A Step Back:
Table of Contents:
Preface
I. A Mindset Change Is Needed
II. The Semantic Reality and the Ego
III. The Problem That Is Religion
IV. Taking a Step Back On Religion
V. Taking a Step Back On Science
VI. Reality Reexamined
VII. The Veil
VIII. How It Works (Or at least my best conclusions)
IX. Lifting the Veil
X. The Indians
XI. The Mandela Effect
XII. Where Do We Go From Here?
Preface:
I am noticing there are many people such as myself who have some insight into the problem that is reality. They know something is not quite right, but they cannot put their finger on it. Much has been written about it since time immemorial. The issue and the answers are reflected in art, music, poetry, and prose, but the knowledge and information is spread out, so although it is accessible, very few sources exist that make the attempt to put it together into one binder. If there is any good that will come from writing this book, it will be to compile the collection of applicable thoughts into one work. Not to serve as any sort of definitive work, but as a springboard for the reader to continue his or her own pursuits. Also, to try and bring the subjects into popular discussion, as my experience is popular culture, with regards to philosophy and science, is still clinging to paradigms that were left behind by the free thinkers at least 140 years ago.
When you go on a journey, upon your return people want to know where you went and what you did. Typically people take pictures, perhaps videos, and frequently they’ll bring back presents for family and friends. When you go on a journey to other realms of existence, how do you prove this to anyone? You can’t take pictures. There are no presents to distribute. And unless you are a very advanced entity, you cannot take your friends to show them. All you can relay to others is what you experienced.
What you can do as an actionable pursuit is relay to them the mindset and the awareness that will be required of them to be able to explore for themselves. Nothing opens someone’s mind like seeing something for themselves. If a picture is worth a thousand words, an experience must be worth thousands of words. As is often said, once seen, you cannot “unsee” something. You can explain it away, or you can choose to ignore it, but it is in your collection of experiences once it has transpired. Others can tell you you’re misremembering, or hallucinating, but your experiences are your own. There is no need to listen to anyone trying to maintain you didn’t actually experience something. If your direct experience makes them uncomfortable, that says more about them than it does about you.
I dare say the majority of humans in the western world consider the “real” world as that which they can sensed with their five physical senses, and everything not capable of being sensed directly by the five senses is open to debate. In order to promote a common understanding, I offer the physical universe, which I will refer to as “physicality”, is that which is cable of being sensed (made knowable) by either the five standard senses or their proxies, i.e. instrumentation. Instrumentation is to include anything fabricated and utilized to extend the range of the senses for the gathering of information beyond what the senses are typically capable of. Instrumentation thus acts as a proxy for the five senses in order to extend their ranges. Science operates within the boundaries of the physical universe for the most part. Anything that is not contained within the physical universe is considered to be nonexistent in the strictly physical sense. That which is not found within the as-defined physical universe is considered to be unknowable, because only that which can be demonstrated to others via the tools, within the boundaries, is considered “real” and only that which is “real” is knowable. It is one thing to consider what you cannot perceive with your five senses or their proxies as unknown, but it is quite another to consider what you cannot know with your five senses or their proxies as nonexistent. This is important. If you research modern quantum mechanics you can see the researchers within their conclusions clinging desperately to physicality.
If one is seeking to see behind the veil, one must first see the veil, no? If you have been seeing through it a bit, catching glimpses of movement behind it, this book may help by pointing out the contours of the veil itself. I am not suggesting you do what I have done, but it has worked for me. Some people who know me might have their doubts, as in spite of my efforts I have allowed myself to get pulled down into the mud excessively at times, but I have succeeded for the most part. During my early life I was given many clues and insights, to the point it became inescapable to conclude I was being allowed to see and experience little bits of the truth behind the veil. I decided in my late teens to formalize the process and had a conversation with All-That-Is. It went something like this: “God, thank you for showing me these things. As I am infinitely curious, so I am going to ask questions of you and trust in the answers. I will make every effort to trust the answers regardless of whether or not they fit into my current ideas and beliefs. I am asking you to remain within my awareness at all times.”
Be aware much of this is not original with me. I have asked the universe questions, and these are the answers, insights, and intuitions I have received. I borrow heavily from the works of others, and I have tried to give them credit within the body of the work and within the footnotes.
There is a strong possibility I may be writing this book for myself as much as for any help it may be to someone else. As I research and ask questions, the universe continues to throw answers my way. Writing has driven me to recapitulate my experiences to date, which has gone a long way towards providing context and structure. I continually have to edit to accommodate the increasing breadth of experience and understanding, as it feeds on itself, more understanding leading to more realization, leading to more avenues to explore.
I will sometimes refer to this reality we find ourselves in as “the reality”. I will also from time to time refer to it as “the construct”. I am not speaking of only the physical world, but also including the mind/thinking/awareness that influences it and supports it and the collective, shared consciousness. I will often use the term “the narrative”, which is the current paradigm of physicality and the mental gymnastics required of people to keep themselves convinced physical reality is primary and completely objective. “The narrative” is what seeks to keep our attention anchored to this construction by creating continual necessities and distractions.
I will from time to time make statements and assert truths and facts without offering anything in the way of evidence or references. If you wish to consider me a hopelessly arrogant know-it-all, so be it. I make no claims of being a sage or a savior. I have no desire or intention to mentor specific individuals with their own quest. My intent is to present what I have learned and experienced so the reader may gain some insight and see through the construction a bit more, to cast enough doubt into them so they start to question the nature of the construction at a fundamental level. If there was one seed to plant at this time, it would be to resist believing in anything without the benefit of close examination and consideration, and where there is doubt, to default to your personal experience.
As I will get into later, the name of God, whether it be God, Allah, Father, Jehovah, Yahweh, Brahman, Shiva, All-That-Is, The Light, The Law, Source, etc., matters not. I am not interested in semantically driven division. It is silly and counterproductive. In deference to the times we live in, I am warning you I am going to refer to All-That-Is as male. If you prefer to refer to All-That-Is as female, please feel free to do so. It is completely a semantic tool of convention and there is no intent to make any sort of statement regarding gender. Gender is baked into the cake in the romance languages, but we have to use the tools at our disposal.
I will also from time to time use verses from various religious texts, or quote some well known author in order to make or illustrate a point. Please be aware this does not mean I necessarily take the texts as truth in their entirety, nor do I make any statements that I consider any one body of work as a complete and unwavering truth. I take the texts as semantic representations generated by inspired humans, and therefore subject to all the errors and colors bestowed by their semantic filters.
I will, out of necessity and convention refer to ‘spiritual’ with words that imply separation and direction. These are driven by semantics and I do not like the terms, as they are colored with all manner of misleading insinuation. We live in a semantically conveyed construction and there is no working around it.
So, if we quit taking the reality at face value, if we start to suspend our agreement and consider other explanations, where does that lead us?
Let’s go exploring.
I. A Mindset Change Is Needed
Why “A Step Back”? The title has to do with a perspective. It is not uncommon for humans to become too close to an issue to be able to see it clearly. The closeness prevents a gaining of perspective. In order to gain perspective it is necessary to step back, to get a wider view. The distance enhances context. You can see the issue as it relates to the larger scheme. This book is written in the spirit of providing a broader perspective, to take “A Step Back”, if you will. I would like the opportunity to examine many aspects of the reality we find ourselves in and question many of the assumptions that may be considered as true and unassailable. It seems intuitively obvious there is but one reality, yet we see at least two major subdivisions. One is defined by modern science and one is defined by religion. It is not a stretch to say there are points of contention between the two. Adherents of each argue for their perspective and point at the other with contempt.
Most people are born into the world and accept the world at face value. They accept the world as “here”, and everything else is “out there”. They are focused on this world, “tuned” to it, so to speak. Their orientation is strong enough that what they perceive directly is “real” and that which they cannot see or touch directly is “not real”. Looking up the definition of “real” Webster’s College Dictionary yields, “Actual rather than imaginary, ideal, or fictitious”, “Genuine, authentic”. There are other definitions, but they all allude to the same idea, which is something must physical to be “real”. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense of “physical” as: “Of or pertaining to material nature, as opposed to the psychical, mental, or spiritual” “As opposed” meaning of course things not physical are “not real”. This is the basis for the philosophy of Materialism. I am going to pick on Materialism because it is currently the prevailing philosophy among the general population.
Per Wikipedia, “Materialism is a form of philosophical monism that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions”. Materialism (also known as Physicalism) is thought to have gained a popular foothold somewhere around 500 BCE. Western thought developed the scientific method somewhere around the 13th century. This led to the popular view that the world is physical and therefore everything springs from the physical, and the physical is always reducible into its constituent basic parts, at which point it is not longer reducible, but fundamental. Stated another way, everything that is knowable can be gleaned as long as the mechanism is disassembled sufficiently and the processes of the interactions of the component parts and materials are understood. This process has a name, and that name is Reductionism.
You can see this stream of thought running through our current western culture. Reductionist thinking seeks to reduce everything to the smallest irreducible part. If you understand everything down to the smallest part, you have reduced the universe to the concept of a large machine, a clock perhaps. Since the overarching theme is physicality, the end result of Reductionist thinking is the fundamental particle. The scientists of our day are constantly looking for particles to explain everything. There’s the Higgs boson particle that supposedly transfers the property of mass to other particles. Light is supposedly composed of photons, and gravity is transferred via the graviton. Everything is particles. This is all conveniently “real”, even though scientists have to revert to massless and “virtual” particles to explain things and get the math to work out. Electricity is the flow of electrons. Everything is derived from the physical. Scientists claim the 95% of the universe they’re missing is composed of “dark matter” and “dark energy”, as though explaining away something is actually an explanation. All of these machinations, the fudge factors they have to include in their calculations to get them come out, descriptions masquerading as explanations, etc. are to keep the narrative intact. That narrative is that the world is composed of little bouncing balls, and everything that can be observed and known owes its reality to these little bouncing balls. Any inferences to anything to the contrary are immediately attacked and labeled “Woo woo”.
And so we have the definition of the current slang “woo woo”. I pulled these definitions off of Google®:
1. Unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine.
2. (slang, derogatory) A person readily accepting supernatural, paranormal, occult, or pseudoscientific phenomena, or emotion-based beliefs and explanations.
Notice in the two definitions above we have “no scientific basis” and “pseudoscientific”. The observant person will recognize this attack straight away of anything that disagrees. This leads us to the scientific method. Using the scientific method, you have an idea of what some root cause might be for the particular phenomena you’re observing. You devise a theory to formalize your idea. You then create an experiment to test your theory. You perform the experiment and evaluate the results. The results may confirm your theory, or they may not. Or the results may partially prove your theory, but also lead to additional questions. You take the results of your experiment, compare them to your theory, and either consider the matter closed, or revise your theory and devise additional experiments. This iterative process is continued until the theory is considered proven or discarded.
This method works very well for things that are “real” and is highly useful. It is repeatable, and so the results can be duplicated by other people who then corroborate them. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the scientific method. As long as experimental results are evaluated honestly, it is a highly useful and beneficial tool for investigating the physical universe. For things that are repeatable, that exist in conditions that can be duplicated, the method performs its function very well.
Our problem is not with the scientific method. Our problem is with the myopic view that it is considered the sole arbitration tool for determining the nature of the reality we find ourselves in. If the scientific method is the only tool allowed for evaluation, only that portion of reality that lends itself to the scientific method can be examined. Anything that does not lend itself to the process is discarded as “not real”. Anything “unconventional” need not apply. The phrase, “If all you have is a hammer, all your problems will look like nails” comes to mind. Although there are credible scientists who offer up the point that we live in a box bounded by our perception, which is constrained by properties of light and electrochemical processes, for the most part popular culture reinforces the materialist viewpoint. It is not an accident that scientific principles have the nomenclature of “laws”. This is a hubristic device intended to divert further investigation, further consideration. If I was to devise a trap to anchor a person to this reality, I could not think of a better one than this. It is evil genius actually. And it is also nonsense. There is little appreciation for the fact that the observed results of experiments are interpreted within the framework of Materialism.
The new term in vogue is “settled science”, an oxymoron if there ever was one. We live in an age of ubiquitous hubris, forgetting that every preceding epoch suffered from the exact same myopia. There is a societal delusion that we are living at the pinnacle of scientific achievement and the theory of everything is right around the corner. They ridiculed Copernicus and jailed Galileo, but we’re smarter now, sarcasm intended. When I was in school we were taught humans only used only a fraction of their brain capacity and that 98% of DNA was ‘junk’ that served no purpose.[i] We know now both of these assertions are nonsense, but they were accepted as fact when I was in high school.
The fates of poor Copernicus and Galileo lead us right into the subject of organized religion. At least science was attempting some semblance of getting to the truth. Religion claims sole proprietorship over the truth, shaming anyone that seriously questions it with accusations of heresy. If you don’t accept their truth verbatim and wholeheartedly, you’re toast. Any insights you may have that don’t fit into the accepted narrative are dismissed as the work of demons, hell bent on leading you astray. No average modern person could possibly have a relationship with their higher self. If there is some evidence of positive change, the case could be made that at least currently the church is not openly prosecuting and jailing scientists for any theory that seems to run counter to the church’s official version of history or reality.
What is needed is a mindset change. Good scientists understand there is no such thing as “settled science”, but popular culture has not caught up with this yet. I propose we would be better served if the popular line of thinking, the term most used, most in the minds of everyone, was “the current model”. This seems like a very small distinction, but it will pay dividends for the remainder of time. It leaves the door open. “Settled science” leaves no room for correction of root assumptions. If the matter is settled, there is no opening to question anything. This can only be an effort to protect the current narrative, to “settle” the matter so no further examination is required.
If root assumptions are wrong, conclusions are wrong. Erroneous assumptions will lead to the need to make mathematical slights-of-hand to get equations to work out, which then leads to faulty conclusions. The correct equation should not need any error correction. If you have mathematics that requires fudge-factors, you need to go back to the root assumption and start over. Therefore, in order to allow for continued progress towards our higher goals and achievements, we should always leave the door open. This runs counter to the ego’s desire to put everything into neat boxes. It is a more uncomfortable way to live, but it will keep us moving towards the truth rather that accepting any falsehood because it is expedient.
Organized religion has a long way to travel to get to anything resembling a search for truth. Dogma does not hold the grip upon humans it once did, at least not within the Christian world, but there is certainly not a large movement to reexamine the entire collection, to revisit and rethink the canon of scripture. Somehow humans of two thousand years ago were capable of spiritual insights, but modern humans are incapable of them and so must glean their spiritual insights from the pages of the approved canon. Yeah, right.
So, in conclusion, humanity needs to recognize everything we “know” may be wrong. Not only wrong, but fundamentally wrong. Much of what we “know” may be nothing more than consensus. We need to keep within our awareness that the models, the paradigms, the scientific conclusions, may all be horribly wrong. Science is actually uncovering, rediscovering, and discovering new and wonderful things all the time, but the accreditation culture we live in provides a very real barrier to drawing conclusions that don’t fit the narrative. The narrative protects itself energetically to any and all challenges. This is interesting, and also exceedingly sad.
To be fair, there is an undercurrent of healthy questioning of the narrative. The modern internet allows like minded individuals to share information easily. Many pondering the situation see the light coming from the crack at the bottom of the door, but they’re not quite ready to take the full leap. Good examples would be “Biocentrism” by Dr. Robert Lanza, and the work of Donald D. ofHoffman and Leonard Susskind. In “Biocentrism” Dr. Lanza argues the human only perceives the world through the senses, which are ultimately reducible to electrochemical signals to the brain.[ii] He argues there may not necessarily be an “out there” objective reality. Donald Hoffman in his book “The Case Against Reality” also covers the subject well. Physicists Juan Maldecena and Leonard Susskind both make the case the world may be essentially a holographic projection. They know something is wrong, but they’re not ready to leap just yet into the “why”. They’re still keeping one foot on the platform. They’re not ready to abandon Materialism and clean slate the whole mess.
I had a teacher once tell the class, “All models are wrong, but they can be useful”. Rather than stating conclusions as fact, they should be prefaced with such statements as, “Based on the evidence, we currently believe………..”, or “The current model leads us to the conclusion that………”. Leave the door open. Question everything.
I had a very smart electronics instructor inform the class no one actually knows what electricity is. He stated that we can use electricity, and it behaves in a consistent manner, which allows equations to be stated as to its actions and effects, but no one really knows what is actually happening. Go to almost all humans today and ask them what electricity is, and they will state with confidence there are little bouncing balls (electrons) flowing through the wiring, and that is electricity. If you question them, they will fight you. They KNOW. In reality, they don’t know a damn thing, they are simply parroting something they were told. Question everything, always.
So we take a step back and flip everything over. Take cause and effect and swap them? What if what we consider cause is actually the effect, and vise versa? What if “settled science” is wrong, and the world is not derived from little bouncing balls? What if the little bouncing balls are the effect, rather than the cause? What if awareness/sentience/consciousness is primary, and the physical universe is a product and not a source? What if we’re actually not seeing the world as it is at all?
II. The Semantic Reality and the Ego
The first step to understanding the true nature of the situation we find ourselves in is to understand we have become slaves to our egos and to our semantic reality. I speak of ego not in the popular sense of someone who has an inflated self worth, but in the base, psychiatric sense, the ego being that which deals with interacting with the physical reality on behalf of the overall self. The ego serves an essential function, as it deals with maintenance of the reality’s minimum requirements. In order to remain within this construct, you must have sufficient and adequate nutrition, water, air, clothing, shelter, and medical care. You may be able to come up with others, but these are the basics for survival. If any of these fall below a critical level for too long you’re not going to be around to worry about it.
The ego wants everything known, compartmentalized, defined. The ego has to deal with maintaining function within the framework of the physical reality. The more it can identify, define, categorize, and then store, the more functionality remains for dealing with everything else the reality throws at it. The ego is good at recognizing something, naming it, and storing it as identity and gestalt. These are handy skills if you’re trying to remain alive, as it liberates attention and brain power by organizing and cleaning up inputs so attention can be relegated to other tasks. This all works well, but it is a trap.
The trap comes when the ego starts to run amuck and monopolizes the entire operation. The ego does not like surprises, as surprises drive a sense of danger and uneasiness. Having to improvise on the spot continually becomes stressful. The ego will release its grip enough to allow for adjustments, glimpses of perception, but overall the ego simply wants to pigeonhole whatever is in its field of perception so it can move on to something else. The ego will as soon as it has a handle on the present revert back to reliving the past and projecting into the future.
One of the things we notice about children is their lack of experience allows them freedom to interpret more freely, perhaps more honestly. Their perceptions are not colored by the ego quite so much. In Matthew 18:3, Jesus is quoted as saying “And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” This is speaking metaphorically of completely bypassing the ego, to not identify with it. The pioneer psychologist Jean Piaget considered the developing child’s abandonment of “magical thinking” as a step towards “reality adjustment” and the beginnings of true maturation. As the ego takes over more and more of a person’s makeup, attention to the physical and manipulation of the physical increases. The child becomes more “reality adjusted”, committing more and more of its attention and awareness to the “real” world. Rather than perceiving each and every moment as a magical world of infinite possibility, the child’s ego is more and more pushing to the fore. What was an endless source of wonderment becomes only something to be identified and filed away. As the child’s ego becomes more and more adept at this process, the child starts to live “in his or her head”. “Reality adjusted” equals the slow death of childhood and the emergence of the “adult” mindset. It is not an accident that the culture makes every attempt to induce this process at earlier and earlier ages. Kindergarten used to be optional, now it is compulsory. Children are rewarded and praised for their ability to abandon the world of childhood and take part in the adult world of ego-dominance.
Recently I was on a bus and there was a family across the aisle from me with two children. The older child was a boy of perhaps six or seven. The child enjoyed talking and had a very good vocabulary for someone of such a young age. The mother spoke at length about how intelligent the boy was, to which the boy reacted by commenting on anything and everything in the most intellectual manner he could muster. It was quite obvious the child had internalized the accolades and was playing at being “smart”. The child was actually quite intelligent, but not smart enough to understand what he might be trading away so readily. Rather than being impressed with how adult the child seemed, it made me sad, for I understood what he was giving up in order to remain fast attached to his adult mind.
The handmaiden to the ego is the semantic reality. The most concise definition of semantics is “The study of meaning”. Each object, symbol, picture, and word carries with it meaning based on its origins, intent, context, and content. The word, picture, or symbol becomes a useful proxy for items within physical reality, and interestingly, for ideas and concepts. As useful as this tool is, it also comes with what we can consider “baggage”. Each person has a unique version of the word, picture, or symbol in question. This version carries the sum of their associated experiences. When they hear or use the word, their mind fills in the blanks with all of the baggage they have accumulated associated with the word. This turns communication into a minefield, as the sender of information has no way to know each receiver’s individual experiences and biases.
Armed with this arsenal of symbols, pictures, and words, the ego is fully empowered to recognize, define, categorize, store, and use all manner of handy and useful meanings and their associations. Armed with these tools, prediction, projection, and control become much easier. As these tools make it easier to convey meanings to your fellow humans, they also make it easier for the ego in its bid to become the arbitrator of reality. The affected individual spends more and more time living in “possibility space” and less time being present in the moment.
This ability to assign meaning to a word or symbol is a very useful tool, as it allows the ego/mind complex to deal with issues that are out of its immediate view. The ego will deal with an event in the present moment if one presents itself, but it doesn’t stop there. The ego seldom rests, and will use the mind to mentally review the past and project possible futures. This increases survivability by allowing the ego to deal with events that are not currently “here and now”, but it comes with a catch. The catch is that the semantic reality acts as a substitute for actual reality. This is a positive that has a downside. What happens is humans become so used to living within the semantic reality they lose track of the actual reality. Ego, always working, is right at home in the semantic reality. It can project outcomes, categorize, schedule, examine, revisit, analyze to its heart’s content. What an advantage! Good stuff! The ego says, “I’m now large and in charge! I can work 24/7”.
Once in full force, the ego acts as a filter. This is good for physical survival, but it’s not good for perception in the sense of the true reality. In “Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg” Joseph Chilton Pearce devotes an entire chapter on this aspect of reality, referring to it as “roof brain chatter”, a term he credits to biochemist Robert de Ropp[iii]. “Roof brain chatter” is the internal dialog the ego utilizes in its efforts to deal with and manipulate the reality to increase survivability and homeostasis. The mind/ego lives in the semantic reality. Nothing is actually being perceived as it is; the reality is filtered, analyzed, categorized, and projected. And it is being projected via words, pictures, and symbols and all the associated baggage heaped on them as well. Since the ego deals primarily with the reality “out there”, it relies on the information fed to it by the five senses, which is useful in maintaining physical existence, but leads to a state of myopia with regards to the overall self. In “The Active Side of Infinity” Carlos Castaneda’s mentor don Juan Matus teaches Carlos, “Every one of us human beings has two minds. One is totally ours, and it is like a faint voice that always brings us order, directness, purpose. The other mind is a foreign installation. It brings us conflict, self-assertion, doubts, hopelessness.”[iv] Don Juan teaches Carlos the two minds are in conflict, a constant battle.
If you live guided by your ego, your entire reality is built by semantics and consensus. You name something, and from that point no further examination is required. You never actually see it again, it is filtered through your consensus reality, named, categorized, filed away. There is little actual perception going on. There is little effort expended to experience the essence of anything. Recognize, categorize, label, file away, move on. Every possible present moment is used only for this constant churning of replays of the past, analyzation, and possibilities projected into the future. The ego becomes a proxy for primary, nonjudgmental perception. Only an urgent need of focus or a total collapse will bring this process to a stop.
Over time as the child develops the ego has the tendency, encouraged by the culture, to become “reality adjusted”, to take over completely, establishing itself as the sole arbitrator of reality and perception.
And so the acculturated “well adjusted” adult ends up living in a world of continuous internal conversations. The ego works away happily while awareness takes a back seat, only to be pulled into action if something out of the ordinary is encountered. If you are a people watcher, you can see these well adjusted adults as they go about their business. Even if they take walks for exercise for supposed enjoyment, most of them are head down, viewing only the path directly in front of their feet, frequently frowning, checking their phones, oblivious to the actual reality, but immersed fully in the internal dialog running in their heads. In extreme cases these individuals can be observed muttering to themselves.
The ego will expend more effort to avoid negative consequences than it will to obtain positive outcomes. Said another way, the avoidance of pain is prioritized over the gaining of pleasure. This is a gross generalization, and all generalizations are false, but this is generally true. Events that might happen and their negative consequences are weighted more in the ego’s queue than events that might happen associated with positive consequences. Fear is built into the fabric of carnality, as it provides impetus for pain and death avoidance. Animals feel fear at the basic level when they perceive a threat, are actually threatened, or actually attacked. Devoid of the ego, animals don’t spend much of their free time contemplating what might happen. They are not munching on the grass mentally running through scenarios of possibilities and experiencing anxiety over them. Human’s ego spends quite a bit of time mentally projecting into the future, which unchecked leads to all sorts of problems such as stress and anxiety. Anxiety is essentially fear of something that might happen, which is a function of the ego. The person is not under an actual danger for which fear would be a rational and expected response, but a projected, anticipated danger that may or may not manifest within physical reality. The mental health and pharmaceutical industries make large sums of money catering to this ego-driven state of being.
Most people associate closely with their ego. Actually, it is safe to say a large percentage of the population acknowledges only the ego, and ignores the other aspects of self. Their ego, being primarily the avoider of negative consequences, is driven by one thing more than any other. That one thing is fear. The fear induced by the ego in its efforts to avoid future negative consequences makes ego driven people uniquely controllable. The semantic reality and the ego make it possible to influence and control humans with fear of what “might” happen. Interestingly, this fear need not be rooted in reality. If you can fool the person with any such fiction as they will believe, their fear will drive their egos, driving the people in the direction you wish them to go. Humans are the only species this type of control works on, and it works very effectively.
________________________________ You left off here on the narrative
The ego is necessary, and in its proper place is well equipped to do the job it is designed for, but allowing it to take over and drag us around like the dog on a leash of a cruel master is another thing entirely. In its bid to be large and in charge the ego blinds us to reality. There are many that will tell you the “real” world is the one in their heads, the incessant roof-brain chatter, but I am telling you your ego is blinding you from other aspects of yourself. It has supplanted actual reality with an imposter and fooled you into believing there is little else that need be examined. So how do we go about putting the ego in its place?
In order to actually perceive something as it truly is, you have to see it without filtering it through your consensus consciousness. This sounds easy, but it is not easy to abandon the labels and look at something with the eyes of a child. If you try it and get bored, you’re about as far away from it as you could be. If you look at it and have a sense of wonderment, you’re on the right track. If you are able to remove the ego to the point you momentarily cannot recognize written words and cannot read, you’re getting there. This sounds odd I’m sure, but I can assure you it is possible to see the world without labeling to the point no intellectual interpretations are possible. I have on occasion been within the present moment so deeply it took me several minutes before I could put our world of consensus back together again.
When you look without labeling, you will see a different world. Eckhart Tolle lays this out well in “The Power of Now”. He uses the term “mind” to encompass that part of thinking that interacts with the ego, and uses the term “thinking” to describe that part of the intellect that serves the ego. He does a good job of describing what I’m driving at, that viewing the world through the filter of the mind/ego complex does not allow for accurate perception. You may be able to describe the physical features of whatever you are viewing, but the overall reality of it will escape you.
Many have written some very good books on this subject, and I have already mentioned two of them. Eckhart Tolle makes his living helping people break out of the bondage of the ego. What I’m going to say about the matter is if you cannot shut off your inner dialog, your “roof brain chatter”, you will never perceive reality as it is. The filters of the ego and the semantic reality blind you to the actual reality, even though it is literally in front of your eyes.
The world “out there” continually tightens and reinforces the consensus reality, and you may be sensing that, but most do not. They simply accept the label, file it away, and from that point “perceive” as they are directed. Their world is getting tighter and tighter…smaller and smaller. Those that are able can see the consensus reality become more ridiculous by the day. I now call it “Clown World”, because the level of absurdity that passes as reality is now astoundingly great. I get a gut feeling this may be by design, the ego-based reality becoming more and more ridiculous in order to wake those who can see up to the larger reality.
I am going to commence with the assumption if you’re reading this, you are already suspicious that something is wrong at the core, that your fundamental assumptions are no longer serving you. You may have had, or are having, experiences that do not fit into the narrative you’ve been fed. Or, the events you are experiencing and the people you’re involved with are taking on more and more bizarre air. You are starting to feel alienated and disconnected, because your mind is rebelling when you observe things that simply cannot be happening organically. You dare to question, and you understand a description is not an explanation. You examine your world and have come to the conclusion more of it than you care to admit is actually not explained, but explained away, supposedly described adequately and no further examination is necessary.
You have been taught from an early age that this material world is primary. You are taught your awareness springs from the interaction of matter and electrical charges. Your awareness is simply a happy accident, a wondrous coincidence. If there was no material world, you would not exist. Your awareness and consciousness remain within the confines of your physical body, and any experiences you have that are outside the realm of physicality are only pictures played out upon the screen of your mind, the result of electrical impulses within the brain. Anything outside the narrow corridor is “woo woo”.
If you have convinced yourself that this reality is all there is, that your awareness is derived from your physical self, then your forays into consciousness and the study of it will be anchored to the physical in a cause and effect relationship, consciousness being, supposedly, a byproduct of physicality. The physical universe came first, and consciousness is, fortunately for us, a happy accident. Since what you consider your consciousness is derived from, and dependent on, is solely the physical universe, you will fear death, as it represents the end of your consciousness, and therefore the end of you. You will seek to assuage that fear with busying yourself with “life”, or getting involved in a religion that provides structure and explanations, or both. Since your world is defined by that which you can sense with your five senses or their proxies, you will tend to consider anything beyond your five senses as “out there”. And so you will continue in these self-inflicted restrictive boundaries until you either have some experience that causes you to reconsider, or you die. You may not remember your dreams, or if you do remember them, the memories are indistinct and the sequences of events will appear nonsensical to your waking self. You will seek outside validation and interpretation of your dreams, as you consider your dreams only fabrications of your subconscious mind that have no validity of their own.
How people become trapped in this prison with seemly no way out is something that has always interested me. At this point I am not going to try and convince you of anything, but instead simply relay what I have experienced and how I came to the conclusions I did. I do not believe I am special or unique, but I do pay attention. I am not a powerful enough being to be able to drive you to have similar experiences, but I can help you to have them of your own accord. So, we take a step back to get a larger perspective.
III. The Problem That Is Organized Religion.
For those who gain some inkling of their true nature, the reality offers organized religion in all of its various forms. And so the ego self happily engages in a sort of intellectual quest, thinking if it can simply learn enough, understand enough, somehow one day a lightning strike will occur and they will be gifted with some portion of divine knowledge and wisdom. Organized religion is more than happy to feed into this and offers exclusive clubs if you pass certain initiation rituals, such as getting baptized, or proclaiming yourself a true believer, and thus are “saved”, your ticket having been punched.
Organized religion is a tool used by the reality to keep your attention rooted to it. For reasons I’ll explain later, the reality is completely dependent on your attention to it, on your agreement it exists and your intention to participate. Organized religion creates the illusion of enlightenment through rituals, dogma, and false authority. It exerts control over those that have no clue, and redirects those starting to gain a clue so that set of people spends their time and effort going down various paths in the hope of gaining more insight and experience. There is just enough truth sprinkled in throughout the fabric of religion to keep the practitioner interested and engaged, all the while redirecting them from the actual truth.
There exists a group of people who have seen and experienced enough that for them the illusory nature of the reality is inarguable. They don’t suspect the Materialist view is wrong, they know it’s wrong. They continually work on their relationship to All-That-Is and seek at all times to strengthen the relationship. These people tend to be lifelong seekers of truth. A very small minority of this group succeeds in establishing a very high-functioning relationship with All-That-Is, and they serve as the teachers and guides.
The vast majority of the world’s religions were founded by individuals or groups of individuals that had either divine guidance, personal experience, or an epiphany that either fostered a relationship with All-That-Is, or at least gave them insight into the true nature of reality. This insight was powerful, and although extremely personal, there was the need and the desire to share it.
In a sweeping grand generalization we can put all humans into one of three groups. The first group believes only what the physical reality presents. The second group has some inkling something is amiss, some intuition of connection to Source, but they are still invested in the physical reality. The third group has a strong connection to All-That-Is and therefore a diminished attachment to physical reality. In typical semantic constructions these three groups have been recognized and labeled at different times by different people. The Gnostics realized this and labeled these three groups the Hylics, the Psychics, and the Pneumatics. The Hylics were totally invested in physical existence and lacked the ability to see beyond it. Psychics were mostly immersed in physical reality, but were starting to have some suspicions there is a bit more to the story. The Pneumatics were completely aware of their non-physical side and were in a state of gnosis. Interestingly the Pneumatics were considered to be direct awarenesses from God and therefore not in need of ‘saving’, and the Hylics were considered so mired in physicality as to be beyond saving. The Psychics, those who had some inkling there may be more to reality than physicality, were ‘save-able’ should they be exposed to the proper concepts.
These three types of humans are outlined and discussed in “The Tripartite Tractate” of “The Nag Hammadi Scriptures”:
“The Three Kinds of Human Beings - Now, humanity came to exist as three kinds with regard to essence— spiritual, psychical, and material— reproducing the pattern of the three kinds of disposition of the Word, from which sprung material, psychical, and spiritual beings. The essences of the three kinds can each be known from its fruit. They were nevertheless not known at first, but only when the Savior came to them, shedding light upon the saints and revealing what each one was. The spiritual kind is like light from light and like spirit from spirit. When its head appeared, it immediately rushed to it. At once it became a body for its head. It received knowledge straightaway from the revelation. The psychical kind, however, being light from fire, tarried before recognizing the one who had appeared to it, and still more before rushing to him in faith. Though it was instructed, moreover, only by means of voice, < it > was content that in this way it was not far from the hope given by the promise, having received, in the form, as it were, of a pledge, the assurance of things to come. The material kind, however, is alien in every respect: it is like darkness that avoids the shining light because it is dissolved by its manifestation. For it did not accept his < coming >, and is even <… > and filled with hatred against the Lord because he revealed himself.”[v]
The problem presented by organized religion is created by the nature of the physical reality as perceived by the Psychics and the Hylics. Whereas the Pneumatics perceive and understand physicality as illusion, and the situations created as necessary for learning, the Psychics consider their place within physicality to be of some importance, and the Hylics are chained to the wall of the prison. If we could share thoughts and experiences directly, if we could share minds, this problem would not exist. Because most people of the Psychics and Hylics groups are caught up within the ego driven semantic reality, the only way to relay information to them is through words, symbols, pictures, or the arts. The experience of one person can only be relayed to another person semantically. There is no magic cable you can plug into your head to share the experience with others in the same manner you experienced it yourself. So unless they were there and experienced it in much the same manner you did, your relaying of the experience to others is problematic.
The people that represent the pinnacle of this third level group, the Pneumatics, can make every effort to communicate what they know to others, but trying to relay what they know and understand to the humans who are at the first two levels is not unlike describing a painting to a blind person. The problem is massive, and as the information is relayed from person to person, the scope and scale of the problem increases. Any two persons that had the same divinely inspired insight would convert it into the tools of the semantic reality, resulting in differences which scholars could then spend hours and hours debating, and the rest of the humanity fighting over for millennia.
So the sage typically ends up with a small group of truth seekers and they set about to get the word out regarding what they have been gifted. In order to preserve the message the work is committed to some sort of semantic vehicle, typically writing, but often personal one on one teaching. It’s not too hard to fast forward this process and see it eventually results in exactly what we observe in modern religions. None of the current practitioners shared any of the original experience. They have the writings and other semantic vehicles they received from the previous practitioners, but they weren’t there for any of the original teachings, and never actually met any of the participants. All they have is the remaining evidence.
People spend time studying and interpreting the evidence in an attempt to glean the underlying message and truth. Some people take this endeavor seriously enough to make a career of it, and the organized religions are more than happy to provide the appropriate accreditation and procedures to obtain them. The more learned scholars of the evidence are held in high esteem and their interpretations of the evidence are taken as gospel by most. They can for most situations quote from their studies, referencing specific passages that apply.
All divine insight relayed within the confines of this physical reality must be relayed semantically. Since the truth is the truth, is eternal, and never changing, all error in the relayed information can be attributed to errors in word usage, errors in translation, or to willing intention to commit error for personal agendas. The words are the words, but the ideas and the concepts are taken from the experience one has when they assemble the words in their minds. We seem to believe everyone assembles the words into the same concepts, and the noble attempt at precision helps towards the accurate reading of the words, but words are slippery things, no?
So where does this leave the persons invested in this reality? To be blunt, those people inclined to seek are trying to find what they’re looking for within a book. Words and images left for them to sift through to try and make sense of. They argue over details and differences. Without insight and understanding, they will never find All-That-Is in a book. The more insight and understanding a person has, the more understanding they will gain when they receive input from reading, listening, looking, discussing. It is said if one has an ounce of understanding, one will get an ounce of information from a new experience or book, but if one has a pound of understanding, one will get a pound of information and insight from a new experience or book.
I grew up in the south, and the prevalence of Southern Baptists and Calvinists was large. To them, the King James Bible is the literal word of God, it is holy, there are no errors, no omissions, and that’s that. End of discussion. You were born into sin, you are stuck in sin, and the only way out is to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, at which point you are “saved”. If you choose not to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you will be cast into a fiery pit and burn for eternity. This is a great example of how truths, run through the semantic swamp and then relayed to people with little connection to Source, become mangled beyond recognition.
In the very early Christian church, Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon, took it upon himself to influence which gospels should be included in the Christian Bible and which should be excluded. Irenaeus was fully aware of the Gnostics, who understood direct knowledge of Source was the necessary primary focus, and he also was aware of the Essenes, with whom he also had philosophical differences. In his work “Against Heresies” Irenaeus advocated for the current collection of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, and labeled the remaining works as heresy. Bear in mind Irenaeus was fully immersed in the Church. I cannot know his motives, but I sense mixed within them is the desire for control, to assist the Church in becoming a force within the society. How convenient, no? The Church has something you need, and that is salvation. They have studied the words, at least the “approved” ones, and know more than you, because they are accredited, official. Irenaeus got his way and the other gospels were discarded. Luckily copies were hidden and later found in the late 1940’s as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts.
Do not dismiss the heavy hand the church ruled with through the ages, the power and influence of the church in Europe up through the 18th century. It was very much an instrument of control. There is a reason the Gnostics had to bury their writings. Highlights include Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who favored philosophical investigation of reality irrespective of its theological implications. This put him in the crosshairs of the church. On February 8, 1600, when the death sentence was formally read to him, he addressed his judges, saying: “Perhaps your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it.” Not long after, he was taken to the Campo de’ Fiori, his tongue in a gag, and burned alive. Nicolaus Copernicus postulates the sun may be the center of the solar system and the planets orbit the sun. He, with help, composes the work “De Revolutionbus Orbium Coelestium” outlining his theories, but waits until 1543 to publish it out of fear of getting on the wrong side of the established religious leaders. He publishes parts under pseudonym, and puts in a preface stating the work is strictly theoretical. He’s obviously afraid. The work is eventually published, but Copernicus conveniently dies of a stroke before the church has a chance to fully digest the work.
In the early 17th century Galileo has been studying the work of Copernicus and carrying it forward. Savvy enough to understand the power structure, Galileo goes to the church and gets permission to write a book about his theories and the evidence. He sends the work “Dialogo sopra I due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e conpernicano (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican)” to the church censors, who instruct him to treat the referenced work of Copernicus as hypothetical. The work makes it through the sensors and is published in 1632. Things went well until Pope Urban VIII reads the book and decides Galileo did not treat his theories hypothetically enough. In 1633, as part of the Inquisition, Galileo is summoned to Rome, where he is eventually found guilty of heresy and sentenced to imprisonment for life.
I relay all this to make this point. The church, organized religion, was the arbitrator of reality. What you saw with your own eyes, what you discerned with your own intuition and intellect meant nothing. The Inquisition was put in place to root out and punish heresy. The church reviewed and censored works, thus acting as a gatekeeper of the official narrative, and actively punished any works or utterances deemed dangerous to the official narrative. This is power, and the church wielded it with authority.
There are snippets of truth sprinkled throughout the Bible, and I am going to take the liberty of using some of them from time to time as talking points. If you’re screaming at me for my hubris and gall in assuming I know what is true and what is not, I can only tell you I know what I know based on my experience. I do not claim to be any sort of prophet or sage and have no desire to be one. I do, however, know what I know. I use Christianity and the King James Bible in my examples simply because I am most familiar with this work. I am confident the same case could be made using the works of any other organized religion.
Organized religion has two faces. Interestingly, they are competing faces, separated only by intention. The first face is the organizational one. It is the congregation, who typically meet in a building in order to study The Bible and other pertinent texts, to worship together, and to assemble for various church functions. Individual churches typically roll up to a regional organization and then eventually to higher levels. Once you get to the higher levels the business like nature of the organization becomes more apparent. I have been involved in a few churches over the years, and they have been populated with many good and well intentioned people. The congregation is made up of a spectrum of people of varying motives and reasons for being members of the church. My impression is the church serves a social purpose as much as a spiritual one. I have met members who were very serious about establishing a relationship with All-That-Is. I have on occasion met within the church some very insightful people who are genuinely seeking the truth, and the church does provide a springboard for them and access to others for interaction towards spiritual goals. Organized religion provides a community and a haven where it is acceptable to consider matters of the spirit. There is acknowledgement there may be something to all this besides physical matter. To this end organized religion is a positive influence.
The other face of organized religion serves the reality. It has been deftly co-opted and is utilized not to spread the truth, but to hide the truth, and to propagate the church’s approved version of reality. Religion reinforces the concept that physical reality is primary and the spiritual realm, heaven and hell if you wish, is “out there”, that the spiritual world and the physical world are separate. Christ on numerous occasions states the kingdom of heaven is within. In Luke 17:21 Jesus says, “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” In the Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi scriptures, saying 3, Jesus says, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea, then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.”[vi]
Within the King James Version there are also passages such as Matthew 7:21 where he speaks of entering the kingdom – “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” This passage is translated from the Greek. This is a good example of distortions caused by semantics. The casual reader might interpret this passage as “You can call out to God as much as you like, but unless you are doing the will of God, you will not gain entrance into heaven, which is where God resides”. Deftly translated and stated to steer the reader into the concept that you are separated from God, and if you do not do what you’re supposed to be doing, you’re not getting into heaven. You are here, and God is in heaven. If you’re not following the rules, you cannot go to heaven. Do you see how this works to keep your attention focused on the physical? If you do not have a personal relationship with God, how are you possibly going to know what the rules are? The rules are stated in “official” documents and reinforced by the church.
Let me reiterate that I am not a biblical scholar, nor do I make any claims to have an inside track into the mind of All-That-Is. However, I am qualified to interpret things based on my own experience and intuitions based on a lifetime of asking questions of All-That-Is. To me this passage says, “It is not sufficient to profess belief and simply call out to God for salvation, but you should strive to come to a knowing of God so you do not have to rely on belief, which is fear based. Belief can exist without any evidence or experience, but knowing knows. As knowing increases, separation lessens.
Religion puts forth the notion that physical reality is somehow tainted, not perfect in nature, and therefore cannot be part of All-That-Is. This springs from the idea that spiritual and physical are separate, and since physical nature is sinful, and by extension Man is sinful, God cannot forgive Man directly because God cannot have any direct dealings with the “sinful” Man or the tainted earth. God sends his son to act as the intercessor between himself and Man. Christ takes the “sins” of the physical world upon himself in order to have them forgiven, due to his sinlessness dies an undeserved death, and through this act becomes acceptable to God, who forgives the sins of man through Christ and decides not to destroy Man.
This has to be the biggest “guilt used as control mechanism” strategy in the history of earth. This directly contradicts “All Is One”, instead placing Man so low as to not even be worthy of God. Man is “sinful” and therefore tainted. God is assigned some very base and infantile qualities here, primarily the need to be honored and worshipped by his obedient subjects. Nice try. All Is One. There is no separation. There is nothing within your awareness at any level that is not of God, that exists without his awareness and funding of it. All works for his experience and to his pleasure.
Religion reinforces the idea of crime and punishment. God has certain expectations and if they are not met there will be consequences, the most dramatic one ending up with you burning in a pit of fire for eternity.” You will come across concepts such as “original sin” and “born into sin”, stated to put you into a state of guilt. The inference is God is separate from the earth, resides in heaven, and looks down at you. You are of sin, unclean, intrinsically wicked, and therefore in need of saving if there is to be any hope for you at all. This takes one of the most basic concepts of truth and flips it on its head, so instead of working to your advantage, works to trap you in a cocoon of fear and guilt.
Proceeding in this vein of thought, anointed individuals are provided to act on your behalf as a channel between God and you”. Since you couldn’t possibly have a personal relationship with God because you have not been educated and certified, the church conveniently provides an intercessor to act on your behalf, a proxy of sorts. In the Catholic faith, confessions of sins are relayed to a priest, who supposedly has the authority to forgive them. This is a pretty good mechanism to assert yourself as moral authority and maintain control of the narrative. It also releases the individual from having to create a relationship to All-That-Is on a personal level, as it is implied in the transaction the priest is acting as an intercessor on their behalf. Mere mortal man is then free to leave the church and return to his sinful existence.
That organized religion works to cement the accepted beliefs and practices into writings and doctrine as the “official” path, the accepted texts to be considered accurate and true is patently obvious. In 1604 King James the First commissioned scholars to publish an official version of the Bible, the work of which took seven years. The result was the first version being published in 1611. At that point, literally and figuratively, the book was closed. Any divine revelations after 1611 are not in The Holy Bible. Somehow a collection of individuals thousands of years ago had intimate knowledge of the divine and were able to commit their experiences to writing, but now it’s all cast in stone and is not alterable. I submit the process of humanity becoming aware of their true nature and the truth in general is an iterative process, moving slowly at times, quickly in others, but always in a state of progress. My empirically based impression is around the time of the late 19th century into the early parts of the 20th century there was a large divine influence. This was a period of massive advancements in science and spirituality. Most of the thinking and research that led to quantum mechanics occurred during this period. “Cosmic Consciousness” by Richard Maurice Bucke was written during this period. Walter Russell received much of his insights during this period. We have since to a large degree been living off the fruits of the revelations of this period. We have been in a period of consolidation, and have done a good job of refining their concepts, but we haven’t had a truly new idea in at least a hundred years. This period of consolidation has allowed the Materialistic mindset to become pervasive once again, so Man is ripe for another round of insights that will move him forward.
Organized religion holds itself out as the only available path to “salvation”. Of course, each individual religion touts itself as the only correct path. The primary reason for different sects to break away from a parent church is over differences in interpretation of the scriptures. The Christian religion takes this a step further and proclaims not only is it the only correct version, if you do not believe in their savior, Jesus Christ, you will be highly disappointed at the time of your death. As a child my first question was, “What about those people who never hear of Jesus Christ? What becomes of them?” I never received a good answer on that one from any authority figures within the church.
To illustrate this paradigm, I recount the funeral of a friend I attended recently. I knew the woman for many years, and she had a sharp, questioning mind. She was suspicious enough to not allow herself to simply fall into some sort of dogmatic belief system solely on the basis of peer pressure, of which there was plenty. Within our circle of family and acquaintances, there was constant pressure to publicly proclaim Jesus as your personal savior so as to get shuttled to the correct door upon your ultimate demise. I used to talk to her about it and my advice was one should invite Christ into their lives and continually leave themselves open to his influence, but accepting the whole story about Christ being the only path, and that if one didn’t swallow the whole dogmatic mess hook, line, and sinker they were doomed to burn in Hell was simply nonsense. We always left our conversations open ended, and we had some good ones.
What I found so interesting was the overriding theme at her funeral, which was the hope that she had “accepted Christ into her life as her personal savior”. This question was front and center, and there was affirmation that merely days before her death she had reached out to Christ, so she would enjoy everlasting life in her new, unblemished body. This entire affair serves to reinforce the separation, the “here” and “there” concept, the notion that physicality and spirituality are the two sides of the coin, we’re on the one side and cut off from the other side unless we accept the dogma and comply with it.
The standing story within organized religion is Jesus was sent to earth to spread the good news, to take the sin of the world upon himself, to be crucified on the cross, so that we, upon proclaiming our belief in Jesus and accepting him as our savior, will have everlasting life. Jesus rose from the dead to illustrate death had no hold over him, that he was a divine spiritual being that chose to embrace a physical form in order to be able to accomplish this mission. This one is another great example of how the truth is twisted by way of the semantic mechanism to state the story in a way that plays in to physicality and the control mechanism, the “crime and punishment” mindset. Western Christianity goes one further through the 19th century works of William Miller and John Nelson Darby, introducing the concept of the Rapture. Now you’re not only considering individual responsibility and guilt, but group responsibility and guilt. Let’s heap on even more pressure to conform, shall we?
So what of the concept of being “saved”? First off, “saved” carries the negative crime and punishment connotation. It is somewhat accurate, but the overall gestalt leads you to believe you are being saved from negative consequences. Seeking a connection with the divine in order to avoid negative consequences is not much different that trading for a Get Out of Jail Free card in a Monopoly game. This goes back to Jesus’ statement in Matthew 7:21 about how those that call out but have no true inner desire for knowledge are wasting their time. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” It is not a ticket to be punched, but a quest. Irenaeus and his cohorts did a masterful job of twisting this concept into something that could be used for power and control. You do not need to be “saved”. You can explore this reality and go as dark as you want, but it ultimately will not serve you, but works against you in your quest to connect to All-That-Is and lift your awareness up and out of this construct, to see beyond it, through it. You cannot continue to feed it your attention and energy and expect to find your release from it. The more you invest in the reality, the more closely you identify with it, the longer you will stay within it and its influence at the most base level. It is you, trapping yourself in the ‘fun house’.
Most organized religions require certain rites of passage in order to be considered a full member. An example would be baptism by a church official, publicly proclaiming your belief in some deity, clearly a rite of passage to join the club. Publicly proclaiming your faith and belief is step one, and getting baptized is step two. These have also always seemed to me like ticket punching, or perhaps merit badges. It is a physical ceremony to reinforce a spiritual idea. Now, to be sure there are people baptized every day who are completely sincere and may very well gain spiritually from the experience, but the potential for the experience to simply be a ritual and nothing more is certainly there. Expected behaviors and rites of passage act as accreditation. Complying keeps one in good standing with the group, and not complying, while not necessarily punished, will get one ostracized in short order.
Religion operates as a way to negate divine intuition that does not conform to the “official” narrative. This is a big one. Once dogma sets in, each version of the truth becomes siloed. Those who are unsure of themselves, unsure of their path, or unsure of their relationship to All-That-Is will cling to dogma because that is what is providing the framework for their world view. Those who have some glimpse of the truth and have partaken of the dogma with some success will commence identifying with the particular religion. There is a very real danger these people will fall into an “us versus them” mentality. Most religions, rather than trying to negate, or at least minimize this false sense of identity and separation, actually encourage it. Interestingly, the “us versus them” paradigm, even in the sense of identification, is precisely the mindset the church should be working against. It is no surprise when someone has an experience or insight that does not conform to the accepted dogma in force they are looked at with suspicion. This process takes advantage of the nature of humans to want to belong. The dogma provides the framework and human nature makes the entire affair self-enforcing.
In summary, the root problem with organized religion is very similar to the problem we see with science. There is a monumental amount of momentum and residue remaining from the church’s long history of controlling and shaping of its approved official version of reality. There is little appreciation for the need for humility. The people on the leading edge, those with actual insight, are typically humble and open, but just behind them is the upper rank and file. They don’t seem to be interested in the “how” or “why”, but instead remain firmly invested in physical reality. This lack of ability to entertain possibilities outside of their circle of knowledge and experience leads to a protectionist mindset that drives a protectionist behavior. Those on the leading edge seek true knowledge, whereas those of the upper rank and file seek certainty and control. Those on the leading edge understand how little they actually know, whereas the upper rank and file doesn’t know what they don’t know, and frankly aren’t all that interested. Organized religion’s tenets are presented as unequivocal fact, and each typically asserts its way is the only way. There is a distinct lack of humility and quite a bit of turf defending. When dogma is rigid and continually reinforced, there is no room for further insights and revision. The words recorded in the official documents are the truth, and everything else can only be viewed as an attack. That is a problem.
IV. Taking a Step Back on Religion
To put all of my experience into one simple conclusion, that conclusion is the reality we find ourselves within is not primary, but is a construction of awareness/consciousness/intention. It is not “real” in the sense we believe it to be, and it only maintains consistency of cause and effect through our attention and our communal assumption that it is consistent and persistent. As an eternal being, the only thing you need to be “saved” from is your ego self and its fixation on this one particular assembly. Your ego self sees everything beyond itself as “out there”, everything is to be named, categorized, and filed away. Almost everything within the construction of man’s ego based intellect serves to trap the ego self here. The reality works nonstop, in fact overtime, always to reinforce the notion that the world perceived by the ego is the only reality.
The notion that this reality is the totality of all existence is explicitly expressed and continually reinforced by the culture. The loud and clear message is that all reality is physical, that all matter is composed of subatomic particles, and all electrical and magnetic fields are associated with and transferred by said particles. Consciousness is the result of electrical and chemical actions and reactions within the brain. Anyone that says differently is getting into “woo woo” territory. Granted, there is some accommodation of different viewpoints, but they are considered “alternative” and fringe. When pressed for what is “real”, the mainstream culture will revert to the Materialism/Physicalism paradigm without fail. Religion is allowed as long as it is relegated to “spiritual” matters and remains on the other side of the fence.
So now that we’ve hashed out a bit of what we’re up against, I’m going to attempt to relay things from a different perspective. I have pointed out some of the problems I have with modern religion, so now we can take some of the things they get right, come at it from a different direction, and come up with a different take on the subject. I will make the effort to stick to the subject of religion, but as religion deals with the basis of reality, saying it’s a big subject would be a massive understatement. There is within religion tremendous amounts of knowledge and insights that are helpful to a great many people. Simply turning your back, washing your hands of the entire mess would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. To those who say you cannot pick and choose what to pay credence to, but that you have to accept the entire cannon and doctrine in toto I say “Baloney”.
When I was three years old, we moved to a two-story house on the corner of St. James Avenue and Smith Street. Catty-corner across Smith Street from our house was John Randolph Elementary School. Smith Street was the boundary between the White and Black neighborhoods. We had a porch swing that I liked to swing in and watch the world go by. One sunny summer day when I was about four, I was sitting in the swing as was my habit, when out of the blue the world changed. Two things happened. The first was a sudden question to myself of “What in the heck am I doing HERE?” It was not much different than someone who goes for a long hike in the woods and suddenly realizes they are lost and instantly sees everything in sharp focus. The world had changed. I had the sudden realization I was not from “here”. I had gained something and lost something else, all in the same moment. The second was a sudden realization that I was separate from this physical experience. Rather than being immersed in it completely, I suddenly had the ability to examine it from outside, and to examine my own thoughts. I was acutely aware I existed independently of this world, but for some reason was thrust into it. I was aware of my awareness, able to examine my thoughts from a distance, and that it was separate from the scene I was observing. Most importantly of all, I was aware of All-That-Is. Not as a tangible, specific being, but I was aware of the presence, and I felt my place within it and it within me, my connection to Source. This has never left me. I have never felt alone, and have never experienced being truly alone. I know when I’m done here, I will return to where I came from. I cannot explain how I know this, but I can assure you I have always known it.
I highly suspect this for me was the beginning of what Piaget coined the “Concrete Operational Stage”, the stage of the commencement of logical thought. For me it was not unlike being in a boat pulled by the current as I watched the home I knew and loved fading into the horizon. I understood the perspective of the world I knew was disappearing and that I had to fight to keep it, that it was important not to allow the boat to go over the falls, but to keep the home I knew so well from fading away, to keep it always in sight, lest it disappear forever. And so I made a conscious commitment to keep a foot in both worlds, to retain the outlook of the child, but to also operate within the schema of logical thought. It may seem incredulous to you that I made this conscious decision at such a young age, but I can assure you it is true. I was immediately sad over the loss of the child’s perspective, and so committed to preserve it to the extent possible. This experience over time inculcated within me two things. The first was a curiosity, the need to know the fundamental nature of what I was experiencing. Obviously at four years old I was not expressing this concept in anything other than a four-year-old’s perspective, but I was astounded and wanted to know more. Secondly, it planted me firmly in a perspective of reality that ran counter to what was considered ‘real’. I am not unappreciative of how much this perspective has colored and shaped my life. I am not an advanced enough soul to be able to will someone else to have similar experiences and insights. If I was, I certainly would do so. I felt compelled to write this book with the intention it help someone who reads it and has perhaps the slightest glimmer of doubt that what they’re looking at when they gaze at the world is not as it appears to be. To provide them with a glimpse of what is real and what is a projection.
My parents regularly took my brother and me to Sunday school at the Baptist church at the end of the street. There I was instructed God wanted to be worshiped, and that if he was not worshiped, he would become angry. The Sunday school teachers would tell me about how I had to declare Jesus my Lord and Savior, or I would otherwise burn in Hell for eternity. I knew instinctively and intuitively they were wrong on both counts. I didn’t believe them. This didn’t agree with what I was experiencing. It ran counter to what my inner voice was telling me. If God made us, why would he want to be worshiped? It didn’t make sense, because any worship from his creation would be by his own hand. So essentially he would be worshiping himself, which seemed to me to be nonsense, as it implied separation. I was part of All-That-Is, and I was created so All-That-Is could, through me, have the experience of being me. I knew this intuitively, and there was going to be no talking me out of it. What cannot be overstated is the effect the interactions with the church had on my four-year-old self. Immediately and instinctively I knew what they were telling me was a lie. A lie about the very nature of existence, the core of being. The biggest lie in the history of earth. There is no way to underestimate how effectively this served to instill in me a complete and visceral distrust of authority.
I asked my father about it. He said he was going to continue to have my younger brother and me attend Sunday school until we were old enough to decide for ourselves whether to continue or not. I remember discussing religion with my father. He said my grandmother required him and his brothers and sister to attend Sunday school and church, but he never could bring himself to internalize any of it. He was bothered by the seeming differences between God in the Old Testament and God in the New Testament. He considered them to be two different entities, based on his studies. He was bothered by the God of the Old Testament, who seemed to childishly demand compliance and worship. The God of the Old Testament was very law and order, crime and punishment oriented, where the God of the New Testament is portrayed through Christ as being more forgiving, less concerned with the rules and regulations and more concerned with the big picture. To my father’s credit, he did not try to convince me of anything one way or the other, but said I should make my own decisions. I filed this away for future consideration.
One of the main positives of the experience was I was gifted this knowing before formal education had a chance to poison and subvert it. I had little in the way of formal religious training other than Sunday school and church. Interestingly, I instinctively understood what they were trying to feed me wasn’t correct. I am not speaking of factual matters, but of root assumptions, the root assumptions upon which the modern Christian religion as presented to me is based. I trusted my inner knowing more than I trusted authority figures, and this has persisted to this day. I took what authority figures told me, bounced it off my inner knowing, and went from there. This inner knowledge is more a process than a complete work. The continual asking of questions, pondering, and receiving answers is an ongoing process, so the insights are in a constant state of clarification. Sometimes new things will take me off in a new direction of discovery, and I’m always grateful for a new avenue to explore, but nothing outside of my own personal experience is ever initially taken at face value. Ever.
So, what conclusions have I reached based on intuition, this inner knowing, and a lifetime of experiences? First, you are a fractal of All-That-Is. As such, you are eternal. You are an eternal being having an experience within this frame of existence, for the experience, and for the experience alone. You have chosen to forget and ignore other aspects of your awareness in order to make this experience “real”. All-That-Is did not create the world and set it aside, the reality is created of his energy and attention, idea within his thinking, within an all encompassing present. There is no aspect, no part of the reality that is not of All-That-Is. This cannot be stressed enough. All-That-Is is not “out there”. You are not here and somehow heaven is up in the sky. The reality is of All-That-Is, down to the smallest division. There is nothing within the reality that is not of All-That-Is, and so each part and aspect is imbued with awareness. As such, there is no separation between what you consider the physical world and what you consider the spiritual world. This division only exists due to your intentional forgetting and the intentionally manifested idea that the signals generated via your nerves and transmitted to your brain constitute the sum total “reality”. In similar manner as every cell in your body having the same DNA, you are an expression of All-That-Is, who has set you into this framework so he can, through you, have the experience. At the base of all of this, there is no separation. I will go into some insights and discussion into how this mechanism might work later, but for the current subject this is sufficient.
The acceptance that All Is One and the fractal nature of reality lead to some inescapable conclusions. When we acknowledge that everything we can possible know or conceive of is “of All-That-Is”, we must take the word “everything” literally. Everything is of All-That-Is. Therefore, everything works towards the ideas of All-That-Is. Consequently, everything is “good”. Every single thing you consider evil, the most horrible and heinous of it, is of All-That-Is, was created by him, exists with his blessing, and exists only because he actively continues to support it with his thinking. Since all parts and aspects of the reality are part of All-That-Is, and in fact only exist with his awareness and energy, everything you consider evil is as much a part of All-That-Is as that which you consider good. It all works for experience. There is only experience and what you learn from it. This fact leads to the primary mistake seekers make in their quest to establish an intuitive understanding and knowing of All-That-Is. It is their largest stumbling block. You cannot see the reality of this clearly if you are heavily invested in assigning “good” and “evil” labels to your surroundings, your interactions, and your own actions. Intentions are another subject altogether.
Within our reality, there is the urge to label and define. Evil is hard to pin down within the ‘gray’ areas and at the margins. While describing the obscenity case of ‘Jacobellis v. Ohio’, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart stated, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”[vii]. Unlike physical manifestations, ideas do not reside within the realm of physicality, making precision difficult. You can define the color red as wavelengths of 650 to 700 nanometers; you can define the note A as 440 Hz. but defining ideas and concepts such as ‘evil’ becomes problematic. There is generally agreement at the extremes, but ideas leave room for interpretation. Intention enters into the argument, as does the ‘vibe’. The ‘vibrational level’ of the person perceiving to a large degree determines the experience. The capacity to recognize and appreciate beauty is front and center for consideration. One person can view the statue of David by Italian artist Michelangelo and be moved to tears while another observer may consider the statue pornographic.
One who has been gifted a glimpse at true beauty, and unadulterated truth, understands it is worth more than all of the ‘things’ within this reality. We bandy the word ‘priceless’ around glibly, but upon experiencing beauty and truth one understands literally. There is no price that could possibly apply. No ownership is possible. It can never be owned, it can never be diminished, it simply is. The only action possible is to hide it, to conceal it. And so it is hidden. Massive attempts are made to conceal it. Cheap substitutes are offered, endless distractions proffered. We get to choose. But who upon seeing the truth could be satisfied with a cheap substitute?
The gateway of the descent is “I want”. The instant the ego pushes forth and ‘wants’, the poison is injected. Instantly the moment moves from truth to ‘me’. The attention is pulled from oneness to lack. Jealousy enters. And so in summary, there is only intention to judge. Evil provides the contrast and the context that allows beauty to play against.
As the individual struggles with the concept of good and evil, if they have any drive towards service to others, will internalize their actions, sorting them into “good” and “bad”. They do not understand that everything works for the experience of All-That-Is. Everything simply is. I have this mental image of All-That-Is creating of himself a creator being and turning that aspect loose. Patting the new entity on the head and pushing it out the door with an admonition to go have fun. I cannot stress how much playfulness and joy I sense in this process. “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”. Supposedly attributed to either Voltaire or H. L. Mencken, it captures our predicament perfectly. The more attachment to the reality is released, the more humor in it is perceived. I have this mental image of me doing a life review and my oversoul laughing hysterically. You’d have to meet the guy to understand this. His commitment to truth is unwavering, and if you get caught up in your own subjective interpretations, that is your problem.
So, put yourself in the place of All-That-Is. This entity he has just pushed out the door is an aspect of him himself. As such, worshiping in the strict sense of the word doesn’t make sense, and the concept of crime and punishment doesn’t make sense. As we experience and learn, All-That-Is experiences and learns. All works for experience, and all works for the experience of All-That-Is. All of it. There is nothing within this reality that is not of All-That-Is.
So we presently find ourselves within the current physical reality. Each of us has chosen to forget where we came from. We all fall somewhere within a spectrum of remembering. Some of us remember much, and some of us don’t remember much at all. Interestingly, the more an entity remembers, the more knowledge they seek. And so this spectrum, stated in terms of the reality, is on one end populated by those who question little and have little curiosity to learn anything beyond what they already know. They are completely invested in the reality and take it at face value. The more inkling a person has of the ultimate truth, the more curious the person is and the less likely they are to accept things at face value. Those at this end of this spectrum believe and value nothing other than their own experience. I’m going to assume if you’re still reading, you fall closer to this end.
Since each aspect of All-That-Is exists as a fractal, each contains the entirety. Or better stated, any fractal can be exploited to produce the entirety. Each is empowered as a creator being. As creator beings, we can choose to create our own reality, or we can choose to partake and experience the creations of other entities. I am led to believe this reality we find ourselves in is the creation of one aspect of All-That-Is. It is not the totality of creation, but is one thought experiment, so to speak. It is a collection of ideas, the concepts of inertia and motion, up and down, pressure mediation, in and out, good and evil, right and left. These are ideas in the most literal sense of the word. The world of duality. Ideas that are mutually dependent upon each other. Personally I have to tip my hat to the creator of this world for the concepts and the intention and concentration required to manifest these concepts into a reality. As flawed as it can appear, it is a marvelous and interesting construction that we all create and maintain in a communal, collective sense.
If you read the Gnostic texts, they get into elaborate stories of the mechanism by which the physical world and Man were created. There is Sophia, who tried, separately from All-That-Is, to create another creator being, and was partially successful, but wasn’t able to transfer her intimate relationship with All-That-Is into it. So she ended up with this powerful being who had no knowledge of where he came from. This being, whom the Gnostics labeled the demiurge, or Yaldabaoth, commences with creating physical reality. Some texts maintain Sophia was able to transfer some knowledge of All-That-Is to Yaldabaoth and some texts maintain All-That-Is recognized the error and transferred this awareness into Man, via the Christ consciousness, the Christ being the aspect of All-That-Is that brought forth and oversees a subset of created entities, and we consider this subset to be Man. For the group of entities we consider Man, Christ is the template and intercessor for Man to All-That-Is.
The King James Bible also addresses the origins of the world and of Man, but there are major differences. The entity the Gnostics label as Yaldabaoth is essentially the same entity as the God of the Old Testament, referred to as Yahweh. This further illustrates my point the writer is trying to convey ultimate truths by way of a semantic system of words and images. All of this is intricate and involved. I make no claims to be a scholar of religious texts, so we’ll leave it at that.
Again, all is one. Therefore, the semantic creations of the Gnostics, such as the aeons, Sophia, Yaldabaoth, and the entire process are to relay the basic truth. This holds true for the Christian Bible as well. All of the beings named are aspects of All-That-Is. Each is an attempt, a story, to describe fundamental truths to others, many of whom have no clue whatsoever of the reality behind any of it. Names and divisions are not important. What is important is the overall concept, the idea. The semantic reality is used to attempt to relay the ideas of basic truths to a population that is heavily invested, and sometimes trapped, at the ego level of awareness. Compounding the issue is the person who had the divine revelation will out of necessity interpret the information based on his or her own knowledge and experience. This is a fact, and it is inevitable.
In order to experience this reality as a full-immersion experience, it is necessary for an entity to play along with the illusion to a degree. If the entity remembers and perceives too much from Source, the actions and reactions will be colored by the remembering. Put simply, if you knew exactly what the true situation was, you wouldn’t take the reality seriously. To have a full-immersion experience the physical reality has to matter to you, because if you fully understood the truth, you wouldn’t care. You would be free to sample the reality, enjoy it, appreciate it, but not invested in it one whit.
Those who accept nothing at face value share the common bond of curiosity. They are life-long learners. The more they know, the more they want to know. This feeds on itself, with each new thing realized leading to other avenues of exploration. The closer one gets to All-That-Is, the closer one wants to be. The more aware one becomes, the more magical existence becomes. People on the other end of the spectrum are frequently bored, continually in need of being entertained. They dream little if at all, typically not remembering their dreams. Others dream entire realities, as real as any waking reality. Their dreams are quests, explorations, lessons to be learned. This bleeds over into waking reality, where they feel the awareness of the reality itself, which can be intoxicating. They literally live in a different world from most people.
Within the spectrum of understanding there is a breakover point, a razor’s edge. To one side of this point are those completely invested in this reality. Those that forget too completely become trapped within this framework. As previously discussed, they live totally within their ego self. They remain totally immersed in this framework, allowing it to become primary. Anything that does not originate from the ego self, from the reality observed with the five senses, is dismissed outright. The spark of divinity that exists within them is so severely depressed and constrained it is not acknowledged or recognized at all. It is currently popular to label these people Non-Player Characters (NPC), which is somewhat derogatory. They have little natural curiosity, take everything at face value, and will argue vehemently with anyone or anything that runs counter to what they have been told by authority. Bear in mind they may have their own reasons for being as such, although they may not realize it themselves. They may be new souls, in the very beginnings of their journey, or they may be a different type of entity that is not necessarily derived from Christ consciousness.
As we come up the spectrum, at some point we reach the person who senses the spark of the divine within themselves. For me this occurred at the moment I commenced what Piaget labeled the “concrete operational stage”. Others will experience this epiphany later in life, although empirically it seems to me this usually happens to people before the age of thirty. This group has become disenfranchised. Science has become a caricature of itself over time. The corporate media is allowed to draw the lines and anyone stepping outside the lines is excoriated. I am exaggerating a bit here, but not much. Although those inclined to follow the latest scientific news can keep up with the latest developments, the corporate media remains totally invested and protective of the paradigm that physical reality is primary and everything originates and springs forth from the physical.
Modern religion seems to be heading down the “social justice” path and has all but abandoned exploration of the true nature of things. Bible stories and other dogmatic religious texts still predominate and serve as a substitute for any honest inquiry into the meanings behind the semantic construction. Rather than searching for base realities and commonalities, modern religions seem to be falling over themselves to see which one can be the most inclusive of popular culture, so rather than steering the culture, the culture is steering the church, which is more than willing to open its doors to the latest faddish trends, even those antithetical to the basic tenants of the religion.
So the modern human who feels within themselves the push, the presence of All-That-Is has a problem. He or she can study, investigate, probe, listen, and gather information and evidence in an effort to find some religion or school of scientific thought that matches up with what their inner voice is proclaiming, or they can clean slate the whole ugly, sordid mess and start over from scratch.
What does that mean, to clean slate everything and start from scratch? You have a relationship with All-That-Is, The Infinity. Step one is to utilize this relationship to build everything else. What do you know? You know you have awareness. You know you are aware of your awareness; you can examine it from a distance, figuratively speaking. You know you are capable of thought, and those thoughts have a reality, a validity of their own, because you can recall thoughts. You can pull them back out of the drawer to reexamine them or modify them. You know your attention has a particular affinity to this physical reality. You know you have two minds. One has an identity, which it protects at all costs, and the other mind is seated within infinity, with All-That-Is. The mind that creates and protects the identity is interestingly called by the old Yaqui Indian sorcerers the “foreign installation”. We call this mind the ego, but the basic idea is the same. The ego deals with this world and is rooted in this world. In order to experience the infinity, the ego must be bypassed, ignored completely, distracted. We could say overcome, or defeated, but this mindset implies action and a negativity towards the ego. The ego is a useful and necessary tool, but that doesn’t mean you let it run amuck and take over.
Those who glimpse even one tiny ray of truth have one mission, and that is to establish and maintain a relationship with the Infinity (All-That-Is, God, etc., etc.), to become and remain as close as possible in order to understand the true nature of things and how they fit into the big picture. Once you throw away the baggage of organized religion you will become aware the present moment is of equal importance to every other present moment. This realization is huge and cannot be overstated. Religion sacrifices the present moment to acts of building up tokens in the hope of gaining some prize in the future. Grabbing the golden ring on the merry-go-round. So you end up living life with a balance sheet, one side is your good deeds and the other side is your failures. This is nonsense. Throughout the eternity, every moment is important. Every moment is an opportunity. You are challenged and evaluated every moment. Every thought and action is eternal.
Add in the realization that there is no separation and you start to gain an inkling of what you’re up against. There is no “spirit” world that is separate from you. You are not “here” and the spiritual world “out there”. Everything is one. There is but one awareness. Because you have chosen to self-limit yourself and ignore the greater reality does not magically cause it to cease to exist. If you are waiting for your death to face the infinity and take your lumps you are on a fool’s errand. There is no separation. You are responsible for yourself in every present moment, with every action. You are not hiding your behavior from Santa Clause in the hopes you get what you want for Christmas. Your present moment is your position of power, your ever-renewed opportunity.
People become aware of All-That-Is through various means. Some have catastrophic events in their lives, some hit rock bottom with everything they were leaning on stripped away. Some in a quiet moment have a tap on the shoulder and suddenly become aware. Some seek with intention and are rewarded. All of these circumstances have something in common. The ego, the foreign installation, the internal dialog, is for a time turned off, shut down. Interpretation ceases. Ownership ceases. Logical thought and reasoning cease. Identifying and labeling cease. Awareness is set free, unencumbered. The world changes. The vitality and awareness of literally everything is available to be known and experienced. The world is seen through the eyes of a child. Everything is a source of wonder and amazement, each of equal value. Inner knowing comes to the forefront. The experience more a knowing than a sensory experience. It is a glimpse behind the veil, a glimpse of eternity. The inner knowing is reinforced, the present moment perceived so clearly, the connection felt so cleanly, the understanding so completely internalized that the feeling of separation falls away. The true reality is sensed, and once this is done, the constructed reality is revealed for what it is by virtue of its absence within the moment.
This “aha” moment changes many people forever. It is so profound, so fundamentally true and real, so eye opening the person is never the same again. It is the difference between experiencing and believing. If you have never seen an elephant, never been near enough to an elephant to experience one, you believe in elephants. You are fairly certain they exist. You’ve seen movies and pictures, other people’s accounts and descriptions. You believe elephants exist, but it is only a belief. Once you have seen an elephant for yourself close up, and had the experience of the elephant, elephants get moved from the belief column to the experience column. Perhaps a silly example, but my point is the person who experiences never has to accept on faith again. They no longer believe, they know. This is a huge difference.
The reveal of the constructed reality and its handmaiden the ego, and the realization of the contrast between the constructed reality and true nature of things, the underlying fundamental reality, leaves the person troubled, then astonished. Attachments lessen. Fear of death lessens. Ego driven pursuits and goals no longer hold their sway, their grip. The need to dominate and control the surroundings diminishes. The realization of eternity, of timelessness pitched much of the ego driven reality right out the window.
This experiencing of infinity, of All-That-Is, establishes a connection. You have seen and you cannot unsee. You are on the other side of the river now. You now have a resource, an awareness at your disposal. You can refer to this awareness as God, All-That-Is, Infinity, the Universe, the collective unconscious, whatever you wish. Labels are not important and really only create more problems than they solve. My suggestions are as follows……Keep this connection forefront in your awareness at all times. Strive to maintain it constantly. Ask that you be able to discern truth from falsehood, that you are able to see what truly is, not what your ego is influencing you to see. This applies in all cases, from observing political discourse to looking at a tree. Ask for the ability to experience on all levels, not simply within the cage defined by the five physical senses. Ask for the proper intention, so your experience is valid and you are not influenced by anything or anyone that seeks to hold you back or steer you in a wrong direction. Intend only to seek a closer relationship with All-That-Is. Be willing to accept this venture may take you into avenues you don’t really want to go down, at least not on the surface. Be willing to accept everything as a learning experience. I mean that literally. Everything. Heart attack? Learning experience. Stroke? Learning experience. Win the lottery? Learning experience. House burns down? Learning experience. If you keep your relationship with All-That-Is at the forefront of your awareness at all times, you are free to explore. Rather than considering if something is evil, sinful, good, helpful in and of itself, you will consider how the thing relates to you and your relationship with infinity. If it is a lesson to be learned, it is helpful. If it binds you more tightly to the physical reality construct, to the ego based semantic reality, it might be advantageous to avoid it.
Over time you will get used to using your higher self, your connection to Source as your sounding board. Christians will refer to this a “walking in the light” or “doing God’s will”. Walking in the light is not a bad analogy, but “doing God’s will” is definitely an attempt to pull you back into the club. There is a difference between continually asking for help and guidance and wanting to “do God’s will”. Asking for guidance, asking questions, asking for powers of discernment has no crime and punishment attached. Wrong moves are simply wrong moves and are corrected. Sometimes you learn as much or more from your mistakes than you do from your successes. Trying at every turn to second guess what God wants you to do leads right into guilt and remorse. There is nothing wrong with inviting the Infinity into your decision making process, but acquiescing responsibility and ownership of the decision is not in keeping in the spirit of why you’re here in the first place, which is to have the experience, including the experience of separation. Consult, but make your own decisions. As an eternal being, your decisions, your every thought and action, will be with you for eternity. Just saying.
With no organized religion to provide a framework for proper behavior and actions, what would you use to guide yourself through the swamp? How do you know if you’re running off the rails? To answer that question, we need to understand what constitutes sin. In order to introduce guilt, the concept of sin was created. We hear about sin all the time. Most people fall into the practice of labeling things good and evil quite readily. Christians have an extensive list of things that are considered sinful. First and foremost is original sin, defined by Wikipedia thusly, “Original sin is the Christian doctrine that humans inherit a tainted nature and a proclivity to sin through the fact of birth.” There is also the trick of ignoring that All Is One, but instead ascribing creation of this reality solely to Satan. The fact this reality was created at the pleasure of All-That-Is and funded by his energy, his thinking, is conveniently overlooked. The reasoning is if Satan created this world, then God is separate and cannot be part of this world, as that would taint his holiness, essentially making God unclean. This masterfully crafted guilt trip is followed up with the seven deadly sins, which in no particular order are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.
Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) wrote extensively on the subject in his work “The Summa Theologiae”, defining sins carefully, categorizing them by type and severity, and extending the definition to include sins of omission, which was a revolutionary concept at the time. You might as well argue over how many fairies can dance on the head of a pin. The entire batch of nonsense is articulated from the reality’s point of view and serves to anchor people to the reality by the mechanisms of guilt and fear. Make the entire subject complicated; add obfuscation and confusion, in order to keep people in confusion and fear and their attention rooted to the reality. One could make the case that these concepts are necessary in order to influence those who have no connection to Source to moderate their behavior rather than sinking into a gigantic pit of debauchery, but lying to people and feeding them falsehoods in an effort to control them is not the best option.
What is sin? Rather than getting pulled down into the weeds with specifics, let us define sin in the most general terms possible. Sin in relation to self is anything that binds you or your attention to the physical, ego-based construction. This places you firmly into ego based awareness, making it impossible for you to get into awareness of the Infinity. Jesus and Paul both make statements to the effect that nothing within physical reality is in and of itself sinful, that what makes something sinful is your relationship to it, your judgment of it. In Romans 14:14 the apostle Paul states as much, although he goes on to say you should refrain from a behavior if that behavior could influence others toward a sinful situation, which points to Paul’s crime and punishment mindset. In Matthew 15:11 Jesus states it is not what goes into a person’s mouth that defiles them, but what comes out of it. My effort here is not to use the Bible to back up my position, but to illustrate the concept was understood but is not emphasized in any meaningful way within current religious dogma. As previously stated, modern Christianity has the interesting concept of “original sin”, maintaining that humans are born with a flawed nature that is inherently inclined towards negative thoughts and behaviors, therefore the human must be purged of this “sin” and sinful nature. This is built in guilt, and the resultant fear of not measuring up is a very useful tool for influence and control. This twisting of the truth does not serve the divine, but serves the reality. Man is carnal, but carnality does not necessarily equate to sinful. Man has control over his thoughts and behaviors. Man has no control over his carnality. Labeling carnality a sin is a trap from which there is no escape presented except the full acceptance of the organized religion’s answer to the problem.
Organized religion tends to view sin as “evil” and not sinning as “good”. In a general sense this is correct, but once you introduce guilt and punishment into the mix it becomes a huge distortion. Anything that traps your attention to the reality, that binds you here, blinds you to All-That-Is. Rather than seeking and asking questions, your attention is rooted to the reality. Once your attention is strongly enough focused on the reality, the ego takes over and off you go into the world as defined by your assumptions and your five senses. So rather than considering sin as something evil, you may be better served to consider it as poorly focused attention and intention. Sin is not conducive to connecting with your higher self because you cannot turn your ego off and direct your awareness effectively if you are engaged in things that are constantly focusing your awareness onto the reality. It is really a matter of where you want to be in relation to your existence. Guilt and fear simply trap you here and so in that regard organized religion is working for the reality to help anchor you here. Once the fear and guilt have less influence, you will commence to shed things that are not serving you because they are not serving you.
While we’re at it we should take a minute and define evil. To perceive evil requires a judgment. To do evil requires intention, a motive. Judgment and intention/motive are aspects of the ego. I have seen a cat catch a bird, injure it, and then play with it, releasing it and re-catching it repeatedly for its own practice and amusement until the bird died from its wounds. We don’t consider the cat evil. The cat has no ego in the sense we think of ego, and so does not intend to torture the bird for the purpose of watching the bird suffer. The cat is simply being a cat. Without ego the cat does what cats do. The bird is useful for food and for maintaining the skills needed to procure more food. The suffering of the bird does not register within the cat. Both are aware of the part they play.
With regards to sin against others, there is only the taking advantage of another to satisfy one’s own personal self-serving motives. Where this gets dicey is your own survival is a self-serving motive. Stealing is wrong, even if you’re stealing food in order not to starve. The fact you’re starving might make stealing more understandable, but it’s still taking advantage of someone else for your own personal gain. Self-serving motives exist in a vast spectrum, from personal gain to simply amusement. One does not by virtue of simply existing have a claim against any other. We go on and on in popular culture with the notion of ‘helping’ others, ‘giving back’, charity, and all types and manner of ‘do-gooder’ organizations, not recognizing if everyone simply stopped sinning against others the world would be transformed overnight, as the vast majority of the creation of poverty and squalor is a direct result of the practice of taking advantage of others for one’s own personal gain.
Everything that is open to interpretation is subjective. 1 + 1 = 2 is objective. It is true for all observers, true in all situations. No agreement is required; the truth is simply the truth and stands alone. It is objective. However, once you introduce anything that requires a value judgment, there has to be agreement. If for example we’re counting cows, there has to be agreement that the cows are similar enough to be included in the same set of cows. This requires a value judgment and puts the whole thing onto the subjective side of the page. One cow may be too young, still a calf, or there may be one of a different breed. In the same type of consideration, evil is entirely subjective. What appears evil in one culture may not be considered evil at all in another. What constitutes evil is intention/motive and perceived intention. We receive input and our minds assemble the reality based on the inputs acknowledged. Those inputs that do not fit the paradigm are ignored. In order to have a communal experience, a value judgment must be made with regards as to which inputs are to be acknowledged and which inputs are to be ignored. Of those inputs acknowledged, further value judgments are undertaken to assemble the input to perceive it within the context of the communal experience. Additional value judgment by the ego assembles the information within context. Context is the domain of the ego. The ego assigns perceived intention to the perception. Evil only exists within the realm of idea, which for our purposes, when specifically assigned may be represented as the psyche. Once evil is defined it is recognized and can be pointed at. The more attention is receives, the more validity, the more existence it gains.
There is increasing recognition within some circles of the reality of the psyche. Author Paul Levy writes extensively of the reality of the portion of the psyche that is willing to harm and take advantage of other entities for its own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. He borrows the Algonquin term and concept of Wetiko and in his book “Dispelling Wetiko” undertakes a valiant effort to define it, pin it down, and explain it. As I read the book, one of my strongest takeaways was that Wetiko, the embodiment of the concept of evil, exists as a notion, an idea, a fabrication, an assembled perception, but within the collective psyche gains identity and existence.
Mr. Levy explains this masterfully and this excerpt is concise and illuminating:
“From the perspective of the psyche as imbued with living reality, the material world is experienced as being like a dream that continues to seem like reality as long as we are in it. Interestingly, this is the point of view of Eastern wisdom traditions when they refer to the physical world as being an unreal illusion or Maya. The Sanskrit word Maya refers to the source of illusion as well as the divine play of the creative spirit. What would happen, I find myself imagining, if more people investigated and more fully realized—not intellectually, but experientially—the living reality of the psyche? What would it bring to light? Since recognizing the psychic nature of reality simultaneously affects both the psyche and our experience of “reality,” how would the psyche, and the world, reflect back this realization? Because there are no absolute boundaries between an individual’s psyche and any other part of creation, none of us are separate from the cosmic creative principle itself; in fact, we are that principle incarnated in human form. The Divine Creative Imagination.
“The wetiko bug originates and operates within the realm of the psyche; the moment we recognize the reality of the psyche is when we begin to engage with wetiko in a way that may potentially lead somewhere. When we realize that the psyche has a reality all its own, we enter into the dimension of experience where our imagination and experience of ourselves and our world intersect, interpenetrate, and mutually influence each other in a conscious and consciousness-generating way. Paradoxically, wetiko simultaneously obscures us from, while potentially introducing us to, the reality and potency of the sacred creative imagination. If we lose contact with the living reality of the imagination within ourselves that is connected to something greater than and beyond ourselves, we become truly disoriented. We then become easy prey for the wetiko bug, which literally in-forms our lack of imagination so as to feed itself. If we don’t use our gift of imagination, other people will use it for us. We then find ourselves unable to imagine a world other than one informed by wetiko. The most decisive and telling question for humanity is, to put it simply, “Are we related to something infinite, something beyond our limited ego … or not?”
Recognize Mr. Levy’s assertion that once The Divine Creative Imagination is ignored, that is the most favorable condition for evil to assert itself and prosper. Charles Baudelaire is credited with stating “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. I would have to maintain convincing the world reality is primarily material is a close second, because that belief cuts humanity off from its true self and provides the opening for Wetiko to flourish.
Take a step back, flip it right side up, and take another look. From the perspective of your essence being primary and physical reality being a construct you are involved in for the time being, what are your goals? Your goals are to learn and grow towards unity, and to help others through the same process. Getting stuck within physicality is antithetical towards these goals. At best you’re wasting time and effort, and at worst case you’re back-sliding. You can have all the money on earth, but that slate gets reset to zero once you check out. As hard as the reality works to keep you focused here, it is in your best interests to remember none of the wealth, power, or prestige leaves the casino.
To review, sin in simplest terms is anything that diverts your attention away from your goals and instead focuses your energy and attention onto the reality construction. That’s it. There is no need to complicate things any further. If you allow something to anchor you here more firmly, that something is a sin. If you can appreciate something without allowing it to cause you attachment, it is not sinful. Considered this way something could be sinful for one person and not sinful for another person. In Romans 14:14, mentioned previously, Paul says, “I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself: but to him that esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is unclean.” There you go.
As you increase the intensity of your relationship to Source, you move forward. As you increase your focus on this reality and become entangled with it, you move backwards. As you help others in their goal to gain awareness of Source you move forwards. As you block and hinder other people from establishing a closer relationship to Source, you move backwards. This rule is generally considered Karma. It is codified in the Hindu and Buddhist religions, but the general concept is actually quite simple and easy to put to use as an intellectual concept. In physical reality, the more anchored to the reality you are the harder it is going to be to put this simple concept into practice.
If the reality matters to you, you will be quite happy to accumulate the rewards it offers. Prestige will matter. The more credentials you can pin on the end of your name, the better. If you are a manager or a department head, the larger your department becomes the more power and prestige you have. You purchase and collect things not for the joy they bring you, not for their utility, but because they announce to the world that you are a success. You seek to set yourself above others, to be important and perceived as important. Not for the sake of mentoring and helping others, but for your own self-aggrandizement. It is a comfort to you to feel elevated in social settings, to feel the sense of superiority.
When your life is completed, what have you gained? When your orientation, your vision, is focused on the ground, the ground is all that matters. When you expand your viewpoint from a step back, you see you are the most powerful and prestigious kid in the sandbox, and that not figuratively, but literally you are no further ahead in what really matters than the king of the sandbox. It was fun while you were here, but after it was over you hadn’t learned a thing, and in fact may have taken a step or two back for having allowed the reality to lead you around by the nose. The more chips you pile up at your casino table, the more tightly and securely the doors are locked.
Bear in mind most religious texts are translated, and even the original texts are semantic descriptions filtered through the author’s own knowledge and biases. The primary bias that colors most translations is the crime and punishment aspect. The King James Version of the Bible is no exception, but it does do a decent job of outlining this subject in Matthew 6:19 through 6:34. Jesus is making the case that this reality is a clown show and attention to it and investment in it blinds one to the ultimate reality. This is a simple concept. In the Nag Hammadi Texts, saying 56, Jesus says, "Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy." Other translations use the word “corpse”. I find this saying hysterically funny because he refers to the physical reality with complete disdain. If I had been with him when he said this, I most likely would have busted out laughing.
In the beginning of Matthew, chapter 4, Satan offers Jesus dominion over the physical reality if Jesus will make himself subservient to him. My take away from this is Satan has no awareness or appreciation of the ultimate truth, because if he did, he would not have wasted his time trying to tempt Jesus. He is aware on some level, but his awareness is blocked. If he did understand fully, he would know Jesus wouldn’t consider it for a second. This is done by All-That-Is to serve the purpose of setting up the physical reality and all the associated negative aspects of it. What we’re dealing with here is a semantic representation of ultimate truths. Satan is the gestalt that represents the physical reality as interpreted by the ego, maintains it, and gives it continuity. The physical reality, ultimately created by All-That-Is, must believe in itself and blind itself to the true nature of the ultimate reality in order to serve its purpose. This is part of the rules of the game. Jesus’ job was to go into the game and help the poor saps who got themselves trapped in it to see it for what it actually is.
The universe, being fractal in nature, can still be viewed as independent separate features, depending on the viewport. For example, the Mandelbrot Set, when viewed from different viewpoints, can look drastically different, but you’re really looking at is a portion of an infinite progression. At the base reality, the Mandelbrot Set is a plot of one equation. Applying this logic to our situation, our awareness/consciousness has been voluntarily self-limited in order for each “individual” awareness to be able to have a unique experiential existence. If you think of a tree diagram, turned upside down, it gives a visual representation of this idea. Each (seemingly) individual awareness branches up to another, higher-level awareness. As you travel further and further up the tree diagram, each branch point has more and more sub-branches. For sake of discussion, let’s call the intersection points aspects of awareness. Each aspect is a bundled awareness of all of the sub-branches. Although each aspect is aware at some level of all of the branches, again, this awareness is blocked in order to maintain the integrity of experience, to create a focal point of identity. What is not blocked from each aspect is information coming from the lower branches.
To put this in different terms, you are part of a higher self who is aware not only of himself/herself, but of all his/her subordinate aspects. This rolls up eventually to All-That-Is, who is aware all the way up and down. Bear in mind as a portion of All-That-Is, you have been given the ultimate gift, your ability to think and act, to intend, independently. All-That-Is wants you to know him, to return, but he has endowed you with the power to assemble and create worlds. You can seek him, or you can turn away. The choice is yours. The problem we encounter is, for this level of existence, in this particular frequency range, we have chosen to allow ourselves to forget who we are, in order to experience this reality fully. We cannot learn the lessons it offers if we’re not fully invested. If you fully remembered you were a soul having a physical experience, you wouldn’t make the same decisions at each inflection point.
There are entities that are powerful enough to dream entire worlds….entire universes. If this being was mired in service to self, control and power would be his intention. And so this dreamer provides the landscape for souls wishing to have a physical experience on this plane of existence. The Lord of This World, being proud, but also controlling, wishes souls in this realm to remain here. He is jealous, and twists the reality to lead souls to believe this reality is all there is, that the material reality is the genuine reality and the spiritual reality is false. Everything he does, says, acts upon, is toward this end, to keep you here, paying attention to his creation.
Pretend you are a higher-dimensional being. You have already been through the lower realms and you are high enough in consciousness that not only are you constantly aware of All-That-Is, you are full of his spirit. You are well beyond third-dimensional existence developmentally, and entering it to command it to your will would be child’s play. As a higher being, it is important to you to help other souls that are struggling along their path, especially the ones you had a hand in creating. You cannot, or choose not to get involved in the process of them exercising their free will, but you can provide insight and guidance if it is requested.
There is a particular version of a third-dimensional earth where the creator of the world is an especially prideful and jealous sort. Souls that visit this reality are ending up trapped and rather than being helped to realize their true nature, the jealous creator wants to keep them trapped in his creation. You have been tasked, or have tasked yourself, with visiting this world to assist the souls there to remember their true mission and to remember who they are.
Such is the dilemma Jesus found himself in. There are many challenges. You cannot circumvent free will, meaning you can’t go in there and simply clean house, at least not right away. You have to convince and present your case to a people that have for the most part forgotten who they are. They are deceived, and they don’t understand the true nature of their existence. These poor souls will be wrapped up and trapped in this reality until they realize their true nature, if ever. So what do you do?
Keep in mind Western thought was already well along. The prevailing wisdom, already entrenched, is the world is reducible to tinier and tinier bits of matter, cause and effect rules the day, and physical existence is supposedly all there is. If you can touch it, it’s real. Anything else is suspect. There are prevailing religions, but they are steeped in dogma and rituals, and are used mostly for control of the masses by the “leaders”. Any challenge will be viewed as a challenge to authority and won’t be taken lightly.
Jesus has one advantage. Unlike you and me, his firmware doesn’t get wiped clean. He doesn’t have to start from scratch. He knows who he is and where he came from. He knows although he could alter the reality directly if he wished, it would circumvent the free will of all involved. He also understands there is a high possibility he ends up with a grisly death, but bear in mind Jesus is fully aware of the true nature of reality. Physical death does not bother him in the slightest. Pain is not fun, but it is temporary.
So he has to be judicious. He has to fight the fight on the enemy’s turf. He has to be careful about direct confrontation with the authorities, especially the religious leaders. He has to present his case in a manner that delivers the message, but is not too much too soon for the minds of the time. He is there for those who are lost but ready to hear, so he has to present ideas in a manner such that those ready for the message hear it, but it sounds like gibberish to everyone else. He knows whatever he says will be twisted to serve the creator of the world, so he must choose his words carefully so there is some semblance of their true meaning as they get passed on. He is there to plant seeds of awareness. He is persecuted by many of the existing religious leaders specifically because he refuses to play into the ‘crime and punishment’ mindset. He acknowledges the Old Testament (the Pentateuch), but refuses to interpret it literally, which infuriates the established leaders.
Western religion also during this time developed into a system of rules and regulations, crime and punishment. It was important to the religious leaders that people be exposed to the “correct” version of reality. Irenaeus went to great efforts to define the accepted orthodoxy, supposedly stating, “Beliefs, after all, do not patrol themselves.” Expressed in mostly negative terms, eight of the Ten Commandments contain the verbiage “Thou shalt not….”. The attempts to gain converts utilize the threats of negative consequences. If you don’t believe as the rules say, you will burn in Hell forever in eternal torment of the highest order. Due to their affiliation with this realm of existence, humans are deemed to be sinners, and the only redemption, the only way out of the mess, is to accept the story as it is told you. To put it bluntly, you have to get your ticket punched or its curtains for you. Fear and negative consequences are stressed. Everything is couched in terms of crimes and punishment. God is an angry and jealous god who is ready, willing, and able to cast you into the pits of Hell for eternity if you don’t toe the line.
And so, to take a step back, all of organized religion is tainted, but each does contain truths for those willing and able to see them. Ultimately, you are an eternal being, a “soul” having a physical experience. Once this is realized, the perspective is flipped over, rotated 180 degrees. The investment, the attachment to this reality lessens. Events and material things are viewed from the perspective of learning. It becomes, “What is this event trying to teach me, what of value can I learn from it?” “How are these possessions serving me in my quest to realize my true nature?” Why hold something that is binding you to this construct? You will evaluate possessions for their utility, for their usefulness. You may appreciate possessions for their emotional value, what they mean to you. Putting a monetary number on them won’t make sense any longer. What you value is priceless, and what doesn’t resonate with you is undesirable no matter the monetary value.
To reiterate, All is One. There is no separation. The being that created this reality did so with the blessings of All-That-Is, on behalf of All-That-Is. What we name this being is immaterial, and his motives and mindset are immaterial. Whether he exists as an actual entity or whether he is the icon for the ego-based service-to-self collective unconscious is immaterial. Good and evil are constructs that are completely relative. All works for good. Your ego self is on the outside looking in. You might view a homeless person and feel sorry for them, thinking, “Oh, the poor dear! What horrible circumstance he must be living in”. If the poor dear’s circumstances led him to finally shut his ego off, shut his roof-brain chatter up long enough to connect with the divine, he has gained everything and lost nothing. In Matthew 16:26 Jesus states riches accumulated within this reality do not serve you at all if they cause your attention to remain rooted here. In the big scheme of things the homeless man, once he gains insight into All-That-Is, is far better off than all of the wealthy people who have no clue of anything other than physicality. When it is said to not judge, our thinking naturally goes to the idea of crime and punishment. Judgment is not here in the punitive sense, but more of “do not try to fit what you are seeing into your preconceived notions”. You’re in grade school. You cannot expect to grade a graduate school mathematical doctoral thesis.
Christ is the name chosen for that aspect of All-That-Is that relates to Man, that serves as the channel and focal point for Man. Belief is fear based and will not hold up when your back is against the wall. The difference is getting to know Christ, or Christ consciousness, if you wish, because you wish to know him, for help understanding the truth, instead of trying to talk yourself into a belief in order to gain some sort of reward, or to simply save yourself pain and suffering. Names fail. If you are seeking All-That-Is, the channel most accessible to you runs through Christ consciousness. It is not necessary that you believe Christ is an actual person in the sense most believe, but that you utilize the avenue and the insights provided to raise your head above the water. He has already done it successfully, and wants to assist you in your quest. All Is One. If you are seeking All-That-Is, you are seeking Christ. If you are seeking Christ, you are seeking All-That-Is. Names and labels do not matter. The instant you name something and put a circle around it to define it, you have locked it in and are in danger of falling back into the semantic swamp.
Jesus’ followers seemed intent on creating a religion, but I never get the impression Jesus was trying to create a religion except as a means to get the message out. I also never get the impression Jesus desires to be worshipped. He wants people to believe in him as a means to an end, which is to grasp the true nature of their existence, to accept his help, but to be worshipped like the sun god Ra or something, no. That is Old Testament thinking. Read the New Testament, and everywhere Jesus says “Believe in me” substitute “Believe me” and it translates more closely to the original intent. If you have ever been a parent, think of your relationship with your children. You want to help them become healthy, happy, fully functioning adults. Most people don’t want their children to worship them in the literal sense. That would be silly, uncomfortable, and even perhaps a bit creepy. Jesus wants you to believe him, and then get to know him, to lean on him. He wants to help you. He wants you to ask questions, to question everything. To call on him so he can show you true from false. His mission is to help you become all you can potentially be. And that cannot happen if you do not recognize your true nature and instead remain caught up in this reality.
The ultimate sin would be to simply renounce All-That-Is, to take the position this physical construction is the end all, be all, and there is nothing else. This is the ultimate strategy to bind yourself to the reality. You’re all in; all your chips are in one pile. Service to self is your mission. The polar opposite would be to be so removed from the construction there is no attachment. Your reference point is not here. Your attention while you’re physical might be here, but your reference point is your overall self and the development of the overall self. The here and now is a tool, props to assist you, to create situations for your learning and development. Only those things that help you in your quest are of any real interest to you. You have taken conventional wisdom and the conventional point of view, considered them, taken a step back, and taken the blinders off.
V. Taking a Step Back on Science
Intelligence as measured in our era is the ability to recognize and manipulate patterns and relationships between shapes, numbers, and variables. Wisdom is the ability to discern truth from falsehood and recognize nonsense. These properties are not mutually exclusive, but it is possible to have one in preponderance and have little or none of the other. People with extremely high IQ’s can display masterful dominion over what they have been taught but demonstrate an amazing lack of awareness and curiosity with regards to the nature of reality. Things we are taught as a child for many of us become ingrained. It is never thought to question. The “facts” are accepted, and anyone who questions them is considered uneducated, or less intelligent. We are taught the Bohr model of the atom from an early age. It is now accepted “fact”, and has been for many years. One of the aspects we are taught is that an electron cannot exist between valance shells. Not only can it not exist between levels, no electron has ever been found moving from one to the other nor has this phenomena ever been observed as far as I know. It seems to simply disappear and reappear. Scientists explain this by assigning energy the term “packets”, quantizing it, so to speak. The thinking is energy, and therefore matter, does not exist except in discreet amounts or steps. This concept always bothered me, because this seemed like explaining away something in an attempt to line it up with the mathematics. Rather than taking what they were seeing at face value, they instead tweak the definitions and the mathematics to line up. Their assumption that physical reality is primary and fundamental drives them to behave as such. There seems to be a reluctance to entertain the idea the quantization is a product of the experiential, perception-based function of ‘reality’, separate from a more fundamental underlying objective reality.
As I got older and thought about this more, it occurred to me that the electron might not be a physical ball at all, but instead a vibrating shell of energy. A tone. A musical note. Any decent musician will tell you harmonics on a stringed instrument will only appear at certain lengths, and the higher the frequency of the harmonic the more energy it takes to make it ring true. Looked at this way, the energy of the vibrating shell of the electron becomes insufficient for it to continue, so it reverts to the lower sympathetic harmonic (energy level). The valence shells can also be thought of in the terms of notes of the musical scale. When the “electron” loses too much energy to be able to vibrate at the higher harmonic, it simply ceases at that harmonic and commences vibrating at the lower, less energetic harmonic. To the observer that is expecting “matter”, it would appear to wink out at the higher valence shell and reappear in the lower one. The fundamental frequency, or vibrational level would define/dictate which harmonics were available. The salient point here is there is a fundamental frequency. The appearance of “matter” winking in and out is because that which is not a harmonic of the fundamental cannot manifest within the substrate.
When we study the work of the pioneers, J.J. Thompson, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Planck, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, Werner Heisenberg, Nicola Tesla and others, we start to understand the concept of the electron as an actual physically existing structure was not what they were necessarily thinking. It is an error of interpretation on our part, their model having been created for the purpose of assigning a label to the observations in order to be able to bring some commonality into the vernacular, to put a name to the effect they were seeing.
In the late 19th century, physicists were attempting to figure out why hot objects glow, and to mathematically model the phenomena, the “intensity spectral distribution function”. Classical mathematics predicted the wavelength to temperature relationship accurately up to a point, but fell apart at higher energies (higher frequencies, i.e. shorter wavelengths), running off the rails as the light approached the ultraviolet region. This became known as “The Ultraviolet Catastrophe”. German physicist Max Planck, by assuming energy was only accepted or rejected in discreet jumps (quanta) was able to come up with a formula that accurately described the observed phenomena mathematically. This was for all practical purposes the birth of quantum mechanics.[viii] I don’t believe it a coincidence the ‘catastrophe’ occurred right at the high end of the visible light spectrum.
This point is also the fork in the road. Albert Einstein postulated Planck’s quanta were real physical particles, which we now call photons. He further postulated photons were not uniform, but existed at different energy levels (frequencies). Einstein won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 for using this postulate to explain the photoelectric effect. We have a tendency in modern times to assume something that wins a Nobel Prize is “settled science” and no further investigation is necessary. Luckily, not all scientists subscribe to that attitude, but continue to question, as they should.
As physicists tried to hammer out a working model of what they were observing, Niels Bohr postulated the energy levels of an atom were discreet and quantized. He further postulated since electrons appeared to gain or lose energy in discreet packets, Einstein’s photon explained things nicely. Bohr maintained electrons gained and lost energy by the absorption and emission of photons. Bohr went on to include these assumptions in his model of the atom, which we now know as “The Bohr Model”.
Getting back to the issue of electrons “jumping” between valence (energy) shells without ever existing in between them, Bohr, Heisenberg, and their cronies simply allowed that mystery to remain a mystery and pressed on with their work. Heisenberg, even though he seemingly went along with the pragmatist wave, was bothered with considering the matter settled, stating “In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, the phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” The term that came into popular use was the mathematically based term of a “wave function”. Mathematicians are used to thinking in terms of functions, as in f(x), so the indeterminate nature didn’t bother them. The electron was “somewhere” in there. It can mathematically be represented as a function of possibilities, but that doesn’t answer the question of what is actually going on fundamentally. The scientific sleight of hand is to state the particle “exists” as a “wave function”, a set of possibilities. No, it is defined as a set of possibilities. Defined does not equal explained. It is akin to developing an equation to predict the speed at which an apple falls from a tree and declaring you have “defined gravity”.
Their interpretation, which became known as “The Copenhagen Interpretation” was a major topic of the fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. Pragmatism won the day, as much of the unexplained observations were glossed over in order to push through a working model that was useful within physical reality. They didn’t try to deny the observations that didn’t fit, they conveniently ignored them. Many physicists, eager to play with their new toys rather than continue to search for fundamental truths, were also willing to go along with the Bohr, Heisenberg, and Einstein’s assumptions and convenient myopia.
Standing on the back of the work of Louis de Broglie, Erwin Schrödinger’s issue with the whole sordid mess was he understood the observations could be better explained via classic resonance phenomena. Considering the observations as waves / vibrations / musical notes, there was then no need to resort to “particles”, and all the “spooky” aspects of the assumption of particles goes away. The valence (energy) shells are considered fundamental vibrational modes, and the electrons would be a superposition of multiple vibrational modes. Schrödinger considered talking about individual particles as nonsense, or even talking about “particles” at all. [ix]
And so for the time being pragmatism has won out, as has the materialist / atomist mindset, reducing everything to the random interactions of little bumping particles. It is completely understandable that those who are not inclined to a personal reflection of the nature of reality would readily adapt the materialist viewpoint. A hammer has its own prominent presence in physicality. They can pick it up, feel the mass, and watch the effects of the impact as they strike objects with it. If they smash their finger, they get immediate feedback in the form of pain and the visuals of an injured finger. Trying to convince this person the hammer is actually only the manifestation of vibratory energy, that it isn’t ‘real’ in the sense they believe it to be will get you an odd look and perhaps the necessity to move quickly to avoid a blow from the same hammer as they seek to convince you of the reality of said hammer.
I hear you muttering to yourself, “Well, we can see atoms with microscopes now, so we know they exist.” Not so fast. Three dimensional cymatics patterns, literally forms, within substrates allow the forms to be seen. The form is manifested as something perceptible to us at the intersection of the dissimilar materials. Vibration and resonance utilized to build notes and chords yield perceivable two and three dimensional shapes.
If you take a metal plate, mount a speaker to bottom and drive the speaker with an oscillator, you can vibrate the plate at varying frequencies. Sprinkle any sort of granular substance such as salt or sugar onto the plate and slowly raise the frequency output of the oscillator. At certain specific frequencies very distinct geometric patterns will emerge. As the frequency is incrementally raised the pattern will become more distinct, reach a maximum resolution, and then become less distinct. The pattern can only exist at that specific frequency. Many patterns will be familiar to you as they will look like many of the patterns you see in nature. This effect can also be done by vibrating liquid with a granular material suspended in it. Heavy ink will work as well. Single frequencies yield two dimensional patterns and polyfrequencies yield three dimensional patterns. There are many videos of this process readily available on the internet and I would recommend you view some of them. This process is called cymatics, and there are some very good videos on the subject if you care to browse for them. Looking at the definition of cymatics, “Cymatics is a subset of modal vibrational phenomena. The term was coined by Hans Jenny, a Swiss follower of the philosophical school known as anthroposophy.” I visited the Wikipedia page on cymatics, and I found not one reference to anything other than strict Materialist viewpoints. This is intentional and by design. In fairness there was a bit about using it for healing, but even that is a utilitarian view. There is no mention of how cymatics fits into the overall creation of reality, what it reveals towards that end.
It is important to note the form exists within the energy field created by the vibrations whether the granular material is present or not. The granular material simply makes the form perceivable to the senses. The air or the liquid is analogous to the ether, the background energy field of light. The sound at a specific frequency where it influences the substrate is analogous to the idea, to identity. Consciousness interacts with the idea in the same manner as the granular materials interact with the form, giving it substance, bringing it forth into awareness to be experienced. Remember, identity exists at all levels, so idea builds upon idea to create composites.
From a step back you investigate things such as cymatics and see the wonder of creation. You understand what you are seeing as a clue to the root nature of reality. You never see the leaves on the trees with the same eyes, as you intuitively understand how they are an expression of form made manifest by your interaction. The modern scientist sees none of this. It is something to be explained away, defined, dissected, disassembled, reduced, examined mathematically. The scientific dogma that matter is primary, that life is simply a happy accident, that awareness/consciousness springs from matter, that the world of spiritual awareness is simply delusions, is now seen as complete and utter nonsense. The concept of the form existing as objective idea is not something materialist/reductionist science considers.
In the August 2020 issue of the magazine Symmetry is the article “LHC Creates Matter From Light” by Sarah Charley.[x] In the article Ms. Charley relays that during an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider the experimenters collided photons together at extremely high energies and the result was the creation of bosons. Bosons, along with fermions, are currently considered the two types of elementary particles. So it is now considered to be experimentally verified that light and matter are convertible one to the other. Break matter apart at the fundamental level and massive amounts of energy are released. Collide light together at extremely high energies and you get particles generated as a result. E = MC2 can and should be taken literally.
It is interesting that within the article Ms. Charley uses the term “produced” and refrains from the term “created”. Whoever composed the title of the article used the term “creates”. It may seem like an insignificant distinction, but it is not. We must take the equals sign in E = MC2 literally. What the experimental results and the equation are telling us is matter and light are two states of the same thing. A good analogy would be water. We use the term ice for water that has solidified, but no one would try to argue that water and ice are two different substances; they are both water in different states. Most people don’t consider they ‘created’ ice when they pull the tray from the freezer. If you take a look at your surroundings, everything within your view is composed of light. Not figuratively, but literally. In the Old Testament, Genesis 1:3 “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” In Isaiah 45:7, God says “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.”
“I form the light...” What does that mean? Bear in mind the being speaking here is representing the creator of the world, this reality. We use the general term “light”, but what is light? Nikola Tesla stated, “Light cannot be anything else but a longitudinal disturbance in the ether, involving alternate compressions and rarefactions. In other words, light can be nothing else than a sound wave in the ether.” Modern scientists speak of light waves, but waves of what? Sound is waves of the air, the air being the medium, the substrate. Water serves as the medium for waves in the water. If you have ever watched a leaf floating on the water while a wave passes by underneath it, you get an intuitive feel for the fact nothing is actually moving longitudinally. If you could see the individual molecules of water you could observe that the molecules were only moving up and down as the wave passes. Granted, if something is positioned in the leading edge of the wave it will be propelled along, any surfer knows this, but the individual molecules of water are not moving longitudinally in any appreciable manner. The same example applies to sound. The atoms of the gases that contact your ear when you hear a sound are not the same ones that were influenced at the location where the sound originated. Molecules of the gases that comprise the air do not leave the point of origin of the sound and travel to your eardrum. The energy that originated the sound set up a perturbation of the air. This perturbation (the waves) contacts your eardrum and through a mechanical and electrochemical process a signal is transmitted to your brain. If you slap the water to create waves, the water is the medium. If you shout, the air is the medium.
Why do we believe light is any different? Do we really believe that photon particles are emitted from the sun, travel 93,000,000 miles to contact our retinas? This would be nonsense. It is known that without an observer or an observer’s proxy instrumentation light behaves as waves. When the light interacts with awareness/consciousness/intent, particles appear. This has been experimentally proven numerous times and is popularly known as “the double-slit experiment”. Since we have determined waves require a substrate, the obvious question is, “Waves of what? What is waving?” Within one of his YouTube™ posts Ken Wheeler makes the statement light is not “waves within the ether, but wave of the ether”. This is a great point. He also makes the point what we experience as physical particles are light energy that has reached a frequency level high enough so as to appear within our defined universe as having no transverse component.[xi] You might consider the analogy of a fan blade you could spin infinitely fast. At some point the fan effectively becomes a solid. It would appear solid and behave as a solid.
Now that we have developed improved instrumentation and measurement devices, it is common knowledge that light, just as sound does, changes speed depending on the medium. Upon encountering a less advantageous medium it will slow down, and upon leaving the less advantageous medium, speeds back up. If you research this on the internet there are some interesting explanations offered that try to explain this phenomena in terms of particles. They manage to gloss over the fact that if the wave is particles additional energy would be required to speed them back up once they exited the less impeding medium. The more logical explanation might be the light is actually waves, which interact with the electrical nature of the outer valence region of the atoms of the less-advantageous material, electromagnetically creating additional waves which interact with the original light wave. However, use any popular internet browser and you can readily prove for yourself those explanations anchored in atomism and light as particles are highest in the queue of responses to a search.
We need to consider what the true nature of the reality actually is, as much as we can know it. We know the wave within the substrate (the ether, the energy field, zero point field, quantum field, God, All-That-Is, etc.) yields a particle only when awareness/intention/consciousness interacts with it. No interaction, no particle. Modern science terms this “collapsing the wave function”. I try not to use the term since it lends credence to the theory of the “dual nature” of electromagnetic waves, but we’ll let the term stand for now.
We are living with a semantic error, that what the two previously mentioned bible verses seem to refer to what we experience as visible light, but actually refer to a much broader spectrum and analogy. I maintain the ether Mr. Tesla is referring to is the light referred to in Genesis 1:3 and Isaiah 45:7. For the creation of the reality, All-That-Is contributes of himself the ether, and funds it with his thinking and with his being. The fundamental vibrational wavelength we know as the Planck length, fundamental as nothing smaller would be perceptible to us or to our instrumentation. Because it is at its core nature vibrational, music analogies work well when discussing the ether. Mind is real. Thinking is real. Intention is real. Idea is real. Matter is manifested when thinking awareness interacts with the ether. Particles of matter are analogous to harmonics plucked on a string. I do not believe it is unintentional that the “light” referred to in religious texts, which refer to the energetic substrate of physical creation, and visible light, are both named the same thing. This sleight of hand directs the focus on the effect rather than the underlying reality, the cause.
Quantum mechanics threatened to throw a wrench into the physical reality machine. The reality had to do something in order to maintain dominance. There was a very real danger that the word get out that consciousness was primary. Many of the finest minds of the day were grappling with the experimental results they were seeing and coming to the “wrong” conclusions. We live with the results to this day. Schrödinger’s, de Broglie’s, and others work that fits the materialist narrative is kept and that which does not is ignored. Turning thinking around takes a long time, and correcting errors in thinking takes even longer. To be fair, recent work on Bell’s inequality theorem are starting to pay dividends, but getting entrenched thinking to accept them is another matter. As the saying goes, “Science advances one funeral at time”.
I recently finished "Punk Science" by Manjir Samanta-Laughton. She does a good job of outlining recent discoveries regarding black holes. Instead of the term "event horizon" she uses the term "perception horizon". She makes the case that humans are essentially living in a perceptual box, the boundaries of which are the limits of what is perceivable (including instrumentation). If I understand her points correctly, scientists are studying the behavior of reality within the confines of the box, but what they're trying to study is not confined to the box, so they're only getting part of the picture. They completely dismiss the reality outside the box defined by the limits of their physical perception and so are shooting in the dark, so to speak. She presents the equation BRAIN = MIND = CONSCIOUSNESS and labels it “the fundamental assumption of neuroscience”. Modern science is still dissecting the frog looking for the frog among the entrails. Backwards thinking prevails.
Since awareness resides in the all-encompassing present, and since physicality is dependent upon awareness, there is only the present. Physicality only exists in the same present as the awareness that is manifesting it. One second into the future and one second into the past do not exist in physicality. This is not to say the past and future are non-existent, as they exist as idea/mental creation. Thinking/mind/awareness is primary and physicality only exists when intention/awareness interacts with the ether/quantum field/Source. Consequently, physicality is entirely dependent on our attention to it. It needs our attention for its very existence, and the more attention it receives, the stronger and more pervasive it becomes. This is the double slit experiment results considered at face value, and I see no problem with doing so. The probability function is a mathematical model and should be looked at as such.
The elephant in the room is the conclusion that if consciousness is primary and physicality is the result of awareness/intent as it interacts with the ether/quantum field, consciousness exists independently of physicality, meaning it is not dependent on the physical body for existence. It also follows that since awareness/consciousness exists and matter is a resultant effect, the hard line between matter/spirit, or perhaps real/spirit, just became very blurry. Maybe there is not as much separation as you thought? Perhaps there is no separation? If your consciousness is independent of physicality, what else is there for it to focus on? Why am I so intently focused on this reality? Uh oh! Cat’s out of the bag! The elephant in the room is running about and just crushed the china cabinet!
In summary, here is science from a step back:
Science is good at evaluating and manipulating the physical world, but it’s insistence that matter is primary and everything springs from matter is provably wrong. Science protects and promulgates this paradigm in spite of evidence to the contrary. Science insists any claims of existence outside of those defined by physical matter are whimsical fancies of imagination. Observed phenomena are explained away with insistence of a “dual nature”, sometimes particles and sometimes waves, depending on which better explains the observations. It is interesting to note the explanations continue to become more and more involved, more and more complicated. Would not something correctly perceived and described become more simple? They speak of light waves, electromagnetic waves, particle waves, but waves of what? What is the substrate? The substrate, the ether, the quantum field, whatever you want to label it, is part of All-That-Is, funded by All-That-Is, so nothing that is part of it is not of All-That-Is. Matter is the result of our awareness/intent and it’s interaction with the ether, where idea is recognized. Matter is formed therefore consistent with our expectations. We, as fractals of All-That-Is, have the ability to interact with the ether and create according to our beliefs and our expectations. Nothing we can perceive, nothing we can conceive of is not of All-That-Is.
Once this realization is internalized, the next step is to realize the implications. You are not separated from All-That-Is, you are literally made from him. You do not need an intercessor. There is also nowhere to hide. God as boogeyman, that there’s an external God that watches over you would mean God was somehow separate from you. We don’t get off that easy. But you also become inspired to want to know All-That-Is better. You want to see the rest of creation, to understand it, to be privy to the mechanisms, to participate to the most effective level you are able. You become hungry to get closer to the truth. You realize you have been gifted a small gift, a glimpse, but you also realize your knowledge and understanding are infinitesimally small compared to what is possible. You make every attempt to get as close as possible to All-That-Is, and you keep the desire foremost in your mind at all times.
How much different would science be if all the scientists understood that awareness/consciousness was primary? That in order for matter to exist there has to be a substrate set up in advance with its inherent self sustaining movement between polarities of potential? Nicola Tesla remarked, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” This is true, and with the understanding matter is an effect and not a cause, more scientific breakthroughs than thought possible would start manifesting.
I submit as evidence we’re on the wrong road the fact we have been stalled scientifically for at least one hundred years. Ninety nine percent of the technology we enjoy today is based upon concepts that were intuited and conceived a hundred years ago. We have made tremendous refinements. Metallurgy and machining have progressed by leaps and bounds. The transistor and the miniaturization of electronic components have made modern computers viable for use in anything we desire to use them for. For those that understand machine control modern machines are actually marvels of simplicity. Machine control routines, CNC machines, “fuzzy” logic and other software developments have made it relatively easy to manufacture things. But there has been no mindset change, and so the base reality that is driving us has not changed. We are stalled.
Without a mindset change, without an acknowledgement of the true nature of reality, progress will only be in the mechanistic direction. More machines, more computers, more push to integrate the “inferior” humans with the machines. The world around us will only be seen for what of it is useful towards these ends, what utility it brings. Everything, humans included, will be viewed as commodities, and they will be evaluated solely on their utility. There will be little pause or reflection before “improving” the human in order to fit the human into the new paradigm. Those things that are allowed by this viewpoint to exhibit some divine influence will be degraded to their lowest common form. Since top-down control will become easier, it will be instituted to the extent possible. Does any of this sound familiar? Does not this segue into Transhumanism? Man serving machine. Sounds like fun……..for the machines.
With the understanding that there is no separation, that awareness/consciousness is primary, physical reality loses its grip. Whether one chooses to admit it or not, if awareness/consciousness is primary, this means our world view is backwards, upside down. Matter, as a product, an effect, perhaps a projection, a hologram, matters little, and the development/advancement of the soul matters a great deal. The pursuit of knowledge and truth becomes more important than the pursuit of materialistic rewards. Science will turn its attention away from pursuit of manipulation of the physical for materialistic/monetary reasons and again become a pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. This is not saying investigation and the manipulation of physical reality will cease, or that properties of it that can be exploited for our use will cease, but these will more often come as a result of the mindset change rather than as a primary driver.
That there is no separation leads to the conclusion all is spiritual, all is awareness/consciousness/idea. As the fear of physical death is put into the background, the grip one has to this reality lessons. The idea of accumulating material possessions for anything other than their utility or the joy they give becomes less appealing. The trap of the pursuit of wealth and power simply for the sake of achieving wealth and power is rightly seen as counterproductive towards the soul’s overall goals. All one takes with them at physical death is the experience and the lessons they’ve learned. “You can’t take it with you” is completely true with regards to physical possessions. They cannot be any help to you, but your desire for them, your coveting of them, and the actions you took to obtain them can hinder your overall growth and development. Once this is fully internalized, the individual simply looses the desire for possessions simply for possession’s sake.
I am bothered by having to use words such as spiritual and soul, as spiritual and soul both imply separation. They reinforce the idea that spirit and physical are two different things. All is One. There is no separation. As this understanding gains traction, as more and more people begin to intuit the accepted view of reality is upside down and backwards, they will cast off religious dogma and scientific materialism/reductionism and commence seeking a direct relationship with Source. Religion as a control mechanism will lose its grip and religion as a window into the truth will become accepted. As people establish their connection to Source, they will acquire the wisdom and insight that will allow them to glean the truth contained within the semantic minefield that is religious writings. Religion and science will eventually merge as understanding increases, as it becomes obvious there is no separation between matters of spirit and matters of physicality. Both will be seen as the pursuit of truth, which works to minimize the dividing line. You could very well trace a large percentage of our problems to the attempts to keep science and religion separated. The merger of them into one pursuit will not have to be enforced or driven; it will simply happen organically as understanding increases.
VI. Reality Reexamined – Baby Steps
Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it would be wise to keep what we know scientifically, but recognize it for what it is. There are times in learning new concepts and skills where the student can only be presented with a small chunk of the overall skill. It may even be necessary to teach the student something that will be temporarily helpful, but ultimately later have to be unlearned in order for further positive progress to be possible. We are collectively now at that juncture. We have learned the lessons of pure physicality, but now find ourselves in the zone of diminishing returns. We understand to a great degree how to manipulate physical reality, but it is obvious that only goes so far before it turns into destruction. It seems a quandary that humans in order to create and thrive must destroy. A teacher I had in high school asked the class once, “Why does human progress look so much like destruction?” Collectively here in America we were coming out of the 1950’s and early 1960’s with the mindset that nature constituted a barrier, and obstacle to overcome, that humans could do better. Tang replaced orange juice. The concept that nutrition could come from a pill was popular, we would no longer need to eat. Artificial everything. Nature was cool, but we knew better. Such is the world viewed from the perspective of pure physicality, from the materialist, reductionist viewpoint.
Armed with this new perspective on the nature of the reality we find ourselves in, that consciousness is primary, what happens as you revisit science and religion? Religion is now approached as a resource of knowledge. If seen in context there is wisdom and truth within it, but there are also half-truths and errors of omission. There are interpretations that are relayed in order to steer you in a certain direction, to control you, to push you into the belief matter is “here” and spirit is “out there”. You realize anyone telling you their way is the only way and all the others are heresy is deceived and may very well be trying to manipulate you. You realize you can ask questions and they will be heard, so you start to use your relationship with All-That-Is to sift through what is presented. Many people do this intuitively. One of my grandfathers was a biochemist with more than fifty patents to his credit. He had a room in his house with a chair and desk made together, just as you used to find in schools. He would go the room and sit at the desk, put his face into his palms, and think. He looked at thinking as an activity, one he utilized regularly. My grandmother would tell me, “Leave your grandfather alone for now. He’s thinking”. Pondering in a focused manner is asking the universe for help. Same concept.
The biggest hurdle is cleared once you realize you have no need of organized religion. It holds no power over you. I am not speaking here of only your interactions with it directly, but the pull of the dogma, the influence upon you. You have need of help from sources that can aid in your knowledge and understanding, but you have no need for rigid organized religion or the associated dogma. The realization we are eternal beings here for the experiences and lessons removes the fear. Without fear, there is no hold over you by the reality. You are no longer overly concerned with ego driven goals. Although you understand the ground rules for the reality, that there are certain minimum requirements in order to remain here, nothing here will serve you once you leave except the experiences. You take away only what you learned from your experiences and your relationships relative to the reality and other entities. Nothing that matters to the reality within the reality, such as wealth, fame, status, accreditations, awards, accolades, will matter once you are outside of the reality. None of it. All that will matter is your relationship to All-That-Is and to the other entities you find yourself involved with. “You can’t take it with you” is true with regards to anything tied to physicality.
In “Biocentrism – How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe” by Robert Lanza, M.D. and Bob Berman, Dr. Lanza postulates the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics may be a workaround for the inconvenient fact the experimental results of the double slit experiment and the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment simply do not fit within our preconceived notions of how physical reality works.[xii] In my reading it seems to me to be in their opinion a desperate clinging to the notion our reality is physical, that awareness/consciousness is the result of physical processes and interactions. The waveform of light on the background in the double slit experiment can be mathematically correlated to “most likely” and “least likely” physical realities. The term “function” in “wave function” is a noun and is referring to a mathematical function, not a function as relates to a physical action. It is simply the set of values that satisfies the expressed equation. If other probabilities that satisfy the equation exist as physical realities, it can be argued the fact electrons can appear, disappear, and appear to be two places at once hints at the existence of multiple physical universes. I take exception to this. What of the regions where there is overlap?
This useful analogy is not original with me, but I cannot remember where I first came across it. Consider a solid block of granite. Let’s say it is a square block with each side measuring the arbitrary measurement of four feet. It can be objectively stated that every possible object that could be fabricated from the block already exists within the block. They exist in real time, simultaneously. All that is necessary is to remove the undesired material. By removing granite you can actualize any granite object possible that conforms to the size restrictions imposed by the measurements of the block.
Let’s create for ourselves a rule that says we can fabricate anything we wish out of the block, but the center and the surrounding one inch, which would define a sphere, must be included in each object. This restricts us somewhat, but even with this restriction the number of unique objects that could be fabricated is almost limitless. It is interesting to consider the number is finite, but the number of possible combinations is an almost unfathomably massively number. It is also interesting to note if the possibilities can be expressed mathematically, it is not necessary each one exist in physicality. Within the realm of thinking/idea, there are no space constraints. The idea can stretch into infinity and still be expressed mathematically. This does not necessarily imply each possible permutation has to be expressed in physicality.
My point is this: Each object that can be fabricated already exists within the block. This is not hyperbole. If you wanted to fabricate a statue, every single atom that composes that statue is already there, in the proper place. All you have to do is remove the atoms that are not included in the statue. The statue and every other possible object that can be released from the block exist as idea/thinking. After being uncovered, it is made available to be shared within physicality. The center sphere exists, and within our constraint exists as part of each and every possible object simultaneously. My intuition tells me this is a clue as to how idea/thinking is translated into physicality, and how the manifestations (electrons and such) can appear to be shared between realities. There is one realm of idea/thinking in which everything exists simultaneously in all possible permutations, but we only perceive, via our conscious participation (sensing, intending) what we direct our attention towards. The act of intending/perceiving manifests “reality” out of the field of possibilities that exist within the realm of idea. Eddie Van Halen in an interview was answering a question about his approach to writing. His remark was, “No one ever writes anything, they find it”. I can’t find the quote to credit it, but when I read it I immediately understood what he was driving at.
I have a novel suggestion. How about we take the experimental results of quantum mechanics at face value? Instead of trying to reverse engineer a solution that agrees with our notions of physical reality being primary, we clean slate the whole mess and admit if there is no attempt to interfere with the wave, the wave hits the backplane unimpeded, uninfluenced, and no particle appears. If there is no intent, no intention to measure, no intention to perceive, no observation, no interaction, no particle appears. Particles only exist if there is intention. Only an awareness, a consciousness, an identity, can observe/interact. Stop trying to explain the quantum property of non-locality in terms of physical reality and simple admit the two entangle particles are not actually separated at the fundamental level. They appear separated within our physical realm, but thinking there is “spooky action at a distance” is no different than trying to cram a square peg into a round hole. If we simply give up trying to shoehorn the experimental results into our version of what “has to be” and simple accept what “is”, we come to the inescapable conclusion physical reality exists only in the present moment, and is literally manifested out of the wave field by intention at the present moment, at the point of inflection/influence. We could investigate physicality from the other direction, an entirely new perspective. The line between physicality and that which we consider ethereal goes away and “reality” is studied using all the available tools rather than trying to shoehorn observations and knowledge into a particular paradigm.
The sticking point, the big reveal, is the realization ideas are real. Ideas are the only objective reality. One plus one equals two. This is true for all observers, and is true for all time, past, present and future. It has always been true, is true, and will always be true. Everything that meets these criteria is objectively true. Everything else, by default, is not, and therefore subjective. Movement is subjective, which by default makes time subjective. Color is subjective. Anything that requires sensing/perception is subjective. In the realm of objectivity, which is idea, realities can be extended into infinity. Infinity only confuses us because we are looking at it from the perspective of physicality. Within idea possibilities can be extended into infinity. Mathematics is one available tool to model and express idea. Within idea there is no need to end, so all possibilities can exist simultaneously in all directions and across time, or rather, independent of time. There is no need for room to store them all, they don’t exist in physicality. Every time there is a new idea, it can extend as far as it needs to extend to reach full expression.
So, one take on my question of “Where do we go from here” is to fully internalize we have objective truth and subjective truth exactly backwards. We consider mathematics to be the reality in and of itself rather than the model, the tool that allows us a window into the truth. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I sat in school classes completely confused as the professor proclaimed, “This behavior, what we’re seeing, is because of these equations”. I was confused because I knew intuitively that proclamation was nonsense. The equation was not the primary driver and didn’t cause anything. The equation was simply a tool to describe, to map, to graph, to predict what was being considered. Don’t get me wrong, mathematics is a wonderful tool, and if properly applied reveals truth that might have otherwise gone unseen, but mathematics is the microscope, not that which is being examined. One plus one is not equal to two because of the equation 1 + 1 = 2. The equation 1 + 1 = 2 is true because it is true and cannot not be true. The equation is our tool to pull the idea into our lexicon so it can be examined and qualified, discussed and relayed to others.
Consider it is always ‘now’. I have always found it curious how humanity takes this for granted. It seems logical that objects existed in the past and so remain consistent through time. We can take a picture and view it later. But you are here, ‘now’. If you are here ‘now’, where, within ‘now’ is the object in the picture? The object captured in the picture is no longer with you. It existed in the previous ‘now’. What about the immediate future, say two seconds from ‘now’? Does it exist in the future while you are in ‘now’? Once the two seconds elapses, where did the object come from? If we take what we have discussed previously and draw a conclusion, it is the object only exists as what we perceive as physical within ‘now’. For any moment in time that is not ‘now’, the object exists only as idea / thinking. And, since it exists as idea, it exists in all possible configurations and permutations, simultaneously. We have agreed to collectively experience ‘now’ together in order to have a communal, shared experience.
A large portion of our problems are the cost we pay for an individual experience. We get the benefit of individuation, but we also suffer the consequences. Once we understand we are fractals of a universal whole, the mindset allows for the exploration of universal consciousness. Where it gets interesting in our macro sense is you actually have multiple points of awareness/intention/consciousness acting as individuals and also acting as communal in a shared, agreed upon reality. Looked at from this perspective, the wonder should not be placed on the exceptions, the anomalies, but instead there should be wonder there is as much continuity as is observed. As creator beings who are remembering who we are, we will start to take upon ourselves the responsibility of the creation/manifestation we find ourselves in. Rather than viewing ourselves as victims, we view ourselves as the primary source of the creation, the path we find ourselves immersed in. We also will start to release attachment to the physical, and by recognition of its true nature, as an effect, gain a better mastery over it. Not as a means of subjugation, but a recognition it is a reflection of our collective, shared awareness, and so by changing our thoughts and intentions manifest within the physical a world that reflects us back to ourselves.
Since idea is primary, and idea extends to infinity in all possibilities and permutations, it is perfect. It is as it is, unchanging, always true, objective reality. To come to this realization requires one to release attachment to physicality and fully embrace being an infinite awareness having a ‘now’ perceptive moment within a seemingly real experience. Once this is internalized, the barrier between ‘spiritual’ and ‘reality’ starts to fall apart.
I had an interesting and very helpful dream several years ago. I was walking through the woods and came to a very high cliff. Bear in mind this dream is completely real to me. I am in a physical world, just not this one. All the rules of physicality are in play. I’m awake, just not “here”. As I am at the edge of the cliff looking over the edge to the brush and woods below, to my left my oversoul walks up to me. He looks over the edge with me and says, “You know you have to jump, right?” I answer, “Oh, and why would I want to do that?” He says, “In order to become comfortable with your death, and to provide you with insight as to the true nature of things.” That may not have been his exact words, but its close enough. Mind you this to me is as real as real can be. I trust the guy, so I jumped. Once I jumped, on the way down the dream changed and I don’t remember to what.
I had a heart attack a couple of years ago. In the emergency room they verified I was indeed in the middle of a heart attack, the blood supply to half my heart being completely cut off, and were preparing me for the operating room for a stent installation. The nurse gave me nitroglycerin to help ease the pain. It didn’t seem to be having much effect, so she administered a second dose. Just as she was giving me the second dose the first one kicked in and the two of them together were too much. My blood pressure dropped to the point I starting to lose consciousness. At this point I honestly thought I was dying. The interesting thing is I was actually excited. I told myself, “Ok, we’re going on the big adventure. Hang on and pay attention!” There was actually a certain joy to it. To put this in perspective, I was ready and willing to go with my curiosity, my awareness, and my intention intact. The short story is I did wake up and they did get the stent installed, allowing me a bit more time to write this.
What these events did for me was reinforce what I already knew. I was comfortable with my own death, and so not anchored so rigidly within the physical experience. What the last few years have done has been to cement the lessons into a knowing, to internalize them. To move them from intuition to knowledge. CS Lewis supposedly said “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” I read CS Lewis for a time back in my earlier days, and I could quote you that line. I thought I knew it, but I didn’t really know it. How do I now make this assertion? Because I was before still interpreting reality from the physical outward. I was looking at the reality as here (the physical) and the spiritual as “out there”. Once I understood better I automatically switched over and saw things from the other perspective. There is no separation. It is all “spiritual”. I don’t even like the word, because it implies separation. The physical is a manifestation, created by thinking/intention/consciousness/awareness and its interaction with the ether/aether/quantum field/energy field, which is on loan from All-That-Is. He funds the playground and keeps it supplied with energy and vitality through his thinking and attention.
There is no separation. You are already in a relationship with All-That-Is. You are an aspect of All-That-Is. All you have to do is ask to be closer, ask for insight, ask for the truth, ask to grow. Maintain this awareness, the question, at the forefront of your thinking at all times. I cannot speak for anyone else, but for me this relationship is not one of my asking a question and getting an answer on the spot. There are no two way conversations in the way you might think. Mostly the answers are demonstrations, dreams, or insights, tidbits of knowledge that hit you in the gut, cause you to burst into tears because the knowing is so on the money, so appropriate, so perfect.
I have been fortunate enough to converse one on one with my oversoul on a couple of occasions. Now that I have a better handle on things, I understand his perspective and why he thinks my plights are so humorous. A good analogy would be when your school age child comes to you with some issue they are dealing with, which to them if it does not get resolved the way they think it should, will be the end of their world. There is much sobbing and wailing, and the matter is to them literally the only thing that matters in life. You as the parent understand in the big scheme of things the issue matters little. There may be a lesson in it, but the lesson is most likely one of helping the child gain some perspective and not get so wrapped up and emotionally involved in things that won’t matter two weeks from now. Just as the child thinks you the parent do not understand their plight, and are angry at you for not becoming deeply involved in it, I had the same perspective as the child. My oversoul was amused because from his perspective I had allowed myself to become too attached to the physical and my perspective was backwards. That’s why he came to me and had me jump off the cliff, to minimize attachment and to demonstrate the permanence of awareness and the temporary nature of the physical.
What happens when this is understood fully and one branches out to observing the overall reality from this perspective? The first thing is the understanding that all semantic portrayals are terribly, hopelessly flawed. The whole semantic reality is a complete mess, a minefield, and where there are no mines there are trap doors, endless rat holes and rabbit holes, endless things to chase. The entire semantic reality is geared towards anchoring you to it, to keep you with your head down and coloring. So let’s start at the top and work down.
God is probably the most semantically slaughtered term ever in the history of earth. It would be hard to come up with another word that carries more baggage than the word God. God, Allah, Father, Jehovah, Yahweh, Brahman, Shiva, All-That-Is, The Light, The Law, etc., etc. Which “god” are we speaking of? If there are differences, let’s argue and kill each other over them, because our interpretation of the words, signs, and symbols has to be correct, and by deductive reasoning yours, since it is not identical, has to be wrong. In order to stop you from infecting the world with your faulty interpretation, I’m going to get my buddies and we’re going to wipe you out. Makes perfect sense, eh? You’re praying to the wrong god, so you must be praying to a devil, some sort of demon. Binary logic at its finest.
My father struggled with this very issue. Having been raised in the church, he was presented with the two versions of God. The Old Testament God seemed petty, angry, even needy. Being worshiped was important to the Old Testament God, and if Man did not stick with the program, there were negative consequences. The New Testament God was more understanding of the human condition, and figuratively holding out an olive branch (Christ) for those willing to take it. There was still a massive negative consequence if one didn’t fully embrace the logic and grab the ring, but the New Testament God was more mature and perhaps even a bit kind and understanding. My father’s reaction to this was to throw the baby out with the bathwater and divorce himself from the entire mess. Of course this is exactly one of the intended outcomes, to keep the human focused on the physical reality and separate themselves from their higher self. Organized religion foments this either/or thinking. The trap is if you reject organized religion you supposedly reject inquiry into the true nature of things and instead accept physical reality as fundamental. This is a false dichotomy designed for the purpose of either bringing you into the fold, or if you reject it, discouraging you from any further examination.
I have never gotten answers to my questions verbally, in other words I don’t hear a voice in my head per se. There is one exception. I did receive one message back when I was very young, well before I had commenced studying anything about quantum mechanics. I started to question how far down the construct awareness went. I had experienced the awareness as a knowing, an immersion, but how far down the construct did self awareness extend? I received a verbal message, “The whole is contained in the smallest part.” I was sitting on my bed in my bedroom and this hit me hard, but I didn’t understand it fully. Looking back on it, I actually did understand it, but my semantic overlay was trying desperately to interpret it “scientifically”, to interpret it from a physical perspective.
So what does “The whole is contained in the smallest part” imply? It is another way of stating “All Is One”. If all is one, individuation is a construction, a defined subset, identity. Individuation is necessary for a separate perception to exist. The concept of individuation and identity is a fundamental idea of the creator. Bear in mind I have to relate this semantically, so before you start off screaming at me understand I am trying to use general terms so as not to insert biases and nuances caused by the tools of semantics. Based on my experience, my intuition, and my “inner knowing”, there is an infinite creator being, which I’m going to label “prime source”. For reasons I cannot fathom, this creator being chose to allow aspects of itself to experience being as separate awarenesses. These awarenesses, also creator beings, roll up to the infinite creator being, so the infinite creator being is completely aware of all subordinate awarenesses. The subordinate awarenesses may or may not be able to experience the totality of the upper level infinite creator being, depending on their focus, their intent, their curiosity, and their willingness. In the long run a creator being’s curiosity will lead it back to prime source, drive it to seek the prime source, but there is also the playful guise of separation. Separation is ultimately an illusion, but with a certain amount of forgetfulness it is possible to have the experience of separation. It is important to note ultimately all thinking/mind/awareness/consciousness originates and is funded by prime source, but the illusion of separation allows subordinate creator beings to experience their own reality as sovereign entities.
One of the subordinate creator beings, as an aspect of its thinking, comes up with the idea of a reality of duality. The concept of differences in potential, relative speed, and inertia give rise to the concepts of fast/slow, in/out, up/down, cold/hot, right/left, high/low, more/less, cause/effect. The idea of physicality is conceived, and the mechanism to manifest it is created and shared with other creator beings so they may experience it as well. For a discussion and more specifics of the fundamental mechanisms of physical reality with regards to toroidal flows, pressure mediation, and mediation of potential, I suggest “The Secret of Light” by Walter Russell[xiii] as something you might wish to read.
It is realized that physicality presents the opportunity to immerse one’s attention into it, to experience it from the inside out, so to speak. The manifested idea of cause and effect, the creation of duality, is interesting and with a huge dose of forgetting provides for the illusion of total immersion if that is what is desired.
A powerful creator being creates within this framework of physicality a means to make it self-sustaining at the level of physicality. The idea of individual identity within physicality is exploited. The concept of linear time is created. Cause and effect is enlisted to create replication of idea and form through intention. The idea of the need to maintain oneself physically from within the physical realm is created. From this point, the only thing necessary to trap an entity in the construct is their ability to forget their connection to primary source and consider the physical construction as primary. Bingo! Trapped!
And so you are left with the mess we find ourselves in. Much later in life I discovered the Gnostics and I found it interesting that what I had intuited matched up with the Gnostic version very closely. There are differences, but there is overall agreement. The Gnostics relay the story metaphorically and assign names to the aspects, but conceptually the versions are very similar. It is important when discussing the concept of “entity” or “being” that all are an aspect, a fractal of the whole, one All-That-Is. The Gnostics seem to get caught up in the good/evil trap to some degree and still assign positive and negative connotations to motives that may be more of their leanings than actual reality. For example the Gnostics relay that the demiurge Yaldabaoth, aka Yahweh, had little in the way of a relationship with God, aka the Monad. In the realization that All Is One, this has to be looked at as intentional by the Monad, as all works ultimately for good. Good and evil are simply perspectives.
If there was one takeaway I could leave with anyone, it would be the realization of the level of playfulness and joy involved in this process. When oriented in the physical, when looked at from the physical, the construct looks pretty bleak. The view from the trenches can be one of blight, sickness, suffering, pain, hunger, and so forth. If the entity forgets their connection to Source, or doesn’t exercise it, what happens within physical reality loses its sense of joy and playfulness and turns into a grim fight for survival. They are fully attached to the construct and perceive the consequences of their ability to manipulate it as paramount. Anything with the potential to change their situation towards that of less survivability becomes the enemy, something to be conquered. Sadly, this can manifest as a disregard for the earth, animals, and other humans. In the extremes everything and everyone can and will be considered a threat, something to be conquered. Fear leads to greed, which leads to protecting what you have, increasing what you have, and eliminating threats to your accumulated wealth and status. What follows is the need to control the immediate environment, which over time extends outward to encompass an ever increasing more, more, more. The logical conclusion is the concentration of wealth, power, and control in the hands of those able to make that reality manifest. More for me, less for you. This leads to the commoditization of everything, including animals, and then humans.
It is important to note the root cause of all of this is fear. Fear comes from the disconnect of the entity from Source. Those you see perpetrating the atrocities, and those going along with them, either directly aiding or indirectly aiding by simply remaining quiet, are driven by massive amounts of fear. Within the shadow of this construct they appear as the leaders, the powerful, important people. In reality they are trapped here by fear and are not worthy of anyone that has even the slightest connection to Source. Within the sandbox they reign supreme, but the sandbox is located on one small corner of the playground, which is one small playground of an infinite creation. Anyone who has the smallest glimpse, the smallest hint of the true nature of the playground is above the most powerful within this realm. If you truly understand this you will view the powerful of this construct as an adult views the small child that is the tyrant of his school’s sandbox. These people in truth deserve our pity and our love, because they are children trapped in a dark foreboding room, afraid. They have bought The Great Lie, that the physical world is all there is, and when your life is over, you simply cease to exist. Your physical body, including all of its electrochemical and electromagnetic processes, simply ceases to function. Your awareness and your consciousness simply cease to be.
If the entity understands fully their true nature, there is diminished attachment. Attachment to the physical construct is much lessened the more awareness one attains. If you are in the physical and have agreed to abide by the rules, there is the need to see to certain minimum requirements, your physical needs, but the importance of physicality is much less than the importance of your thoughts and actions. You don’t necessarily want to make your life harder than it has to be. In fact, if you are negligent in your upkeep of your physical self and your surroundings, you become a burden to others, but living your life for the approval of others will not appeal to you.
In Mark 8:35 Jesus says “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall have it”. Be aware Christ is the last human ever that would need saving from anything, and The Truth is safe in all cases, so “for my sake and the gospel’s” is a flawed translation. It is an attempt, or perhaps an inadvertent happenstance, to make Christ and the gospels the focal point. What is more accurate is the message itself is the jewel. If the message is true, who cares where it came from? Truth is truth and false is false. What Christ is trying to relay to them is the physical world, their physical life is temporary and a falsehood, but in truth they are eternal. He goes on to say in Mark 8:36, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” What he’s saying is you can be the king of the sandbox, but if the actions you took to get there were counter to your overall development in its totality, if you harmed others, or caused others to be mislead, you are going backwards. The physical construct is a test, and you failed. It’s off to summer school for you.
So what would reality look like from the other direction? For someone who fully understood their true nature, the true nature of the reality, and their relationship to Source? I am not going to be so hubristic as to maintain I have achieved any of this in full measure, but I’ve had some glimpses, so let’s give it a shot.
Your relationship is built on an inner knowing that you are not from “here”, meaning the physical construct. You understand you are a soul having a physical experience. You understand the fabrication intuitively, and you sense the identity, awareness, and vitality around you. For you there is no separation of physical/spiritual. You understand you are physical for the experience, but there is no compunction to get so involved in it that you sacrifice your overall development, to pull you off your path. You have need of the means, the relationships, and the tools to maintain your existence, but there is little interest in accumulating physical things, as you understand if they have no usefulness for you they are simply a nuisance and a burden.
To put it in simplest terms, physical reality is a total immersion game, but it has ramifications for your overall self. As awareness of overall self increases, the game becomes seen for what it truly is, a contrived situation you have chosen to participate in. As your character in the game gains tokens, power, the game situations change. Your character may within the game gain more wealth, status, weapons, abilities, but these things remain within the game. Once you exit the game, you have not personally gained anything other than the experience of having participated, or experienced, the game. You keep the lessons and the skills. You get to keep the knowledge and experiences. You get to keep the relationships. Everything that exists as thought/idea you keep. Nothing physical goes with you. If you gained all the physical wealth and status humanly possible but you didn’t learn anything from it, you wasted an opportunity. If your capacity for love and understanding went backwards, you went backwards. If you become fabulously wealthy, popular, universally admired, important, and you end up further from the truth, your circumstances became worse. If you die penniless in a back alley, everyone hates you, but you ended up closer to the truth, you won.
As I have become older and had time to recapitulate my life, I am able to see the parallels and common truths. Just as the Gnostic’s teachings lined up with my intuition in the overall sense, the nature of perception as relayed by Carlos Castaneda in his works struck cords within me as well. The take on reality and perception the Toltec sorcerers had made complete sense to me and lined up well with my own experiences. Those steeped in Materialism consider Carlos Castaneda’s works to be works of fiction, but I saw them as textbooks, practical guide books, full of useful tools and techniques.
Realizing this, there is only one path, and that is of the seeker, the warrior. You seek not for yourself, but only for knowledge, for the truth. You ask only for the truth, nothing for yourself, because to you that is self indulgent and leads nowhere but back to here. Value is only that which increases closeness to the truth. Anything that does not increase your closeness to the truth has no value. Don Juan Matus and the old Yaqui sorcerers considered it “power”. The more truth you had, the more knowledge, the more power you have. There is only the truth, the seeking of truth, and nothing else matters. In this quest there is no room for self indulgence or complaining. Every battle may be your last on earth, as it may take everything you have to learn more, to get closer to truth. Once you understand the seriousness of each moment, each an opportunity, the less need you have of anything that diverts your attention from the truth, from infinity. In order to internalize this better, think of infinity not in terms of never ending sequences, but instead as existence outside of time.
What we are dealing with is the predator's attention as opposed to a warrior's attention. The predator needs to act quickly, and so needs to ascertain a situation and the attributes of the surroundings quickly. Things are examined, categorized, defined, and then examined further only if there is a need to examine further. This liberates attention and awareness for predatory use. The warrior goes a step further and is able to control his awareness. The warrior takes nothing at face value. The warrior constantly examines and re-contextualizes. The predator may lose the urge if the fight is too hard or the cost too high. The warrior, once committed, follows the path to the end regardless the cost. The predator becomes bored, the warrior constantly seeks. The predator projects one move into the future. The warrior plans the war, battle by battle. The predator takes the world at face value, the warrior believes nothing is as it seems and continually reevaluates. The average man sees everything as a positive or a negative, but the warrior sees only the challenge. The average man seeks the approval of others. The warrior seeks only infinity. The average man is self important and lives in a state of being constantly offended by the seeking of approval from others. The warrior has no need of anything that binds him here, and so remains humble in the face of his quest.
It is plain to see the way of the predator is defined by the ego, and so the ego is the driver of the predator’s attention. One cannot seek infinity by remaining within the predator’s attention. The predator’s attention is a tool to the warrior, but also contains the trap of the internal dialog that accompanies it. The warrior seeks only infinity, and so strives to gain the ability to shut off the internal dialog in order to see clearly. One cannot see clearly if the information is filtered through the internal dialog. Modern dogmatic religion seeks to keep you grounded within the physical by portraying infinity as something inaccessible, attainable only by way of following its dogma and belief system, acceptance and pledge of allegiance. Science is the other side of the same coin, working towards the same goal of locking you into ego awareness by proclaiming only the material world exists and everything springs from and owes its existence to it.
In order to see the truth, to see infinity, you must loosen your hold on everything here and only seek infinity. This is a long term task. It requires you to cease labeling, as labels, words, are symbols that can only be interpreted by the ego, but are not the thing they describe or stand for. Labels leave room to argue over shadings, inclusions, exclusions. Only direct experience is capable of leaving out the ego, and only when you leave out the ego can you directly experience. This fact is what makes discussions on the subject so difficult. The person you are conversing with typically tries to continually pull the discussion back to some reference within an established religion. They are so anchored to the religion and it’s tenets they instinctively evaluate everything through that lens. The Christ is another example of this sort of either/or thinking. Per Merriam-Webster, an archetype as relates to psychology is an inherited idea or mode of thought that is derived from the experience of the race and is present in the unconscious of the individual. In this manner of thinking, Christ is the archetype that represents that human that is primary and closest in relationship to God. Christ is the channel, the oversoul, for humanity. Ego driven humans get caught up in the semantic version of Christ and overlook the big picture. At the risk of having you screaming at me for being an arrogant hubristic jerk, I am going to presume to speak for Christ and tell you Christ would rather you believe him and take him at his word, to use him as a sounding board, a trusted advisor, than for you to worship him. Maybe it’s me, but if I was Christ, I cannot think of anything more distasteful than having someone worship me, or worse yet, to fear me. The best way to honor Christ is to take him at his word, and to admire him for the work, to admire the work itself. If I were to generate a great work, I would want people to appreciate the work, and through the work honor me. I would never wish anyone to worship me directly. I cannot think of anything that would make me more uncomfortable.
As with anything in life, constant minding and attention will yield better results than one massive effort. Rather than looking at it as a project to be worked on, it might be more advisable to consider it a mindset change. You are having a physical experience. Every moment is as valid as any other. There is no need to wait to commence. The start is simply to practice ceasing your internal dialog. Think of trying to see the world through the eyes of a newborn baby. Your intent is to not be an observer, but an experiencer. To experience without labeling, without identifying. To be neutral to everything, judging nothing. At the moment of experience there is no judgment, no evaluation, only experience. What you learn within the semantic, ego based reality is a map, perhaps correctly drawn, perhaps fraught with errors, but a map. You can only experience the destinations by direct experience. Looking at a map is not the same as visiting the destinations.
The first order of business is to recognize we live in an ego-based reality, a construction. Most of what is considered normal and unassailable is in fact fear-based mindsets and actions springing from fear of lack, fear of injury, and ultimately, fear of death. The ego based reality is at the ready with all sorts of dangers, boogey men, false dichotomies, and other such misdirection to keep the focus and the argument within its sphere of influence. Whether to go with one choice or the other is argued endlessly. The option to go in another direction entirely is never offered and so never considered. We go in another direction entirely.
VII. The Veil
Until I was five my maternal grandparents, my great grandmother, my parents, and my brother and I all lived in the same house. It was a large house, so room wasn’t a problem. When I was five years old my grandparents and great grandmother moved to Fredericksburg and we moved to an apartment on Chestnut Street. One day when I was about ten they came down for a visit. It was a warm, sunny day. We had eaten lunch, and the adults were in the kitchen at the table talking. I went outside to play. I was in the yard between the dogwood tree at the edge of the driveway and the garage. I looked up at the dogwood tree and the tree’s presence overwhelmed me. I felt as if I could speak to it and it would understand me. I knew the tree, and it knew me. I stopped and scanned the yard and the sky. Everything was alive and completely self-aware. The clarity was astounding, mesmerizing. I was immersed in my surroundings, part of them. The colors were so completely vivid, deep, translucent, so vibrant a Technicolor film would appear dull in comparison. I sat down and examined the grass, the flowers. I could hardly believe the change. There was no separation, in anything. Everything radiated and was bathed in awareness. I was home, where I belonged.
I ran back into the kitchen and pleaded with the adults, pulling on their sleeves. “Please come outside and see this! The world has changed! It’s different! You have to see this!” Oddly, none of them were interested, and so they continued with their conversations. I went back outside, but the world had changed back. I sat in the grass for some time, trying to see the world as I had just seen it moments ago, but it was to no avail. I could not bring it back. Things were back to “normal”. I was upset and disappointed, but happy at the same time. I had been gifted an insight. I knew the world most people see is an illusion, a poor, degraded copy of what actually is. This verified for me what I knew intuitively, that the world we “see” is what we are tuned to see. Even in my child’s mind, this was enough verification for me that I existed independently of the reality, and could view this reality and perhaps other realities by shifting my attention.
The main lesson for me, that I internalized immediately, was the world we live in seems “real”, but it is a poor copy, an overlay. The world I experienced with the veil lifted was somewhat the same. The forms and shapes were the same, it seemed vaguely the same, but instead of a world of inanimate objects, mechanistic objects, everything was alive. Everything was imbued with its own vitality, identity, sentience, awareness. If I had to state the difference in simple terms, it would be that here I am a visitor, but there I was part of that world, immersed in it. There was no separation. I perceived the vitality in everything, the awareness. The Hindu tradition calls this a Kundalini experience. I came to the conclusion we are trapped here in this copy by our narrow, intently focused attention on it. My assignment was to keep this fact in the forefront of my mind at all times.
So what is “the veil”? One of the most widely accepted definitions is “something intended to conceal or disguise”. For our purposes of discussion, this definition is accurate. The veil is the belief system and associated rigid, ego-based, narrowly focused attention that anchors a being within three dimensional physicality to the exclusion of all other aspects and dimensions of existence. It operates within the collective consciousness and is continually reinforced and advocated for by the adherents. Not content to coexist, the veil denies the existence of anything and everything it works to conceal. If you’re thinking this sounds like the philosophy of Materialism, you are correct. They are joined at the hip. Materialism is the philosophy and the veil is the beneficiary. By virtue of the resultant blindness and the continual reinforcement humans become unwittingly trapped within the confines of physicality.
If all life is physical, if everything springs from physicality and owes its entire existence to the physical, the plight of the ego driven human can be represented quite neatly with the analogy of the sandbox. They see nothing beyond the sandbox, so in their universe, “the one who dies with the most toys, wins”. Three dimensional ego-based reality is more than willing to provide all the rewards of power, prestige, and material wealth and comfort one’s guile can arrange. To someone fully invested in this physical construction, anyone viewed as acting out of some higher moral inclination is viewed as a “chump”, someone to be taken advantage of. Psychologically these fully invested types are viewed as psychopaths. Psychopaths view other humans only as something to be exploited in their quest for more and more ego gratification. There is no consideration to any sort of higher moral purpose. There is no consideration given to how one’s actions affect others, other than strategically. What would the point be? Science has told them they are the result of random interactions of little bumping particles, happy accidents. And when they die, they simple cease to exist. So why not get all you can, right? Screw the other guy before he screws you. Looked at from the Materialist perspective, since physical reality is all there is, there are only physical consequences for your actions. If you have some glimmer of humanity within you, there may be a tinge of guilt, but since your awareness and consciousness springs from little bumping particles and ends at death, this guilt is only holding you back from your quest. In fairness, there have been some very good attempts at defining morality in completely materialistic terms, Ayn Rand being one of my favorites, but they all fall short in terms of the conscience. The moral codes and rule of law we see today must be externally enforced. There is little appeal to conscience.
This external enforcement is perceived by the ego-based psychopath as merely a set of rules. Life is looked at in the same perspective as one huge, glorious baseball game. They don’t consider themselves to be intrinsically evil; they are simply on the other team. The reality is more than happy to play into this. For those willing to harm others, to take advantage of others for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement, there is a glorious world of low-hanging fruit, waiting to be plucked. Entire systems are created to swindle other people out of resources. Modern government and banking systems are held up in high esteem by most people, but are at their root the means to an end, and that end is to increase the power and wealth of those on the inside at the expense of the clueless masses. As for the masses, endless rewards are dangled in front of them to get their buy-in, to compete for their attention and energy. Every time someone lends their energy, engages with the reality on its level, the reality wins. For many, once they experience some semblance of success with gains of power, wealth, and prestige, it is difficult for them to retain any connection to Source, but instead begin to see themselves as separate from “the others”, the unwashed masses. Their ego sinks its hooks into them, dangles ever more cash and prizes, and they are hooked completely. The other side of the control is fear, which is exploited to keep the masses in a perpetual state of unfocused anxiety. Every time the current situation starts to exhibit diminishing returns on the anxiety meter, the next ‘thing’ is presented and the cycle continues. Each ‘thing’ is replete with nuances and conflicting ‘facts’ that keep the population continually focused on the issue and arguing amongst themselves.
Typically once someone becomes completely ego-centered, the only thing that will open their eyes is for them to hit absolute rock bottom. Our culture is replete with stories of the redemption of individuals who “had it all” only to sink to the lowest levels possible and then have an epiphany. For those starting gain an understanding of the true nature of the reality, the lure of “manifesting” is dangled in front of them to bring them back into the fold with promises of material wealth, satisfactory relationships, business success, and more. The message is, “Hey, you have gained some spiritual insight? Let me teach you how to use it to manifest the desires of your ego! You too can have it all.”
We should consider the awareness of humanity in general. Until the printing press became popular, the church actively discouraged lay people from reading the Bible in its totality. We need no further evidence that the church is a control mechanism more than a path to enlightenment. This “protect the narrative at all costs” was the prevailing mindset, the fear being some uneducated, i.e. non indoctrinated individual might see something differently than the “official” view. The Catholic Church was quite specific as to what was accepted canon and doctrine, everything else being heresy. I’m sure this was all carried out only from concern for other’s souls.
Eventually the volume and weight of scientific discoveries easily repeatable became too much for the church to cover up. They tried valiantly, but ended up reaching a truce of sorts. The church retained the spiritual rights to man and reality and science confined itself to the physical aspects. As long as science didn’t ascribe any experimental results to anything other than physical matter or its interactions, religion would leave it alone. Science was therefore physical matter or its associated interactions and religion was the sole arbitrator of the nonphysical aspects of reality. Anything else was “woo woo” and dismissed without consideration.
We live the results of this unholy marriage to this day. In accepted science, everything is a particle. The “Z and W bosons” carry the weak force, the “gluon” carries the strong force, the “graviton” carries gravity, the “photon” carries the electromagnetic force, on and on. Most are familiar with electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. Everything is a particle.[xiv] Youtuber Ken Wheeler jokingly calls this the “cult of bumping particles”.
Religion guards the spirituality of the masses and herds it into the accepted channels. Any attempts to inject a true spirituality based on personal experiences and insights are typically thwarted. “New Age” is the convenient label that is pasted onto anything that cannot be shoehorned into the protected narrative. The prevailing narrative some call ‘scientism’ is what is taught in the public school system, which is foisted onto the public through the corporate controlled mainstream media, including the entertainment industry. I hear you jumping out of your chair in protest, “The entertainment industry explores all kinds of alternate realities”. Well, yes they do, as fiction. What better way to hide something in plain sight than explore the truth and label it fiction? Or better yet, a mental illness.
If you Google® the terms hypnagogic and hypnopompic you get some insight into how tightly the narrative defines ‘normal’ and how incessantly it works to maintain humanity’s attention focused on the narrow road of physicality. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic are terms associated with sleep ‘disorders’. I used Google® to search for these terms and one of the top sites within the search results I found The Sleep Foundation website. The Sleep Foundation is a collection of doctors and other medical practitioners dedicated to the promotion of sleep as relates to health and the treatment of sleep disorders. On the surface this sounds like something that would be of great benefit to a good many people.
Both ‘disorders’ are referred to as hallucinations. Scary, terrifying, and if explored, possibly leading to schizophrenia. The reality does everything it can to discount the experiences and discourage anything that might upset the Materialist world view. The information that follows is from The Sleep Foundation’s website, and where I have quoted it directly there will be quotation marks.[xv]
“Hypnopompic hallucinations are hallucinations that occur in the morning as you’re waking up. They are very similar to hypnagogic hallucinations, or hallucinations that occur at night as you’re falling asleep. When you experience these hallucinations, you see, hear, or feel things that aren’t actually there. Sometimes these hallucinations occur alone, and other times they occur in conjunction with sleep paralysis.”
What they are discussing is the region between being asleep and awake. They feel the need to separate the two situations of being in the process of going to sleep and of waking up. Perhaps their patients have different experiences based on which situation the experience is occurring within. There may be some differences, as I find the region easier to exploit as I am waking up, although it is accessible when going to sleep as well. I find it more difficult to catch myself within the region when I’m going to sleep. Don Juan’s instructions to Carlos were to work to become self-aware of the region while falling asleep, so there may be some underlying reasoning behind it.
Continuing, “For most people, hypnopompic hallucinations are considered normal and are not cause for concern. They generally don’t indicate an underlying mental or physical illness, though they may be more common in people with certain sleep disorders. Generally, hallucinations are sensory experiences that don’t correspond to what’s happening in reality. Hallucinations may include seeing, hearing, feeling, or even smelling things that feel real but are not. Hypnopompic hallucinations, in particular, are hallucinations that occur as you are waking up in the morning and in a state that falls somewhere between dreaming and being fully awake.”
“The nature of hypnopompic hallucinations differs from hallucinations arising from mental illness. A primary difference is that hypnopompic hallucinations only occur as a person is waking up. Schizophrenic hallucinations can occur at any time, and commonly occur in the daytime while a person is fully awake. Also, 86% of hypnopompic hallucinations have a visual component, while only 30% of schizophrenic hallucinations do. Hallucinations in schizophrenia are auditory 75% of the time, while hypnopompic hallucinations are only auditory in 8% to 34% of cases.
“Usually, people experiencing hypnopompic hallucinations recognize that what they see or hear is not real. When people experience hallucinations due to schizophrenia they tend to believe that what they heard or saw was indeed real. This difficulty distinguishing between reality and hallucination can cause problems and feed into delusional or paranoid beliefs. Hypnopompic hallucinations tend to be vivid but relatively short and straightforward. Schizophrenia-related hallucinations might be more detailed and consistent, such as repeatedly hearing the same voice speaking.
“Hypnopompic hallucinations are similar to hypnagogic hallucinations — together called hypnagogia. Both are hallucinations that involve sensing things that aren’t actually there while in a mental state between dreaming and waking. The hallucinations can be visual, auditory, or tactile. Hypnopompic hallucinations occur while a person is waking up, and hypnagogic hallucinations occur while falling asleep. Hypnopompic hallucinations generally occur beyond our control. We do not get to choose if we want to have them or not.”
The site continues with recommendations about when you should seek medical attention with regards to hypnagogia related issues. Merriam Webster defines hallucination as “a sensory perception (such as a visual image or a sound) that occurs in the absence of an actual external stimulus and usually arises from neurological disturbance (such as that associated with delirium tremens, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, or narcolepsy) or in response to drugs (such as LSD or phencyclidine)”. The understanding, stated implicitly, is physical sensor inputs are in the ‘sane’ column, and everything else is not. There are some allowances for dreams, but by and large if you’re experiencing anything beyond that, you may very well need psychiatric help. “Well”, you say, “dreams that seem real aren’t actually there, whereas physicality is real. I can touch it. If I cut myself it hurts and I bleed”. I tell you the best minds in the business are coming to the conclusion ‘reality’ ain’t all that real either. But it is revealing that the reality cloaks a window into other realities in terms of ‘disorders’ and ‘hallucinations’. Do tell.
Why does the narrative have to be protected? What drives the effort to protect and reinforce this “accepted” narrative at all costs? Certainly there are countless multitudes of people that are heavily invested in it. Many of these would have their careers and livelihoods affected negatively if the narrative is not maintained. These people work within the system, help support it, help maintain it, and would have to start over from square one if the true nature of things came out into the open. Their authority and their ability to control……gone. Their status…..gone. Their diplomas, reduced to scrap paper. Their identities are tied to the narrative. It is not difficult to understand why these people would defend the narrative at every turn. There is also that portion of the populous who never question the nature of reality. By virtue of their lack of curiosity they are fertile ground for any belief system presented to them. Why not offer them belief systems that cause them to behave somewhat civilly while also leaving them open to exploitation and manipulation? These narratives run counter to their own well-being, but with modern understandings of psychological control methods, once the means were well entrenched the narrative immediately went into a full-court press. Control the content of the majority of the cell phone, internet and television traffic and you control the minds and hearts of almost everyone who lacks a core. The tools of fear and anxiety are at your disposal. This would be amusing if it wasn’t so completely sick.
But what of the narrative itself? What overarching purpose does it serve? One aspect of it is telling you there is nothing but the end results of little bouncing balls. That your awareness, your consciousness, what makes ‘you’ you, owes its very existence to said little bouncing balls, the little bumping particles. When the particles quit bumping, you quit bumping. You are no more. Returned to the nothingness with nothing. The other aspect, religion, tells you if you have any inkling of anything that runs counter to what they’re feeding you, if you don’t join the cult and swear allegiance to it, if you don’t accept the guilt assigned to you simply for existing, you are damned to an eternity of unspeakable pain and suffering. You are incapable of any sort of spiritual insight on your own. You need them as an intercessor to speak on your behalf, so don’t even believe your own insights, as they must be the work of demons and evil spirits.
This narrative, with its two aspects, serves one purpose, and one purpose alone. That purpose is to exploit the weaknesses of the ego, maintain you in a very controllable, subservient state, maintain the integrity of the veil, and lock you into the constructed reality. To use whatever means are available to it to keep you diverted away from any deep examination, but instead placed on the fear based treadmill, the carrot of success within the physical environment dangled just out of reach. Head down and coloring. Should you manage to latch onto that carrot, another is presented, so your life becomes an endless pursuit of the dangling carrot, a stretch for the brass ring. Every ring attained soon loses its luster, ending in an emptiness that one attempts to fill with the pursuit of the next ring. How many stories are there of someone who attained every single material thing they ever desired but were still not contented? These control mechanisms and the associated narratives constitute the veil. As long as you remain behind the veil and make no attempts to see beyond it, you are considered to be a normal, reality-based human. You live in the “real” world.
The ego, which works so hard to maintain dominance over our attention and awareness, frequently ends up ignoring the overall God-self, and if any awareness of infinity should leak through, actively blocks and circumvents it. That this occurs is fact and not open to debate. This tendency is humorously portrayed in “A Christmas Carol” by the character Scrooge when he tries to make sense of Jacob Marley’s ghost, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” What is open to questioning is the “why”. If we default to “everything is one”, the obvious answer is that in order to have a valid total immersion experience in the physical, one has to forget their connection to Source, or, at the minimum, curtail it to a degree, to agree to be physical in order to experience the physical, and so be bound by the characteristics of physicality.
Looked at from the perspective of “All is One”, that which works for division does so with the full knowledge and blessings of All-That-Is while performing the function. In order to identify the energy that works toward separation the ego identifies it, names it, and dresses it up with a personality. The archetype Satan, the Egregore, the collective shadow, the gestalt comprised of all the negative urges and actions is conjured up in order to have something to point at. Those entities who work to separate, and the energies necessary to create duality are lumped together and assigned to a straw man, in our culture Satan, in Native American cultures, Wetiko. It is important to note these energies and tendencies are not necessarily a being or entity in the way popularly presented, that the entity is comprised of our collective shadows and only has the reality we assign it with our intentions and attention. It is a creation of our own, collectively. In “Dispelling Wetiko”, author Paul Levy writes, “Seeing the field, and stepping out of the perspective that we are separate from each other, converges into being the same experience. Seeing “through” the illusion of the separate self, rather than seeing “through the separate self” as a lens through which we view the world, entails recognizing that even the full-blown Big Wetikos, the master predators themselves, are not separate from us”.[xvi]
Where we become confused is the energies that work to separate and create duality are necessary in order for the reality to exist, so labeling them as evil is counterproductive. We should instead bless them for performing their duties, and appreciate them. We hold the key by our attention and intention. Duality is one thing, and the collective shadow is another. Duality can and does exist without ego. Duality allows for the cat and the mouse, the lion and the gazelle, the rotting fruit that later becomes a tree. Ego-driven intention is the well spring of evil. As with all shadow work, the darkness has to be recognized, identified, acknowledged, and brought out into the open to be worked on. With little acknowledgment the Egregore is able to operate in the shadows and its pull is not recognized. In the extreme societies can delve into some very horrible, sick behaviors that are sanctioned and voluntarily participated in, even to the point of the behaviors becoming ‘normalized’. One of my favorite quotes is by Jiddu Krishnamurti, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. Many, sometimes most, within the society live with the norms and question little. This tendency is examined in the extreme by Shirley Jackson in her short story “The Lottery”. In the story a town annually selects someone by lottery and stones them to death. This is portrayed as normal behavior for the people of the town.
Those who understand the bigger picture work to influence awareness towards unity, towards Source, infinity. This has been portrayed as a war, but it is the fabric of the larger reality, and so war is not the best analogy. You are, and are eternal. Although you cannot be destroyed, this aspect of you can become bogged down in third dimensional reality by your beliefs. Beliefs are not based on direct knowledge, but are experience extrapolated upon and projected outwards. If you believe you are trapped here, or your beliefs are trapping you here, you will remain trapped here until either you have an experience that shows the error in your beliefs, or someone prompts you to have an experience that shows you the error of your beliefs. Once you assign the term “beliefs” to your beliefs, and recognize them as beliefs, it is possible to back up to the point of knowledge. At the point of knowledge you know what you have gleaned from experience, and surmise and project very little forward. It may be expedient to go over what you know, to try and make sense of it, but projecting forward into beliefs that have no basis in experience is self indulgent at best and serves to misdirect at worst. Your belief helps create and sustain the veil.
Over time the suspension of belief and the effort to sense and perceive the world as it is will lead you to a realization, that the “real” world is not real at all, but is an overlay hell bent at every turn on keeping your attention and energy rooted to it. You see it for what it is, and upon understanding its true nature its power over you is greatly diminished. This is the veil. To assign it evil attributes, to name it and identify it as an evil entity is to play into its schemes. The more you assign it identity and point at it, the more manifest within the collective unconscious it becomes. You give up your sovereignty and donate your power to it the more you acknowledge its existence, its identity. It literally needs your energy and attention TO exist. I know it sounds like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth here, but there is a difference between recognizing it as a manifestation of the collective unconscious in order to quit feeding it and recognizing it and choosing not to continue to fund it. It is part of your nature, but once you see it for what it is you are free to examine it and turn away from it. The veil is applied at the instant judgment occurs, or better said, the ability to judge creates the veil. Awareness/attention/identity creates physicality, and judgment creates the overlay. This is the nature of it, and also this is the reason the narrative has to be protected, why it spends so much time and effort incessantly reinforcing itself, protecting itself, covering up inconvenient truth. The game only exists if you play, so each time you turn away the game becomes just a bit weaker, a bit less convincing.
The collection of individuals who are anchored to the physical reality have psychic energy, which is donated and applied to the construction. We are here to experience, to learn how to manipulate energy, and how to overcome fear. The construction, which ego based individuals label “reality”, is based in fear. The anchoring power of fear will wax and wane over time, a sine wave, as the total percentage of ego based individuals rises and falls within the realm. We are within the physical only able to see a small window of history, and so have a skewed view of this cycle. We see the current past several hundred years and see a slow ebb and flow of fear based control, but it is always tilted towards fear. The fear based construct can only maintain itself by the attention and energy afforded it by the participants. The game can only continue as long as there are players. No players, no game. The resulting fear based construction is labeled “reality” and is jealously guarded and defended by those entities that choose to experience it. They protect it at all costs, and any suggestions it is a construct are dismissed as nonsense. “You’d better get your head back in the real world, boy” is a typical phrase one hears in discussions with people bent on protecting the narrative. I have friends that refer to these types of people with some derision, using terms such as “minion”, “normie”, “NPC” (Non-Player Character), and other even less flattering terms. I am of the opinion those types are necessary to create and maintain the reality and to provide contrast and situations to be participated in, and so are not to be denigrated, but utilized for the frame of reference they provide. The salient point is the aspects and identities considered negative, immoral, and evil, are necessary to the reality, and the tendency to reinforce and maintain itself is baked into the cake so that you may have the full-immersion experience of navigating it. As much as you rail against these negative aspects and attributes, they are fundamentally necessary in order to provide the situations for you to create, manipulate, and overcome. Fighting the construction head on only provides it more energy and identity. A friend of mine once instructed me, “The universe does not understand positive or negative, it only understands energy and attention”. By raising our awareness, we raise the average awareness level of humanity.
So how does one “lift the veil”, so to speak? Peek behind the curtain? These are great questions, and each of us has a different starting point. Why do some remember and others do not? Different missions perhaps? I cannot answer this question for each person, but there are some starting points. You have at least some inkling of the veil and its function or you probably wouldn’t be reading this. I am going to aim this discussion at those that are just starting to feel uneasy, that have a feeling their missing something, but they can’t quite put their finger on it. Before we commence down the road of trying to lift the veil, we might be well served to reconsider what constitutes existence should we not constrain ourselves to physicality when defining the word.
VIII. How It Works (Or at least my best conclusions)
One of my hobbies growing up was building models. I would build models of airplanes, movie characters, ships, but mostly I built models of cars. I became pretty skilled at it, and there were two outlets for showing off your work. There was The Hobby Shop, which was very close to my house, and then on Main Street was the Woolworth’s department store. Both of these stores would host model building contests. I did well in the contests, typically placing in the top three. I mention this not to brag, but to illustrate that my level of skill and attention to detail was high. I would paint the gauges on the dashboards; install thread as spark plug wires, that sort of detail.
One day I bought a model of a 1949/1950 Ford Tudor. It was molded in black plastic. I started out with the build in my typical progression, but for some reason I decided to go a different direction and make a model of what some would call a jalopy. I was good at spray painting models, and had recently won a contest with a car that had a two-color scheme that slowly morphed from one color to the other, which was pretty sophisticated for a twelve year old kid. For some reason, for this Ford I painted it orange. With a brush. And I let the brush strokes remain, so some of the black bled through the orange. It still didn’t look right to me, so I removed one of the front fenders, and I left off the hubcaps from the wheels. I didn’t understand why, but for some reason I considered this to be finished, complete.
Years later, when I was nearing 16, I was over on 2nd Avenue visiting a schoolmate of mine. We both played guitar, so I went over to his house to play guitar with him. A couple of doors down from his house I spied a black 1949/1950 Ford Tudor for sale. I was going to be getting my license soon, and a car of my own was what I had in mind. I asked the man about the car. He said it ran and would pass the state inspection. He was asking $50.00 for it. I went home and talked it over with my Dad. He wasn’t really too keen on the idea, so in spite of what I’m sure was a full-court press, I wasn’t able to talk him into the deal. I hadn’t really thought through the whole insurance, tags, and upkeep angle, so he was probably making a sound financial decision. As a teenager, patience was not my strong suit.
A classmate of mine ended up buying the car and driving it through high school. By our senior year, he had painted it orange, with a brush, so the black sort of showed through. By this time one of the front fenders was missing, as were the hubcaps. It was the real-life version of the model I had built as a twelve year old. Not sort of like it, exactly like it. Now, the car being a 1949/1950 Ford Tudor, and that it was black, you could chalk up to coincidence. Painting it orange with a brush and having one front fender missing? No, the similarities were too great. At some point you have to throw the coincidence angle out the window and admit the model I built several years prior was a model of the car I tried to purchase, my classmate owned, and drove through his high school years.
The problem that presents itself is the model was made several years before I ever saw the car in reality. It would be at least three or four years before my classmate would purchase the car and configure it to match the model I built. Which, by the way, he never saw. You could explain the make, model, and year of the car as coincidence. You might be able to explain the original black color as coincidence. Once you add the variable of the brushed on orange paint, you start to get into some very low probability numbers. Add the missing fender, and you’re not in coincidence territory any longer.
So what was I to make of this? I remember the events perfectly, but as has been typical my entire life, I wasn’t surprised by it. As odd as it sounds, I knew I had perceived a series of future events, but instead of being amazed by it, things seemed like they were progressing as they should. I should have been floored by these events, but it all seemed natural. I don’t remember ever being disturbed by any of them, I simply continued to ask questions.
I was perhaps fifteen when I had a very vivid and strong dream. I was in front of what looked to be a western ranch house. There was a low porch that stretched all the way across the front of the building. There were porch chairs and the porch had a simple wooden railing. The grass was cordoned off with chain. The chain was low, perhaps eighteen inches off the ground, and it was stung through pipe tees mounted atop pieces of pipe driven into the ground. There is a screen door. I enter the building. There is a counter on the left, and past the counter to the right are shelves. I go up to the counter and the man behind the counter hands me a letter. I open the letter and am reading it. In the dream, I don’t know what the letter is saying exactly, but it has a profound impact on me and an oppressive aura of sadness envelops me. As I open the door and go back out to the porch, I survey the yard from the porch. As I’m looking out across the grass field in the center of the complex the dream ends.
When I was in the Air Force, I was stationed at Lackland AFB for my basic training. When I graduated basic training, I didn’t have orders quite yet, so I was put into temporary barracks used to house those awaiting orders. They were simple wooden structures, probably left over from World War II, with a very rustic, western feel to them. The post office was also in this section of the base, and I went to the post office to check to see if I had received any mail. I walked up to and into the building, went to the counter, and received my mail from the clerk. There was a letter from my parents, which I opened immediately. I was reading it as I was walking out the door. The letter was informing me my grandfather had died. He had been my childhood hero, and his death was something I hadn’t been prepared for. As I stepped onto the porch and the door closed behind me, I stopped and took in the scene. The scene didn’t “sort of remind” me of the dream, it WAS the dream, identical in every detail. Not only was the post office the same post office that had appeared to me in the dream, the events and the sequence of events were the same.
This perception of future events has happened to me on multiple occasions, but we’ll leave it at these two, as there is enough substance here to make my point. There were several dreams I had during this time that were actually future events. Again, I took the answers and ran them through my reasoning, which proceeded something like this: In order to perceive something, it has to exist. That which does not exist cannot be perceived. This led me to the inescapable conclusion the events existed before they manifested within this reality. If they existed before I reached them, it was not time that was primary, it was the event. The event simply was. My awareness was the variable. I perceived the event once in the dream state and then again in the waking state.
In order to continue, we have to clarify what is existent and what is nonexistent. We are constrained by our perception of time. We are also constrained by our awareness and our attention being uniquely focused to this “here and now” reality at the expense of everything else. We are locked in, not unlike the manner in which one tunes a radio to a particular station at the exclusion of the other stations. We recognize the other station’s broadcasts exist, because we have at some point tuned in to them, but we dismiss within the reality anything outside the present moment as being nonexistent. We say the past, even one thousandth of a second ago, is gone and no longer “exists” other than a memory. The future is considered to be nonexistent, even one thousand of a second into the future is considered to be “not real”, but exists only within the realm of possibility. Yet we hum along merrily, thinking the past of a second ago has somehow disintegrated into some sort of non-reality, and that the next second’s reality will faithfully appear, conjured up from where is seldom considered.
The fact is, with this world view the entire reality would have to be created in all of its splendor and complexity literally right before your eyes, just a moment before your attention lights on it. Or perhaps even at the moment your attention is focused upon it. Interestingly, people will profess to not believe in creation, but handily take the next moment in time, this process of moving through time and what it implies, completely at face value. This in itself is bizarre.
My conclusion was the events exist, and I use the present tense intentionally. They existed before I reached them in this waking awareness, they existed after my awareness was no longer focused on them, and they continue to exist. The events are eternal and simply are. As this applies to all events, it had dramatic implications for the nature of reality. Whether or not they exist in physicality is another matter altogether.
Investigation of a subject based on evidence is one thing, and direct experience is quite another. One is as an outsider, trying to prove to themselves something exists, based on evidence. The person who has experience has no need of proof until he or she has need to relay the information to someone else. This is the sticking point. People strongly rooted in physicality, materialism, invariably require “proof”, as though somehow you can reproduce your experience on demand. They are trapped by their own worldview in a jail of their own making.
This chapter borrows heavily from several avenues of inquiry and several sources. The first is the pioneers of quantum mechanics who put their careers on the line by their honesty and willingness to entertain non-materialistic stances on what they were seeing rather than trying to shoehorn experimental results into explanations based on physicality. I speak of this in the previous chapters, so there is no need to restate anything here. YouTube™ poster Ian Moore of the Candigram[xvii] channel has done a great job of putting together a concise analysis of his take on where logic and mathematics run off the rails in its efforts to describe reality. The works of Carlos Castaneda, specifically “The Art of Dreaming” and “The Fire From Within” were a huge eye opener because of the attempt to condense the knowledge of the Toltec sorcerers regarding the true nature of reality into something relatable. My contribution is being able to see the commonalities across the sources, put them together with my own experiences, and understand it is not either/or, but all of these and more.
It is worth mentioning here the inflection point between how reality works from the standpoint of idea and how reality works from a nuts and bolts perspective, from the mechanics of it. This is actually two related, overlapping subjects and is at the root of our misunderstandings. Humans tend to evaluate the effects and look for mechanistic root causes while ignoring the conceptual and experiential aspects of reality. Melding the two outlooks together leads to the conclusion we are not experiencing a reality that was created for us, but are by our attention, intent, and sensing creating/manifesting the reality we experience. This is the divide one has to see for what it is, which is an artificial construction created for the express purpose of propagating the illusion of division through identity. Agreeing to the division creates the split, which allows the idea of a stand-alone physicality, which allows for the study of ‘science’ in isolation, which leads to a mechanistic world view, which leads straight into the mess we find ourselves in. I started to approach this chapter from the two different viewpoints, but thought perhaps that would only reinforce within the reader the concept of division rather than the approach of one subject from multiple aspects.
I have within the previous chapters made statements to the effect that physical reality is not primary, and by that I mean physical reality is not the source, the basis, nor primary driver of anything. I have stated physical reality is a result, a fabrication gleaned from a collection of various inputs, assembled based on a communal and collective awareness. This strikes at the very heart of “what is real”. If we go to the arbitrator of the reality, meaning the artificial intelligence that is Google®, we get the following results….”actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed”, “not imitation or artificial”. Among the synonyms we find “material, physical, tangible, concrete, corporeal, and unimaginary”. Going to Merriam-Webster’s site yields, “having objective independent existence; not artificial, fraudulent, or illusory; occurring or existing in actuality”.
Because the base assumption is that physical reality is primary and the fundamental basis of existence, the definitions offered reinforce this assumption, thus lending them a validity they do not deserve. By virtue of relating “real” to “material, physical, tangible, and corporeal”, the gatekeeper leads the unsuspecting reader into the desired direction, into the desired “reality”. Since anything not material, physical, tangible, or corporeal is by default ‘not real’, the reality is maintained and protected. The slip-up was the Merriam-Webster definition “having an objective independent existence”. This is the middle of the coin, that which exists simultaneously as part of each side, and part of neither side. If physical reality does not have an “objective independent existence”, it cannot be considered “real”, yet other definitions of “real” are based in physical reality. So we’re in Wonderland here, following Alice along, trying to make sense of the circular reasoning.
One way we might try to pull ourselves out of the semantic quicksand is to recognize the definition of “real” has been hijacked by the gatekeeper and instead look for another option. Perhaps the word “true” can be used as a suitable substitute. The gatekeeper’s top result for “true” is “in accordance with fact or reality”. Merriam-Webster’s offers “being in accordance with the actual state of affairs”. Ok, so the gatekeeper has been here and skewed the word “true” towards physicality as well. Perhaps we can take another tack and steer the discussion into terms of objective and subjective, the thinking being objective will be what is ‘real’ and subjective is that which is pinned down by definition and/or consensus. The top response by the gatekeeper is “Subjective: Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions. Objective: Not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.” Not bad, we’re getting closer, but ‘facts’ are still assumed to be based in physicality. Adjusting direction slightly by narrowing our focus to objectivity, we find Wikipedia’s definition, “Objectivity is the concept of truth independent from individual subjectivity”. They further clarify subjectivity as “bias caused by one’s perception, emotions, or imagination”.[xviii] Now we’re getting somewhere.
Interestingly, we had to venture into what is considered “philosophy” to find an adequate definition of objectivity, and these results were not near the top of what was offered. This is not an accident. By Google’s® own admission, 25% of searchers use the first result returned, and 75% of searchers never go beyond the first page of search results. The search engine uses this tendency to its advantage and skillfully steers the discussion into the materialist camp at every opportunity. Philosophy is considered by most as something outside of themselves, with little application to their own lives, something only to be delved into in a hypothetical sense, something they studied in school, the musings of scholars disconnected with the ‘real’ world. Fuzzy intellectualism. “Doesn’t apply to us, down here in the trenches”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The very root of the word objective is “object”, which to anyone with ‘common sense’ means something you can hold in your hands, reach out and touch, or see with your eyes. This by itself steers one towards the physical. “Back into the quicksand for you!” So, in order to pull yourself out of the quicksand you need to get a handhold or a foothold onto something substantial enough to be able to pull or propel yourself out of the mire. This handhold is the understanding ideas have a validity all their own and so in a very real sense can be considered to be objects, albeit intangible objects. Ideas are ‘real’. They can be made into tangible objects, influence tangible objects, but ideas have an existence outside of physicality. You cannot touch them, but they exist. Where I believe Plato, Aristotle, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell ran off the rails was the attempt to define and link a nonphysical object to physicality. They could not make the leap that physicality might not be primary, and so never stepped into the realm of considering otherwise. Once the mind wraps itself around the concept of ideas being ‘things’, with their own validity, the door is cracked open and the mind starts peeking around. It is not a long stretch to comprehend the concept of duality as an idea. Well, if duality is an idea, someone thought it, or better expressed, someone imagined it. Duality leads to direction and a center point of rest, and to degrees of separation, which leads to increments, aka numbers. The progression is, the idea is thought, and then the idea is made manifest. Thought is primary and therefore every bit as valid as physicality.
Getting back to objectivity, once we are not constrained by thinking in terms of physicality, we can now consider what an objective truth might be. I’m going to stick my neck out here and proclaim an objective truth is an idea / concept that is true for all observers, regardless of their location within any coordinate system, be it three dimensional or time. 1 + 1 = 2 is true. For every instance of identical arguments, physical or nonphysical, it is true now, it has always been true, and it will always be true. Therefore, 1 + 1 = 2 is an objective truth, as numbers themselves are in the same sense objective truths. There is no instance where 1 + 1 = 2 is not true, and there is no crack in which to insert any question or falsehood. It is true regardless of anyone’s opinion or perception. I also maintained previously and still maintain mathematics as we perceive it is a description, and has the same semantic minefield built in. 1 + 1 = 2 is an idea, but we translate this idea into physicality by the symbols 1 + 1 = 2. Semantics also leads to the insertion of subjectivity by virtue of errors in descriptions and definitions of what is being calculated. If you’re counting ice cream cones, are they all vanilla? Are they all sugar cones? To the extent the base reality is misinterpreted, the mathematics will be misleading. Mathematics is a useful tool from which man has benefited greatly. The important point is to understand 1 + 1 = 2 is an idea, expressed with mathematics, but the mathematics is not the base reality, but only the tool, the window through which we express the idea. The idea stands on the bedrock, independently. It is objectively true.[xix]
Ok, so what? In order to answer, we have to examine the other side of the comparison, and that is subjective truth. Can there be subjective truth? Let’s simplify it and just look at the ‘subjective’ part. Per the previous discussion, something subjective is “based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions”. We can within a spectrum define a point and use that point as a base reference, but that does not make the thing observed ‘true’, it merely serves as a reference. For example, the color red is defined by convention as the electromagnetic spectrum with wavelengths between 625 and 740 nanometers. The musical note A is defined as 440 cycles per second. These arbitrary values are agreed-upon conventions. A little research will convince one there is not complete agreement as to 440 Hz being the best choice for note A, nor is there complete agreement on the naming and divisions of the color spectrum. Some sources exclude indigo because supposedly many people are not able to reliably distinguish indigo from blue. Not everyone even sees the spectrum the same. Just as with hearing, some people can see higher and lower frequencies of visible light than others, so their perception of any particular color will be different than someone who sees less of the visible spectrum. They will, when looking at the same object, see hues and shades of color that others do not. Taste, smell, and touch can be analyzed and shown to be relative in the same manner as hearing and sight. I read in interesting research paper by a scientist who is convinced dolphin’s and bat’s sonar return signals are assembled into visual images, meaning the sounds they emit that are reflected back to them are converted by their brains into visual images. You and the dolphin aren’t getting the same version of the scenery. Which one is correct? It is only your bias that allows you to state your version is the ‘real’ one and the dolphin’s is incorrect. The scene is subjective in every sense of the word.
Since everything sensed must be interpreted through the filter of what is agreed upon, what is defined, and since there is frequently disagreement in opinion, sensed reality is subjective. People have conversations every day to illustrate this. “You said the soup wasn’t salty!” “You said it wasn’t cold outside.” “That suit is clearly dark blue. I’m not sure how you cannot see that.” There is quite a lot of anger created when one person’s version of reality does not agree with another’s. When talking about subjective truths, we are limited to what meets the previously defined constraint. If the string is vibrating at 440 Hz, then it is producing the note A, as defined, but only as defined. We could collectively decide to redefine the note A as 432 Hz, and then the statement “Note A is 440 Hz” would be false within the collective. What is subjectively true requires agreement.
Perhaps the best way to consider subjectivity, sensing, and the semantic reality would be the nature of light. We are in many senses young and therefore our impression of reality is skewed by virtue of the collective knowledge base being very small. There are those in positions of authority who steer the impressions of others for their own benefit, but most are simply not looking at the big picture. If we remove the semantics and consider electromagnetic radiation, we get a clearer picture of what is actually going on. In the same manner as sound is a perturbation within a medium, typically air, electromagnetic radiation is a perturbation within a medium. We call waves of air sound, so let’s clear things up a bit and label all electromagnetic radiation as EMR.
Anyone who has paid attention around bodies of water knows what waves look like. Waves can be expressed mathematically via the sine function, which leads to the term ‘sine wave’. If we assign values, the wave can be expressed as commencing at zero, rising to a peak in one direction, proceeding back through zero to a value in the other direction, then back to zero. The start and endpoints of this action define what is considered one cycle.
The picture above depicts one full wave. The length of one cycle can be measured, and this length is given the common-sense name of wavelength. So when someone speaks of the wavelength, they are literally speaking of how long, or how much distance, is covered by one wave. To get an idea of how big some of these waves can be, the shortest radio waves have a wavelength of 10 meters, but they can be much, much larger. Microwaves are defined as one meter to one centimeter. When you get to one millimeter it is defined as infrared. Infrared is considered those wavelengths from 1mm to 10μm (micrometers).[xx] Humans can see the length of one millimeter with the naked eye, but once you get smaller than that you are quickly into the ranges of the very small. As you continue up the scale of higher and higher frequencies you get into visible light, ultraviolet light, then x-rays, then gamma rays. It is important to note the border lines between these designations / definitions are completely subjective. Because we are uniquely set up to perceive EMR between 0.4 to 0.7μm as visible light does not mean visible light is somehow intrinsically different than any other EMR. If you go to the “Light Spectrum” file page in Wikipedia, the chart is not restricted to visible light, but instead starts at the lowest radio waves and continues up through the shortest gamma rays.[xxi] Without stating it blatantly, they have revealed all EMR is considered to be light at different frequencies and energies.
Scientists, and most other people in our culture, have become so comfortable with living within the confines of the definitions they cannot see outside of them. The intuitive, but obvious conclusion is it’s all the same thing, all the same stuff. For the sake of convenience we arbitrarily define different frequency bands of light as different things, but it’s all waves of light. For convenience, to line up our nomenclature with our perception, we have named various bands of EMR as different ‘things’, but in reality the dividing lines and the names are arbitrary. The bands of EMR are arbitrarily for the sake of convenience divided in the same manner as sound. We define the note A as 440 Hz because it is convenient and lines up well with our sense of hearing. We break up the EMR spectrum in the same manner. The ultimate convention may very well be the Planck Length. We may at some level have agreed that any wavelength smaller than the Planck Length is undefined within the realm of sensing and therefore has an imperceptive transverse component.
In my statement that our reality is largely subjective, there is the understanding we as humans are the ones making the decisions and the perceptions. There is also the strong possibility the decisions as to the base rule set were a conscious decision, but a perhaps a decision made from outside the reality itself. In Symmetry magazine’s online article “What Is a Photon” we find this statement, “Radio waves and microwaves; infrared and ultraviolet light; X-rays and gamma rays: All of these are light, and all of them are made up of photons.”[xxii] There is their tacit admission all EMR is light at different frequencies and amplitudes. In defining a photon (aka a “gauge boson”), it is proffered the photon is a massless, energy-conveying particle whose energy can be calculated via the equation E = hf, where E is the energy in Joules, f is the frequency of the EMR in question, and h is Planck’s constant. Massless? And no direct correlation between the quantity of waves except via the Planck Constant? The point I’m driving at is the waves are base reality, but the Planck Constant may very well be an agreed upon convention, a mathematical convenience.
I maintain the Planck Constant is what it is precisely because the originator of the reality chose it. I also maintain we perceive the Planck Constant, the defined pixilation as we do because while within physicality we are set up, engineered, to perceive it precisely as we do. This is the base reason for the “dual nature” of the photon. The act of perception, interaction with the wave, produces the illusion of physicality, and the Planck Constant is the chosen smallest division possible, the ‘pixel’ of physicality, so to speak. The wave is fundamental, but the photon is a result. Once the wavelength goes below the Planck Constant the transverse component of the wave can no longer be perceived within the boundaries of this reality. Said another way, “matter” to us is light (EMR) at a frequency so high the transverse component is not perceivable within this reality.
Now we get to point at the elephant in the room and acknowledge it. Physicality is subjective, and objective truth is non-physical. Interestingly, but completely understandably, this is exactly backwards from our cultural norm. This is the fact the gatekeepers work so hard to conceal. They work tirelessly, day and night, to keep your attention focused on the communally agreed upon construction because it is your agreement and attention that maintains and sustains it. Remove your attention and agreement and the construction loses cohesiveness and strength. Your imagination, your ability to construct your own reality, increases, and your ties to the communal reality can be released where they are no longer serving you. Your existence becomes more magical and more the result of your own individual perceptions and inclinations.
This was exactly the disconnect that bothered me so greatly through my childhood and young adult years. I took a fair amount of mathematics, up to and through differential calculus, the first semester of integral calculus, college chemistry and the like, but I could never shake the feeling I was being presented a description cloaked as a primary truth. The instructors would point at the description, the depiction, and tell me ‘this is the reason’ for whatever was being discussed. I actually had one instructor tell me he was surprised at my high test results, because based on my perpetually confused expression in class he had been under the impression I was somewhat stupid. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the mathematics; it was that the underlying assumption that the subject matter sprang forth from the mathematics didn’t make sense. I was adept at what I called ‘turning the crank’, and by that taking what I was given and working from there, but there was always the feeling I was being surreptitiously led astray by virtue of having been pointed in the wrong direction to start with.
Modern science is trying desperately to get everyone on board with the concept reality is merely composed of information. Pixilated. Ones and zeroes. A simulation. Artists and musicians are outliers to some degree because they understand intuitively information is merely information, but the experience is the reality. Relationship and context convey meaning. The intervals between musical notes each has its own feeling. Each drives a perception, an emotion. The major third is happy; the minor third is darker, a bit more reflective. The minor chord doesn’t simply sound different from a major chord, it “feels” different. Play a C major arpeggio against a C pedal tone and it sounds happy. Play a C major arpeggio against an E pedal tone and it’s dark and ominous. Where does this “happy” and “dark” spring from? You can look at the entire affair mathematically and see the relationships, but it tells you nothing about “feeling”. Combinations of color and shading give the painting its meaning and impact. The experience of playing music, the experience of painting, the listener and the viewer who are perceptive, experience an exchange of intention, of sharing, of oneness with the work and each other. Without intention and perception the music and the painting are merely information. The music is not the notes on the page, and the painting is not the oils on the canvas.
Paintings once viewed and music once heard have three components. There is the intention of the sender, the medium, and the experience of the receiver. Saying physicality is composed of information is essentially correct. Saying a painting is merely oils of varying colors and textures applied to a canvas is essentially correct. Stating music is merely vibrations of the air in different frequencies and combinations is essentially correct. You strive to experience the painting and the music, but yet consider taking physicality at face value, as information, ones and zeroes, nothing more? You recognize the idea within the painting and the music, but never think to experience the idea behind the creation that is all around you? Anyone who recognizes the idea lives in a continual state of amazement and curiosity. Everyone else lives marking time.
“Particles” are not solid in the way you think of them, but wink in and out, appearing from and disappearing into the background energy field. An analogy would be that of a harp, the strings of which are all around you. All of the strings are available at all points at all times. “Particles” are notes, the different energy levels are harmonics. Your awareness is the plectrum, and your attention activates the plectrum, influencing the background energy field and manifesting the notes. The notes interact to form harmonic intervals and chords based on the rules established by the base frequency.
Cymatics demonstrates these notes and intervals drive geometric expression. Single frequencies and their harmonics form two dimensional shapes within the substrate (typically salt or sugar on a vibrating plate) and polyfrequencies (multiple notes, chords) form three dimensional shapes within a substrate (typically ink or some other colloidal suspension). It is important to note these shapes exist as a manifestation of the vibrations, the substrate only makes them visible. The shapes exist independently of your observation, the salt or the ink only makes them perceivable to the eyes. Think “sensing”.
Sensing only happens in “now” for the physical self. For your individuated attention, there is only one “now” available to it to “play the harp” so to speak. Physicality, the melody, only exists in “now”. Notice how it is within physicality never not “now”. We are uniquely set up to perceive these vibrations coming back to us and we assemble them into a cohesive and coherent perception. Through our collective attention we reach agreement on our perceptions and form the world. The world of sensing is completely subjective. The mystery is how and where this sensing becomes integrated into a coherent perception. This coherency, the assembling into something that makes sense, is not dependent on physical sensing. It works just fine on its own. Physicality is only one avenue of input.
Where it gets interesting is when you realize the portion of “you” that processes the inputs into a coherent perception is not dependent upon physical input. All it needs is a template and a reference. What would be the proper name for that of you which accomplishes this function? Materialists will say it’s the brain, but so far no one has been able to ascertain how and where the inputs are assembled into an experience. Where is “feeling”?
I have strived throughout my entire life to pay attention to my dreams and have learned to exploit the region between sleeping and awake. I have also experimented with becoming lucid within dreaming. As for the region between sleeping and waking, it is possible to visualize something with complete, total clarity. Not the somewhat fuzzy “mind’s eye”, but the same clarity as if the scene was physical. If you could drop a person into the scene they would literally have no way to know whether they were asleep or awake. I have actually gotten into the scenes to the point I could feel the sun on my skin, smell the air, feel the wind blowing. The only thing that tethered me to “here” at that point was my agreement “here” is physical and therefore “there” is some sort of manufactured version of “not real”. The “experiencing / feeling” part of me can’t tell the difference, they’re both real. It gets input from physical sensing, and it gets references it can use, but it is in no way dependent on physicality.
There is an objective reality, but it is not the world of sensing. We can through our thinking get glimpses of the objective reality, the rule set. Through thinking we can evaluate relationships that form the ground rules of the reality and depict them mathematically. Be aware mathematics is not the primary driver, but a way of depicting, a way of viewing, documenting, and relaying the information. The set of ground rules that generates the information is what we’re really after. The mathematics reveals glimpses of the underlying objective reality and therefore clues we’re not living in the “real” world, but a subjective world of interactive sensing. For example, take the number Pi or the square root of 2. Many a powerful computer has consumed tremendous energy trying to find out if the computation ever ends. No one has found the end yet. Think of it this way….someone gives you a magic pointer that has a point so small it is much, much smaller than any subatomic particle. There is a graph of the numbers zero through ten on a page. You are instructed to take that pointer and touch the number line where the number Pi is. You will find that no matter where you touch, it’s never quite close enough. Conclusion – the number Pi does not actually exist in the world of sensing, it exists outside the world of sensing and the ratio is a ground rule, an objective reality. It is objective because it is the same for all observers, is unchangeable, and is true across time.
We attempt to get a grasp on some of these objective realities by naming them “infinities”, saying they go on forever. We’ve labeled it so we can discuss the idea. Case closed, right? Everyone knows about the concept of infinity, right? Infinity is the objective reality, which is iterated based on the relationships (equations / functions) defined within the ground rules. Go onto YouTube and watch a display of the plot of the Mandelbrot Set. The graph of this function can be iterated out as far as one cares to go. Infinity cannot be defined or grasped within physicality because it simply doesn’t make sense. As idea and mathematical construct infinity is easier to grasp and define.
Our world of sensing only exists within the “now”. We have collectively (or maybe the restriction is impressed upon us) agreed within the reality of physicality that the construction is only allowed to iterate in one direction, which we label “forward”. The agreement (or rule) that only iterations in the forward direction are allowed within physicality restrains us, but the reality is perfectly capable of being iterated in reverse. Be mindful this is not one equation (function) but an unfathomable number of them, all changing based on the input values. These input values change based on our interaction (mentally and physically) with the reality. Going back to the plot of the Mandelbrot set, notice you can go into any number of branches of the plot. If you had control of the input variables as you traveled, your path through the plot would be steered by your choices of what values you ran through the current iteration.
There is to consider the mechanism through which physicality is manifested in the ‘now’ via the interaction of an awareness with the ether / quantum ‘foam’ / energy field / etc. I have in previous chapters touched on this to a degree, and although there is no definitive source that can explain it unequivocally as unassailable facts, the insights and work of Walter Russell may serve as a springboard into the works of the early pioneers of electricity and quantum mechanics. Although Walter Russell has a large body of work to choose from, “A New Concept of the Universe” has been the one I have found to be the most comprehensive.[xxiii] It is interesting that new scientific discoveries are leading us towards a reexamination of Walter Russell’s work. One would be the discovery black holes expel neutrinos and gamma rays. Combine this with the previously discussed “LHC Creates Matter From Light” and you have both extremes of the toroidal construction, the interplay of the conversion of light to matter and matter to light.
Getting back to the matter at hand, we notice there are seven valence shells of an atom, seven notes in a musical scale (the eighth being the start of the next octave), seven colors in the visible light spectrum. The ancient Toltec seers relayed there were seven different realities that could be assembled with the emanations of the Eagle. We notice perturbations within the substrate, the ether (dark energy, quantum field) do not yield anything unless sensed. We know all of physicality is composed of electromagnetic radiation (light). We know reality derived from sensing is subjective. We know the sensing creates that which is sensed at the point of sensing. We know once sensed the sensing can be shared communally through the collective awareness/consciousness. We know simple ideas can be combined together into more and more complex thought structures, which can be manifested into physicality. We know objective truth is non-physical, but exists within the realm of idea / thinking.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for providing evidence Bell’s Inequality is in fact experimentally and mathematically provable. Without going into too much detail, the conclusion is that locality doesn’t actually exist. The effects observed where measuring one entangled particle causes the “collapse” of the other’s wave function need to be taken at face value. The cleanest answer is the particles at a more fundamental level are not separated. This leads to question “What does this more fundamental level consist of?” One logical possible avenue of exploration is what we perceive as physicality is a projection from a more fundamental construction. Put in simplest terms, the concept of space-time falls into the dustbin of history and we go forward trying to learn more about the fundamental nature of what we experience as physicality.[xxiv]
So, knowing all we know, which admittedly can only be a very small fraction of all that can be know, let’s take a stab at putting all of this together.
In a burst of playful self-reflection, an attempt to learn more about himself, All-That-Is, within his thinking comes up with the idea of a world of division and duality. By allowing facets of himself their own individual identity and instilling division in the form of forgetfulness, he creates ‘individuals’. My intuition tells me this is not the only idea he ever came up with, but it is the one we find ourselves within. Within the idea of division he funds the substrate (for discussion’s sake we’re going to call the substrate the ether and the perturbations of this substrate light or EMR) with a self-perpetuating torus which creates potential difference, a dynamo of sorts. Potential difference leads to pressure, pressure mediation, and waves. Waves are periodic, which is frequency. The higher the frequency, the more crests and valleys per unit length, thus the higher the energy. As YouTuber Ken Wheeler is fond of saying, “Waves are not a thing. Waves are not what something is, waves are what something does.” We name the waves and consider them a ‘thing’, but they are not an object in the way you would consider an object.[xxv] And so the substrate supports and funds the construction, the waves being the perturbations of the substrate, acting to remediate the created potential difference. And so the playground is created. And so all the subselves, with their varying degrees of forgetfulness and creativity, are turned loose onto the playground. I laugh as I write this because it sounds like a recipe for disaster.
For this discussion the subself who came up with the idea of duality, pressure, and pressure mediation is unimportant. All subselves roll up to All-That-Is, so for this discussion the point is moot. What is important is any time a wave is interacted with it is changed. Left alone waves simply continue from their point of origin indefinitely until they either come in contact with something or they are recycled by the universe through the yin yang of the electric/magnetic cycle. It is not a leap to consider the background energy source, the either, the ‘quantum foam’ as the substrate and the waves as tones, musical notes. What is interacting with these tones is our awareness, which interferes with the wave in such a way as to produce a harmonic, which we perceive via our sensing or their proxies as a particle. I do not claim to know the inner workings of this process much further than this, but this is the intuition I was given as a teenager and it lines up well with scientific experiments to date. So now we’re back full circle from the other direction. The physical world is assembled from our sensing, driven by the interaction of our awareness with the playground. Everything derived from sensing is subjectively true, but subjective nonetheless. Our agreement as to how this input is interpreted is, within the construction, ‘reality’. Objective truth exists within mind/thinking and remains rock solid and unchanged over time, invincible to opinion or belief. Objective truth is the ground rules of the idea, and so is true because it cannot be anything other than true, otherwise the idea ceases to exist and the entire construction becomes nonexistent. The reality constructed from sensing relies on awareness, which only exists within the present moment, the ‘now’. Therefore physicality only exists within the present moment. Subjective truths only exist within the present ‘now’, but objective truths are eternal.
The conclusion that can be drawn is the reality is a construction based on our interpretation of our sensing and the collective participation and agreement of that which is sensed. Where we run off the rails is our disregard for the collective awareness by prioritizing our individuation. The more one cuts themselves off from the collective awareness, the more one has to rely on the input they receive from outside themselves via the construction as assembled through sensing. It is a shared dream, with the vast majority of the dreamers insisting they are not dreaming, but are instead planted firmly in ‘reality’. They look through their paper towel roll and adamantly insist they are seeing things as they are.
The collective unconscious remains in operation whether you choose to ignore it or not. You may choose to consider everything outside of you as nonexistent ‘woo woo’, but that doesn’t make it go away, nor does it prevent it from relaying information. If the collective unconscious is going down the path of physicality being primary and therefore the source of all existence, that thought pattern exists within the collective unconscious and will be reinforced by virtue of being habituated through relentless repetition. “Reality” could be depicted diagrammatically as a pattern of many overlapping circles. Everyone who agrees with a premise is depicted as being contained within a particular circle. Each premise has its own circle. Where beliefs are held in common, there is overlap, and where there is disagreement, no overlap. “Reality” goes whichever way is dictated/manifested by the majority aligning themselves with a particular premise. Each premise could be looked at as effectively democratic, being a tyranny of the majority. These premises, the beliefs, are reinforced by the culture’s constant repetition and habituation. One of our missions as humans is to move the collective unconscious into the collective consciousness.
“The Art of Dreaming” and “The Fire From Within” both by Carlos Castaneda, are masterpieces of explanation of the mechanics of perception as researched and practiced by the Toltec sorcerers. They ‘saw’ the energetic emanations of the universe (known and unknown) and labeled them the ‘emanations of the eagle”. Don Juan explained to Carlos that to those who can ‘see’, humans look like luminous balls or eggs. “When sorcerers see a human being, “don Juan said, “they see a giant, luminous shape that floats, making, as it moves, a deep furrow in the energy of the earth, just as if the luminous shape had a taproot that was dragging.”[xxvi]
To quote from “The Art of Dreaming”, “In the course of his teachings, don Juan repeatedly discussed and explained what he considered the decisive finding of the sorcerers of antiquity. He called it the crucial feature of human beings as luminous balls: a round spot of intense brilliance, the size of a tennis ball, permanently lodged inside the luminous ball, flush with its surface, about two feet back from the crest of a person’s right shoulder blade.”[xxvii] This point of intense brilliance was called the assemblage point, the purpose of which is to assemble selected emanations and form them into a cohesive reality. Emanations that are not processed via the assemblage point are ignored. “After seeing what the assemblage point and its surrounding flow seemed to be doing, don Juan said that the old sorcerers advanced an explanation. They proposed that in human beings the assemblage point, by focusing its glowing sphere on the universe’s filaments of energy that pass directly through it, automatically and without premeditation assembles those filaments into a steady perception of the world.”[xxviii] They saw that only the energy filaments that pass directly through the assemblage point can be assembled into coherent perception.
Don Juan further explained that the emanations that passed through the luminous egg surrounding the human were contained within the human domain. “The human domain is the energy filaments that pass through the entire luminous ball.”[xxix] Those emanations outside of the luminous ball were “filaments of energy that are beyond the human realm. Perceiving such filaments engenders worlds that are beyond comprehension, inconceivable worlds with no trace of human antecedents in them.”
Now is the time to throw away our semantic and cultural biases and consider what don Juan is trying to relay to us. The emanations of the eagle are the energetic perturbations within the ether that are perceivable. The boundary of the human, as seen as “a luminous egg”, comprises the human domain as currently defined. Don Juan stated everything that passed within the boundary of the human was perceivable by the human, but the assemblage point narrows the choices down to a small collection and assembles them into a coherent version of ‘reality’ by virtue of its location. In modern humans, the location of the assemblage point is rigidly fixed by habituation and continual reinforcement. It was seen that the assemblage points in children were not as rigidly anchored down, tending to move around, but over time as the child progressed within society, the assemblage point became less mobile, eventually becoming rigidly affixed to a single location. This corresponds to the child’s ‘concrete operational stage’ as defined by Jean Piaget.
The important consideration is the assemblage point is only fixed by agreement and habituation. There is no natural law that requires the collection considered ‘reality’ to be so rigidly adhered to. Don Juan taught Carlos that one’s assemblage point can through intent and practice be made to move, and once made to move, with further practice can be held in any position. Don Juan called a change of position within the human domain a ‘shift’, and a change in position to outside the human domain as a ‘movement’ of the assemblage point. This is not figuratively, but literally the path to experience other worlds, other realities.
The root word of “the assemblage point” is assemble. In “The Fire From Within” don Juan relays to Carlos the truths the old and new seers had discovered about human awareness. “He explained that the mastery of awareness consisted in internalizing the total sequence of such truths. The first truth, he said, was that our familiarity with the world we perceive compels us to believe that we are surrounded by objects, existing by themselves and as themselves, just as we perceive them, whereas, in fact, there is no world of objects, but a universe of the Eagle’s emanations”.[xxx]
“He briefly outlined the truths about awareness he had discussed: that there is no objective world, but only a universe of energy fields which seers call the Eagle’s emanations. That human beings are made of the Eagle’s emanations and are in essence bubbles of luminescent energy; each of us is wrapped in a cocoon that encloses a small portion of these emanations. That awareness is achieved by the constant pressure that the emanations outside our cocoons, which are called emanations at large, exert on those inside our cocoons. That awareness gives rise to perception, which happens when the emanations inside our cocoon align themselves with the corresponding emanations at large”.
“The next truth is that perception takes place,” he went on, “because there is in each of us an agent called the assemblage point that selects internal and external emanations for alignment. The particular alignment that we perceived as the world is the product of the specific spot where the assemblage point is located on our cocoon.” [xxxi] (Italics are mine)
In order to get out from under ‘the tyranny of the majority’, one must first recognize the nature of it and then internalize the knowing of the nature of it. The process of internalization, through constant repetition, will through experience turn belief into knowing. Be patient and go easy on yourself. You’re in the process of unlearning that which literally forms the basis for your ‘reality’. Once the knowing stage is reached, one is released from the tyranny and is free to explore. In “The Art of Dreaming” within the author’s notes we find, “Don Juan explained to me that, for us to perceive those other realms, we have to covet them but we need to have sufficient energy to seize them. Their existence is constant and independent of our awareness, he said, but their inaccessibility is entirely a consequence of our energetic conditioning. In other words, simply and solely because of that conditioning, we are compelled to assume that the world of daily life is the one and only possible world.”[xxxii] Once one internalizes that other worlds (other circles of assembled worlds) are as valid as this one, the ability to perceive, intend, sense, assemble and cognize other realms within what is available becomes something to foster rather than some theoretical abstract possibility. Thinking about it is one thing and living it is another. The breakover point is the full realization reality is primarily nonphysical and therefore the ‘real world’ the average person lives in is an agreed upon construction. Removing your agreement and participation liberates energy and attention to explore.
You will have to take my word this is not simply esoteric conjecture. I am not a powerful enough being to will you to have your own experiences, but I can vouch I have had much success by putting all of these concepts together and exploring, particularly the art of dreaming. If I had to put this into some sort of idea to be easily conveyed, ‘dreaming’ in the Toltec sense is to awaken within a dream. You awaken in the same manner as you awaken from normal sleep, and the world you awaken in is as ‘real’ as the one you currently find yourself in. I have to date gotten through what don Juan called “the second gate of dreaming”, where the dreamer awakens from one dream into another dream. I have been at the point where I lost track of whether I was dreaming or awake within this communal reality, having, at the time, no way to verify if I was dreaming or not, as the dream was in no way different than this reality. I honestly thought I was awake, having run every test I could think of to verify if I was awake, only to find out later I had in truth been asleep. I only present this empirical evidence as a testimony of what is possible once one starts to consider reality from the perspective of thinking/idea as the primary reality and physicality as a result.
There is one question that has bothered me nearly my entire life, and I have pondered it regularly. Since I first as a child sensed the awareness that drives the reality, where is the dividing line between awareness and projection? My intuition told me awareness was capable of identity, and that identity drives manifestation into physical form through interaction. I also know I can visualize something within my mind to the point it appears completely real and physical in every detail. So how would one know what was an energetic awareness and what was a projection of imagination? Turns out the Toltec sorcerers also pondered this very thing. Don Juan, in speaking to Carlos about the subject said, “Dreamers have a rule of thumb. If their energy body is complete, they see energy every time they gaze at an item in the daily world. In dreams, if they see the energy of an item, they know they are dealing with a real world, no matter how distorted that world may appear to their dreaming attention. If they can’t see the energy of an item, they are in an ordinary dream and not in a real world.” So, as is typical, the answer is not binary, but both. At the end of the book Carlos is guided through a shared dream with a very powerful sorcerer and is able to put this concept into practice, amazed at how, despite how real most of the dream appears to him, it is actually a projection of imagination of the sorcerer.
Throwing our semantics and enculturated biases aside for a second, let us pause and consider what conclusions we can draw. If one cannot discern, if one has no means by which to discern, there is no way that person can know if what they are experiencing is awareness/identity or a projection. If the person in question has never experienced being able to tell the difference, to them there will be no difference. If the person has been enculturated to the point they believe the projection is the base reality, in fact the only reality, they are trapped within the projection with seemingly no way out. Not only are they in prison, they are in a prison they reinforce and help maintain through their own agreement and attention. Not only will they not try to escape, they will fight to remain in it and ridicule anyone who sees the prison and tries to escape.
Lastly, what of imagination? Miriam Webster’s top two definitions are “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality” and “creative ability”. My experiences and intuition lead me to the conclusion everything is in the process of becoming more self-aware, and imagination is the chasm, the dividing line. Imagination makes mental projections possible. Imagination can work independently of physicality or in conjunction with physicality. Personally I feel the term ‘create’ is bandied about too loosely. The term ‘manifested’ would be a better way to express the idea. As with my granite block analogy, every form possible within the constraints of the dimensions of the block is already there within the block. By uncovering one, you aren’t ‘creating’ anything. You are manifesting it, limited only by your ability to imagine (from the Latin imaginare, which means ‘to form an image of’) and your physical skill. Creation is a process by which an idea is conceived that is composed of its own objective truths. Within the creation the objective truths are true because they cannot be anything other than true, or the reality could not exist. This will make sense in a moment.
Working from inspiration, intuition, empirical evidence, and conjecture I’m going to make some bold statements here, and you can disagree if you wish. The instant an entity gains the ability to form a mental image independent of physicality the entity also gains the ability to mentally project. Form and outcomes can be mulled over within the realm of idea/thinking. Animals that demonstrate clear problem solving skills are starting to crack the door of imagination open. Some animals dream, and what is a dream but a mental projection? If you plotted the capacity for imagination it would look something like this:
· Little to no imagination – the entity is essentially operating from pure awareness. There is awareness of self, there may be a group communal awareness, but there is little or no awareness of self as existing independently from surroundings or circumstances.
· Some imagination – there is some awareness of self as existing independently of the surroundings. There is some capacity for mental images, leading to the ability to mentally project possible outcomes based on current actions. Animals that demonstrate tool usage and problem solving skills are in this category.
· Vivid imagination – The sense of identity as separate from the surroundings is in full force. Multiple mental images can be constructed and projected into the future to explore possible outcomes. Mental imaging can be remembered and played back in detail, even to the point the physical body reacts with appropriate responses. Used constructively, this allows for such things as athletes being able to mentally rehearse particular movements. It has been noted their bodies respond in the same manner as if the movement was actually being executed. It has also been noted mental repetition lowers the time for learning the skill in physicality. The down side of this ability is that negative outcomes can also be mentally projected and explored. The medical and mental health establishments make a decent living catering to people who cannot control their ability to mentally project negative outcomes. I wouldn’t even venture a guess how many medicines are prescribed for anxiety alone.
· Advanced imagination – The ability to generate and hold a mental image that has the same clarity and definition as physicality. The object or scene imagined has the same visual quality as the object or scene within physicality. I have read Nikola Tesla had this ability. I can do this in the region between waking and sleeping, but I have yet to be able to do it at will while awake in physicality.
· Operational imagination – the ability to mentally project objects and scenes that allow for participation by self and others. Entities with enough energy/power can mentally imagine and project objects and scenes that have enough validity as to be perceived and participated within by others and are nearly indistinguishable from physicality. Participation requires the participants to be in a heightened state of awareness and active participation. This is the level of a shared dream with the participation being voluntary, requiring intention to participate.
· Super-Operational imagination – the ability to project entire realities that are indistinguishable by the average observer from creation. Participation can be involuntary for those individuals whose awareness is below a certain level. Participants unwittingly contribute energy and so increase the cohesiveness of the ‘imagined’ projected reality.
· Creation (God) Level imagination – the ability to imagine and create ideas that have no link or correlation to anything previously conceived, and to assign and delegate awareness. This level of imagination is capable of creating and setting aside sentient self-actualizing worlds, universes, dimensions. Words fail because I only have this created universe as a point of reference. All-That-Is never really sets aside, but how do we describe creating another sentient universe, with ground rules (objective truths) we cannot even imagine?
The ability to mentally project into the future is precisely the breakover point where evil / Wetiko / Satan / whatever you wish to call it becomes manifest. Before this, there is only sensing. Sensing requires duality, because in order to sense something there has to be change. The world of duality is not in and of itself poisoned. Until the ability to mentally project is gained, things simply are as they are. Life sustains itself, eventually giving in and dying, but serving the higher purpose of keeping the construction going. Cells serve their purpose and eventually die. Leaves die and fall to the ground. Flowers give up their nectar and then die. Animals eat plants, some animals eat other animals, but there is no conception of anything being anything other than what it is. The ability to mentally project carries with it an analysis of the current situation. Once possibilities can be explored mentally and outcomes favorable to the individual entity can be brought about, the entity is free to choose outcomes that are favorable to it though they may be at the expense of others. Bingo. The “knowledge of good and evil”, which spawns motives.
The result is entities, or collections of entities energetic enough to be able to imagine and project realities that are so cohesive they are participatory. Any reality cohesive enough to be participatory can be shared. Notice this viewpoint, once internalized, is exactly upside down from what is currently considered the correct model.
There are three other ‘facts I can’t prove’ that need to be presented here. The first is, though ‘the reality’ tells you only the present moment exists, that is only true with regards to your sensing awareness. Your sensing awareness creates physicality within an ever present ‘now’. Your consciousness exists outside of physical time. Your awareness within sensing is pinned to the reality. Your consciousness is free to explore outside of physical time, and can focus awareness as it chooses. Since all reality exists simultaneously in all probabilities, all can be explored by any consciousness, frontwards, backwards, inside and out.
The second ‘fact I can’t prove’ is that each awareness is a fractal of All-That-Is, operating under the illusion of division in order to create and have separate experiences. The implication is the more aware of this fact the entity becomes, the more aware the entity becomes of the experiences of all aspects of itself. As each consciousness gains awareness and imagination it gains awareness of that which it has spawned / created / brought within its awareness via imagination. Although each awareness / consciousness is responsible for its own journey, its own creations, it is also at some level aware of the creations of its other associated awarenesses. As the entity gains understanding, the capacity to become aware of and profit from the experiences of its associated awarenesses becomes more developed.
Although rife with semantic error, a useful way to conceive of this is a hierarchy of consciousness. Some relay it as a vertical progression. Many use the analogy of the layers of an onion, which grows from the center out. Although the total is accessible to all, those entities who have gained sufficient awareness / insight / knowledge are more adept at accessing the consciousness of associated awarenesses, especially those of its own creation. And so we have the concept of nested awareness. Entities of a certain ‘level’ are aware of and access easily ‘subordinate’ awarenesses. This is the concept of the ‘oversoul’.
Your oversoul is not only aware of you, your oversoul is also aware of all your possible selves. This leads into the concept of time as relates to your awareness and is the third ‘fact I can’t prove’. Everything exists in one present ‘now’. Time exists for you as a flow of events in order for you to experience cause and effect. In reality everything exists in all possibilities within ‘now’. This includes all past and all future. For you at your present awareness there is the past you remember, your probable pasts, and your probable future. This entire landscape is malleable, frontwards and backwards. You may not be aware of it, but you have access to your future selves. Your interaction with your future selves influences you, which changes their past self (from your point of awareness).
Hopefully I have piqued your interest. I assume you are reading because you want to know the true nature of existence, and have allowed yourself to entertain the idea ‘reality’ ain’t all that ‘real’, that what current humans define as ‘real’ is actually nothing but an elaborate construction, a manifestation, an assembly. One of many, from an infinite number of possibilities. To consider this requires a considerable amount of courage, a willingness to exchange certainty for uncertainty. To leave a life of stability, safety, sameness, and embrace a life of continual uncertainty, endless challenges, but also continual discovery and wonderment.
IX Lifting the Veil
One thing that assuages fear is certainty. The “safety first”, or more accurately, “safety at all costs” mindset is the attempt to introduce certainty and then remain in certainty for the duration. What gets thrown out the window is actually living and experiencing your life. Safety makes sense to a degree, but carried to its logical conclusion it stifles and represses joy, experience, and life in general. It is one thing to put on safety glasses if you’re cutting or drilling, but it is quite another to prevent children from playing on the playground under the pretext they might get injured. What is it that makes life worth living? The child is uninjured, but has never experienced life from the treetops, exuberantly admiring the view with a sense of accomplishment at having climbed it. Do not underestimate how much this call to safety has influenced your thinking. You cannot see clearly through a haze of fear.
In our culture there seems to be a tendency to take new perspectives and knowledge and frame our current take on the nature of reality in the new terms. One that has become trendy is the notion that our reality is composed of information. This notion that the reality is information leads to the erroneous idea that the reality is merely information. This disregards the effect of the observer/intention and tries to direct the discussion back down the rabbit hole to a sort of quasi-materialism where bits of information supplant subatomic particles as the basis of physical reality. A painting can be reduced to its component parts of colored oils and canvas, but the colored oils and canvas are not the painting. Ideas have existence, are existent. The relationship of the colors, their interaction and the context convey meaning and idea. The painting can be destroyed. The idea and the experience are eternal.
Be aware this collective construction protects itself at all costs, so not going along with the game makes you immediately an outsider. Conveniently they have defined sanity in terms of the communal construction, operating under the assumption physicality is all there is, or at least the primary reality from which everything else springs. Once you grasp the truth, you are not simply considered to be eccentric. To them, by definition, you are crazy. You are now, within their world, easily diagnosed as quite insane, and I am not being glib or facetious in any way. Your assertion that what you can hold in your hand, what you can touch and see, is subjective, and objective truths are nonphysical is seen by them as clear evidence you are quite insane. As long as you are not considered a danger to others they will typically leave you to your delusions, but to them you are insane. Not figuratively, but literally. Your diminishing sense of attachment and your lessening fear of death will put you at great odds with them, and it will make them angry and uncomfortable. You realize death stalks us all and choose not to run, but to use the fact to sharpen your focus.
To lift the veil, to see behind it, you may have to throw out everything and start over. There can be no clinging to what you “know” unless it is based on your own experiences. Some say this takes a tremendous toll. They will go on and on about how much pain they had to go through, how much anguish they had to endure, how much they suffered. If they were heavily invested and immersed within the construction and never really looked any closer, then I can see how this might be so, but any suffering is only birth pangs, no? I know of no one who, who once setting down the path, regretted it or wanted to return to not knowing. Regardless of what they had to go through, they would never return even if they could.
“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 every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.”
“Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.”
Above are two excerpts from “The Over-Soul” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The italics are mine. “Only itself can inspire whom it will…” This is an answer to a question I asked about why some glimpse the truth and therefore the veil, but others do not. What I offer is advice for the former, as for trying to open the eyes of the latter you can present your case, but often the more you offer the more entrenched in their dogma they become. Rather than trying to open the eyes of anyone who doggedly clenches them shut, I instead confine myself to those who at least have been tapped on the shoulder and noticed they’re no longer living in the same neighborhood.
If we are not seeing reality as it is, of which I am certain, why not? If there is an illusion at work, a curtain blocking our view, what is its nature? You are reading this, which means you have very likely gotten a glimpse of the veil. There is a sliver of doubt, an unease that gives you pause. At this point most in your position start looking for the break in the curtains. If you took all the past and present literature, all the music, all the movies, all the art created in an effort to point out the veil, and put it in one location, it would be mountains and mountains, and that is not in the least an exaggeration. “The human condition”. Still a mystery after all this time.
Many will try and find a religion that aligns with their intuition. Although there are truths to be found in organized religions, they are also the tool the reality uses to trap people and pull them back into the collective ego-based reality. I envision it as a huge warehouse with concealed trap doors everywhere. Your chances of walking through to the other end without falling into one are about zero. Am I saying religion is bad? Yes and no. First, the no part. Anything that encourages you to seek and learn more is a good thing. Religious texts are full of writings of some very insightful people and they make many points worthy of consideration. The bad? Religion, if accepted as the one and only path, the one and only truth, is a dead end, a roadblock. If the religion allows you to consider the matter as closed, the question answered to the extent possible, you’re right back in the clutches of the reality.
These are recommendations. Bear in mind I have no credentials of any sort with regards to religion, psychology, self-help, or therapy. I make no claims to be any sort of spiritual insider, spiritual teacher, or guru. I do have a lifetime of seeking, asking questions, and fostering a relationship with the creator. I have been fortunate to have had many experiences that have led me to the understanding I currently have. I feel compelled to relay what I have to offer, and expressing myself in writing is one of the few talents I have a predilection and affinity for. I can tell you this path has thus far worked for me, it involves much that is universal, and it may be of help to you.
Recognize you have agreed to perceive precisely as you do, but you are not currently set up to cognize what you perceive as reality, but as that which increases your survivability. Your cognition does not construct what is, but what is useful for you within this physical construction. In the same manner as your brain transforms the electrochemical signals from your eardrums into “sound”, your brain transforms the electrochemical signals from your eyes into “sight”, shapes and colors. There is a huge body of literature and videos on this subject if you wish to delve into it for yourself, but all you need to internalize for now is there is no “out there” objective world. No light or sound actually enters the confines of your cranium, it is a sealed chamber. All it has to create sensing from is electrochemical signals from outside. Within physicality you are the airline pilot flying the plane with the windows blacked out. All you have to perceive the outside world of physicality is what your instruments relay to you.
Recognize everything perceivable by your senses is light at varying energies / frequencies. All of it. You perceive by sensing and assembling your sensing into cognition based on your assumptions. Your assumptions are taught to you from an early age, carefully selected in order for you to assemble your perceptions along precisely the lines they presently exist. “Don Juan expressed wonder at what he called the greatest accomplishment of our human upbringing: to lock our assemblage point on its habitual position. For, once it is immobilized there, our perception can be coached and guided to interpret what we perceive. In other words, we can then be guided to perceive more in terms of our system than in terms of our senses. He assured me that human perception is universally homogeneous, because the assemblage points of the whole human race are fixed on the same spot.”[xxxiii]
Recognize when you see, hear, feel, you are filtering through the semantic overlay of words and symbols. Unless you and the people you are communicating with are telepathic, these words and symbols are the only means you have to relay your experiences to them. You have become so used to this semantic reality that even though it is a substitute, a proxy, it is taken as primary. You will not be able to perceive reality until you can sense without filtering through this semantic overlay. Eckhart Tolle makes a good living teaching people how to get past this hurdle, and I highly suggest his work if you are interested. The work of Jean Piaget, Carl Jung, and Joseph Chilton Pierce may be of interest to you if you wish to investigate the role of the internal dialog and the advantages of shutting it off.
Cease with the assumption of division. The act of naming and defining creates division where there is in actuality no division. In order to define something you have to draw a circle around it, including everything within the circle and excluding everything outside the circle. Once something is defined, your ego brain more quickly recognizes that which is defined and excludes that which does not fit the model. You “see” that which you have defined and ignore the ‘noise’. You have done this quite successfully with physicality. Anything you can pick up, touch, see, feel, anything physically tangible, either via your senses or their proxies (instrumentation) is defined as ‘real’. What is not defined and does not fit will not be perceived, even though the senses will register it. The electrochemical signals will be generated, but they will be ignored.
Daniel Simons, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, along with partner Christopher Chabris, in 2010 wrote “The Invisible Gorilla.” The study that prompted the book won a Nobel Prize and the associated demonstration film won an Emmy. The test involved the viewer watching a group of young people, some dressed in white, some in black, as they pass a basketball around while moving about as a small group. The viewer is asked to count the number of times one of the persons dressed in white passes the ball. While this action is taking place, a person dressed in a gorilla suit passes right through the middle of the group, even stopping and waving at the camera. At the end of the test, the viewer is asked how many times someone in white touched the ball. People are generally reasonably sure of the number and will answer with some confidence, typically getting the answer correct.
The viewers are then asked if they saw the gorilla. The vast majority of people that viewed the video did not see the gorilla, and would strongly insist to the testers there was no gorilla! It is only after viewing the film a second time they reluctantly admitted there was a gorilla and they failed to see it. Mr. Simons and Mr. Chabris rightfully make the point the error is attributed to people’s inability to focus on multiple things simultaneously.[xxxiv] When the focus is strict, other distractions are dismissed outright. I maintain this same process is in play when the mind/ego is minding the store. As the ego is busy projecting, planning, rehashing, mentally rehearsing, reality goes by largely unnoticed. Defining semantically reduces the attention to the scope of the circle that can be drawn around the set that comprises the definition. This set gets attention and the ego awareness readily acknowledges that which demonstrates the attributes applicable. The end result is a definition-induced myopia.
By defining that which is considered ‘spiritual’ as separate, as ‘out there’, the ego cuts off the recognition of sensory input that does not match the defined reality. Don Juan pointed out to Carlos that the Toltec seers could see this functionality in real time. The emanations of the eagle (the sum of all that can be sensed) were largely ignored, but a subset of the emanations were allowed through the assemblage point and assembled into a cohesive reality. These emanations constituted ‘reality’ for the entity and the other emanations were ignored. By shifting the assemblage point the previously ignored emanations were brought into the awareness of the entity, thus allowing the entity to experience a different reality. The salient point is to strive to cease limiting your perception by defining too tightly what constitutes ‘reality’.
To reduce your mission to two tasks, the first is establishing a relationship with All-That-Is, and the second is to disconnect from the communal ego construction to the extent possible. YouTuber Matt McKinley humorously calls this second task “jumping off the ship of fools” as it heads downstream towards the falls. As you continue to ponder and consider, at some point the veil comprised of the average of the collective awareness will become obvious to you, at which point you will “wake up”. The psychosis will be broken. I wish I could tell you everything is peaches and cream from that point, but the pull of the collective awareness is strong, and you will find yourself continually engaging with it. You will see through it at one point, and then perhaps even seconds later become dragged back into it. The reality will put an endless supply of rabbits into your path for you to chase. The reality plays the long game and never tires. The way you win on a personal level is to choose not to play, which is harder than it sounds, because if you find yourself chasing one of the rabbits, you didn’t initially realize you WERE playing the game. To put it in Matt McKinley’s terms, your mission is to jump off the ‘ship of fools’ and swim to shore, where you can wave at the ship as it proceeds down the river of ‘reality’ toward its inevitable conclusion at the bottom of the falls.
Do not agree to be bound to the reality. Take back your agreement to participate in collective insanity. Recognize, then don’t participate. This takes the most extreme amount of courage imaginable, as you are turning your back on everything you thought you knew and embracing the unknown, infinity. Be willing to have people disagree with you. Do not allow your acceptance of any idea or perception to be influenced by a personal need to be accepted or belong to any group. This works in both directions, as you may find yourself, exasperated that others do not recognize what you recognize, energetically trying to seek your own validation by changing their minds. You are not seeking truth in order to feel good, or feel better about yourself, but to know truth, regardless of the consequences.
Recognize and acknowledge your shadow and the collective shadow, which essentially means to own your dark side. Not to dwell in it, but to realize you cannot choose against something you do not fully know and are able to recognize. Paul Levy termed that aspect of the collective shadow that had become so well defined as to have identity as “big Wetikos”, or “the Wetiko virus”. In “Dispelling Wetiko” he writes, “Big Wetikos are fully embodying, in personified form, a pathological tendency that exists in potential within ourselves. Their madness is truly a reflection of our own. It is as if they are the externalized materialization of this potential within ourselves that we’ve projected outside of ourselves and collectively dreamed up into manifestation. Recognizing this generates compassion for this part of ourselves. It is only through compassion that we immunize ourselves from the virus.”[xxxv] As you become more and more aware of this collective shadow, the more you will recognize how finely it is interwoven into the fabric of our collective reality. Pointing it out when you see it will make you a very unpopular person. Most people consider what their tribe does as morally justified and what the other tribe does as criminal. This tendency is used to great effect by the authority figures dubbed ‘leaders’ as they interpret issues in terms of nationalism and “us versus them”. To the average person authority figures hold great sway.
Understand the difference between doing versus being and the interrelationship between them. If you are being, you can only be, but by being you become more open and receptive, less judgmental, less dismissive. As you gain understanding your being becomes more expansive and intricate. Your awareness encompasses more and more input from an ever increasing variety of sources. The state of being and only being is the awareness you had as a child. It was the state of being I was so acutely aware of losing when I became aware of operational awareness overtaking me. It is the state of awareness I so longed to hang on to. In being you simply are. It is your center. In a state of being you will be able to sit in a chair by yourself and be perfectly happy, content.
Doing is another matter altogether. Doing is anything that is not simply being. Doing is taking action. Thinking is doing. This is a tough one. Being, or ‘not doing’, is what some consider ‘non-duality’, where there is no action, only being. The instant you start thinking you are squarely back in duality, as an identity is required in order to create the separation necessary to contain a separate thought. So being is ‘not thinking’ and doing is thinking. Volitional action requires thinking. True knowing, the understanding, the internalization of base truths, does not require thinking, but becomes part of being. Understanding comes not from effort, but from asking, quieting the mind. Realize existence is not either/or, but both. Not adding, but subtracting. It is unity, ‘I AM THAT I AM’, rest, center, and it is duality, thinking, potential difference expressing motion and pressure mediation. We have collectively lost our center and have become too immersed in duality, but this is changing.
Maintain humility at all costs. You will become aware of yourself considering yourself as somehow different than others. You’re enlightened and they’re not, or you know something they don’t. You can deal with this as you like. I chide myself with “You self-indulgent asshole”, have a good laugh, and get back into a better mindset. Let every single answer and intuition be a beginning. Consider the person you view as completely lost and then, looking at yourself, realize in relation to All-That-Is when you are comparing yourself to someone else it is the difference in the thickness of two dimes. You come to realize how much you don’t know. Each intuition leads to more questions. You accept you are never finished, there is never an end to your path, but there is a contentedness that comes with accepting the rewards of knowledge and experiences. View everyone as fellow travelers, understanding each knows something you do not. Be open to learning from anyone and everyone. There are some that wish to take advantage of you, but if you close yourself off you are missing the point of being here. When you meet others, make the effort to imagine yourself in their circumstances, and by that I mean their circumstances from day one of their existence. This is not a brain-storming session where you mentally project what you would do if you found yourself in their situation at that moment, but to consider what their lives must have been like over the course of their entire life. You may not have even fared as well as they had you experienced the same things.
Remember what your mother taught you. Every single issue can be reduced to right and wrong, or to true or not true. Don’t let anyone misdirect you with “It’s not that simple”. It is that simple. If it doesn’t seem to be that simple, you are either not at the root issue, or the root issue has not even yet been identified.
Keep track of your dreams. Start a dream ledger. The instant you wake up, review the dreams you had and note what type of dreams they were. Even if you only remember snippets, write them down. I find the process of writing even a few words will often pull additional memories to the surface. How vivid and clear was the dream? Did the events jump around in some sort of random fashion, or was there definite continuity? Did you meet and interact with anything or anyone? The intent here is to start remembering and analyzing. Many people I talk to say they don’t dream at all, or upon waking they have a vague feeling of having dreamt, but they do no remember any of it. If you’re reading this, I’m thinking you’re not in this group, but if you are, then there’s no better time than the present to start paying attention. Every time you lay down to sleep, make the conscious commitment to yourself to remember your dreams. I have my entire life slept primarily to dream, as I have always enjoyed exploring the dreamscape. Many dreams are influenced by daily events and can be highly symbolic. Some dreams can have a high degree of continuity and a common thread, a storyline.
As you become better at remembering our dreams, the next step is to participate. To do this, you must bring your identity into the dream so as to recognize yourself as independent of the dream so you can exercise intention and action, the conscious ability to choose. The dream will then not be something you are passively observing, but a place where you have intention and the power to use that intention. You are no longer simply an observer. You can choose to stop, look around, engage beings within the dream, travel in whatever direction you wish. You can examine anything in the dream in detail; essentially do anything you do in waking reality, plus more. For me the dreams I have where I have my awareness and identity intact take on a variety of forms. Most people call these lucid dreams, but that is a general connotation and doesn’t capture the range of experience. These dreams can range from a dream that is still vague and somewhat cloudy to an experience that is no different than being awake. In fact, asking yourself if you’re dreaming or not is a great habit to get into. During the day whenever you think about it, ask yourself if you are dreaming. Practice looking around to take everything in without fixating on any one item or view.
Learn to exploit the region between awake and asleep that occurs right as you’re falling asleep and as you’re waking up. When I’m in this region I can visualize with complete clarity. I can visualize an object, rotate it to any viewpoint, and it’s as clear as if I had the object in front of me. I am able to imagine scenes and pull myself into them to the point I can feel the breeze, smell the air and the sun on my skin. I don’t believe I’m any different than most humans, so this should be available to anyone who cares to seek it.
You may use whatever method you wish to try and become self aware while dreaming. Initially I used my hands, telling myself if I saw my hands in my dream, that would trigger me to realize I was dreaming. Before sleeping reaffirm to yourself if you see your hands in your dream, you will realize you’re dreaming. Eventually this will occur. Once you realize you are dreaming stop and take a look around. Do not focus on any one thing for too long. If you feel yourself slipping back into a regular dream, you can use your hands to reorient yourself.
I have done this so long all it takes for me to engage in the dream is for me to notice one thing in particular and focus on it. I still from that point use my hands for a reference point, but the realization I’m dreaming can come at any spontaneous time. I say this only to convey that, as with anything, the more you practice something, the easier and more natural it becomes. Do this regularly, even through drought periods where it seems to be getting no results. Every night before you go to sleep reaffirm to yourself your intention to be more aware during your dreams. Consistency will reap rewards.
This one’s a biggie. Pray, in whatever manner works for you. I am not speaking of the version of prayer a person mired in religious dogma might assume. I am speaking of a conscious attempt, executed with intention, to ask the universe / God / All-That-Is to allow you to remember and perceive you are one with it, and so access the answers to the questions you have. “My brain is only a receiver. In the universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength, and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of the core, but I know it exists” – Nikola Tesla. And how is this core, the primary driver, accessed? Is it found in a book? Is it found by studying? Does information lead you to this core? Spoiler alert, the answer to these questions is “No”.
I personally don’t have any sort of ritual or ceremony regarding prayer. I pray whenever the thought occurs to me to do so. There is no formality, and often no words, just a simple intention to reconnect to Source and to pay attention. Typically I express thankfulness for being allowed the opportunity to exist, and ask that I see the truth behind the veil. I ask to be guided and held within the “service to others” vibration and protected from the “service to self” orientation. I expect to be treated the way I would treat someone if the roles were reversed. My feeling is the smart king is thankful for and respectful to each and every one of the citizens, as they each have a job to do. In this arrangement I ask nothing for myself except the knowledge and the chance to experience, to grow in understanding, to be closer to the campfire, so to speak. I understand the concept of prayer as a means of manifesting desires from the universe, and perhaps I do not utilize that avenue enough, but it would feel self indulgent to me to ask for specific outcomes for myself. I view prayer, a reconnection to Source, as different than sending a request out into the universe for some specific result. I do pray for others in their plights, and offer my energy for their use if they are able to make use of it. As with any communal, agreed-upon reality, the more people focus on a desired reality, the more probable it becomes.
I am fortunate that I have always felt the presence of All-That-Is, so simply asking questions such as “What am I really seeing here?” come naturally to me. And the urge to understand what the term “love” involves. Love is a word that means something different to nearly everyone who hears it. It is one big semantic quicksand pit. There have been attempts throughout time to define it accurately. Nearly everyone is familiar with 1 Corinthians 13:4 in the Bible. Interestingly, the King James Version translates the word as “charity”, but other versions translate it as “love”. I know I’ve heard that verse at weddings numerous times. I think we have to go back to “All Is One”. I have never felt abandoned, I have always felt the reassurance that I am whole in truth regardless of what happens here. This infinite positive regard in both directions is from love, part of it. With regards to love as relates to asking questions, in Matthew 7, verses 7 through 11 Jesus speaks on the subject of asking questions. Verse 9 speaks directly to the relationship, “What man is there of you, whom if his son ask(s) for bread, will give him a stone? Establishing and maintaining this relationship will pay tremendous dividends. Ask questions to your heart’s content. Don’t expect answers in a serial fashion, but pay attention. To everything.
There are those that speak of “giving your life to God”, or such phrases as “God is my copilot”. I have trouble understanding what these phrases are supposed to mean. I sense a need or desire in those statements to relinquish sovereignty and responsibility. My surrender does not relieve me of any responsibility nor any less necessity of action. I am still the point man for this aspect of awareness and have need of navigating it moment to moment. There is an ease that accompanies remaining in contact with All-That-Is, an acknowledgment of the advantageous coincidences, the happy accidents that pop into your life, seemingly out of nowhere. The secret is to acknowledge them and express thanks, to accept them with humility. To me, “giving your life to God” is not a point in time, so that there is one “before” reality and one “after” reality, it is a process. You don’t need to suddenly have the urge to join a monastery or join a missionary trip in order to feel some sort of external validation. External validation, second guessing yourself in the effort to try to do “God’s will” is the antithesis of everything we’re talking about here. I have since the beginning challenged All-That-Is to speak loudly, as I am not all that smart or observant. I am willing, but I recognize I can be pretty dense at times.
The continual seeking, the continual questioning, will set you off down the path. In order to remain on this path you must suspend belief at all times. There is a popular phrase, “Belief is the enemy of knowing”. This statement is true because belief suspends and ends seeking. At the point you believe, your energy and attention is not involved in seeking, but instead as acting as the gatekeeper of your beliefs. Your reality is assembled from what you know, but even that remains suspect. Pay attention, as the answers to your questions will come in the form of visions, dreams, déjà vu experiences, physical and emotional experiences, and information and events within this physical reality. For example, you may ask a question of the universe, and then some time months later walk by a library. A book in the window catches your eye, so you pick it up and open it to a random page where the book addresses the exact question you asked. In order for you to accept the information and make use of it, your preconceived notions, “i.e.” your beliefs, may need to be put into the back of your closet. You will find yourself trying to break through the ego attention and trying to see the world as it is, not as you believe it to be. To see it without judging, without labeling. Again, judging is not meant in the sense of persecution, but in the sense of perceiving. Perception uncolored, untainted. What you are doing in the practical sense is stalling the collapse of the wave function, holding it off in order to leave it suspended. Dreams are held in equal validity of experience, and given equal weight within the context of the seeking of knowledge. Coincidences are not taken for granted, but seen as indications you are on the right path, aligned with the universe to a greater degree.
Realize there is one truth, and for this one truth there are thousands of paradigms, gestalts, descriptions, stories, pictures, symbols, and songs within a fabric of institutions and civilizations. One truth, millions of attempts to convey this truth to those that don’t see it, in the hopes they may be able to glimpse some small piece of it. Your seeking and your questions are geared towards uncovering this truth through direct experience. You can read all the lessons and teachings you want, and they can be very helpful, but you never actually know anything except through direct experience. Study can present things in a different way, to help understanding, and the vast body of religious works can provide direction and insight, but all they can leave you with is belief. Belief is not something I ever considered to be good enough. I see belief as a lazy person’s way out. Believe, thinks the average person, and no further work is required. “If I believe in God” they think, “I am down that avenue as far as I need to go”. No further curiosity is necessary, as they already believe. They can worship periodically, learn a few Bible verses so as to be able to speak intelligently on the subject, and they’re good to go.
If you strip religions and spiritual teachings down to their essence, they are all either working to wake you up or keep you asleep. The truths stated and those hidden work to wake you up, and the translations, the relaying of the information in a semantic means, the adherence to dogma, the need to be seen as the way and the only way, are what works to trap you here, whether intended or not. I see the same truths relayed in Hinduism, Gnosticism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Toltec sorcery. To say you are an adherent to some specific religion binds you to its tenets, to its dogma. You should not be interested in practicing some particular religion except what leads you to a direct experience of the truth. If there was one aspect of the teachings of don Juan Matus as relayed to Carlos Castaneda, it was the technique of having a direct experience and evaluating the results. After Carlos would have a direct experience, don Juan would go over the experience with Carlos in order to provide context, but what I found appealing was don Juan was willing to learn from Carlos’s experience as well, to add to the body of his knowledge, not necessarily to impress his version of reality onto Carlos for all cases. The warrior is at the point of interaction, so the people behind the lines telling the warrior what he is experiencing is backwards thinking. Don Juan on numerous occasions refused Carlos’s request to interpret his experiences. Don Juan would tell Carlos his experiences were for him alone, and only he could judge them and try to put them in context.
With the proper mindset you will start to be able to see things without judging. “Judging” is a loaded word, and there is a shade of meaning that doesn’t necessarily come out to the biblically minded. Your mission is not to assess what you perceive by cycling it through the ego and quickly dividing everything that comes across your senses into the good/bad or good/evil buckets. You cannot accurately perceive anything if you are placing everything you are perceiving into your ego-based silos. This is difficult and has to be practiced continually. I’ll give you an example. You’re walking down the street by yourself in a somewhat run-down neighborhood and someone is approaching. You look up and it’s a young man dressed in dirty coveralls and work boots. It’s just the two of you and you’re both on the same sidewalk, so you’re going to pass very closely to each other, almost touching. Not judging means you do not assume any bad or good intentions, no value judgments, you simply observe. Common sense dictates you stay alert, but there is no need to assume anything. As you approach him you look him in the eyes and give him a friendly and genuine “Good morning”, one fellow human to another. He looks up, flashes you a big smile, and returns with his own “Good morning to you”.
Had you assumed based on your location and the young man’s dress and proximity that there was cause to be concerned, you would have been on your guard. This concern would have manifested itself in your behavior and your demeanor. Humans are animals, and they sense more than even they may be consciously aware of. Your concern will cause trepidation and influence your behavior. Sensing this trepidation, the young man is now experiencing an entirely different situation. He would sense you had already considered him a threat, and will react accordingly. If he is inclined to be easily offended, that is what you may see. His reaction to you will be colored by his reaction to your fear. Being aware and present is not the same as being cautious and wary. You should always be ready for any interaction to take a turn for the worse at any moment. I’m not talking about going for a walk in an angry mob or mindlessly interacting with everyone you meet, I’m saying don’t color your interactions with others with your preconceived notions about what is transpiring. Perceive, don’t project. In “The Active Side of Infinity” Don Juan chides Carlos, “It’s not the people around you who are at fault,” he said. “They cannot help themselves. The fault is with you, because you can help yourself, but you are bent on judging them, at a deep level of silence. Any idiot can judge. If you judge them, you will only get the worst out of them. All of us human beings are prisoners, and it is that prison that makes us act in such a miserable way. Your challenge is to take people as they are! Leave people alone.”[xxxvi]
You will eventually get to a fine line here that will set you at odds with many of your family and friends. As you start considering each aspect of the reality from a step back, you will not be so inclined to follow the party line, to follow it without question. True empathy will kick in and you’ll start seeing the reality from both sides of the isle, from the ceiling, from the balcony, and from the orchestra pit. They will see their country’s invasion of another country as a righteous and just cause, perhaps not even calling it an invasion, but perhaps a ‘police action’. You will see their point, but you will also see their enemy’s point. You will understand to their enemy the invasion as just that, an invasion. To them, there are unwelcomed foreign troops in their neighborhoods. When you don’t go along with your family and friends in their zeal to demonize the other country, you will be criticized and ostracized. This dynamic will appear across all issues, politics, race, religion, sexuality, you name it. You will speak to your position, but they will not hear what you say. Your prodding to look at the issue from the other side will be met with their sense of betrayal. You are betraying their cause, speaking against it. Of course you are not speaking against anything, you are only prompting them to look at the issue from multiple viewpoints, but if they’re not ready to hear it you will be the object of their wrath. Be ready for this, as this is another aspect of not judging, and that is the realization the situations are there precisely for your benefit, for your opportunity to learn about yourself and to grow.
Lighten up. If you have preconceived or left over ideas about having to fear God, that it’s all crime and punishment, so you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, constantly evaluating your actions to see if they’re “good enough”, worried you’re not passing the test, lest you be cast into the fiery pit, lighten up. You’re already in the meat grinder. Every point of awareness at 3D consciousness or beyond knows you’re in the trenches, involved in a damned bloody fist fight. If you’re working to develop a heightened awareness, a closer connection, keeping that foremost in your mind will drive you to make good decisions much of the time. Being a self-serving, self-indulgent asshole won’t be something you will aspire to. Will you make mistakes, give in to your weaknesses? Yep, you will. However, over time the bar will raise on its own and you will gain more control over your predilections as they no longer serve you.
Take responsibility for your situation. Rely on yourself, not in terms of physicality, but mind your own internal inventory. Rather than being a leaf in the wind, anchor yourself to what you know and work outward from there. You are a creator being. At each juncture, instead of immediately going into problem-solving mode, take a step back and say, “Ok, here’s an inflection point. What am I supposed to learn here? What am I supposed to see? Why did I put myself into this situation?” You’re here for the experience, remember? “Everything happens for a reason” is grade school stuff. Stuff happens because at some level you created the situation, or at the very least you agreed to it. All Is One, remember? Own it, no matter how bad it gets. Pain hurts, but suffering is anchored in thinking. Suffering comes from thinking the situation or the outcome is not as it should be. Own it, pay attention, and keep your relationship with All-That-Is especially close.
With “All Is One”, the “Eternal One” comes an interesting situation for you. Your separation being an illusion, the flip side is there is no separation. You are a fractal of the eternal, universal One, hence there is no separation. No separation means ‘no place to hide’. Every thought, every victory, every failing, every slight, every action, exists in the eternal Now. You are laid bare, all your intentions known. You have to live with each and every one of them for eternity. You can look at them as a learning experience and move on, but to do this you have to forgive yourself.
Do not get pulled back into the pit of dogma. Don’t get into lengthy discussions with people who are fully invested in dogmatic religions. I have tried this many times and can assure you it’s a complete waste of time. They have a heavily fortified wall, a strongbox around their “beliefs” and you’re not going to make any inroads. In fact, the more you present, the more entrenched they become. That being said, there are many people who are involved in dogmatic religions, but also seek to see behind the veil for themselves. These people can be allies and very interesting to talk to. Simply because someone identifies with a religion you deem to be restrictive and dogmatic doesn’t mean they’re on board with every single aspect of it. They’re still questioning and studying, and can be very helpful. The same thing applies to published works as well. Just because you find much of what C.S. Lewis wrote resonates with you doesn’t mean you will eventually become a Calvinist and start proselytizing door to door. Beware of people married to dogmatic religions if they attempt to label your views and assign them to some specific sect or theological paradigm. They are immersed in either/or thinking and have need to label everything, to name it. They typically assign the label “New Age” to anything they cannot pigeonhole. “New Age” becomes the dumping ground for anything that doesn’t fit the established modes of thought. I get a sense of “New Age” actually morphing into a collection of dogma of its own, which I find somewhat humorous.
For examples as to how answers come, here are two. I have the last few years been pondering the mechanism by which matter is manifested within the present moment, and the question “Is the present moment the only reality manifested as physical?” I was walking down the sidewalk on Main Street by the First Baptist Church parking lot, which borders the street. There is a chain link fence that partitions the parking lot from the sidewalk. I stopped to tie my shoe. As I stand, a bird comes from my left, lands on the fence right in front of me, cocks its head to the side as if to examine me, then flies off to the right and off across the street behind me. I follow the bird with my gaze until my neck runs out of range of motion. I bring my head back to center to face the fence and an identical bird flies down from my left, lands on the fence in precisely the same spot, looks at me, cocking its head as if examining me, then flies off to my right and across the street. Both instances were identical. Identical bird, identical path, identical behavior. Both birds were close enough if I had a mind to I could have grabbed them. Personally I am convinced I simply experienced the same event twice in a row. Is it possible there were two identical birds who flew the exact same path, landed in the same spot on the fence, behaved exactly the same, and flew off via the same path? Absolutely. Probable? No.
I was working on my truck out front of my garage. I live by myself. My neighbor on the left walks only with great difficulty and I have never seen him walk over to my garage. He seldom even comes outside. The neighbor on my right is on speaking terms with me, but we’re not friends in any sort of social sense. I was in the process of tightening the alternator belt on my truck. My truck is an older Ford, and the tops of the fenders are flat, providing a nice place to lay tools while you’re working on it. I have a very large screwdriver I often use as a pry bar. I had this screwdriver laid on the top of the left fender. The garage door was wide open. It’s a two car garage and I keep it fairly neat, so when the truck is parked facing the garage with the door open, the front of the truck is in full view no matter where you are in the garage, and my workbench is perhaps ten to twelve feet away from the garage door. So the large screwdriver is on the fender and I remember I need a backing wrench for the alternator mounting bolts. I turn, walk to my work bench and get the necessary end wrench. When I return to the truck seconds later, the screwdriver is not on the top of the fender, it’s gone. Like anyone in this situation, I look all over the truck, under the truck, and it’s simply not there. I figure I must have somehow been mistaken and I go back to my work bench to see if it’s there. Now my back is to the truck, but it’s only a dozen feet away and would be in plain sight if I turned around. The screwdriver is not on the bench, so I go back to the truck and the screwdriver is sitting on top of the fender where I originally left it. Mind you, this screwdriver is huge and took up a substantial portion of the real estate of the fender, so there is no way I missed it the last time I was at the truck. It had not been there. I didn’t hear anyone, nor did anyone pop out and proclaim they were playing a trick on me. Nor has anyone ever claimed they played a trick on me. Typically if someone pranks you they like to own up to it to get credit for having gotten your goat. There was no one else around. My house is a single family house set by itself, there is no foot traffic at all. Is it possible someone pranked me? Absolutely. Likely? No, not at all.
I could choose to consider these two events completely within the realm of possibility and therefore dismiss them as normal events, however improbable they may be. This is the dividing line between the seeker and the non seeker. The non seeker dismisses anything that does not fit the narrative, no matter how improbable, how bizarre. Some physical explanation is pulled out and pasted over to explain away the experience. The seeker explains away nothing, but instead asks questions and evaluates how experience works to answer his or her questions. The seeker understands the world is a mental construction, a construct given continuity by virtue of multiple creator beings tuned into it. The only continuity is what is agreed upon communally. Without this agreement the continuity starts to break down. The two experiences I just outlined are the result of the questions I was asking, and are a great illustration of how answers may be provided. No words, no symbols, but often just simple demonstrations.
Keeping your questions foremost in your mind, and establishing a continuity with your relationship with All-That-Is allows answers to be recognized quickly. For these two events, I knew immediately they were demonstrations to provide me insight into the true nature of physical reality. To say I was astonished each time would be an understatement. I had sweeping waves of emotion, mostly thankfulness, a sense of being honored and humbled for having been considered important enough to warrant such a demonstration. Be open to the humor and playfulness within this process.
There is a technique don Juan named “stopping the world”, which is also something Eckhart Tolle and Dr. Manir Samanta-Laughton discuss in their works. For all three of us this initially happened spontaneously, but it is possible to experience this intentionally. Eckhart Tolle calls it “the Now”. It involves shutting off the internal dialog so completely the ego cannot color or influence your experience. I do not have any advice on how to go about this other than tell you how I approach it, which is to let my mind go blank, to quit thinking, completely. No thinking, no interpretation, no labeling, no judging. Essentially to experience the world as a newborn opening their eyes for the first time. You may find yourself surprised at how quickly your thinking brain resumes running its internal dialog. You think you’ve shut it down only to realize you’re thinking about the brakes on your car that need work or some other such thing. Practice this often, frequently throughout your day. You will eventually start to experience from a vibrational level, to perceive the essence and identity of things rather than simply seeing them. As Carlos Castaneda relays in “The Fire From Within”, “He (don Juan) stressed over and over that the internal dialog is what keeps the assemblage point fixed to its original position. Once silence is attained, everything is possible”.[xxxvii]
In “The Fire From Within”, in the chapter titled “The First Attention”, Carlos Castaneda relays the Toltec’s called those capable of seeing energy as “seers”. The Toltecs divided the perception of reality into three segments, which they labeled the first, second, and third attentions. These correspond loosely to the ego self, the overall self, and All-That-Is. Don Juan correlates the three attentions as the known (normal human awareness), the unknown (that which humans are capable of knowing, but lies outside of normal perception), and the unknowable (that which humans cannot know without fully committing themselves to it, i.e. dying or otherwise leaving the reality). The Toltec seers “saw” that the light funding reality emanated as filaments from what appeared to them to be “the Eagle”. The Eagle represents the portion of All-That-Is that funds reality with energy and awareness. It is not difficult to see we are quickly getting caught up in semantics, which is a great example of why words and stories do such a pitiful job of relaying experience.
The aura is “seen” as a cocoon of light filaments surrounding each individual awareness. Entities appear as luminous eggs. There are filaments of light within the cocoon and filaments outside of the cocoon. Humans are unique in that the filaments within the cocoon are not typically aligned with the filaments outside of their cocoons. From the seer’s perspective, humans are the only entities that do not by nature align their internal filaments to those filaments outside their cocoon. “Don Juan continued his explanation and said that in examining the first attention, the new seers realized that all organic beings, except man, quiet down their agitated trapped emanations so that those emanations can align themselves with their matching ones outside”. Don Juan equated the disconnect of the internal and external filaments as man’s self-absorption, easily correlated to the ego-based attention. Animals live in flow (connection to Source), aligning themselves with the universal energy. Humans rely on their ego, since if one is cut off from flow the ego is the only place to turn. So humans are able to examine their own thoughts, but the mechanism that makes this possible cuts the human off from infinity and is the price paid for the experience of an independent existence.
I go over this because it illustrates well the different semantic constructions describing a base reality. I am going out on a limb here and state the base reality for everyone below the level of All-That-Is does not differ from entity to entity. Said another way, the experiences and the affects are unique to each individual, but the source, All-That-Is, is unchanging. Each entity interacts with the emanations of the Eagle, to use the Toltec analogy, and perceives and describes this interaction based on their own knowledge and experience level, from their current perspective. We should not be surprised with errors, but instead pleased there is so much agreement once you strip away the semantic baggage, at least to the extent possible. My point here is you through your experience will by your nature filter your experience through the ego. The more locked to a particular dogma you are, the more error, and the more you will try to fit your experiences into your preconceived notions, based on whatever dogma you have internalized. This is precisely the trap you are trying to avoid. Most people around you live in this trap. They are so immersed in it they have no other aspirations other than to remain in it. They will go whichever way the trap directs them, and will consider you crazy if you don’t follow along. To them, you are mentally ill, and I’m not being the least bit facetious. This being said, the frame of mind is to experience and then bounce it off of your intuition, your inner knowing, your trusted advisor. The less you try to fit your experiences into your preconceived notions, the closer to the truth you will find yourself. I periodically ask for and intend to have the strength to recognize the truth should it run counter to my current notions. You might have the opinion without a framework going in you will become a leaf in the wind and fall prey to anyone that comes along with a strong personality and a bag of nonsense. I would counter it is the opposite. Those who trust their own experience but continually seek are much less likely to get bamboozled.
I cannot stress enough the willingness to accept the world as a construction, an assembly, is exactly what puts one’s foot in the doorway, preventing it from closing. Once you’re awareness backs out a bit and assembles the world differently, or assembles entirely separate worlds, you either think you’re going crazy, or you accept the reality of your situation and embrace it, own it.
“What happens to the persons whose assemblage points lose rigidity?” I asked.
“If they’re not warriors, they think they are losing their minds,” he (don Juan) said, smiling. “If they are warriors, they know they’ve gone crazy, but they patiently wait. You see, to be healthy and sane means that the assemblage point is immovable. When it shifts, it literally means that one is deranged.”[xxxviii]
Once you get to a certain point you will realize there is nothing within the ego-based construction that brings you any closer to All-That-Is. Nothing. Everything within the ego construction serves to separate. Once this is realized, there is only surrender. Not action in the physical sense, but only quiet. No amount of “doing” makes any difference. No achievements, no possessions, no accolades get you any closer. You establish the relationship, then you beg for it, plead continually. Your only prayer is knowledge and to be closer. You will cease caring what becomes of you within this physical framework because your awareness is outside of it. It is a marvelous construction, but it is only one stop on the train tracks. It was fun to visit, but the train is still running every day. The ego has to be recognized for the useful tool that it is, but you don’t glue your tools to your hands, you use them when appropriate and set them aside when they are not.
I have been told lifting the veil requires great courage. Many speak of suffering and angst upon receiving a glimpse behind the veil. If this is your experience, but you press on in spite of your fear, I commend you. All I have to offer is knowing is more reassuring than believing. Doubt breeds fear. There is no doubt in knowledge. At some point there is no going back, and I can see why that would create fear in some, but how can one live in an illusion once the truth is realized?
Once you get to a certain point, to be of service. For me this is not to “glorify” God, or turning yourself into some sort of unbearable do-gooder, constantly running through the neighborhood looking for little old ladies to help across the street. It means offering your services to the universe from a sense of gratitude. Realize what you are and where you came from and simply offer yourself up to service. Simply “I’m here, and whatever you want me to accomplish, I’m available”. That’s it. The rest of it is simply making the effort to keep this mindset in your awareness. Giving people the benefit of the doubt, trying to relate to others honestly without assuming anything, only taking what you need and no more. You will be learning and experiencing new things, and the urge to share this with others will be strong. Develop the ability to discern if the person you’re talking to is ready to hear what you have to say. Let them ask the questions. One indication you’re on the right path is you’ll start randomly running into people at your level of understanding or greater. Should this happen, it is wise to turn the “talk” switch off and turn on the “listen” switch.
Lastly, be easy on yourself. In spite of the wonderful things I have been shown, the insights and experiences, I allowed myself for much of my life to get dragged down into the pit. I have fallen prey to every kind of horrible behavior, cruelty, and self-indulgence. My life graphed would be an upside down parabola, starting with a close relationship to Source, getting dragged down into the mud, then slowly climbing back out. I kept my relationship to Source within my awareness, but I also allowed myself to be pulled into an ego based existence for much of my life. It is easy to get pulled into an ego based existence, especially when you have other people who depend on you for their physical survival. There is only now, and there has only ever been now. By design you can only act within the ever present now. In order to move forward you have to forgive yourself, and you have to forgive everyone who wronged you. They played a role to get you where you are now. Forgiveness is forgetting. Allow your world to become as magical as it has the potential to be.
X. The Indians
The consideration we are approaching reality backwards and from the wrong direction brings up an interesting reconsideration of the European colonists and their interaction with the Native Americans with regards to religion and the nature of reality. My intention here is not to document in an historical fashion, but to illustrate how dogmatic religion and the semantic reality served to create division where there need not to have been any.
In order to “collapse the wave function”, there must be awareness. Or perhaps better stated, identity. No observation / awareness / identity, no particle. Granted, I am not an authority on Native American religion, although I am somewhat familiar with the Toltec and Yaqui Indian’s worldview via Carlos Castaneda. I am thinking perhaps the colonists misunderstood the Indian’s take on things. The colonists thought the Indians were worshiping the “gods” of various animals, plants, objects. Perhaps not so. There may have been an acknowledgement of the identity, the essence, the presence that manifests this reality out of the energy field. To acknowledge it and get to know it is not necessarily to worship it, as in placing it above or equal to God, but simply a practical knowing and feeling of the ethereal presence that is manifesting itself out of the vibrational energy field. The dogma-driven colonists would mistake this as worshiping multiple gods. So, effectively, the Indians were actually spiritually more advanced than the colonists. The same hubris that drove the English to plant a flag in the ground and declare the entire landscape the property of the crown also allowed them the moral superiority to declare the Indians savages and heathens.
As the reality of the Europeans was becoming more and more rooted in physicality, logic, and reason, the Indians were still connected to the earth, to nature, at the most basic, intimate level. The Europeans were deeply invested in Catholicism and Christian religious fundamentalism. The Indians were more experiencing based in their understandings and interaction with nature. The European’s worldview was nature as enemy, as something needing to be conquered and controlled, altered to the will. The Indians lived within nature and used the natural ebb and flow to their advantage. Europeans worshipped and feared one God, and anyone that didn’t toe the line was a heretic whose soul badly needed saving, whether they agreed with it or not. The Indians were observers who didn’t necessarily feel the need to buck the system, so to speak, but to go with the flow. These are sweeping generalizations, but there is a thread of truth to them. I don’t believe the colonist’s struggles when they first came here were completely driven by their unfamiliarity with the surrounds. I think their world view of nature as adversary also had much to do with it. I don’t believe I am the only human who feels more at home in the deep woods than anywhere else. Admittedly there is a collection of predators there, the most prevalent being insects, who see humans as food, but overall being in the woods is preferable for me, and I find it most relaxing.
When I was very young my grandfather took me on a visit to the Mattaponi reservation. He was friends with Chief Custalow and was going to visit. I remember there was a store/gift shop. After my grandfather introduced me to the chief, I was sent outside to play and explore while my grandfather and the chief chatted. Outside of the store was a large fenced in area with a peacock and some trees. I met up with a young Mattaponi boy roughly my age and we went into the fenced in area to play. The peacock was taller than I was, so I was a bit leery of it. The boy scampered up into one of the trees with an ease I can only describe as phenomenal. I was fairly athletic, so I was able to climb the tree, but he climbed it with an ease and confidence that I found amazing. He was as comfortable climbing the tree as I was walking on flat ground. I relay this to illustrate the differences in the realities of this boy and me. We literally lived in two different universes. He was part of the landscape and interacted with it with an ease I could only marvel at.
I have lived in southeastern Virginia my entire life. I have often considered what it would have been like to live here when the Indians were dominant. The two primary tribes that lived where I live now were the Nansemond Indians, who were a subdivision of the Mattaponi, and the Algonquin. The Algonquin tribe lived primarily on the coast and the Nansemond tribe was inland about thirty five miles, which is at least a couple of days on foot. My understanding is the Mattaponi, the Algonquin, and the Nansemond Indians were all ultimately part of the Powhatan nation.
One thing that is interesting to me is the accounts of the Jamestown settlers and the struggles they had with diseases. Having grown up here, I am native and not bothered by many of the maladies that waylaid the colonists. Mosquitoes don’t even leave a whelp, as I have been bitten so many times I am immune. I have pulled hundreds of ticks off myself, and have been stung by every manner of fly, wasp, and bee. The colonists had simply not been exposed. The Indians grew up here and were adapted.
There is more than enough game and edible plants around to survive off of easily during the spring and summer. The riverbeds have oysters galore, laid out at the ready. Crabs and fish are plentiful. Game animals are numerous as well. Turtles and frogs are everywhere there is water, which is ubiquitous. If you know what around you growing naturally is edible and medicinal, vegetation is your ally. With modest numbers the Indians would have had a fairly easy life in the warm months, and with some work stored food to make it through the winter. The Nansemond Indians practiced agriculture and that also provided for stores of food for the winter. The winters here can be very cold, but they are not long. If you can make it through January and February, chances are good you’ll survive to live another day. I saw a history display at First Landing State Park that estimated the Indian population of what is now Virginia Beach, at the time the English landed, was roughly one thousand, which the landscape would easily support as hunter gatherers.
For me personally the mosquitoes and the deer flies are, and would have been the most bother. In the swamp their sheer numbers are mind-boggling, especially in the shade and in the evening. I go for long walks in the summer and the strategy is to walk for two minutes, then run for thirty seconds. Thirty seconds of running will give you two more minutes of peace, which is until they manage to find you again. If you stay in one place for more than two minutes, you will enjoy the company of several hundred mosquitoes and tens of deer flies. The mosquitoes want your blood, and the flies want your hide, literally. Lore has it the Indians would smear mud on themselves, and also made use of plant extracts to ward off the insects. Ticks have to be pulled off daily. I can attest in the summer it is not unusual to go for a walk and have several ticks on you when you get back.
The other thing that would not have been fun is the lack of the technology of modern medicine, not the allopathic aspect, but primarily the hardware and the skills. Much of what we take for granted would have killed you back in the early 17th century in the wild. An abscessed tooth could be fatal. Pulling abscessed teeth out without anesthetic has to be the most painful thing imaginable. For many injuries there would simply be no fixing them. A crushed bone would simply have to heal the way it was. Severed tendons and ligaments would have to be lived with. So although my fantasy is to have lived then, in reality it would be fun until it wasn’t, and when it wasn’t, it would be not fun in extremis. A walk through the local cemetery and checking the dates on the headstones reveals it was common in the 18th and 19th centuries for many to live only a short time.
All that being said, my point is the Indians were more connected because they chose not to fight earth, but to live within it. This creates the mindset of unity and being part of something rather than being separate and having to overcome something. If this difference seems minor, I can assure you it is not, it is massive, at the root of awareness. One looks at nature as provider, the other looks at nature as enemy. One level of awareness looks at a tree, senses the identity contained within, the awareness that makes the tree possible, that which manifests the tree. The other level of awareness sees a tree, merely an object. There may be some appreciation of the beauty of the tree, but it is ultimately a tree. It grows according to natural “laws” and rules, and is the end result of these processes. One level of awareness is thankful for the tree, and is aware it causes harm to the tree in order to make use of it. The other awareness considers the tree something to be utilized, a commodity to be taken. One awareness recognizes and senses the awareness and identity of living things. Thankfulness and understanding of the unity of all on one side, senseless, mindless killing on the other. One sees the earth left to itself always provides if one is willing to live in tune with it, the other seeks dominion and control. It is no more than the understanding All Is One versus feelings of separation driven by materialism and religious dogma. Earth as provider versus earth as something to be conquered. One experiences thankfulness and contentment, the other experiences fear and apprehension.
I can hear you screaming at me about romantic versions of the “noble savage” and other complaints. Admittedly what I am saying is a gross generalization, but it is rooted to a degree in my own experience. There is a spectrum within our culture regarding this, and it is changing. The awareness that mind is primary and the physical universe is a product, a result, is gaining. As this realization becomes more universal priorities will change. More and more will experience living in abundance versus living in fear of lack. True security will not be what one has, but what one can do without. What is important will no longer be important, and what was once ignored will become revered.
I have been a student of Carlos Castaneda’s works since the early 70’s. I would go to book stores frequently and I was always on the lookout for his work. It is interesting to me how the Toltec / Yaqui version of reality meshes with Christian understandings. The Toltec seers “saw” the ether, the “quantum field”, as emanations from a source they called “The Eagle”. The emanations are perceived and labeled as bands, filaments, and fibers. Organic beings have a cocoon that traps a portion of these emanations in order to create a defined collection, or an identity and associated reality. The Toltec seers “saw” that all organic beings are comprised of a cocoon. The point upon the cocoon which interacts with the emanations outside of the cocoon they labeled “the assemblage point”. Not all of the filaments within the cocoon are utilized, but only select ones. The identity of the being chooses which filaments/emanations to interact with and which ones to ignore. For organic beings other than man, the filaments inside the cocoon and the filaments outside the cocoon align themselves naturally in a mutually influencing relationship. Those emanations allowed within the collection of emanations paid attention to constitute the boundaries of the entity’s reality.
In “The Fire From Within” don Juan explained the nature of human perception to Carlos as relates to how the ego via the cocoon restricts and channels which emanations to pay attention to and which ones to ignore. Don Juan explains the senses are capable of perceiving nearly everything. What to allow and what to discard is not dictated, but is learned behavior. This learned behavior cements within the cocoon which emanations are acknowledged and which ones are ignored. This consensus provides the collection of emanations agreed upon as the “real” world. We live in a prison of our own making. To put it in modern vernacular, organic beings left to themselves tend to live in “flow” and humans, dragged around by their egos, live in a continual struggle.
Shifting the assemblage point slightly alters perception. Moving the assemblage point massively puts the entity into another reality altogether. Per don Juan there are seven realities that the Toltecs were able to assemble themselves into based on the emanations available to them.[xxxix] When one goes to, or assembles, one of the seven realities, one ceases to be in the others. In “The Fire Within” Carlos and his fellow apprentices go through the final step of their apprenticeship. They are taken to a mountain plateau for the purpose of jumping into the gorge below. The task was to be in normal waking awareness when jumping from the plateau and shifting their assemblage point on the way down to appear within another reality. This brings me to one of the major points I am trying to make, and that is the use of direct experience versus belief. Carlos had shifted his assemblage point in numerous occasions and shifted to other worlds, other realities. He had recently become adept at doing this on his own, hence the final test. There was no hope and no belief involved. Carlos was the beneficiary of direct experience. He was working from a base of knowledge and experience. Only a fool would jump off a cliff on the basis of belief.
Getting back to the subject matter, realize the culture dictates to a large degree what is considered “real” and what is “not real”. The colonists were coming from very strict social orders, perhaps too strict, as many were fleeing to get away from the oppressive hand of conformity. Those emanations ignored are not perceived by the entity and so are outside the band of “perception”. The input exists, but if it is not within the collection of those “accepted”, the input is ignored and falls into the “not real” column. The Indians did not restrict their perception in the same manner as the colonists, and so literally perceived reality differently. The colonists, used to the tightly defined perception limits, did not understand what the Indians were perceiving at all. To the colonists there was only one way to interpret reality, and that was through the lens of strict physicality and religious dogma. Interestingly, since the colonist’s view was primarily materialistic, their mindset led them along the path of manipulating their surroundings rather than living within them. The effect, the outcome of this difference manifested itself in the colonists being more technologically advanced within physicality than the Indians. This led the colonists to consider the Indians inferior savages. The fact they were measuring with a yardstick of their own making escaped them.
One could say there was a meeting and interaction of two cultures, and that in those interactions the superior culture typically wins in the end. Well, ok, but I don’t even give that the rating of a first-grade answer. That’s a kindergarten answer. “Culture” is an easy word to bandy about, but it masquerades as an explanation while revealing little. A bromide, trite, concealing, only scratching the surface. It was the intersection of two universes. The colonists were more skilled at fabricating and utilizing physical objects precisely because that was the behavior driven by their world view of nature as enemy, or at best merely a resource to be exploited.
We find ourselves now trying to regain what we threw away. We have become bifurcated along a very real line, and it is the same line that caused the conflict between the Indians and the colonists. Those tightly married to the materialist paradigm limit their perception and openly challenge anyone that offers they might be self-limiting themselves. So modern western man lives completely based in physicality, a world of fear, fear of lack, wielding the weapon of technology, and wonders why everything he does eventually turns into a steaming pile of manure. It is not unlike the teenager railing against having to grow up and accept adulthood.
In “The Fire From Within” Carlos relays, “He (don Juan) explained that what makes the warrior’s path so very dangerous is that it is the opposite of the life situation of modern man. He said that modern man’s has left the realm of the unknown and the mysterious, and has settled down in the realm of the functional. He has turned his back to the world of the foreboding and the exulting and has welcomed the world of boredom.”[xl] The point here is perception is dependent upon your worldview. You will perceive the world around you based on what you have agreed to perceive and what you expect to perceive. And this is not only in the metaphysical sense, but in the literal sense.
If you end up closer to the truth when you leave this life than when you entered, it was a good life. If you end up closer to the truth than when you started, you can look back on your life and understand you didn’t miss a thing. Not one thing. It all worked for good, for your benefit. Had the colonists understood this, how much different their interactions with the Native Americans might have been. Perhaps humility rather than hubris?
XI. The Mandela Effect
We for years would have a real Christmas tree in our living room for Christmas. I used to get a tree that was six feet tall or taller. Once Christmas was over, getting the tree out of the house without making a mess was a bit of a job. I would put down old sheets, get my pruning clips, and cut the tree branches down until the tree was small enough to fit through the front door without scraping the doorframe up. While I would do this, I would watch the television, which was in the corner of the room. This is sometime in the late 1980’s I believe. I don’t remember the exact date.
As I’m trimming the branches, a news short comes on the television. Here in our area the local news stations would get high-interest stories from the national feeds, and would show them in short bursts during regular programming, essentially a commercial for the evening news. As I’m trimming the tree, a news short comes on, and it is about Nelson Mandela, who had died in prison a few days prior. It was a video of the funeral precession, and the newscaster was describing the video and the circumstances around the funeral, who was attending, where he was to be buried, the controversy around his imprisonment, that sort of thing. I had followed Nelson Mandela’s career a bit, so I was interested, so I stopped and watched the entire news bit, which was probably no more than a couple of minutes.
Fast forward to the early 1990’s. I hear a news story about Nelson Mandela, and he’s the president of South Africa! Considering I clearly remembered the news story regarding his funeral, and his dying in prison, I was very interested. After watching long enough to verify it wasn’t a gag, I considered what it meant in the big scheme of things.
Surprisingly, none of this rattled me at all. Everything seemed to be as it should be. I understood immediately I had shifted into another reality/ time / probability stream, and abruptly at that. I filed it away as one of the things to note as a clue into the true nature of things. For me, it was an answer to some of my questions, a clue.
I learned in school that our location within the Milky Way galaxy was very far out on the outer reaches of one of the spirals, in the Sagittarius arm. My science teacher made the remark “We’re out in the boonies”. We surmised that may be one reason we saw no evidence of extraterrestrial life, because we were simply too far away to be able to be visited. Now we are deemed to be located in the Orion spur, which is about two thirds from the center to the outer regions. So we’re not in the boonies any longer, we’re now in the suburbs, to use an analogy.
On globes South America was portrayed as directly south of North America. The easternmost part of Brazil was roughly the same longitude as Nova Scotia. Now South America is well east of North America, almost to the point Africa doesn’t look all that far from it. Before you start screaming at me about map distortion, the Mercator projection issues and all that, be mindful I’m talking about on a globe, which should have very little longitude and latitude distortion. For some reason, possibly my future self reaching back to clue me in, I had on several occasions in the past noted Nova Scotia was at the same longitude as eastern Brazil. So Brazil now being two thousand miles further to the east is for me definitive evidence I’m not in the same reality timeline I was in previously.
I’m not sure how much bigger you’re going to get than the solar system moving within the galaxy and an entire continent moving east two thousand miles. There are tons of smaller changes one can investigate, such as the changed Ford Motor Company logo, or the Berenstein Bears children’s books changing to Berenstain Bears. Many people also report personal changes where something in their local reality changed for them, such as the color of their old car, or the name of a childhood friend. I don’t see that the nature or the size of the change actually matters. Any change is as significant as any other. In order to put this in perspective, let’s define what we’re talking about.
Years after my own experiences, I learned others were experiencing some of the exact same reality shifts. A young lady named Fiona Broome noticed other people shared her memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison and coined the term “Mandela Effect” in 2009. In an effort to learn more, I went to the official internet-based gatekeeper of the narrative, i.e. Google®, and typed in “What is the Mandela Effect?” The first answer that popped up was “The Mandela Effect refers to a situation in which a large mass of people believes that an event occurred when it did not.” Right off the bat we see the narrative protecting itself. The quote is from a website “VeryWell Mind”. Another website, Healthline, within the Mental Health section, has a story “The Mandela Effect – How False Memories Occur”. Within the article, we find, “The Mandela effect is an unusual phenomenon where a large group of people remember something differently than how it occurred. Conspiracy theorists believe this is proof of an alternate universe, while many doctors use it as an illustration of how imperfect memory can be sometimes.”
Interesting, eh? The narrative put forth by the gatekeeper is the Mandela Effect by definition is misremembering, perhaps a mass psychosis of sorts, and if you stick to your guns and maintain you’re not misremembering a damn thing, you’re either mentally ill or you’re a kook conspiracy theorist. Wow! I guess I’m screwed, because I’m both, so I’m a mentally ill conspiracy theorist! The gatekeeper prioritizes the responses based on the narrative, so the responses that protect and reinforce the narrative are higher in the results. You don’t have to be a genius to see the gatekeeper does not want you harboring any notions the changes might actually exist, and they absolutely do not want you pondering any esoteric implications.
Let us concede the very definition steers one towards the narrative, because the definition itself is skewed towards the narrative by virtue of being defined in terms of misremembering. This is convenient for the narrative because any time one tries to inject any insights of how ME’s might be a window into the nature of reality, the supporters of the narrative quickly pull the discussion back to the definition, which is a collection of humans misremembering an event or past attribute or feature. “Sorry, that’s not what we’re talking about”.
Those who have actually experienced a shift in reality they are completely sure of have a different take on things. “ME”, since it is defined in terms of misremembering, does not apply to this group of people’s experience. They are on the other side of it. They’re not experiencers of an ME, because that implies they are misremembering. They have experienced a change in their reality of which they are completely confident of. Some people have experienced massive shifts in their own personal realities. No one who has experienced a change in their reality they are completely sure of will allow someone else to change their mind by explaining it away, especially if they are dismissive about it.
So what is needed is another nomenclature for those who have experienced a reality shift. I have seen others name this a “quantum jump”, so the term would be “quantum jumping”. My reluctance to use this term is my impression the term “quantum” is another dumping ground for everything not understood. Whatever needs a handy explanation is suddenly a “quantum phenomena” in the same manner anything esoteric that doesn’t fit into a current paradigm is “New Age”. You might as well substitute the word ‘magic’ for ‘quantum’, as it wouldn’t change the meaning one whit.
As good an explanation as any would be to consider the reality we see as being contiguous, as having a thread of continuity, only appears so because of the continual reinforcement of our will, our intent, that is be so. A communally agreed to convention. “Don Juan said that the new seers examined how the perception of the world of everyday life takes place and saw the effects of will. They saw that alignment is ceaselessly renewed in order to imbue perception with continuity.”[xli] So perhaps many are simply on some level no longer participating in the collective agreement of continuity.
What the Mandela Effect phenomena is telling us is there are numerous people who believe they have experienced a reality shift, and within that number are a large collection of people who have no doubt the reality they currently experience is not contiguous with the reality they lived previously. Having experienced them myself, I am going to take them at face value based on my own direct experience. Taken at face value, many people have experienced, and are experiencing, ‘shifts’ in reality. What does this tell us about the nature of reality, and what is currently transpiring with regards to the nature of reality?
Since there is no objective, “out there” reality that exists independently of mind, we are left with our individual cognition based on our perception and interpretation of the individuations of the vibrational energy field, what don Juan called “the emanations”. We collectively agree on a shared group of perceptions and the resultant cognition in order to have a shared reality to experience. The requirement for a shared experience is that all parties that share an experience have to be tuned to it. In the vernacular of the Toltec sorcerers, their assemblage points are all tuned to the same emanations. The televisions are all tuned to the same station is another way to express the same idea. Those experiencing reality shifts are for whatever reason not as rigidly fixed to the reality as those who have not experienced them. Their awareness is now located more outside the agreed upon reality and is getting acquainted with the idea of identity as separate from the communal experience. Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, they are beginning to understand they exist as outside of the agreed upon communal reality. Their awareness is free to explore from a different vantage point, one that exists outside of the four dimensional reality they had previously bound themselves to. Some consider this to be the fifth dimension, and that is as good a nomenclature as any.
We are at a pivotal juncture. Our agreed upon reality is becoming more and more nonsensical on a daily basis. The reality protection team has become panicky and increasingly desperate. The reality is aware more and more people are jumping ship by virtue of removing their consensus. The reality senses this diminishing agreement and has pulled out the stops, engaging full throttle in the generation of fear. Fear keeps humans within their reptilian brain and inhibits clear thinking and perception. Fear makes the population more malleable, more compliant, and more likely to acquiesce to tyranny out of concerns for “safety”. For those experiencing reality shifts, this is the wakeup call from the universe. It is their higher self reminding them not to take the construction too seriously, because, after all, it is a construction. “Reality” ain’t all that real.
For those of you experiencing reality shifts, I encourage you to take them at face value. You are no longer tuned to the same communal experience you once were. The current physical reality you find yourself in is not in the same event progression (timeline) as the one from whence you came, the one you lived up to the point of the ‘shift’. You have chosen at some level not to be bound to experiencing awareness as a sequential contiguous series of physical events, but have instead chosen to exercise your awareness as identity/consciousness that exists outside of, and independently of physicality. Once you grasp this, there may be a “Holly cow” moment where the truth of it hits you, but you won’t fully internalize it until you have lived with it awhile. Once you have internalized the truth of it, the knowing will not comfort you, but instead open up more things to consider as it bleeds into your everyday life as a constant presence within your awareness. You will eventually come to the point you take nothing in the physical realm for granted, and take nothing at face value. You just leaped from “everything is completely mechanistic”, like a clock, which can be predictably run forwards or backwards, to a magical existence where you are outside the clock, seeing it is many clocks, which can be set as needed. Maybe not a great analogy, but the general idea I’m trying to relay is you exist outside of physicality, and you now know this intuitively, as it has been demonstrated to you that you can experience physicality without being bound by the mechanistic appearance of it. You’ve taken a step back and are viewing the world of objects with a new found suspicion. Good stuff.
XII. So Where Do We Go From Here?
We humans are not very good at evaluating cause and effect, tending to place the blame on the subject matter and never looking at ourselves, ultimately transposing cause and effect. Almost every problem we face is of our own creation. For every problem with the world today ask "Did human action or thinking cause this?" Obviously not all problems are explainable as such, but I dare say the vast majority are. Of those problems that can be explained via human action or thinking, how many have fear as the primary driver? Fear of lack. Fear of pain. Fear of death. Fear of failure. Fear of isolation. Fear of being ostracized. I have heard it said that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear. As darkness is the absence of light, fear is the absence of love. Love is the substrate of creation. Do not confuse creation with physical existence. Creation occurred when All-That-Is, desiring of learning about himself, divided his thinking/being to create the illusion of separation, inertia, potential difference, and motion. All creation knowable by humans is an outgrowth of God’s thinking within the illusion of separation. The knowledge there actually is no separation is awareness of love. Giving in to the illusion of separation separates one from love and puts one in a state of fear.
Without human value judgments physicality is perfect, no? The cat does not wish the mouse it is toying with any ill will. It is simply being a cat. The birds of prey do not wish their prey any harm or suffering. The herbivores eat the grasses without a thought to the plight of the grass. The birds eat the worms. Each identity does what it does without any premeditation. As long as the identity doesn’t gain the awareness of itself as separate it never feels the separation and never stops to consider itself within a larger framework.
Our task is to examine each and every aspect of physical existence from the vantage point of an outsider. Having a larger perspective makes us the outsiders. Most people are head down and coloring. They don’t look up. Their waking time is spent either in labor or leisure. Labor is spent working for others or for themselves. Leisure happens in between and is divided between rest and recreation, recreation being either hobbies or vacations. Much has been said regarding the plight of those on the hamster wheel. Of how ‘the system’ works to trap each of us in a blanket of indebtedness so working 50+ hours a week, striving for promotions, extra effort to get ahead and separate yourself from the crowd, working during your supposed time off, and all sort of other indignities become the norm. In my working career I did hear people speaking of living your life, saying, “You know, when you’re older and sitting on the porch in your rocking chair, you probably won’t be thinking to yourself, “Gee, I wish I had worked more”. In the better companies there is appreciation for family time and making sure an employee doesn’t burn the candle at both ends as a regular state of affairs. But even those that understand there needs to be a balance between work and play don’t stop and ask why the entire system exists at all, or where it all is headed. No one asks, “What’s the end game here?”
The modern Materialist will tell you there is no end game. You live, then you die. That’s it. End of story. If you get to have a bit of fun in there somewhere, good for you. He who dies with the most toys wins. Religion may sneak in there and provide some hope for something different as long as you recite the required pledges and adhere to the dogma, but the big payoff only occurs if and when you die. Granted, a religious person who is sincere will be inclined to better behavior, but there is also a quiet acceptance of the status quo, a resigned aura of quiet desperation. “That’s just the way it is.” The Materialist / Scientism path leads to the self-fulfilling realization of the finality of physicality. You’re made of little bumping particles, and when those particles quit bumping, that’s it, you’re done.
Once one experiences the insight, the gnawing feeling something is wrong, seeks, looks within, ponders, asks, gains understanding, a connection to Source, to All-That-Is, a switch gets flipped. That which serves and furthers understanding is retained and utilized. That which does not serve, but hinders and blocks understanding is discarded and ignored. As understanding increases, this strategy starts to be applied across one’s entire existence. Once this has proceeded to a degree, it becomes obvious the same facts and logic apply to the entire culture. Once the culture, the collective, realizes very little of the hamster wheel that is modern life serves them, it will start to unravel, and I believe this is already well in progress. The need to “do” will take a back seat to the “being and becoming”. Progress in the quest to become closer to Source will be prioritized over the quest for any sort of advantage within physicality. This is not to say one should shirk their responsibilities to maintain themselves, their families, friends, and associates, but rather there will be less inclination to engage in activities that are not conducive to furthering one’s relationship with All-That-Is. How many of us are currently engaged in jobs, work, and lives that aren’t going anywhere except towards more toys, more ‘stuff’? Have not our ‘conveniences’ been transformed into more time on the hamster wheel? Does it not seem one of the goals of our culture is to keep the hands and mind engaged at all times in order to prevent introspection? I’m not speaking of introspection initiated by self-help gurus, but true introspection aimed at the base of existence itself. At the end of the day, if you’re no closer to Source than when you started, within the big picture you have gained nothing.
Generally people who have the inclination, who have an epiphany, become involved in seeking within themselves, becoming involved in ‘spiritual’ matters. This is looked upon by the culture as being within a sort of ‘self-help’ dictum or paradigm, meaning it is defined, the borders are established, and attention is directed primarily towards self. What happens collectively? We live in an agreed-upon, communal, collective reality. Every single entity that increases awareness raises the average of the collective awareness. By raising yourself, you are influencing the average of the collective by virtue of your contribution. You can run around and try to emulate Mother Teresa if you want, but by simply minding the store and taking care of your own self, you are influencing all of humanity. Dr. David Hawkins, in “Power Versus Force” goes over this concept extensively.[xlii] There exists a critical level of awareness / consciousness where integrity becomes the norm, the prevailing internalized, fully blossomed, fully realized core of being. As I write this integrity is something most consider a state of being to aspire to, the exception.
Those individuals fully immersed in physicality see changing the world through the lens of physicality. Their minds go first to taking action, to doing. There must be a plan devised and put into action in order to affect change through effort. They consider their connection to humans only through physical interaction. They believe the reality is the same for all observers and is only changeable through interaction within the highly focused but also highly restrictive path of physicality. Once one realizes how completely discontinuous, how highly individualized the reality actually is, one starts to view it from the other direction and accepts the reality’s changes, thus bringing change into the realm of high probability. Not change as morphing from one into the other, but skipping from one path to the other. Jumping ship and getting on another ship entirely. I have seen this in my own life many times and relay here the most recent example.
My girlfriend and I play tennis and the local high school is a very short walk from her house, so we hit there frequently. We have hit there periodically over the past nine years. When we walk we typically take the break in the fence and walk around the running track to the courts. This means for nine years we have walked through the break in this fence, across the grass, onto the running track and then around to the court.
The school had the courts resurfaced last spring and to our disappointment had locked them to keep the general population off the courts. During Thanksgiving we were out for a walk and decided on a tip from a friend to check the courts to see it they were still locked. As we’re walking across the grass there’s now a fence coming from the fence bordering the street and extending to about six feet from the track. The natural path across the grass to the track puts you walking right by the end of this fence. It looks based on the shape it was intended at one time to funnel people in and out of the athletic field, perhaps to facilitate admission for events.
I stopped at the end of this fence and was looking at it. Without any prompting from me my girlfriend said, “That fence wasn’t there before”. She took the words right out of my mouth, because she was right, the fence had not been there when we walked the exact same path just weeks before. Nor had the fence been there when we walked the path at any time in the last nine years. The fence is no small detail, but while you’re walking on the grass is a major portion of your field of view, and you have to take a sharper angle towards the track than you otherwise might to avoid the fence.
I examined the fence closely and it appeared to have been there for years. The dirt around the posts showed no evidence of having been disturbed and the aging and finish looked exactly like the rest of the fence bordering the street. The grass growing at the bottom of the fence did not look new or disturbed. This fence had obviously been in place for a very long time. When I pointed this out to my girlfriend, she said, “Well obviously they had the contractor make sure it matched the existing fence, and they have done a good job of it”.
When I got home I went on the internet and found some photos of the school that were taken a few years ago. The fence does appear in the photos. I’m confident the fence does not exist within the reality I was in previously, but does exist within the reality I currently find myself in. Interestingly it is not possible to “prove” this jump to anyone because this reality will be contiguous in and of itself, meaning if you research history within it, the history will reflect the reality as presented. The viewpoint you want to foster is that only the present moment is moved out of possibility space. Everything else within this realm, forward and backwards, exists ONLY in possibility space. One aspect of “Where do we go from here?” is to accept this fully.
Once accepted, what does this tell us about the nature of what we’re experiencing? It means “reality” is not fundamentally contiguous. Within the current moment we see a smooth progression of past – present – future that moves evenly in a completely cause and effect manner. Actually it is not only not contiguous, meaning the past, present, and future physical objects do not touch each other, it is not continuous, meaning one moment does not necessarily have to follow another. Our awareness is completely free to drop in anywhere in the sequence and start the projector from that point. There is more than one movie and we can switch movies at will, either collectively or individually. We don’t have to change the movie we’re viewing, we can simply get up and go into another theater.
Once you have experienced for yourself the consequences of gaining this knowledge, the idea of your own death troubles you less and less. As don Juan told Carlos, “Death stalks us all”. Accepting your death does not make you morbid, but frees you up to live a life of integrity. You cannot live with integrity if you are driven by your fear to act in a way that lacks integrity. Your line in the sand will not be determined by your internal moral code, but by that which averts harm to you and prolongs your life. This is the dilemma of the “order follower”.
In 1963 Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to study how susceptible people were being led astray by authority figures, how far would they go against their own conscience and morals when authority figures were prompting them to do so. Dr. Milgram advertised in the local area for people willing to participate in a behavioral study (which was true) and they were paid to take part. What the people answering the ad were not aware of was that they were to be the subjects of the study, and so were the only ones that would be present that were not in on the ruse. Everyone else present was part of the cast, so to speak. Participants were split into pairs, where one participant was the ‘teacher’ and one participant was the ‘learner’. The selection process was rigged so the subjects of the study always ended up in the ‘teacher’ role. The test involved the ‘learner’ seated in a closed room at a desk, with an arm band attached to them, through which electric shocks of ever increasing intensity were to be administered for wrong answers. The learner was to be assigned mental tasks such as remembering sequences of numbers, doing simple math problems, etc. For each wrong answer the teacher is instructed by the experimenter (the authority figure) to deliver an electric shock to the ‘learner’. The teacher is told by the experimenter to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of orders/prods of increasing intensity to ensure they continued. There were four prods and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter read out the next prod, and so on.
The results were disturbing, but telling. 65% (two-thirds) of the test subjects (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.
Milgram did more than one experiment, eventually carrying out 18 variations of his study. Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:
“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations.
“I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.
“The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”[xliii]
My personal take is Dr. Milgram and all of the psychologists that followed trying to explain the test results are over thinking the entire issue. Dr. David Hawkins, with his work of assigning levels of awareness has it pegged, “All people at levels below 200 (integrity) tend to be powerless and see themselves as victims, at the mercy of life. This stems from a belief that the source of one’s happiness or the cause of one’s problems is “out there.”[xliv] It is really that simple. Once the awareness level of integrity is reached and fully internalized, one simply will not willingly engage in behaviors that harm others, regardless of the consequences to themselves. Any further investigation only results in needless complication. It really is that simple. One based in integrity has an internal moral compass that is not influenced by external input, including the threat of death.
What would reality look like should humanity collectively reach this level of awareness, where integrity was not the exception, but the norm? What sort of world would we live in? I can assure you the world would be drastically different. Would suffering be gone? No, it would not. Would poverty be gone? No, it would not. Would we all live in a sort of etheric utopia? No, we would not. You would still be required to maintain your physical being and you would still have all the responsibilities to maintain yourself you have now. Physical existence comes with a set of problems that have to be seen to or it quickly falls into the ‘not fun’ category. Well, ok, so what would be all that different? If you have to ask yourself this question, you are not aware of how deeply ingrained and normalized theft, graft, and corruption are woven into the basic fabric of your daily existence, the basis of the society, the bedrock of the culture. It is so institutionalized, so pervasive, that you literally cannot see it from within itself, but consider it all ‘normal’. It is so ingrained that anyone pointing it out is frequently ridiculed. I have had people scream at me upon my pointing it out, as the recognition of it threatened their world view so badly they became almost violent.
Anyone trying to sell you a societal makeover that leads to some nirvana or utopia is either trying to take advantage of you, or they are operating under the assumption the problem stems from some external forces and influence, so by changing the external situation they can bring about that which they seek. There is a reason low income neighborhoods look run down and shoddy, frequently with trash lying about openly, screen doors kicked out. Numerous groups of do-gooders will contribute their efforts, picking up the trash, effect repairs, and a year later it looks just like it did before. Keeping your surroundings picked up and organized does not require a substantial amount of effort. Cleanliness is not expensive. The failure is in not recognizing the state of the surroundings as a result, an effect, but instead incorrectly seeing the surroundings as the primary driver. This is a good example of humans getting cause and effect reversed. This backwards thinking is applied to entire societies. Socialism, communism, capitalism, spiritualism, all sorts of “isms” are bandied about as the fix for what ails humanity. If we would just embrace the ‘next big thing’, we could pull ourselves out of this mess and we’d be ok.
Eventually what comes is the realization the problems we face are of our own making and reflect the thinking, beliefs, awareness level, and experiences bubbling up to the surface from the collective awareness. Pogo the cartoon character nailed it when he said, “We have met the enemy and he is us”. Exactly. With this realization is its companion, that each person is at their own level of awareness with their own experiences, their own worldview, their own needs and their own toolset of knowledge and actions. With these realizations your expectations will change. Running off to “change the world”, to try and pull everyone to your way of thinking, yet wondering why they don’t see what you see, is not a productive endeavor.
You didn’t get to where you are overnight, it was a progression over your lifetime. Somehow we think we can have a discourse with someone, walk them through the logic, and “Presto”, they will have an epiphany and immediately have full understanding. In reality they can only start from where they are. Tailor your interaction with them based on them, not where you think they should be. You must relate to them in their world, not have the expectation that somehow you’re going to forcefully pull them into yours. You cannot skip all the steps for them. You can plant seeds.
I am telling you if the prevailing center of humanity was integrity, it wouldn’t matter what “ism” we were living under. Any of them would work. Our monetary system, our food production, the production of goods and services, government at all levels, the way we’re organized as a society, all of it would be drastically different. How can I make this claim? Because if the prevailing pervasive level of awareness was one of integrity, the current systems could not exist, because each and every one of them is based on taking advantage of others for personal gain, or the need for external control. To put it bluntly, the entire current reality that everyone so willingly participates in is based on theft. Many blindly and unknowingly participate in it, but many participate willingly, with full engagement, completely aware their actions are taking advantage of others, stealing from them, harming them directly or indirectly. Those engaged in the theft, the graft and corruption, rather than languishing in prison, are held in high esteem, pillars of society, lauded for their efforts, seen as something to aspire to. Once humanity attains the collective level of integrity, once integrity becomes the default, those involved in the theft, the ruin, the graft and corruption will be shunned, looked at as someone who should be pitied, their schemes simply will not be participated in. They will hold no power over humanity, no sway. Humanity will simply look at them with either a confused or bemused expression on their faces and say, “No, I’m not doing that”. The ability to steal surreptitiously having been taken from them, they will sink to the level beggars, or they will resort to stealing overtly through force and violence. Since they will be in the minority, this strategy may yield short term gains, but won’t serve in the long term. Their true predatory nature will be seen for what it is, out in the open, in plain view for all to see. It is difficult to trick people if they’re on to you. You can still steal from them, but it will have to be done out in the open, in broad daylight.
Realize the monetary system was created and exists to function precisely as it does, and that is to serve as a tool for the insiders to be able to clandestinely steal from the general population while maintaining the façade of legitimacy. The entire fabrication that is the western monetary system, debt as currency, the roach motel masquerading as a legitimate endeavor, would not be able to exist if the general population was at the level of integrity. Theft is theft, and no person of integrity would willingly be involved in stealing from those the least capable of dealing with being stolen from. No person of integrity would work within a system they knew was built to fleece money surreptitiously. The western monetary system is evil at the core, and everyone who understands its true nature and still works to further it is partaking in an institution created to take advantage of other humans, to steal the fruits of their efforts in order to enrich a small collection of individuals at the top. Sorry, but the truth is the truth.
What would the world look like if actual money was used? Money that met the criteria to actually serve as money, a stable measure and store of value? First, you could put twenty dollars in a drawer, pull it out ten years later and it would still purchase the same amount of goods and services, perhaps more. Increases in efficiency and productivity are deflationary in nature, meaning over the period of years mankind gained in efficiency and productivity, your twenty dollars would purchase more goods and services than when you stashed it in the drawer. If this sound fantastical to you, I assure you it is not. The increases in efficiency and productivity of the past have been siphoned off and kept from you. With a stable money, increases in efficiency and productivity results in the lowering of prices. The ability to live below your means and accumulate wealth over time would be greatly in increased. Much of the ‘hamster wheel’ effect of modern society would lessen. Life would slow down to a degree. The ability to actually save would make borrowing less enticing. Companies would eventually comprehend borrowing only added cost, that it was preferable to finance improvements and expansion from profits rather than borrowing. If you’re laughing, do some research, as during sound money periods in our history this is exactly what happened. Bankers, stripped of the ability to conjure ‘money’ out of thin air and lend it at interest would be forced to assume a moral path.
I’m not even going to go into fractional reserve banking, which is another related but separate mechanism all its own, designed to create currency out of thin air and indebt the recipient to repay money the financier never actually even had in the first place. If you desire to read up on the subject a bit, I suggest three works, two of which are easy reads, and one video series that is actually pretty entertaining.
· “The Bastiat Collection” by Frederic Bastiat[xlv] – Although Mr. Bastiat lived in the early 19th century, his works are very readable and his wit is sharp.
· “The Hidden Secrets of Money” by Mike Maloney. This is an educational video series, very watchable. Mr. Maloney lays the issue out well, pulling not punches.[xlvi]
· “The Creature From Jekyll Island” by G. Edward Griffin – Reads like a crime story, which essentially is what it is. Heavily footnoted, the research is so complete and inclusive it would be difficult to argue against Mr. Griffin’s assembly of the crimes.[xlvii]
There is general agreement government as it currently exists is a completely ineffective mess. There is a reason H.L. Mencken said ““Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” Government would be comprised of people who would be averse to stealing. That alone would drastically curtail or eliminate most of what modern governments are involved in. Taxing one person only to give it to another person unearned would be seen for what it actually is, and that is theft.
Per Frédéric Bastiat, “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” I believe every human at their core realizes their basic needs must be met. Every human requires adequate food, shelter, clothing, protection from the elements, and medical care. Lack of any of these for too long and one cannot remain within the physical construction. There are many avenues by which these basic requirements can be obtained. Interestingly, the more people are congregated together, the more opportunities avail themselves. If you’re alone, you must satisfy each requirement yourself. You’re in the same fix Robinson Crusoe found himself in before Friday showed up. You see to them all yourself, or you suffer, perhaps die. Grim choice, but those are the ground rules. They are not negotiable.
As soon as another person shows up there is the potential of division of labor. The two can enter into a relationship where the labor is shared, benefiting each mutually. There are several ways the two individuals can relate to each other with regards to their contributions, but primarily the relationship can be voluntary or one of coercion. Humans interact with each other voluntarily, or coercively. The coercive aspect can be overt or covert. The first can extract labor and material goods from the second by force, either real or implied, or the first can resort to any manner of trickery and dishonesty in order to surreptitiously extract labor and material goods from the second.
I have always found it amazing that some people believe the other people on the planet owe them the means to maintain their physical existence simply because they themselves exist. By virtue of their being born into physicality, they assume a claim against the other humans in the form of the required goods and services necessary to keep them alive or better their circumstances. Government through violence, actual or implied, makes this bizarre notion possible. The person who assumes they have a claim on your effort and the fruits of your efforts would not come to you directly in order to collect, but through the power of government they are more than happy to drain you of your labor and the fruits thereof in order to make their own lives easier. No person of integrity would engage in such immoral and injurious pursuits.
If composed primarily of individuals possessing integrity, government would remove itself from many if not most of the activities it currently engages in. Government employees would act to do their jobs effectively in order to benefit the citizens rather than be preoccupied with their own personal aggrandizement. If this all sounds crazy to you, realize we’re not that far away from this. No one of integrity would knowingly take advantage of others for their own personal gain or aggrandizement. All that is required is the general population at large reach the level of integrity. That’s it, nothing more would be required. Government would back out of people’s lives to a great degree, leaving them to keep more of the fruits of their own labor, liberating funds to be saved and so reduce the need for ‘hamster wheel’ labor. Time liberated from the hamster wheel would be available for other pursuits as dictated by each person’s own predilections.
In order to lend some perspective with a couple of real-world examples I offer the following:
I worked as a project manager for years, and in order to increase my understanding of financials and the associated methods and terms I attended a multiday seminar on the subject. During the seminar while going over accrual accounting, we got into a short discussion of the nature of ‘money’. It was a natural segue, as accrual accounting considers money owed to the business as ‘revenue’. I made the argument that our current financial system steals from those least able to defend themselves, that someone’s retired grandmother living on a fixed income did not have the knowledge or the wherewithal to cope with the fact the currency was losing value daily. One of the other attendees remarked, “Only a fool leaves a large portion of their assets in US dollars”. I said it was unrealistic to expect a little old lady to be a financial expert. To which the gentleman replied, “Look dude, grandma needs to educate herself. Her ignorance is not my problem”. The guy had no issue with impoverishing little old ladies for his own personal gain and aggrandizement.
I met a young lady who worked as a deputy prosecuting attorney for the government. I asked her if she had prosecuted anyone that she thought might be innocent. She remarked she didn’t care if they were innocent or not, her job was to procure a guilty verdict for her employer. She added it was the defense attorney’s job to defend their client, so if she ended up prosecuting an innocent person and sending them to prison that was their problem, they should have hired a better attorney. She was interested in furthering her career, and if a few innocent people end up in prison, so be it. Not her problem.
To put all of this in context, we currently live within a system that rewards the type of behavior illustrated by the two people in my personal experiences outlined here. Without the constraint of personal or collective integrity these types of people rise to the top within their prospective endeavors. They have no qualms taking advantage of others if it results in a benefit to them. These are precisely the type of people currently in charge of our systems of government, large corporations, major media, and finance. As each human individually gains awareness to the milestone of integrity, the people they previously admired and aspired to emulate are now repugnant to them. Where there was admiration it is replaced with revulsion, then understanding, then pity. Once the eyes of humanity see, they can recognize it for what it is, identify it, point at it. Once seen, the conscious decision can be made to turn away from it, to no longer partake in it, to not associate with it or have anything to do with it. Each who reaches this understanding raises the level of the collective consciousness one tiny, but significant increment. Once the percentage reaches a critical breakover point, it becomes preponderant. At that point taking advantage of others moves from the ‘business as usual’ column to the ‘things we would never ever do’ column. Don’t think that wouldn’t change the world? We’re not as far off of this as you might think. We don’t all have to become transcendent guru masters, we just need to stop taking advantage of and stealing from each other.
What about effects within other aspects of our culture, our society? Does polluting not take advantage of others by depriving them the use of something they otherwise would be free to enjoy? Modern farming is largely profit driven. It is common knowledge food grown with corporate farming methods is less nutritious than naturally grown foods. Modern farming was developed to increase yields, appearance, and to prolong shelf life, all in the interest of maximizing profits. Pesticides and oil-derived fertilizers are applied to plants organically engineered to be resistant to the pesticides. Seeds are patented, so the old practice of saving some seed from the current crop is no longer utilized. Modern fertilizers augment and replace the nutrients in the soil to the point the rotation of crops is no longer necessary. The runoff from the fields pollutes the streams and rivers. I don’t have the figures, but my understanding is these farming methods are also net negative in relation to energy, meaning the farming methods use more energy in producing the goods than the goods provide. This is all great for profits, but not so great for human nutrition and health. Returning to real food means farming would have to become local again. Can the world survive without big agribusiness? For those of you unable to recognize it, that’s sarcasm, one of my few talents. I realize you have to fell a few trees in order to build a house, but knowingly polluting streams and rivers at the altar of corporate profits is not something someone of integrity would take part in. They simply wouldn’t do it.
The curtailing of the culture of borrowing your way to prosperity will reduce the need for immediate profits, as ventures financed from earnings and savings don’t have the associated interest payments attached. Society and life would slow down. Quality would be become more important than speed. Money which retains its value allows one to take the long view. The current paradigm is to spend the money before it evaporates. Money of a continually diminishing value encourages borrowing because you’re repaying the loan in nominal terms, so you’re repaying with “cheaper dollars”. The dollars you are using to pay back the loan have less purchasing power than the ones you received when you took out the loan. This drives businesses to finance with borrowed money to realize the savings inherent in paying back with dollars of less value, and also to ‘lock in’ the pricing. This in itself creates pressure to increase prices, an ever increasing upward spiral. The very concept of ‘value’ within the population would change. How many times have you heard someone remark, “My house has gone up in value. The price is higher. It has appreciated”. Assuming they have not made any alterations to the house, nothing has ‘appreciated’. It’s the same house. The house I live in, on the last assessment for taxes, has increased in price 440% from the price I paid for it. It has been fairly well maintained, but it is the same house I purchased thirty eight years ago. It has not increased in ‘value’. The idea is complete nonsense. It’s the same house. The house is the house. What has happened is the dollar has lost value. If I used my house’s assessment as a guide, it now takes $4.40 to purchase what $1.00 purchased in 1984. This is a perfect example of the point I was making, that our unit of measure, our yardstick the dollar, is not money. With actual money in play the price of a house would go up or down depending on how well it was maintained, or how much or little demand there was currently for houses, but generally the price would stay pretty much the same.
What would you do if you had more time on your hands? Some would be bored, but some would have a bit of time to ponder their situation and start to become more involved in their surroundings. This would be good for them, good for the community, good for humanity, but bad for the ‘rulers’, the psychopaths in charge. They like having you on the hamster wheel. You don’t have time to consider your situation because you barely have time to turn around as it is. If you realized the extent of the cage you were living in you might consider changing things up, and that would be bad for them. There are some YouTube™ videos of comedian George Carlin speaking to this, and they are all hysterically funny precisely because they are so completely true. If enough people understand and comprehend their true situation, eventually some of them will simply say, “No, I’m not doing that”. Much of government authority is simply asserted to be valid by the government and then assumed to be valid by the population, when in reality the government never had the authority to start with. Current events are full of examples of this. ‘Health’ authorities have assumed all sorts of dictatorial powers they did not have and never had. Most people simply went along. You see news stories about governments making it illegal to capture rain water on your own property. Government assumes to own the water that falls from the sky? Do they assume they own the sunshine as well? What gives them domain and ownership over all of creation? Am I the only one who sees how evil and nonsensical this is? They get away with this by keeping you frenetically occupied with ‘life’. Hamsters on the wheel don’t pay a lot of attention to what is going on around them.
All this being said, this chapter is about what is ahead, so I think that is enough context on the subject of how our culture would change in the short term view should the human change. What about the long term view, what’s on the horizon? I have mentioned this previously, but do not underestimate the effect of the realization physicality is an assembly, a construction. The eventual result will be the cessation of ignoring input that does not fit into the current narrative. This input taken at face value and afforded the validity it deserves pulls the collective attention out of the construction enough for people to start poking their head out and looking around. The society and culture we have today will not remain because it cannot remain without people willing to harm others for personal gain, or because some authority figure told them to do so. They simply wouldn’t comply. Focus and goals will change, and rightfully so.
Humans now have the ability to manufacture things with relative ease. Robotics is making large strides and quickly becoming a factor in everyone’s daily life. Once battery technology catches up small robots will become practical and highly useful. With machine learning you could teach and program a robot to keep your garden weed and pest free, dust your house, that sort of thing. A robot, since it works tirelessly, could housekeep an entire field of crops, eliminating the need for weed killers. Building Information Modeling (BIM) software will eventually be utilized by robots to perform many tasks within the construction industry to get buildings built.
If you find yourself thinking, “What about all the jobs that will be eliminated?” that line of thinking springs from lack, from fear, from the system of greed and theft. Less fear and greed results in more sharing and cooperation. You might own something for its utility, for sentimental reasons, but accumulating more, more, more simply for the sake of having more will rightfully seem foolish. I have heard rich people say once their needs were met the rest was simply keeping score. So you have enough for yourself and your family, but somehow you’re fine with continuing to accumulate wealth in order to satisfy your egoic desires? Only those based in the fear and greed mindset would even understand this line of thinking.
We live within temporality. As mankind gains awareness and understanding of its true nature things will change, and this change will be violent. The collective within 3D has the power to all at once become self-aware and shift the reality quickly, but personally I don’t see this happening. What is more likely is those heavily invested in the old ways will cling tightly and fight. Consider what sound money would cause. Almost all of the high level people in “finance” will be out of a job. Bankers will be essentially overblown clerks and stewards. Their power and their status will be mostly gone. Their Ponzi schemes will have been exposed and replaced with a system that does not function on greed and theft. Their influence over government will be greatly reduced.
I’d like to sit here and tell you everything is going to be lovely, peaches and cream, rainbows and unicorns, and it will get there in the end, but the monster isn’t going to slink off quietly into the night. The monster is going to thrash around violently and dramatically, burning and destroying everything possible. That is what monsters do. We may very well see a “monster temper tantrum”. We will more than likely become caught up in this, as the monster is still very much in control at the moment.
You will have to decide for yourself how to approach this coming temper tantrum. You can have your own hill to die on, and when you’re the only one directly affected the decision is an easy one. If you are directly responsible for others the decisions will be very difficult. There will be a time to confront the monster directly, but in many aspects this serves to make the monster more powerful, more tangible. Other times the best course of action is to ignore it and accept the consequences. The monster is the boss within the confines of the cave. My hope for you is you live to see the transparency of the walls of the monster’s lair.
Footnotes
[i] https://www.ancestry.com/c/dna-learning-hub/junk-dna
[ii] “Biocentrism – How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe” – Robert Lanza, M.D. and Bob Berman
[iii] “Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg” – Joseph Chilton Pearce, 1974, Simon & Schuster ISBN: 0-671-80638-6, Chapter 10
[iv] “The Active Side of Infinity”, Carlos Castaneda, Laugan Productions, Harper Collins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-019220-8, 1998, page 7
[v] Meyer, Marvin W.; Robinson, James M.. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (P. 93). HarperOne. Kindle Edition
[vi] Meyer, Marvin W.; Robinson, James M.. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (P. 139). HarperOne. Kindle Edition
[vii] http://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/obscenity-case-files/obscenity-case-files-jacobellis-v-ohio-i-know-it-when-i-see-it/
[viii] Wikipedia, “Ultraviolet Catastrophe” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe
[ix] “What Happens During a Quantum Jump?”
[x] “LHC Creates Matter From Light” – Sara Charley, Symmetry Magazine, 8/24/20
[xii] “Biocentrism – How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe” – Robert Lanza, M.D. and Bob Berman, p.58
[xiii] “The Secret of Light”, Walter Russell, The Walter Russell Foundation, 1953
[xv] https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/hypnopompic-hallucinations
[xvi] “Dispelling Wetiko”, Paul Levy, 2013, North Atlantic Books
[xvii] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPQR8jv6Xk3kpOsBm4A_iHQ
[xviii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivity_(philosophy)
[xx] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
[xxi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Light_spectrum.svg
[xxii] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-is-a-photon
[xxiii] “A New Concept Of The Universe” – Walter Russell, 1953, The Walter Russell Foundation
[xxv] https://www.youtube.com/user/kathodosdotcom
[xxvi] “The Art of Dreaming”, 1993. ISBN 0-06-092554-X, Carlos Castaneda – Chapter 1, page 5
[xxvii] “The Art of Dreaming”, 1993. ISBN 0-06-092554-X, Carlos Castaneda – Chapter 1, page 5
[xxviii] “The Art of Dreaming”, 1993. ISBN 0-06-092554-X, Carlos Castaneda – Chapter 1, page 7
[xxix] “The Art of Dreaming”, 1993. ISBN 0-06-092554-X, Carlos Castaneda – Chapter 1, page 9
[xxx] The Fire From Within” by Carlos Castaneda, 1984, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-49205-5, (p45)
[xxxi] The Fire From Within” by Carlos Castaneda, 1984, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-49205-5, (p114/115)
[xxxii] “The Art of Dreaming”, 1993. ISBN 0-06-092554-X, Carlos Castaneda – Chapter 1
[xxxiii] “The Art of Dreaming”, 1993. ISBN 0-06-092554-X, Carlos Castaneda – Chapter 4
[xxxiv] “The Invisible Gorilla” by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
[xxxv] “Dispelling Wetiko”, Paul Levy, 2013, North Atlantic Books
[xxxvi] “The Active Side of Infinity”, 1998. ISBN 0-06-019220-8, Harper Collins Publishers, page 208
[xxxvii] “The Fire From Within” by Carlos Castaneda, 1984, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-49205-5 (P137)
[xxxviii] “The Fire From Within” by Carlos Castaneda, 1984, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-49205-5 (P126)
[xxxix] “The Fire From Within” by Carlos Castaneda, 1984, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-49205-5 (Chapter 10)
[xl] “The Fire From Within” by Carlos Castaneda, 1984, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-49205-5 (P152)
[xli] “The Fire From Within” by Carlos Castaneda, 1984, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-49205-5 (P173)
[xlii] Hawkins, David R..Power vs. Force (Chapter 5. Hay House.
[xliii] https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html
[xliv] Hawkins, David R.. Power vs. Force (p. 59). Hay House.
[xlv] Bastiat, Frederic. The Bastiat Collection (LvMI) . Ludwig von Mises Institute.
[xlvii] “The Creature From Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin, American Media P.O. Box 4646 Westlake Village, California 91359-1646 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-80322 Softcover ISBN 978-0-912986-45-6 Hardbound ISBN 978-0-912986-46-3