the universe above them.

I would ask myself a question only a child could ask: what would it be like to be a carp? What a strange world it would be! I imagined that the pond would be an entire universe, one that is two-dimensional in space. The carp would only be able to swim forwards and backwards, and left and right. But I imagined that the concept of “up”, beyond the lily pads, would be totally alien to them. Any carp scientist daring to talk about “hyperspace”, i.e. the third dimension “above” the pond, would immediately be labeled a crank.

I wondered what would happen if I could reach down and grab a carp scientist and lift it up into hyperspace. I thought what a wondrous story the scientist would tell the others! The carp would babble on about unbelievable new laws of physics: beings who could move without fins; beings who could breathe without gills; beings who could emit sounds without bubbles. I then wondered: how would a carp scientist know about our existence? One day it rained, and I saw the raindrops forming gentle ripples on the surface of the pond. Then I understood.

The carp could see rippling shadows on the surface of the pond. The third dimension would be invisible to them, but vibrations in the third dimensions would be clearly visible. These ripples might even be felt by the carp, who would invent a silly concept to describe this, called “force.” They might even give these “forces” cute names, such as light and gravity. We would laugh at them, because, of course, we know there is no “force” at all, just the rippling of the water.

Today, many physicists believe that we are the carp swimming in our tiny pond, blissfully unaware of invisible, unseen uni- verses hovering just above us in hyperspace. We spend our life in three spatial dimensions; confident that what we can see with our telescopes is all there is, ignorant of the possibility of 10 dimensional hyperspace. Although these higher dimensions are invisible, their “ripples” can clearly be seen and felt. We call these ripples gravity and light. The theory of hyperspace, however, languished for many decades for lack of any physical proof or application. But the theory, once considered the province of eccentrics and mystics, is being revived for a simple reason: it may hold the key to the greatest theory of all time, the Theory of Everything.


Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist specializing in the String Theory. He also teaches at NYU and the City College of New York. Kaku’s carp story is food for thought. He opens a door of possibilities, and we step into it. We find ourselves up to our waist in questions, but we are scared to answer them. We use our familiar life-line of beliefs to reassure us that Kaku and others like him are crossing into sacred territory without a permit. But, when we think outside of our religious beliefs, we realize there’s nothing sacred about our quest to know what life means and how we function in spite of our ignorance.

Our ritualistic blinders are tight. We pull the covers of religion over our heads and hope the talk of other universes and realities goes away. The best, we want to offer our inquisitive mind, is faith. The faith that God will stand firm and show us his truth. The interesting fact, we all miss, is God does show us his truth every time we expand or tweak our beliefs. In the awareness of that expansion, lies the face of God. God’s face is our face expanding in the experience of living in the magnification of our pond of beliefs.

Monday, January 12, 2015

Balance Of Power

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken.

Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket and the naked Indian whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength.


Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay Self-Reliance digs a deep trench in the synapses in our brains. We are on a three-dimensional balance of power roller coaster that takes us for a ride up the hills of renewal and deposits us in valleys of fear. We are lock in sidecars of doubt and are covered with the inconsistencies of religious politics. We ride and ride until brakes of awareness throw us in another cryptic moment. We are educated ignoramuses that reject anything that conflicts with our judgmental and conforming complacency.

The valleys of fear shroud us in sameness and transform us with bitterness. We blame our difficult adjustments not on choices, but on our associations. Our influences blind us from seeing the ruin of self-responsibility. Skin color and religion defines us and hatred brands us. Our self-created dilemmas confuse us and power separates us. We are sinking in worship, and we are drowning in rituals that make little sense.

We battle brothers and sisters and exile them in shame. The quest for power drains our ambitions and control sentences us to distasteful compliance. Ambiguous amelioration comes from the surrender of power, and we label our position free. The health of our nation is being siphoned off by the organized idiosyncrasies of government and the money-hungry vultures that banter in isolation.

The balance of power is skewed by subtle domination. Our physical and mental health is compromised by our irrational push against our innate wisdom. All these issues create the expansion we need for change and change we will in spite of our egotistical shenanigans. The balance of power roller coaster doesn’t stop at the top for long, and it always rises from the valleys as it reaches the continuous straight line of soulful expansion.

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Creative Activity

To be of the Earth is to know

The restlessness of being a seed

The darkness of being planted

The struggle toward the light

The pain of growth into the light

The joy of bursting and bearing fruit

The love of being food for someone

The scattering of your seeds

The decay of the seasons

The mystery of death

And the miracle of birth.


John Soos wrote that poem. How incredible it is to see how the Earth displays different elements of its consciousness. Like the Earth, we all go through the stages of life and death every day. Ideas are born each minute, and some of them die in the stream that leads to other probabilities. Ideas are seeds, and the mind is the soil that nourishes them. The impetus for growth lies in the conviction of our choices, and the water for continued growth is our desire to experience what we believe.

We fear the mystery of death, but there is no mystery in that act of renewal. We prepare our self for death when we dream. We see our self in those dreams as clearly as we feel our self in this wakeful world. There are miracles in every choice and desire in every thought. We know not the face of creation, but we live to create every moment. In those creations lies the face of our soul. The creative activity we call the soul brings us face to face with God, and we wonder why.

The wonder of decaying seasons lies in the rubble of our forgetfulness. Our past sit there and wait for another creative act that sparks our zest for expansion. In that expansion we feel the glory of being one with the Earth, with the seeds, and with creativity activity we call the soul.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Grateful

A Spark Of Gratefulness

Lights The Eternal Presence

An Act Of Peacefulness

Brings Love To Separation

The Glow Of Thank You

Magnifies A World

Of Beauty