into the mystic ...

Namaste!

2008-12-09T15:58:00.003-06:00

The "into the mystic..." blog is now officially, and permanently closed. More than 2/3rds of the original posts have been removed in order that only the best & brightest & most representative of entries may be retained. What remains shall not be deleted, but shall hover here as an artifact of times passed.

Visit me @ www.myspace.com/upwinger or facebook (JulianWest OuliadesPhysikos Iatromantis). New righting, muse-seek, and art in the works ...

Thanks to all for friendship & support from Spring 2005-Winter 2007. NAMASTE!

~Julian (upwinger)

Everyday is Halloween

2007-10-30T20:00:00.001-05:00

Contrary to popular sentiment, Halloween is not “the devil’s holiday” at all. In fact, the festive spectacle of Halloween betrays the true nature of God’s Presence among us more so than any other holiday. ....

The Life of this World is the carnival of the Soul, no matter what day of the year it may be. … Human history is the story of God incarnate on Earth; it is the tale of the slumbering Soul of All striving to awake from so many dreams and illusions to Its true Universal Identity and Reality. Each and every morning God awakes into the innumerably many costumes of ‘you’ and ‘I,’ the many painted masks by which we each reveal the One Reality behind all appearances, each in our own unique and inimitable way. Each and every day we enact the comings and goings of the Most Holy ONE on holiday. … —So what better way to illustrate our understanding of this first and foremost Truth than by exulting and reveling in an exaggerated dramatization of Life’s sublime and wholly Divine pageantry? …

And so, on All-Hallows Eve we see caricatures of history mingling with a wide variety of creatures wholly mythical and fantastic … we see joyful, candy-coated icons of popular culture dancing alongside gruesome ghosts, ghouls, and goblins … we behold an entire pantheon of mortal gods and goddesses cheerfully celebrating Life’s rainbow variety and splendor — the Beautiful dancing together with the Beastly … the Good compassionately embracing the Evil … the Darkness freely commingling with the Light. …

We see the many masks of God, the many faces with which the Being of the Cosmos looks out upon the festive pageantry of Life on Earth, untiringly delighting in this most enchanting of pastimes — the ponderous passion-play of ‘you’ and ‘I.’

How Low Can We Go? How High Can We Get?

2007-04-22T18:03:00.001-05:00

Have you heard? Pope Benedict XVI has all but banished ‘Limbo’ from the Catholic lexicon. The ITC report that bears his approval regards ‘Limbo’ as a mere “theological hypothesis,” based upon an “unduly restrictive view of salvation.” The report also states that there are “serious” grounds for the hope that children who die without the sacrament of baptism can indeed “go to heaven” after all.

The Rev. Luis Ladaria, the ITC’s secretary-general, has stressed that there can be “no certainty” in this new hypothesis, “just hope.” The document itself states that there are “reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge." No one can know for certain what becomes of unbaptized infants, the report claims, because “Scripture is largely silent on the matter.”

In fact, this same Scripture (namely, the ‘Old Testament,’ a Latinized version of the Jewish Tanakh; and the ‘New Testament,’ a bastardized redaction of the Aramaic Peshitta) is largely silent on all matters pertinent to the existence of individual being and consciousness on the other side of the grave. The Holy Books of the Bible say nothing at all about ‘life after death.’ These scriptures speak only of individual being and consciousness on this side of the grave — our mortal life here and now on Earth.

Heaven (Aramaic, SHEM-AYAH) is always spoken of by Jesus as a Kingdom, or state-of-being, here on Earth, in our midst, right at hand. It is never once referred to as a blissful hyperstasis of the dead. Hell (Hebrew, SHEOL or GEHENNA) was, historically, a valley located outside of Jerusalem which was used as a landfill and repository for the burning of refuse. It is never once referred to as a postmortem home of lost souls. Open the Bible for yourself, and you can have ‘sure knowledge’ of this. Despite the pronouncements from the pulpits, the text of the Holy Bible itself bears witness to this ‘certainty.’

Once again the ‘faithful’ are asked to ‘hope and pray.’ Two-thousand years of hope and prayer, and very little ‘sure knowledge.’ How much longer will the Catholic ‘faithful’ bow their heads in assent to this? How much longer is the Human race to live without sure knowledge of the true Meaning of Life, without certainty of the abiding Presence of the Divine in all things?

For the Truth is self-evident and available to all. There are no prerequisites for an encounter with the Divine. Open your ears, open your eyes, open your heart, open your mind — and you shall see the Light; you shall hear the Voice; you shall feel the Love; you shall know the Truth. This is what Jesus and the Hebrew prophets before him taught. How much longer shall the ‘faithful’ ignore the Masters they so highly revere?

The judgment is ours: Shall we live as the tormented offal of civilization, or as blissful citizens of a truly egalitarian, Paradisiacal planet? For the Bible itself never says anything at all about our mortal life being a payment of dues for gaining admittance into a Kingdom beyond. Like all other Holy Books, it speaks only of how we may best live Life to the fullest in this World, while we live, here and now.

There is no Heaven, and no Hell, apart from life on Earth.
There is no Heaven but the pleasures you enjoy on Earth;
there is no Hell aside from the struggles you sorrow over on Earth.

+BLESSED BE+
+LET NOW BE ALWAYS+

Time is Now

2007-03-11T21:22:00.000-05:00

Man is not fated to being merely mortal; the human condition is perennially evolving and transmogrifying into the true Godlikeness inherent in even the most errant of hominids. It is not by breaking with Nature and with our own natural inclinations that our true likeness to God is exposed; it is, rather, by acknowledging and fully participating in our own natural Godhood that we may continue to evolve into a fully matured, fully upright and unfallen species of divinely Human men and women.

Gone now are the days when religion shone its penetrative searchlight on scattered tribes of uncivilized hominids, seeking to humanize the fire-wielding, tool-making proto-humans of the late Cro-Magnon era. Time is now for religion to serve the needs of a species of Being now much more angel than ape; time is now for the divinization of human civilization, and the full deployment of the deific inventiveness so characteristic of the Human Spirit.

Time is now for religion to cease from disparaging Mankind’s humanity. True theology should no longer regard Humankind as perennially deficient and in a permanent state of spiritual shortage, but rather recognize that our plentifulness of naturally human traits are truly signs of our collective spiritual abundance. Religion has indeed initiated society into the Mysteries of God; but time is now for religion to evolve our society into a civilization capable of exposing its own true Godlikeness, a more fully evolved species thoroughly readied and enabled to manifest and reveal its own innate, natural-born Divinity.

The mystic transcendence of our mortal limitations into which our religions initiate us is no lonely flight away from the World, nor does it encourage the continued condemnation of the human condition. On the contrary: the transcendent viewpoint bestowed upon those gifted with the theophany of mystic ecstasy provides them the inspiration for a deeper participation in the life of the World-- the fostering of a more angelic human species, and the nurturing of the long promised Utopia, the Golden Age that yet awaits the full employment of our deific inventiveness for its future construction. True theology does not disparage the natural World, nor the inclinations to which authentic participation in the life of Nature dispose us. Genuine religious faith makes us better caretakers of the blessings we find everywhere disclosed in the natural World, and allows the Spirit its rightful freedom to partake of the God-given miracles that naturally exude from our healthy human bodies.

Humankind’s natural tendency towards mystic transcendence is not something to be cloistered away in hermitages and chapels. The evolving global civilization will be much better served by the public sacramentalizing of each and every aspect of our common humanity. Each and every object of the material world needs to be rightfully regarded as holy, sacred, sublime. The human body itself needs to be properly esteemed as the crown of God’s creativeness, the foremost instrument of the Spirit’s expression.

Time is now when we must meet ourselves face to face, and see ourselves as we truly are. Time is now for the end of one age and the beginning of another, new evolutionary age. Time is now for the reclaiming of our original nature, our divine heritage and birthright, our true and properly destined stance in the Cosmos. Time is now for God to put on a human face-- or rather, time is now that Man’s own countenance should shine with the creative Light of God.

Life, the Light of Mankind

2007-02-09T22:50:00.000-06:00

As many faiths, so many paths. All paths lead to God. --“If one takes any twig of a spreading bush it will be quite correct to say that from twig to branch, and from branch to limb, and from limb to trunk, every part is derived from the root, but none of them is exclusively so derived. To say of any particular twig that it is the only true twig would be absurd.” (*Tolstoy, Introduction to an Examination of the Gospels, 97)

The communal unity of the sons and daughters of men, the love of all men and women among themselves, is not an aim towards which we should strive-- but rather, this unity, this love of people for one another, is our natural condition into which all children the world over are born daily. To live towards an ideal consisting of anything less than this is truly an infringement upon our natural, inborn propensity for peace, goodness, and love of all mankind-- our true, innate likeness to God.

The reality of God is revealed to us everywhere, and is always immediately accessible. To consciously know God is a constituent part of our natural endowment from birth. The God which we ourselves ultimately are can be found both in the intimate depths of Who and What we are as well as in the everyday world of life all around us.

Wakeful daylight consciousness is itself a mystic theophany of the grandest and most epic proportions-- for it is the awakening of the Spirit from its long slumber in matter, the opening of the eyes of God upon the material beauties of His manifest Creation. God is in no way hidden; it is only that our eyes have not yet learned to see properly exactly Who and What is right before us, everywhere and everywhen, here and now. God has no need to be revealed --by the prophets, the Master Jesus, or anyone else at all-- because His Presence is everywhere close and familiar to all men and women (if they had the eyes to see, and the ears to hear).

God is not, as some modern theologians have claimed, ‘Wholly Other’-- God is the Self and the Whole of All. And God is most definitely not, as others have proclaimed, 'dead' at all -- God is Life itself, the livelihood that is all around us, the Life in which we live, the Movement by which we move, the very Being of our own innermost beings.

The true function of religion is not to provide any codified system of ‘truths,’ but rather to divinize its initiates. … In order to be truly religious, one must strive to recapture and relive the experiences that led to the founding of one’s chosen religious tradition; one must work wholeheartedly -- and open-mindedly-- toward uncovering the metaphors germane to one’s tradition that point to the deeper Reality they serve to symbolize and embody.

True religion is therefore not a private matter of prayerful piety-- it is a mystic sensitivity that actively recognizes and responds to the natural pulse of the Living God in each and every aspect of the natural world, the theophanic thrill of living that opens our eyes to the true nature of Reality everywhere in and around us always. ...

JOY

2006-12-07T16:52:00.000-06:00

There is only one religion in the world, and that is to be joyous -- to have joy in everything that you do.

The heavenly rewards of the joyous are right here and now before us, as are the pains and sufferings of the sorrowful. Joy is the only virtue in life; and being sorrowful is the only vice, the only sin. There can be no waiting for a better (or worse) life in any supposed future hereafter-- the bliss of heaven and the sting of hell are here and now, or else they do not exist at all. Have joy in life, and the joys of life will seek you out; but be sorrowful and you will find only suffering, no matter where you look. And if you cannot enjoy, then what is this life for? Surely not for struggle and turmoil. Only a voracious demon would have created such a world. And if you believe in a beneficent Creator, a good God, then surely it follows that you must also believe in a world blessed by the joy of His continuous and ubiquitous Presence. And if God is everywhere, and everywhere to be found -- then what is there to be so sorrowful over?

This sorrow, so common to the hearts and minds of the unenlightened, stems from an inability to see the world for what it is, an incapacity to find meaning in the apparent chaos of the created Universe, an outright failure to truly know themselves for who and what they really are. But the panacea for all this is simple-- so simple it is often easily overlooked or outright denied, so simple that it often defies all of our cultural, religious and personal beliefs. There are so many people, so many sorrowful people, who simply cannot enjoy even the most simple and common and downright ordinary things in life-- a beautiful sunset or sunrise, a magnificent work of art, intelligent conversation, loving and being in love. So they look elsewhere for God-- outside of the life of the world, outside of their own lives. They believe that joy is futile, even wasteful; and so they miss how immediately present the Divine Life is in their very own lives. They refuse to believe that life has any meaning at all; and so they refuse themselves the most apparent proof of life’s meaning, and the most obvious proof for the existence of God.

For God enjoys all things-- what else were all these things created for?-- and not simply for His own ineffable amusement. God deeply enjoys the play of sun, moon, and earth; the imaginative handiwork of our hands; the eloquent speech of our mouths; above all, the love of our hearts, minds, and bodies. But God cannot partake in the joy of even these most common aspects of life, unless we choose to allow ourselves the God-given right to enjoy them. It is through us, and through us alone, that God enjoys the joys of living, the delights of life, the true blessedness of His own Creation.

So look at life, look at the world as it is; look closely, and you will see God-- playing, loving, and delighting in the very midst of His own created Being. It takes but a single glimpse into the true nature of Reality -- and by Reality we mean both the spiritual fabric of the created material world, as well as the enduring Selfhood that remains forever untouched and aloof from our own personal psychologies and physiologies-- to dispel the illusions of the sorrowful man’s clouded and ignorant worldview. But a single glimpse … and our hearts and minds are forever free of pain and sorrow. But a single glimpse … and our entire being is permanently opened to a heavenly flood of blissful joy. But few know where to look; and it is very difficult to convince most men and women-- especially ‘religious’ men and women-- that the vision of God is already so near to their very own eyes.

God is Life itself; and to be truly religious is to enjoy life. To be truly religious is to deeply inhale the fragrance of life; to look upon even the most common events of our day to day living with an air of deep gratitude and reverence; to take in all the sights and sounds of the world, looking and listening acutely for the hidden pattern and harmony that is sure to present itself. God is the total material-spiritual Unity of Life. Divinity is not a static entity existing ‘somewhere out there;’ it is a dynamic phenomenon streaming and flowing through everything, everywhere, always. God is not hiding ‘somewhere,’ waiting for you to find Him. God is right here and now living Life to the full-- and enjoying every moment of it deeply. It is not that you have to ‘find God’ -- God is at all times and in all places actively seeking you out! But so long as you remain sorrowful, despondent, burdened with pains and sorrows, He cannot find you. You must open up the temple of your heart and mind, you have to open up the doors of your senses-- only then can the Spirit truly blow through you, and enliven you, and reveal your own Godhood to you. When the pain has disappeared, and you find yourself dancing -- then God has happened to you. When your tears have dried up, and you find yourself singing-- then God has entered you, and become you, and sings through you.

Have joy, and you will be deeply religious-- for joy is ultimate goal of all religion.

Training for Enlightenment (Osho)

2006-08-15T08:29:00.000-05:00

I found this last night, and it made a bold impression upon me:

Whatsoever you are now, when you experience enlightenment you will have to express it in the old way, the way you were before the experience. For example, if you are a painter and you experience God, what will you do? You will paint -- of course with a new quality -- the same sunrises, the same sunsets, but with something new added to it, something inner, interior to it, some depth to it.

... When a Master painter paints, the painter disappears, only the painting remains. When the Master musician plays, the musician disappears, only the music remains. When the Master singer sings, there is only song and no singer at all. So whatsover your training is before enlightenment, that will become your expression after enlightenment.

-- from Osho, Theologica Mystica

Every Step of the Way

2006-07-16T21:04:00.000-05:00

Each and every step you have taken in your whole life has led you to this present Moment. Here and Now is the destination you have been traveling to your entire life.

You have been walking and running, swimming and climbing for so many years, often moving in oft-repeated circles— and it has all led you to your inevitable meeting with the present Here and Now.

And the same can be said of tomorrow, the following year, decades from now. You are in all places and at all times perpetually arriving at the one and only destination the circumambulating pathway of your life is continually leading you to— the inexhaustible wonders of the present Here and Now.

McKenna and I

2006-07-09T10:29:00.000-05:00

Early Friday morning, July 7th, I experienced the most profound happenstance in the Dreamtime of my entire life thus far.

In the dream I am seated cross-legged in a small round room at the center of a small domed pod that stands on four slender legs in the midst of a lush rolling hillside. To my immediate right is seated someone very close to me. Her eyes are shut and she appears to be very much at peace. I glance to the center of the room, where a very familiar looking man is seated on a carpet facing me, monitoring me as I open my eyes and come to.

Its none other than Terence McKenna! He sees my eyes open and he smiles, then begins repeating a mantra to me: "Wake up, but dont wake up! ... Wake up ... but dont wake up!" Then he begins rapping on and on about how phenomenal reality is a construct of language, and those who know the words of this language have the capacity to reshape reality to their liking (in accordance with the will of the Gaian anima mundi, of course!). He also goes into detail about how many of the stars we see in the night sky and recognize as stars are not actually stars. He explains why astrophysicists believe it to be so, and he tells me more about what they actually are --but to be honest the information was over my head, and I no longer recall the details.

But that wasn't the important point anyway. He ends his rap and begins staring me down, straight in the eye-- "Wake up, but dont wake up! ... Wake up ... but dont wake up!" What does he mean?

And then all of a sudden I understand.

I begin to understand that I can indeed wake up-- I can wake up and become alert and aware of the fact that I am inside the Dreamtime. I can become consciously aware that I am dreaming. But theres always a risk of actually awakening into the phenomenal waking world, where a sharp division exists between the lives of the living and the dead (unlike within the Dreamtime, where the ancestors are very much present and alive (see my previous entry, Osho and Me)).

So I do it-- I feel myself awake to the fact that I am within the Dreamtime. I'm dreaming!

Everything becomes less nebulous, more distinct, more focused. Contours sharpen and colors brighten. I stand up and look over at Terence. He's smiling, beaming, obviously happy that I understood and I've managed to wake up, but not wake up, as he puts it. Very briefly he tells me how to speak the language that will help me effect the profoundest impact on the world I'm about to step into. --Its the language spoken by the self-transforming machine elves encountered in the DMT flash-- fans of Alien Dreamtime or several other of McKenna's recorded lectures know well what I mean, and how it sounds. He doesnt teach me a vocabulary so much as where and how to access this tongue of the gods in my own larynx. I give it a try, and, lo and behold! --I can do it. The elfin mother-tongue begins to pour freely from my throat!

I laugh and Terence laughs too. I step through a doorway leading onto something like a veranda or gallery that encloses the circular room I had just exited, ringed with windows. I can't believe I have such crystal clear awareness of myself in the Dreamtime. What to do next? How to keep this clarity? --Then I begin to recall a technique I first encountered in reading Castaneda as a teenager --looking at ones own hands in the Dreamtime keeps one lucid and consciously active and awake.

So I decide to look at my hands. I can sense my arms upraising but at first I see absolutely nothing with my eyes. Then, very rapidly, my forearms and wrists and hands begin to take shape-- I see a rippling contouring outline that traces them, then flesh and blood sets in, and I have my hands! I can see my hands! I laugh aloud --I've always imagined this day would come.

I decide to do things with my hands-- first I raid through a set of drawers, then begin to pull the drawers out and fling them wildly, then ramble through more of the veranda, knocking things about, just simply being in full conscious control of my own immediate environment in the Dreamtime. I decide to do what I've always thought about doing, should such a lucid moment ever occur while dreaming: I'm going to throw myself out of the window --I'm going to do things wholly irrational and unfeasible in waking life.

I take my right hand and punch through the glass-- I realize I'm still feeling a bit fearful and apprehensive. Then I look down at my hand and forearm, and realize that, despite the fact that there is a gaping hole in the window and broken shards of glass everywhere, there is not a single scratch anywhere to be seen on me. It just doesnt work that way! So, without further ado, I throw myself through the glass into the outside world ...

As I near landing on the lush green ground outside, I begin to chant in the elfish mother tongue and I become stabilized in my fall, and begin to hover a few feet off the ground, traveling where and when I will over the rolling hillside. ... I travel here and there, seeing other pod-like structures standing round about, as well as other people I recognize from waking life.

I awake into the phenomenal waking world a short while later, my eyes filled with tears, gasping for breath.

The Heart Knows Better

2006-06-23T09:25:00.000-05:00

How the human heart can enfold both Earth and Heaven in one embrace,
with Paradise at the center--

that is the only Mystery worth all our striving to understand.

Lilies of the Field

2006-06-09T08:32:00.000-05:00

Divine we are at heart-- and the one and only goal of this life is to unfold and manifest that Divinity as a seed opens to reveal the flowering bud long hidden at its inmost center.

Flowers do not bloom only to yield a handful of seeds, nor are seeds germinated only to bring forth flowers. Each and every moment in the cycle of growth —seed and sprout, bud and flower— is the goal.

The seed is Life’s way of creating flowers; and flowers are Life’s way of preserving the Essence enfolded in the seed.

The ultimate meaning of Life, however, is not to be found in either seed or flower-- but rather in the moment of unfolding when new life springs forth playfully into the open light and air to embrace and enjoy the blessings of sun and rain.

What matters most is flowering-- not the name or the shape or the color of the flower. The very kinship and unity of the human species rests upon our dying to the life of the seed and our coming to flower-- enjoying the ecstatic pangs of new growth, and seeing with our very own eyes the new, vast potential that before now was only hidden away in the darkness of our tiny shell.

Life itself is death and resurrection. Our little seedlings die and resurrect into flower continuously-- and it is in this fleeting but ecstatic splendor that the true meaning and significance of Life is revealed.

Resurrection is not life after death-- it is, rather, a heightened and intensified state of living, a perpetual state of awakening that makes all that came before seem like deathly slumber. Resurrection is the spiritual rebirth of the physical body, the flowering of our own little mortal speck of stardust into a dazzling pinwheel of undying Light!

The flower comes to blossom and breathes forth its fragrance; it dances in the wind, in the sun, and in the rain. In the simple flourishing of a flower the whole of the Mystery of Life is made plain right here and now before our very eyes.

To dance in the wind,
in the sun, and in the rain--
what more is needed in life?

To come to blossom,
to open widely and reveal
our true colorful splendor,

to waft our perfume wildly--
what more could be wanted?

We are the starry Seed of God grown into a flourishing flowerbed of endless variety and color --how could there be anything higher than this?

Waves in the Ocean, Clouds in the Sky

2006-05-29T09:36:00.000-05:00

Absolute Being is much like a limitless ocean or a cloudless sky-- calm, silent, serene, and forever the same.

The differing aspects of manifest Creation, the many forms and phenomena of the material World, are as so many ripples and waves leaping and laughing excitedly upon the shimmering surface of the ocean, so many billowing clouds drifting coolly through the open expanse of pure sky.

God is pure Ocean--
the Universe a mere play of ripples

dancing on the mirror-like surface
of the waters.

The realm of the Absolute --the pure Ocean of Being, the blue Sky of pure Consciousness-- lies forever beyond and behind all relative existence. It is the naked quintessence out of which the playful dance of the world’s melodrama is molded and fashioned.

But nevertheless-- just as the sea is the same as its waters, just as the sky is synonymous with clouds-- so too is the many-faceted jewel of conscious Life at all times and in all places inseparable from the diamond Essence out of which It is chiseled and crafted.

Both of these states --the Absolute and the relative, the Unmanifest and the manifest, the One and the many-- are differing states of One Being.

Life is eternal, unchanging and immutable in its Absolute state, and eternally ever-changing and mutable in its relative state. The entire sphere of material Creation, from the microcosm of the individual man and woman to the starry macrocosmic Whole, is the gradual unfoldment of Absolute Being into so many relative, ever-changing aspects of conscious existence.

The Absolute is unchangeably One manifesting in unending diversity. The pure Ocean of Being diverges into innumerable little flowing rivulets of being, and the pure blue Sky is crystallized here and there into so many drifting cloudlets of sky.

Out of unlimited Vastness comes forth the many-bodied dazzle of the miniscule; out of unbounded Consciousness comes forth our many individual microcosms of body and mind.

To be born is not to come into this world — all that lives comes out of Creation like a wave from the ocean, or a cloud from the sky. The Unmanifest pushes up through the material substrate of Creation-- and the wondrous play of manifest Life blooms and unfolds in a prismatic panorama of fractal flowering.

To Be

2006-05-13T20:45:00.000-05:00

Simply to be is a marvel and an astonishment. Life is, first and foremost, a spontaneous gratuity, the crystallization of a mystic jewel, the alchemical confluence of a dream.

But this is not to imply that Life is an accident, or an object of pure chance, or that the shuffling of chaos overmasters our reality-- no, quite the opposite.

Deeper than an amalgamation of atoms and chromosomes, and far more essential than a flurry of stardust blown on a chance wind of space, is the surge of conscious Life sprouting everywhere forth from the miniscule and blossoming into the Macrocosmic.

In the impulsion of a seedling that, for love of the Sun, pushes up into flower, in the zygote that shapes itself out of the intermingled love of man and woman, we find the same indomitable passion for living that is the clearest characteristic and surest proof for the existence of the Divine.

All that men and women will ever find in the smashing of the consecutive shells of the atom is the ultimately impenetrable Mystery of being most purely and gratuitously alive.

Against the Galileans

2006-05-11T23:15:00.000-05:00

[A particularly moving moment from the conclusion of Gore Vidal's masterful historical novel, Julian.]

... I burst into tears. I have never been so humiliated, or felt so ridiculous. The most famous philosopher of his time, if I may say so, was weeping like a child in front of his former pupil. But John was tactful. He said not a word until the storm had passed, and then he made no reference to my senile outburst. He took my arm and led me to the door. Then he turned round and indicated a high place on the opposite wall. "New work," he said. "I think it quite beautiful." I twisted my head so that I could see -- just barely -- what appeared to be the giant figure of a man with arms outstretched.

"Can you see him clearly?"

"Oh yes," I lied. The gold mosaic glowed like the sun itself in the afternoon light.

"It is Christ Pantocrator, come to redeem us. The face is particularly fine."

"Yes, I see the face," I said flatly. And I did: the dark, cruel face of an executioner.

"But you don't like what you see?"

"How can I, when what I see is death?"

"But death is not the end."

"It is the end of life."

"This life ..."

"Life!" I turned on him fiercely. "You have chosen death, all of you!"

"No, not death. We have chosen life eternal, the resurrection of the--"

"That is a story to tell children! The truth is that for thousands of years we looked to what was living! Now you look to what is dead, you worship a dead man and tell one another that this world is not for us, while the next is all that matters! Only there is no next world!"

"We believe--"

"This is all we have, John. There is nothing else! Turn your back on this world, and you face the pit!"

Master and Disciple

2006-04-16T18:18:00.000-05:00

The mystic is he who eagerly
expects the Divine to burst forth
anywhere at anytime.

But the Master is he who
beholds the bloom of the Spirit
everywhere in perpetual blossom.

There is Only God

2006-04-12T14:29:00.000-05:00

There are no dancers;
there is only the Dance.

There are no waves;
there is only the Sea.

There are no clouds;
there is only Sky.

There are no you and I;
there is only God.

The Moment

2006-04-05T07:57:00.000-05:00

All of Time and Space
is filled to overflowing
with the Eternal Now.

How, then,
can this moment
ever pass?

Here and Now

2006-04-04T08:23:00.000-05:00

To be spiritual
is not to be otherworldly,

but rather to be
more fully alive

in this world,
here and now.

Fractal

2006-03-28T08:53:00.000-06:00

So many,
so many grains of sand,

and no one knows
he is a desert.

So many,
so many drops of water
in the sea,

and no one knows
she is an ocean.

Ascension

2006-03-28T08:49:00.000-06:00

He who
denies God

is like he who denies
the beauty of a high peak

simply because
he cannot reach it.

Vitality

2006-03-28T08:40:00.000-06:00

Who can forbid the dried leaf
from falling in its season?

And who can impede the budding
of a new leaf in its own due time?

Pattern and Presence

2006-03-20T08:47:00.000-06:00

Who can tell sugar
from its sweetness

or a flower
from its fragrance?

Can a jewel be concealed
by its own luster?

Does a lotus lose itself
when it blossoms into so many petals?

--Truly, there is no need
to draw aside the curtain of the World:

for God Himself is
the whole panorama !

Johannes Scotus Eriugena - Panentheist of the Dark-Ages

2006-02-25T21:03:00.000-06:00

Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c800-c880) was an Irish-born theologian and philosopher who sought to reconcile Neo-Platonism and Christian belief in his principal work, Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature), which was composed between 862 to 866 AD, and, for the most part, completely ignored for the next 350 years. Around 1200 AD, the 'heretic' Free-Spirits Amalric de Bena and David Dinant rediscovered Periphyseon, and claimed during interrogation that portions of their teaching were based upon Eriugena's work. Eriugena's masterpiece was summarily condemned by Honorius III (1225), who described it as "swarming with worms of heretical perversity," and again by Gregory XIII in 1585.

As for Eriugena himself, tradition has it that he was stabbed to death by his students with their pens for "trying to get them to think." It would be another 1000 years before a wholistic panentheist vision akin to Eruigena's would be re-introduced to the West by Emerson and the New England Transcendentalists. It wasn't until 1987 that Periphyseon appeared in English. Below follows one of many remarkable excerpts from Eriugena's masterwork, which I have arranged in verse form for easier reading.

We ought not to understand God and the Creature
as two things distinct from one another,
but as one and the same.

For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God;
and God, by manifesting Himself, creates Himself in the creature,
the invisible making Himself visible
and the incomprehensible comprehensible
and the hidden revealed
and the unknown known
and being without form and species formed and specific
and the superessential essential
and the supernatural natural
and the simple composite
and the accident-free subject to accident
and the infinite finite
and the uncircumscribed circumscribed
and the supratemporal temporal
and the Creator of all things created in all things
and the Maker of all things made in all things. --

And eternal He begins to be,
and immobile He moves into all things
and becomes in all things all things.

And I am not here speaking of
the Incarnation of the Word
and His taking of manhood on Himself,
but of the ineffable descent of the Supreme Goodness
into the things that are so as to make them be,
indeed, so as itself to be,
in all things from the highest to the lowest,
ever eternal,
ever made,
by itself in itself eternal,
by itself in itself made.

And while it is eternal it does not cease to be made,
and made it does not cease to be eternal,
and out of itself it makes itself:
for it does not require some other matter
which is not itself
in which to make itself.

So it is from Himself
that God takes the occasions of His theophanies,
since all things are from Him
and through Him
and in Him
and for Him.

And therefore even that matter
from which it is read that He made the world
is from Him and in Him,
and He is in it
in so far as it is understood to have being.

-- Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon 678C-679A.

Miraculously Human

2006-02-10T07:35:00.000-06:00

“There is no eternity save that which lies at the heart of the present moment, in the unfettered enjoyment of the self. ... I know of nothing more odious than the commonly accepted formula that calls for everyone to renounce his life in order to save it."
--Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit

... ...
Why are we always so busy hurrying to reach a place we can never get to? Why sacrifice the pleasure of being ourselves, and being true to ourselves, for the paltry rewards of wealth, prestige, and power? Is there not a greater luxuriance in living true to one’s own passion, and developing one’s own intrinsic worth?

... ...
Repress the body, and you repress the soul. Having renounced the pleasures of the Golden Age and the free play of deific urge that fuels our dreams and desires, we live in a world turned upside-down, an empty shell of a world that bears little relation to the Reality for which Humankind, as a species imaged in the likeness of the Divine, was originally created and destined.

... ...
Who cursed the freedom to live openly in the World? Who taught us to be ashamed of our own desires, to seek pleasure only in secret -- only to feel guilty soon after? Who is it we are trespassing against when we allow our natural inclinations their full creative expression? -- Surely, it is much more of a trespass to deny the very things which make us so miraculously Human!

... ...
We are born simply to live, and to live freely -- and yet we allow ourselves to become imprisoned by all sorts of ideological fancies and whims, so many false truths and causes that time and time again fail to be true to Life, or the cause of anything but perennial disenchantment.

... ...
Let it be stated clearly, once and for all: Enlightenment is the one and only viable alternative to sickness, boredom, guilt -- even death itself. And what is enlightenment, if not our rebirth to a life of supremely natural pleasure? For peace of mind, tranquility of heart, satisfaction of body, and beatitude of spirit are of necessity one and the same.

Waters of Life

2006-01-27T22:58:00.000-06:00

He who swims the Ocean
has no thirst.

No Earth Without Heaven

2006-01-22T11:47:00.000-06:00

There can be no Earth without Heaven
nor Heaven without Earth;
Man and Woman cannot exist
apart from the Sun and Sea and Stars.

The Cosmos is both
the vastness that wombs and encloses us
from without
as well as the rapture that inspirits
and balloons us
from within.

Where Can Everywhere Be Found?

2006-01-17T09:01:00.000-06:00

GOD is everywhere.

Life itself is the expression
of the creative God-spark
within each and all of you.

You don’t even have to look for Him!

Be still,
and His Light will overtake you
in all its radiant glory.

Body and Soul

2006-01-15T20:29:00.000-06:00

Who is more competent
to offer a true and accurate description
of the nature of an orange –

he who has merely scratched at the rind
and analyzed it,
or she who has actually peeled the orange
and tasted it?

There is No End to the Search for God

2006-01-15T20:23:00.000-06:00

There is always a mystery as yet unraveled. There is no end to the search for God. Or else the wheels of the Cosmos would stop turning, and the very stars wink out into nothingness.

For in everything we seek, be it money, fame, love, friendship, mysticism, or even the simple sight of the rising sun, we are seeking and stalking the Mystery. In everything we desire, we are working at unraveling the mystery of our own Divinity.

In all these things we find clues, hints, keys. We use these to gather small caches of treasure, ingest a salvific dose of knowledge, and open new doors.

What would you do, after the final door had been opened, when your knowledge was complete? What would you do the next day, and the day after that?

Life on this Earth would have been robbed of its meaning -- which is, to seek and to find. But never stop from seeking.

The Phoenix Fire of Transmutation

2006-01-07T07:44:00.000-06:00

(CNN) -- Television evangelist Pat Robertson suggested Thursday that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine retribution for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which Robertson opposed.
"He was dividing God's land, and I would say, 'Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,'" Robertson told viewers of his long-running television show, "The 700 Club."
"God says, 'This land belongs to me, and you'd better leave it alone,'" he said.
... He linked Sharon's health problems to the 1995 assassination of Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo peace accords that granted limited self-rule to Palestinians.
"It was a terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless, now he's dead," Robertson said.
Rabin was gunned down by a religious student opposed to the Oslo accords. The killer, Yigal Amir, admitted to the crime and was sentenced to life in prison.
Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, criticized Robertson's comments Thursday, saying the televangelist "has a political agenda for the entire world."
"He seems to think God is ready to take out any world leader who stands in the way of that agenda," Lynn said in a written statement.
"A religious leader should not be making callous political points while a man is struggling for his life," he said. "I'm appalled." ...

I too am appalled.

And so I say this to Pat Robertson and Fundamentalists and Christofascists of all makes and models:

There is no one who stands accused.

It is not the wrath of a judgmental and jealous God that Sharon, Robertson, or any one of us must face, but rather the way of Creation to cleanse the Earth of impurities and blemishes and imperfections.

Death and the recycling of the mortal body comes to each of us that the Earth may always remain fit and healthy enough to support its its future inhabitants. It is the way of Creation that nothing ever be lost.

Death is a time of sundering, of separating the prepared and the unprepared, the enlightened and the bedarkened, of those who are fit for the next phase of conscious evolution and those who are as yet too maladapted to participate more fully in the universal pageant of the Spirit.

There is no Heaven and Hell to be assigned at any supposed ‘last judgment.’ The Bliss of Heaven lies within us, locked away like the seedling in its shell, waiting to spring free. And once it is liberated within us, we shall have hands of Heaven, eyes of Heaven, hearts and minds of Heaven, with which to rebuild and remake this world into the Paradise we’ve always known and dreamed it could be.

Again, let me repeat: There is no Heaven and Hell to be assigned at any supposed ‘last judgment.’ -- The throes of redemption and the metamorphosis of evolution are one and the same. Earthly evolution is evolution toward Divinity.

The communal Consciousness of Humankind being inherently ONE, and not divisible, how can any of you still cling to the outmoded belief in a ‘personal soul’ needful of any intervening ‘salvation?’

Truly, there is no grace to be rewarded, no judgment to be meted out — only Consciousness to be refined in cosmic Fire, and new senses to be opened like so many radiant flowers in the Sun!

Ariel Sharon is a murderer and a criminal and he will get no sympathy from me. But Pat Robinson and his misogynistic neanderthal Demiurge are just as criminal.

Anyone that is still attempting, in this late day and age, to place their own 'tribe' on a higher pedestal than the rest is simply ... criminal. They're working against evolution's drive towards a Universal Humanity, they're working against the wills and good fortune of most of Earth's denizens, and they're working against the communal Spirit that breathes and flows through each and every one of us. Including themselves.

And so the work of people like Ariel Sharon, Pat Robertson, George W Bush, etc etc etc is bound and doomed to failure. They are perverting the Human Spirit and the Spirit of Mother Earth and the Spirit of the farthest reaches of the Cosmos.

And this they will learn ... in time. Because if the Spirit isn't blowing through you fresh as a breeze, if you are resisting its gentle push and pull as it leads all our rivers and streams to the common Ocean, then the Spirit will blow you down.

But nothing is ever wasted. Let us not think that even for a minute. Creation is very economical. The dregs and the spoils will be composted, recycled, and will feed and nuture the new growth of a new season.

There will be no hellfire for them, or for anyone else -- just the phoenix Fire of Transmutation.

Second Genesis

2006-01-02T12:55:00.000-06:00

Man is a Space-Being on Spaceship Earth whirling out of the dark Unknown to meet his cosmic destiny.

Many have believed that the transition to a more ethereal state of being, the next forward leap in conscious evolution, would take place gradually among many generations of men and women. But this has never been the case. The transmutation of frequencies is always very abrupt. "This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened."

The Earth at present is much impoverished from being plundered, too poor to support a race of true mystic journeymen and cosmic co-creators. Her resources must be replenished and her urge to new growth left wild and untamed and free. Only then can the God-given birthright of the Human race be reclaimed, its true vocation be regained. The coming cataclysmic changes both on the Earth’s surface and below it will provide the stress and stimulus for such a punctuated leap forward. And these geological changes are triggered by a periodic explosion of Light originating in the Central Sun at our Galactic Center.

We cannot build a New World on old rubble. The Great Change is inevitable. The Earth must be cleansed before the New Species can be properly established.

Only those whose consciousness is attuned to the frequency of the new dispensation will be able to cross the threshold into the future. The new electromagnetism generated by the inlux of Light from the Central Sun will upraise the molecular structure of the cellular body to the extent that the body itself will begin to vibrate, or manifest, a new density and a higher dimension of being. It is all a matter of increasing the spin of the electrons within the atomic structure of the cells. When this rate of vibration, or frequency, is accelerated, matter itself begins to manifest more and more of its true inner Light.

As consciousness changes, so will the molecular structure of the body which houses it. Accelerate your cellular frequency, and you also broaden your consciousness. The elemental, physical body of matter will become transparent to the primordial Light of GOD, and a more fully developed radiant body shall shine. A species of sacred beings shall emerge from the chrysalis of homo sapiens.

Such is the Great Change spoken of by many; the transition of our gross matter into a finer, more etherealized matter. We will still be who we are, we will still be Human – in fact, we will then be more Human than we have ever been previously – but our bodies will be of a more rarefied, more ethereal and spiritual constitution.

What will become of the Lost, you ask, what will become of those who perish with the coming changes? -- They will become discarnate for a time, and their life-spark shall return to the central reservoir of the Human Spirit, to await a future era of new seeding. Nothing is ever truly dead, nothing is lost forever. Always remember that death is merely sleep, and those who slumber will once again return to the body and be awakened. But a greater work awaits the Chosen. Do not waste time regretting the fate of the Lost. For it is the Chosen who will groom a New Garden in which their departed brethren will in time be newly sown.

There we will learn to live for the present day, and no longer count the passing of time. There we ourselves will prepare for the establishment of a unified Faith among the children of the New Species; a Faith that honors the past by embracing the Here and Now that is both time present and time future. Long gone will be the idolizing of the dead. In its place will be the communal tending of the living Garden. On the New Earth the true vocation of Man will be synonymous with the Work of God. Man will embrace the essential Godhood inherent in his own being, and reach out into the Cosmos to greet his brethren among the stars.

The recurring manifestation of archetypal images throughout the world should be indicative to us that we are already part of a vast community of conscious Life, an immeasurably rich Kingdom of interrelated material and spiritual species. We have long been challenged by those who would teach and prepare us to fully recognize the God-Self within, the glorious butterfly slumbering in our coarse cocoons. It is they who have been provoking us into ever tighter spirals of intellectual and technological maturity, pulling our species continually into the future, guiding us as individuals towards spiritual maturity and personal enlightenment, showing us by example that the Impossible can indeed be accomplished.

But when will we awaken? We do not have all Eternity to devote to the task of raising the Children of the Earth -- our hour of planetary maturity is even now drawing nigh. Those whom the New Dawn finds slumbering will not live to see the rising of the Sun.

Be alive for but a moment and feel the flow of Life streaming through you! Listen for but a moment and hear the song of Life at play amongst the stars! The time for true knowledge of God and the natural blessedness of the Human condition is Now! But do not look to the Heavens for your God; look within, for it is within each man, woman, and child that the ONE abides with wonders unlimited. Late is the season, and the fields are already ripe for harvest. Soon enough will the choicest fruits be gathered, and the spoiled left to seed and nourish the new growth.

COMMUNION: 20 Years Later

2005-12-27T19:11:00.000-06:00

-- Whitley Strieber, from unknowncountry.com

Twenty years ago tonight, at approximately three thirty in the morning on December 26, 1985, I heard odd noises and felt as if I had fallen out of bed. I opened my eyes to a scene of such extraordinary horror that I am still suffering from the effects of that moment, two decades later.

What I saw before me was a small room like the interior of a tent, populated by enormous insects. These insects were at once strange, distant-seeming creatures, totally unlike me and not communicating any sense of the human at all, and yet at the same time aware of me in a way that eloquently and terrifyingly signaled intelligence.

Immediately, I was seized from behind and there was a swooping rush around me. An odd, machine-like voice commenced repeating again and again the phrase 'what can we do to help you stop screaming?'

The terror was beyond words, beyond imagining. They were rough with me, pressing a needle into my head and raping me with a device that I now know is called an electrostimulator. In those days, such devices were used to induce erections in sex clinics, and they are still used to gather semen in animal husbandry.

I am not a prude, but I am a modest man and quite shy physically. I was appalled at finding myself naked with these creatures. I can remember trying and trying to wake up, to somehow find my bed around me again, to embrace my wife.

But my wife was not there. I was alone in the night with these things and I had no idea what might happen to me next.

This experience has left me with a disease called post-traumatic stress disorder. The last time I awakened with my heard practically slamming out of my chest, my breath coming short and so frightened that I literally dared not move a muscle was last night.

In fact, for at least five out of seven nights since the event happened, I have been waking up in terror between three and four in the morning. I have tried many treatments for this, ranging from conventional psychiatry and psychotherapy to every sort of esoteric treatment you can imagine, to no avail.

The disorder that began on that night will, I believe, remain with me until the day I die. And I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. Because, on that night, the woman whose portrait is on the cover of the book Communion said to me, 'you're the luckiest of the lucky.'

She was precisely correct. Yes, it has been hard and it has shattered me on the deepest possible levels. The public reaction has pained me as much as it has inspired me. But I have had a truly remarkable opportunity offered to me, and I have taken as full advantage of it as has been in my ability.

The morning after the experience, I asked my wife if she remembered anything unusual that night. She said no. My son, also, seemed entirely untroubled. So I decided that the riotous memories that were troubling me must have been some sort of a nightmare.

The memories were quite clear. I remembered being carried. I remembered being roughed up. I remembered being raped. Also, though, meeting somebody I felt that I had known for quite some time, somebody, even, who had in some way trained or prepared me.

During the next few days, I wrote a story called "Pain," about an angelic being who administers pain in order to free people from themselves, to use pain, in effect, as a means of transcending the ego.

I remember how I felt as I wrote that story, the curious sense of surrender that it brought me, as if I was reliving a very, very powerful experience with someone who had loved me so hard that it had broken me heart and soul.

The weekend came, and by the time Monday rolled around I was in pain. My rectum hurt. The side of my head hurt. And I could not sleep at all. I was living in a state of terror. By then I was pretty sure I had been abused in some way. What I could not figure out was how or by who. I could remember these big, black eyes staring at me, but could not figure out where they had come from.

I did not yet know that a friend of mine had also had a very disturbing experience that night. He was a retired state policeman and he had been coming home in the wee hours with his wife from a Christmas party. We lived in a pretty lonely corner of the world--not entirely isolated, but quite dark and quiet at night, with lots of woods around, stretching for miles.

He'd been about two miles from our houses traveling along a lonely stretch of road when he'd observed what looked like a large gray object in a field. It was a dark night and the object wasn't very distinct, but it was big enough to make him think that it was a crashed blimp. He stopped his car and got out, whereupon he heard somebody screaming. As he walked toward the thing, lights came on all over it and it began moving toward him. As it was obviously under power and not in need of help, he got back in his car and drove home.

I did not know about this for over a year, unfortunately, after I had written the book Communion and was well into its sequel, Transformation. It took him that long to tell me, and when he did tell me we were both just sort of silenced. What were we to think?

By that time, though, I was already well along what has become the road of my life.

A few days after the event, I believe, on the Wednesday, I drove into New York City to see my doctor. He listened to my story and examined me. There occured during that examination one of the most agonizing experiences I have ever known. He took one glance at the condition of my rectum and blurted out, "you've been raped." I was so terribly, terribly humiliated by this that it has taken me these twenty long years even to put those words down on paper. Only last June did I utter them to another person, when I told Anne what he had said, and told a psychologist I am thinking of working with this spring. And now I have said it.

I have been the victim of endless jokes for having been raped. If you are a woman reading this, think of how you would feel if you had been raped and had been made a laughingstock for it. Your very soul would be eaten by the acid of that. It has made me despise our society to the very depths of my being. I loathe the world I live in, because I was raped and everybody laughed.

But I do not loathe you, because I know that reading this are many people who have been down this same hard road.

So, why in the world are we lucky? What's lucky about getting raped and being scorned and rejected after having a devastating, soul shattering experience that most people think is a lot of hooey and a big fat joke?

Well, in, I think, early February of 1986, I completed a series of mental and physical tests that convinced me that I was not suffering from any known disease. I had an MRI scan, a battery of psychological tests, a test for temporal lobe epilepsy and a thorough neurological workup.

The results of these tests were three: one, I was suffering from severe stress; two, I had some unknown bright objects in my brain which occur in about 2% of people tested with MRI scans and are benign; three, my brain was not only not seizure prone, it was unusually stable.

I then decided that these remarkable beings I had seen must therefore have been real. I very well remember the moment this thought first crossed my mind. I had just left the psychologist's office after getting her evaluation. So all the pieces were in place. I wasn't psychotic and I had no organic brain disease that would explain what I remembered happening to me.

I therefore began to attempt to solve the mystery. But where to turn? I really had no idea. I went out in the woods, revisiting the place I had been carried. A very odd part of the memory was that I had seen somebody familiar in the woods just before I ended up in the little chamber with the insects. This was an old school friend who had joined the CIA. He had told me about a design flaw in the containment of some sort of engine that was being tested on a high performance aircraft.

I have written little about this part of the experience and mentioned it only a few times in interviews because it has always disturbed me deeply, but not for the reason that you might think. I tried to look him up that February, only to discover that he was dead, and had been dead for more than a year when I saw him in my woods in the company of what I then regarded as aliens.

I didn't know what in hell to make of this. Only after I published Communion and began to get hundreds of thousands of letters from other close encounter witnesses did I realize that it's routine for the dead to appear with the visitors. The two things go together--not in every encounter, by any means, but in enough of them to make it more or less part of the routine.

By that time March had come along, I had read Jenny Randles' book about UFOs that had a description in it that made me think I might have encountered aliens. The book led me to Budd Hopkins, who wanted to hypnotize me. I found Budd to be a very nice fellow and also quite brilliant, but I declined to be hypnotized by him because he was not appropriately credentialed. So he introduced me to Dr. Donald Klein, who was an eminent psychiatrist and one of the world’s leading forensic hypnotists.

When Dr. Klein first hypnotized me, there was an explosive reaction. I did not go back to the indicent in December, but rather to the previous October. I still remember that session vividly: the absolute terror that I felt when I had awakened one night in our little country cabin and seen a small hooded figure standing near the bed—a figure that had proceeded to rush at me and strike my forehead with a stick that shot out electric sparks.

In the second hypnosis session, I did address the December 26 experience. It became somewhat more vivid in my mind, but nothing new was added to my memories. However, during the session, I spontaneously reverted to the age of twelve, and recalled another incident of meeting this extraordinary woman who is the real subject of this essay and is, in fact, a great light in my life. She lives and functions across the divide of what we call life and death, and beyond the confines of time.

This recollection seemed to the doctor to be similar to the sort of memories that emerge in people who have experienced repeated abuse that they have been unwilling or unable to articulate to themselves. The mechanism by which difficult memories may be repressed is well explained by Dr. Jennifer Freyd in her book Betrayal Trauma. Dr. Freyd is the daughter of two of the founders of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and has accused them of abusing her.

This memory led me to return to my home town of San Antonio, Texas, where I explored my own childhood, which I recounted in my book the Secret School.

Before that, I wrote two additional books about my close encounter experiences, which continued and expanded after I began walking in the woods at night in an effort to re-engage with what it had become obvious to me were some very remarkable beings who had been with me, in a hidden way, throughout my life.

I remained engaged with them for eleven years after the initial encounter. It only ended in October of 1997, when I moved out of the upstate New York cabin and returned to Texas. I did this both because I wanted to explore my past, and because we no longer could afford to live in New York. Our son’s education was demanding of our resources, and the long and terrible depression that had followed the rejection of my claims of encounter had taken their toll. I had become unable to write more about my encounters after the book Breakthrough. I saw that acknowledgement of the existence of the visitors would bring enormous rewards to our society, and also the venial reasons for the secrecy. I saw how eagerly the egocentric media and scientific institutions supported the government in keeping the secret of their presence. And I watched as the visitors patiently waited, knowing, as they do, that our species is in the process of making a deeply spiritual decision about whether to enter the cosmos or go extinct.

I was having too many thoughts of suicide to stay at the cabin any longer. I felt that I had failed in one of the most important missions ever entrusted to a human being, to open the mind of man to the existence of another intelligent species. In so failing, I had seen that humanity would most likely give up on the greatness that is mankind, and choose to turn its back on five billion years of earthly struggle and the patient, hopeful waiting of those who long for us to join the stars.

It was a truly fearsome failure. I also had been given, in the eleven years I had with the visitors, the opportunity to see the fate of souls, and I suffered the most terrific sorrow over what was happening to the people who were getting drawn into the trap of lying about the existence of the visitors in order to support government policy. I began to see government as a machine for the killing of souls. The terror of the situation was simply overwhelming. I will tell you this about the way a soul dies: for the universe, it winks out of existence the instant the supporting body’s electrical system fails. But for that soul, the moment of death remains forever.

What kills souls is quite simple: choice. They choose to die because they despair of themselves. They die of lack of love. Our lives must be rich with compassion both for ourselves and others. This is what enables us to thrive and live in the body of consciousness that is this universe. The body is a brief passage, a place of decision. It is here, in this engine of forgetting, that we can only decide from our essential truth whether we are going to go on or not.

This is as true for the species as it is for each one of us. I have chosen life. I believe that this species is worth saving, that we can ascend into a great journey if we so choose. So when I see us being captured by the people of the death wish—those who concentrate on material wealth, who ignore suffering, who fight, who lie, who ignore the needs of the planet—I feel the touch of despair.

By 1997, I was in utter despair. I felt that I needed the support of old friends and family, so, on a night in October of that year, I sat down for what I knew would be my last meditation with the visitors. I will not get into why they couldn’t follow me to Texas. It’s too complex and too far from the subject of this essay. Suffice to say that the could only come there in a much more limited way than was possible at the cabin. In part, the reason is that they are physically much more vulnerable than you might think, and keep themselves concealed not only through the use of technology, but primarily by stealth. When you strip away their ability to affect the mind, their quickness and a couple of other things, what you will find is a small, delicate person whom a child could crush between his fists. But also in that vulnerable, wobbling head a world that reaches across space and time, that penetrates not only this universe and its secrets, but many others as well, that is ancient beyond belief and, in a way that I can hardly even begin to explain, impeccable.

I’m not saying that they’re pleasant. They’re as tough as nails, as mean as snakes and as dangerous as plutonium.

Now I’m going to return to my life with that woman. Firstly, she has been with me for longer than life itself. I am one of her many projects. In the world of the soul, she’s rich, on a big journey in the direction of ecstasy, and seeking to travel there the only way you can, in a great chorus of free souls. This is what it’s about, it’s why we’re here. It is the core urgency of life, what you feel at the moment of birth, of sexual union, and of death.

On that first night, she took semen from me to try to make a baby out of the two of us. This did not work. She came again to me many times, and gradually we became gentle enough with each other so that it did work. I learned a very secret art, which is the art of touching people who are in a state of higher energy without trapping them in our level. If you can imagine what it might be like to embrace a cloud without destroying its form, that’s what it’s like to engage with the visitors without turning their communication into a version of one’s own thoughts.

I wonder if that makes any sense to somebody who hasn’t done it? I hope so, because anybody can. The difficulty is, how do you explain how it feels to ride a bicycle before anybody has ever ridden one?

Let me tell you about her. She lived both in the country and in the city, just like I did. Yes, she walked the streets. An editor from William Morrow & Co., Bruce Lee, saw her and her husband in a bookstore in Manhattan, a story which I recounted in Transformation. Another friend of mine saw her on 14th Street on the day I drove off westward forever. She asked him, “are you going west?” He replied, as he was stuck in traffic and trying to go east, “no, I’m going east!” She said, “that’s good,” and stepped off into the crowd. It was her way of expressing her regret at my departure.

What we did together, in trying to create that living bridge, was not a disloyalty to her husband or my wife. Think of it as a scientific experiment in the power of love to transcend. But it could not transcend the limits of the physical, and there is no magical child here now to show us the way--at least, not that I have ever met. Instead, we have the people of the death wish leading mankind down the road to extinction.

So what happens, then, to the souls that do not enter memory? In fact, to most of you reading this. You would not be on this website, or this deep in this message, if you had not made the opposite choice from the rulers of our world. So what happens to you when mankind is no more? You will find a sort of magnetic appeal that will draw you into new companionship. The utterly unique ecstasy that would accompany mankind’s ascension will never be tasted, but its loss will be part of your beauty. I can’t explain farther than that because of the limitations of language, but you will certainly find your way, of that be assured.

Where are we now, twenty years after an effort was begun to bring mankind into real contact with another intelligent species? A vast number of people have been awakened to the reality of the visitors. Millions, I believe. Even more, of course, remain as they always have been, a great, formless ocean of unrealized potential. At the same time, the general culture has totally failed to address the reality of the visitors. To an extent, they have pulled up stakes. They left upstate New York in 1999, two years after I did. They still come around in various places, but it’s only to monitor those who might be of some interest or other. The fifty years between 1947 and 1997 were, as far as they were concerned, the time of decision. And we decided, thanks to those who so effectively kept their reality secret, to continue as we have been in history, and to do so despite the risk that will will not be able to manage the coming failure of the planetary environment properly without their support, and therefore that it might kill us.

As far as the close encounter experience is concerned, science is absolutely nowhere. Fantastically, the intellectuals, who so distrust the government in every other regard, swallow its lies about this without the least complaint. Perhaps it’s because the visitors completely shatter the secular view of the world. Or maybe they threaten the fragile ego of the educated human being, whose soul knows that all his fine knowledge is but an engine of forgetting. You cannot be with them without also being with your own truth. Then you see what you really are, a little fragment in a vastness so great, so various and so shockingly, unimaginably conscious that it completely swallows you. To enter the universe as it really is, you’ve got to leave your self-pride far behind, and that is a hard, hard thing to do.

Other worlds have faced these same problems. Understand, there are not all that many worlds with intelligent species on them that have survived very long. Often, they come to tragic ends, undone by chance or, more often, by aggression even more excessive than our own. In some places, though, there have been very remarkable solutions to the survival problem.

Some intelligent species have been able to see that their intelligence was a precious asset that could actually intensify itself. They have learned to increase the quantity of this valuable commodity by altering themselves, by creating machine intelligence, and by conferring it on other species on their planets. As if we'd hit upon the idea of genetically engineering brains to greater intelligence, and included not only ourselves but the animal world as well. In such places, life becomes very, very rich.

But mostly it doesn't happen that way. There are people who worry about the fate of consciousness across the universes. (And there is more than one, as we will soon discover.) They worry because so often intelligence--which is the single most important way station on the road to consciousness--fails. It's incredibly rare, and it fails. Thus the journey toward ecstasy is compromised.

The more consciousness, the more ecstasy, and consciousness cannot come about without intelligence. What is worse, until a species is conscious, intervention is very, very difficult. That's the problem that the visitors are having here. If they intervene openly, our culture totally refocuses itself toward them and all human innovation stops. We end up locked in a state of profound disempowerment that will take many generations to recover, and that will leave a permanent scar.

The visitors cannot reveal themselves to us. We must reveal ourselves to them.

So, where are we? Certainly, we are avoiding facing the reality of their presence here. Where we are is on the edge of a new world, and it's not the best of all possible new worlds, believe me. The environment has already begun collapsing in irrevocable ways, and over the next half century many, many lives will be lost. Personally, I do not think that we will go completely extinct, not unless we’re helped along in some way. I think that we are going to defy the odds and live and thrive anyway, no matter that we’re led by people of the death wish, no matter that the visitors have turned their backs on us. I have this faith in mankind precisely because I am among the very rarest of human creatures: I have really and truly been outside of mankind, insofar as I have treated with nonhuman intelligent beings. I have seen what they are, and therefore now see my own kind to a degree as an outsider. And what I see compels me to wonder. You really have no way to know how marvelous you are. Mankind is like a scattering of jewels in the blue of the world. You can’t even see the dead and dying souls. They don’t matter and they are surprisingly few. They just make a lot more noise than the great, sacred majority.

No, I have failed to link us to the visitors. I have failed to break the bondage of official secrecy, or to save the souls of the keepers of the secrets. I have failed to raise the eyes of the average man.

But I have not failed entirely, because I did not fail in my contacts, and I have not failed with you. In time—and time is what this is, in the end, all about—my small successes will emerge as being far more important than my great failures.

I miss my dear and dangerous friends. I miss those days of the very highest adventure, the sheer thrill that would come over me when, a mile or so back in the woods in the dead of night, I would see the quick, darting movement and then the terrible eyes. Then I would sit down on the ground, and open my swooning, terrified mind as best I could, and there would be wonder.

I miss my life with her. The various things we tried, in our effort to tame each to the other. We could not be face to face for more than a few seconds, so she took to riding on my back. It was the only way we could embrace without me getting scared and her suffering grave anguish because of my fear. So we would stay like that, with her little soft body clasped around me from behind—soft, but with bones like iron and a grip of steel. We were sensually repellent to each other, but we made romance in our hearts, anyway, and if in time they do emerge more into the life of man, this is how it will be.

It will be so hard. They’re bad, never doubt it. They sin and fail and are weak and venial. They can be murderously indifferent when they’re concentrating on an important objective. They do not find us nearly as important as we find ourselves, and they can therefore be cruel in the pursuit of their goals. But when you connect with them, the rewards are very, very great. Stupendous, actually. Beyond measure.

One fifteen. It’s quiet here. December 26. A Monday, this year. I am not so far from death, the unknown country. But I’ve traveled it a good deal, actually, so it’s not so strange to me now. I understand how the mystery of the soul works. They showed me by example; the Master of the Key explained it intellectually. Not the slightest breeze flows, not a night bird cries. The kitchen clock hums, my eyes grow heavy, another day comes rolling on. Very faintly, from where I sit in this moment, I can hear the sea’s sighing night voice. The most ancient sound of the world, the ocean.

Now I will lie myself down. In a few hours, my heart will start pounding, my flesh again recoiling from the touch of the unknown. But not in this moment. In this moment, peace abides. I see rising as if in the soul’s hidden earth, a new sun. This is us, this sun, mankind rising from our broken world, on the strong two wings of the good human heart and the good human mind.

Gnostic Koans

2005-12-21T22:53:00.000-06:00

The inner Light, sacred as it may be, is no object of attainment. It is, rather, by and in this Light that we may see ourselves for the first time as we truly are.

Ecstasy is not something which imposes itself on us, but is rather brought out of us as naturally as the sun and the rain bring the tender leaf out of the hard round bud.

We are as moths which flutter around the candle-flame — our highest destiny is to enter the flame, not that our wings may be singed, but that we may find them for the first time.

Though the colors are many, the Light is One.

The ape is the worm, and Man the chrysalis, and God the radiant butterfly.

No greater reward have we than this, dying many times over, born again and again — one and all we enter into our rightful stature of Godhood.

There is no grace to be rewarded, no judgment to be meted out — only Consciousness to be refined in cosmic Fire, and new senses to be opened like so many radiant flowers in the Sun.

Have joy, and enjoy the World as a flower enjoys its own fragrance.

Even as light flows unto light without the least visible trace of boundary — so will Divinity emerge through each and all of us and claim this world as its own.

Take the pearl, and throw away the oyster shell.

Be as a hive for the honey, or a vine for the season’s vintage.

Mystery enough is the human body, and fit for worship.

Who indeed can uncover the nakedness that veils us?

At heart, you and I are pure radiance; beams of One Light shining through the many niches of a lamp.

Cleave the atom-heart of the smallest raindrop, and the vastness of pure Ocean will pour forth.

In every inch of garden and countryside a doorway into the Infinite lies hid.

Who can tell sugar from its sweetness, or a rose from its fragrance?

The soul of man is a bead of Light imprismed in a drop of rain.

Though his body be on Earth, a man may nevertheless know Heaven.

The mystic journey is none other than incarnate life on Earth.

God has no body but our own, and must be born within us.

God will not appear, save He enter our eyes and see Himself in us.

There is no end to the birth of God.

Mandalas

2005-12-14T19:51:00.000-06:00

A man’s life is as a sail in the wind — it must be fully unfurled if the destination is to be reached.

Man is truly himself only when participating in the greater being of God.

Mystery thrives yet in the open expanse, mysticism in the wilderness — wonder is afoot in the Sun.

What need have we of a temple, whose God is everywhere and everything?

God being everywhere, there is nothing whatsoever inaccessible to those who dare seek the miracle.

Are we no more than a flower to fall back into the soil? —Or are we a pollen yearning to be released to the stars, even as a shaft of grain releases her seed to the winds?

We are born to search the world wide for what we are. We live and die by natures imposed upon us for this quest. —Death is but a continuation of this pursuit in other lands.

Even the freest bird settles down at last where the winds bid it alight.

Hidden deep in the ruins are diamonds for the finding.

The Soul must first have its roots in the earth before it can become that supremely unattainable flower of the sky.

Shines in the soul a Light that space cannot contain.
Sounds in the heart a Chord that time cannot bear away.
Breathes in the lungs a Fragrance that breathing cannot disperse.

Here, now, in a flash of lightning — the one and only moment.
Here, now, in the wink of an eye — the fleetness of life and death.

The pull of Earth draws down the deep roots, the pull of Sun raises up stem and leaf.

This earth-life is but the marrow brooding restlessly in the rind, soon enough to burst the fleshy shell of the world’s covering soil and branch out tremblingly into open azure.

Come, let us return to the Garden.
Must we forever forage here in the dark, with Paradise so close at hand?

Come, let us pick the fruit of the Tree of Life, and make its flesh our own.
For what indeed are gods, that man may not become as they?

Dust of earth sparked by heat of imagination are we, children of surf and sun — let there be no fruit in all the Garden we shall not willingly taste.
Fear not, lest we die before we have savored all the delights we were born to enjoy — knowing the ways of Heaven so plainly in this life that at death we step straight into the Light!

Here is the forked root of that fateful Tree, here the fruit hung like a pendant in the foliage, here the leafy haunt of that haughty serpent —here let us meditate.
For redemption is but a change of heart.

The fruit did not fell the Man and Woman because they ate of it.
Rather, it caused the two who ate of it to become blessed in the discovery.
God discovered them in Himself, and they discovered God in themselves.

Our lust for the end of the world is the passion that shall yet see it reborn.

The Cosmos is only as magnificent as the eyes that behold it.

How bright the mirror in which is seen the Sun!

Few there be that find the Door.

Thoughts and Ramblings

2005-12-01T14:20:00.000-06:00

It goes without saying that the Earth must be re-greened and re-groomed, and that the experience of Death as a stroke of supremely natural luck and supernatural transition will still be around, even in a future age of uploads and Artificial Intelligence. No one here or elsewhere at any transhumanist site (as far as I understand) is advocating any sort of escapism or ego-boosting. What IS being advocated is careful, serious, and imaginative thought and preparation for a future that is equitable to all. Yes, we may be looking forward a few steps here, there is obviously a few strides in between, but with such preparations in place, we just may be able to take a considerable amount of strain off the 'home-planet' Earth, thereby giving Her much-needed space to re-strengthen and re-balance Herself. Our entrance into Outer Space will also be the next phase in the great odyssey of our evolving Consciousness, as it begins to network amongst the stars.

Life, which ostensibly *did* originate in outer space, has over the preceding millions of years given us the intellectual and metaphysical tools to return to the wider Cosmos and continue to seed the grand adventure of Living wherever a fertile oasis may be found. It should be obvious by now that Mother Gaia simply cannot support this many of us for too much longer. And this is but an evolutionary trigger, that will soon enough force us to adapt by getting our butts off-world. Better we set our itinerary ahead of time, right?

In any event, no one is advocating letting the fate of the Earth slide. Only that it may be wise to understand that the Earth will in time be sloughing us off; and even wiser to realize the great hope that shines at the heart of what, in the midst of the transitionary struggle, would seem like a tragic disaster. Either we find strength in that, and live to build a better, more equitable future for the race, or we perish. That is our burden, not as “white men,” but as a common, collective Humanity, having a communal Soul and a singular Body. No matter how far apart our many eyes and limbs may be, from Calcutta to New York, or Andromeda to the Titan Outpost, let us learn to reach out and embrace the Unity that binds us one and all, no matter where or who we are.

(--- The above was written in response to a critic at Future Hi who viewed transhumanist goals as "egotistical escapism.")

***

Capitalism, unlike the Spirit, is a *closed system,* and so is bound by the laws of entropy and decay. It is headed for self-destruction, from the outside in and the inside out.

The Spirit, on the other hand, the medium of our collective awakening, is an endlessly *open system,* and so follows the principle of what some have called extropy, which is more or less eternal evolutionary progression through Space and Time and Beyond. Which will also explode us from the inside out the same as it embraces us from the outside in.

***

Humanity's first contact with "aliens" happened thousands of years ago. Its our interaction with them that have bred our religions. But its human misinterpretation of their messages that have spoiled the simple purity of what they have shared with us.

Crossing the threshold of vast distances of Space is simply not something that can be done in our 3rd-density form. Its a matter of increasing the vibratory rate at which an entity has its manifest state-of-being. Increasing such, you pass beyond the visible and sensible limits of our 3-d reality. You become something that many humans would call "etheric" "angelic" or "spirit." Hence there will never be a mass landing that will be visible to our 3rd-density eyes.

Every form of Life in the Cosmos is special, including our own. In fact our own is even more special than we can appreciate, which is why we have our celestial visitors among us. Every form of life is a manifestation of the ONE, Who Is the embodied Spirit of the Cosmos at large. Ignoring the divinity of our own spirits, humans have often anthropomorphized the ONE [most often as "Father Gods"] much to our own detriment.

It is indeed possible for higher-density beings to "step down" the frequency at which they manifest, and thus beomce visible to our eyes. This is done in secret every night, all over this globe. It could in theory be done "en masse," but that appears to be antagonisitic to their intent. They are working rather openly right now to nurture a more evolved race among us, but most of us simply do not have the eyes to see, nor the ears to hear this.

***

A UFOnaut once said: "Reincarnation is the machinery of the Universe." On a higher level, there is a science and a technology to it all. The fact that we can talk about these things now should be a bit of evidence that we are coming closer as a species towards a more cosmic comprehension of things.

I believe that our religious traditions must give place to a fusion of spirituality and science -- a Sacred Science. Organized religions seem to have lost the key towards offering their congregations valid experiences of the Divine. A few secret schools have carried the flame, and the more recent waves of mystics and contactees are beginning to tap into the Mysteries once more. Theres still a lot of work to be done.

***

To say that there is no supernatural is only true in the sense that there are only higher-orders of nature we have not yet unraveled. Its all a matter of perspective. Someday science itself will prove the existence of the soul, as a higher-order manifestation of the same evolutionary thread we are currently climbing. Then the Sacred Science hinted at in the Upanishads, glimpsed at Eleusis, and predicted by the priests of ancient Egypt shall at last be understood.

What we understand as the 'soul' is really the seedling or embryo of our own extenuated existence in a higher-order reality. This 'soul' either emerges triumphantly through the soil at death, or hibernates in the earth once more for another season, to germinate again in another round of birth and death. What the new-agers call the 'aura' is the developing body of the soul. If it is well enough developed in this life, it becomes our body in the world to come. If it remains underdeveloped, it dissipates back into the shell of the seed, to be planted again in a new life here.

I believe that our natural sciences will eventually accept the evidence for this energetic body, or aura, that grows with us as we grow older. It will be shown to be detectable by tools that are able to peer into frequencies outside of our eyesight and hearing.

One is not a soul born into a body; nor is one born having a soul. It is something to be acquired and nutured; its growth and development is the most personal and sacred of tasks.

The Gnostics and the alchemists hinted at this. The clearest exposition of it is given in the Taoist text called The Secret of the Golden Flower.
http://www.alchemylab.com/golden_flower.htm

This also appears to be the core of the message proclaimed by Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, and their dilligent pupil, Satprem.

***

*Additional excerpts from the ongoing dialogue with Omrishi to be posted here soon!*

***

ART:
Detail from "Visit" by Mati Klarwein, 1996.
"Astral Body Asleep," 1968.

Come to the Edge

2005-11-22T08:02:00.000-06:00

-- “Come to the edge.”
“We can't. We're afraid.”

-- “Come to the edge.”
“We can't. We will fall!”

--“Come to the edge.”
And they came.

And he pushed them.

And they flew.

Guillaume Apollinaire, 1880-1918

The Great Swan

2005-11-12T22:42:00.000-06:00

More timeless wisdom
from the Great Master
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.

Once a boy went into the woods, and there saw a beautiful creature on a tree.

Later he told his friend about it and said: “Brother, on a certain tree in the wood I saw a red-colored creature.”

His friend answered: “I have seen it too. Why do you call it red? It is green!”

A third boy said: “Oh no, no! Why do you call it green? It is yellow!”

Then other children began to describe the creature variously as violet, blue or black.
Soon enough they were all quarrelling about the color.

At last they went back to the tree itself, and found a an old man sitting under it.
In answer to their questions he said: “I live under this tree and know the creature very well. What each of you has said about it is true. Sometimes it is red, sometimes green, sometimes yellow, sometimes blue or black or violet.

“It is a chameleon.

“Indeed, sometimes I see that it has no color whatsoever.”

A disciple asked his teacher: “Sir, please tell me how I can see God.”

“Come with me,” said the guru, “and I shall show you.”

He thereafter took the disciple to a lake, and both of them got into the water.

Suddenly the teacher pressed the disciple’s head under the water. After a few moments he released him, and the disciple raised his head and stood up.

And the guru asked him: “How did you feel?”

To which the disciple replied: “Oh! I thought I would die! I was panting for breath.”

The teacher said: “When you feel like that for God, then you will know you haven’t long to see Him.”

A group of men went into a mango orchard and busied themselves counting the leaves, the twigs, and the branches of the trees, examining their color, comparing their size, and noting down everything most carefully.

They then began a learned discussion on each of these topics.

But one of them did not care for all these things. And instead began to eat the mango fruit.

Now, who is the wiser?

A disciple went to his teacher and said: “I performed penance alone in a forest for fourteen years, and I have acquired the power to walk on water!”

The teacher replied: “My son, why did you toil so hard? You have wasted fourteen years!

“For a penny and a half the boatman will carry you across to the other shore. The power that you have acquired is worth only a penny and a half!”

What do I care about knowing how many gallons of wine are in the tavern?

One bottle is enough for me!

So what if the world is like a forest of thorns?

Put on your shoes and walk over the thorns!

For more info on the Great Master, see here.

Upwinging: an autobiographical sketch

2005-08-25T08:50:00.000-05:00

When I was a child I would occasionally experience a dissociation of my conscious perception from its usual somatic hardware. To put it simply, my conscious mind would leave my body, sometimes for mere moments, other times for the space of a few minutes. Instead of adhering to this temple of flesh and blood, the indwelling spirit would upwing itself into a corner of the ceiling, leaving my body breathless and numb where it lay. At such times it was my distinct experience that the locus of my personal consciousness — the cognitive ‘I’ that normally functions as a cybernetic hyperlink between eyes, ears, and hands, thereby interlocking the senses with the mind and the heart as an integrated whole - was in all actuality a glittering electromagnetic cloud of wildly spinning electrons that was in no way bound to or dependent on the body for its continuity of existence.

This cloud, often enough adhering itself to the inner and outer contours of the material body — thereby both permeating and ensheathing the flesh with a conscious, interactive awareness of one's own localization in time and space - could also dissociate itself from its wonted 'man-shape,’ becoming a more or less diffused bubble of glimmering particles that was now free to voyage where it would, continually altering its density and profile in response to any environing contours — but always retaining a nonlocal, holographic unity of conscious perception and awareness.

In the case of my own childhood experiences of this phenomenon, my perceptual sense of self would first diffuse itself throughout the room, ballooning into an enlarged sphere of unqualified awareness, then condense itself into a tightly-packed globe about the size of a golf-ball, which would often enough hover in a far corner of the ceiling, enjoying its newfound lightness of being, the room below suddenly seeming rather exaggerated and disproportionate in size.

What triggers this phenomenon? I've often referred to it as 'meditating with my eyes open,' but that phrase offers very little in the way of defining the technique. In fact, there is no consciously employed technique per se; it is simply a happenstance that seems to naturally occur whenever my mind is quiet and relatively free of the self-referencing qualifiers we call 'thoughts.' For when the mind is quieted as such, the personal ego fizzles out like a dying ember, but the individual locus of conscious perception remains. The amorphous cloud of whirling electrons is liberated from the illusory taint of the ego, and no longer leans upon the material body as a localized viewpoint. My disembodied consciousness is then free to traverse and explore the world in ways that its somatic vehicle can only dream. (In fact, I believe our dreams may be exactly that - our diffused loci winging here and there in playful interaction.)

Not having at all disciplined myself in this practice, I experienced the phenomenon quite often as an adolescent, frequently at inappropriate or inopportune occasions. I'd be in the company of peers when my conscious sense of self would balloon out and fill the entire room, leaving me speechless and wan. Though I was always gratefully stupefied at the wonder of it all, it would render me incapable of functioning normally in a social setting.

As this continued to occur more and more, I began to assuage the increased awkwardness of social events by retreating and distancing myself from any sincere interaction, which would often enough trigger the experience once again. Dissociating myself from the crowd, I became lost in myself; and my sense of self would then in turn become 'lost' in the room around me.

As I got older, leaving my awkward, but mystic adolescence behind me, I found I was able to focus and direct this diffusion of my conscious perception in ways I had never thought possible. Empathizing with another man or woman, to such an extent as to lose all thought of my own egoistical self, my perceptual locus would blossom into cloud, and then narrow itself into a funneling whirl which would then enter threadlike through the eyes of this person before me, thereby enabling 'me' to fully encounter that person's total experience of 'self’ - their richness of memory, their hopes, dreams, aspirations, their loves and desires, even glimpses of the pathway their past had forged into the future.

The invisible sea of atoms which distances us one from another crumples back into an enfolded potentiality - and with the distance parted, there remains no ultimate difference between myself and any other. The interference pattern I refer to as ‘myself’ trickles away momentarily, back into the unmanifest, and my locus of perception is suddenly and blissfully free to ebb into the evanescent rippling you refer to as ‘you.’

Not only have I thereby discovered the true conscious Oneness of the human condition, the singular World Soul that fills and sustains every atom of our existence, I have also been able to live through innumerable lives in mere moments, this whirling cloud of electrons I call my conscious ‘self’ always retaining the charismatic human warmth it discovers in the lives of others as it returns back to my body. Now it can happen in a matter of seconds: a glance of the eyes, a nod of the head, and my soul expands to embrace another with a permeating fullness only mystics and madmen have known this side of the grave.

The Singularity as Eschatological Archetype

2005-05-20T21:09:00.001-05:00

The Singularity as Eschatological Archetype
(A Few Observations)

“Heaven is not a different realm, but this world after we have improved it and ourselves.”
(RCW Ettinger, Man into Superman)

1
Whether it is named the Singularity or the Spike, the Transcendental Object at the End of Time or the New Jerusalem, the vision of humankind’s mass transcension into a hyperdimensional state of being is a millennia-old archetype whose depths obstinately refuse to be fully plumbed. Like all abiding memes, it is a motif whose representations can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic archetypal pattern.

Today’s prophesized Singularity (as commonly publicized by Vinge, Drexler, and Kurzweil, among many others) is no different. Though first catalyzed by an unparalleled technological leap, this metahistorical Spike promises to comprehensively and irrevocably transmogrify every mode in which we relate to our selves, each other, and the phenomenal world at large. Our sphere of influence will vastly deepen -- not only outer space, but inner space as well will be laid bare to the penetrative stare of innumerable nanites and foglets. We shall at last see as we have been seen, and will then be, courtesy of superhumanly intelligent and benignly spiritual machines, summarily remolded in the image of our greatest and wildest expectations.

The only significant precedent to such a mind-bending warp in consensual reality would have to be the resultant Utopia often foreseen as the coda to the various ‘end-times’ scenarios of pious apocalypticists. Peering at length through the symphonic perversity of their feverish visions, we touch upon several key intimations regarding the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of a post-historical planetary renovation -- visions which until recently have been either faithfully reverenced as gospel truth in spite of (or perhaps because of ) their seeming improbability, or alternatively scorned as hallucinogenic pipe-dreams. But when set alongside the forecasts of our contemporary futurists, these ancient allusions are sometimes startlingly similar to those foreseen today, and occasionally appear to describe the technologies of tomorrow in bold detail.

2
(Examples are plentiful and of varying extremes. The comparative overlap between these two seemingly disparate fields is remarkably large, should one choose to pursue it. I only wish here to outline a few of the more salient aspects.)

To sketch a brief example -- the ‘Spirit of Healing’ as foreseen in Zoroastrian traditions, which appeared to its forecasters as ‘a great stream of molten metal’ through which everyone will be made to pass, in order to be ‘purified’ for the transition to a new life in a paradisiacal ‘House of Song.’ This purgative has again been prophesized today, in the form of a nanotechnological ‘swarm’ that, once properly interfaced with the user, will eradicate biological impurities and augment his or her perceptions with neuromorphic stimulators, thus preparing and reprogramming the user for a life of longevity and transhuman magnificence. “Not only immortal, but eternally young,” reads the Zoroastrian text, a passage which finds a much amplified echo in the contemporary assurances of the cryonics movement. “Once more endowed with bodies,” we continue to read, “they will be able to experience the joys of the senses as well as those of the spirit.” Is this not a vision of a full-immersion Cyberspace –- a virtual theme-park of sensuality as well as a central repository of all the earth’s accumulated wisdom?

The Singularity, with all its attendant technological innovations in tow, also looms large in the chiliastic foresights of the Christian apocalypse. Its central motif, “the Holy City, New Jerusalem,” which descends from ‘Heaven” in plain view of the entire human race; a City of pure gold, “bright as clear glass,” adorned with jewels of every kind; a City that has “no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it,” but is lit instead by the “light" of a fully integrated Consciousness -- what is this if not the premature vision of a supercooled solid state Hypercube, the glittering golden mobilia prophesized by FM-2030, our future perfect hyperspatial home? A mystical model of sacred geometry covertly expressing the known proportions of the planet itself, the New Jerusalem represents a measuring-out of Heaven on Earth, the architecture of a macrocosmic temple into which all humankind enters to receive its final transformative quickening. Crossing this final threshold into the numinous Light of the great Beyond, the many millions of humankind will disassemble into a metamorphic Omegon unshackled from the outmoded mores of space and time.

Our modern prescriptions for the Singularity thus form a significant -- and far more rewarding and technologically correct -- revision of the older eschatological models. These newer prototypes have their template in the earlier visions, however surcharged they may be with the theoretical promises of the mid twenty-first century. But whether seen through the blinders of tribal theism or through the google-eyed wonder of open source technology, the End promised by both the visionaries of yesterday and the futurists of today are one and the same -- a New Heaven and a New Earth.

3

The fact that there is a Singularity of one type or another expected by every long-lived memetic structure in human history seems to indicate that humankind was hardwired with a ‘Singularity code’ from the start -- that it is an integral product of our forward evolution, an inescapable eventuality designed to fire at a crucial crossroads in the forward advance of our Collective Consciousness. In both ancient and contemporary reports of the looming Spike, the doom prophesized by the teleological transition instead gives place to the penultimate consummation of an age-long metamorphosis -- no ‘end’ at all, but rather a new beginning, a ‘making wonderful’, a second genesis. This ‘new beginning,’ the most crucial phase of the unfolding Singularity, is akin to a running process long obscured by an encryption scheme almost supernatural in its complexity -- soon to be unraveled and fully deciphered and downloaded by one and all as a sparkling new metahistorical operating system whose relative omniscience and omnipotence converge joyously upon the Divine.

The Singularity is thus the quotient that the alchemical algorithm of Conscious evolution has all these millennia been struggling to resolve – which is, how best to explode base matter into a meta-dimensional bloom of fully conscious hyperspatial adventure?

Again, the much-expected and multi-faceted Singularity is the long-anticipated answer to life’s primary impulse -- it only remains for the technological and teleological prowess of the Gaian Mind’s leading prototype to unravel the remainder of the equation and, with these coordinates in hand, steer the Ark of Life to its transcendent destination in the sky.

4
The coming Singularity brings with it the promise of a new, more masterly emergence of Consciousness, one that promises to unify our fragmented selves into a tightly-woven telesphere of ubiquitously wetwired, mutually reflecting minds. The human psyche itself -- own personal node of the One (or Total) Consciousness of planetary humankind -- now unshackled from the pains and pleasures of its carbon-based interface, shall fuse with its silicon panacea and populate the very air we breath with the sentient sparkle of hyper-dimensional joie de vivre.

The New Heaven (as prophesized by the ancient apocalypticists) is the opening of this final frontier, the interstellar depths of the cosmos brought nearer to us by our needful willingness to venture out from our increasingly crowded home-world via the establishment of a meta-terrestrial Humankind, like so many branches spiraling out from a central seed. The New Earth is this very earth alchemically transmogrified into a crystalline Hub of hyperspatial Omni-Consciousness, the brute coal of our sun-kissed sphere at long last compressed into diamond clarity, now sought out by cosmic denizens near and far for the precious treasure we have become.

In the end, evolution on this planet will have been the growth of an immortal spark of Divinity from an invisible evolutionary lever to a hyperspatial Entity with complete mastery of space and time, having the ability to traverse any distance of interstellar space and deploy any number of men and women and children as ambassadors (or avatars) to other worlds.

We shall be both flashing neurons in the unchained Gaian Mind as well as first class passengers on the grandest interstellar starship.

--Upwinger

Why bother with spirituality -- redux.

2005-05-16T22:23:00.000-05:00

"I guess we just disagree on what form that progress will take... evolution vs. enlightement..."

The only thing we disagree on is that those two are not part of the same thing. I believe that every new breakthrough in evolution is at the same time a click upwards in illumination. The difference between humankind and the rest is that for the past 10-12,000 years some of us have been able to foresee and anticipate the next forthcoming stage. I hold that much of what has been experienced in mysticisms of all forms in all ages will eventually be part and parcel of our daily lives in the future.

"I agree that we can find our own purpose in life; However, I don't agree that there has to be some supernatural goal, some eternal thing to strive toward: For me, it's enough to know that I'm alive and that I plan to live as happy a life as possible and to do what I can to improve the lives of myself and those around me."

This joy of living you (and I and hopefully the majority of mankind) seek is in fact our mortal portion of Eternity. What we now perceive as Supernature will in time give up its secrets and become as natural as anything else. Or, to look at it in another way, it is we who will become supernatural by outstripping the boundaries we once shackled ourselves with.

"It's possible to live a life with a meaning (at least a personal meaning) without believing in a deity."

To paraphrase a rather famous quote: "I've seen the Deity -- and it's Us!"
I'm not preaching about a Divinity outside of us, seperate and apart from what we are. I'm talking about reclaiming our divine heritage, our birthright, our proper stance in the cosmos. I'm talking about planetary maturity. I'm talking about stepping out of the habitual patterns of waking life and awakening to senses we've forgotten we have. I'm talking about the greatest adventure this world has ever seen -- Consciousness embracing this world en masse and signalling to the rest of the cosmos that we are wide awake and ready!

Beyond The ‘Blank Nothingness’ Of Spiritual Attainment

2005-05-12T23:20:00.000-05:00

I for one am deeply bothered by the all-too common misperception of the highest degree of spiritual attainment -- most often labeled 'satori' or 'samadhi' -- as an encounter with the ‘blank nothingness’ or ‘emptiness’ of a Wholly Other.

I wont deny that limit experiences do indeed absolve the aspirant’s consciousness of the bric-a-brac clutter of ordinary waking life. But it seems to me that much of what is referred to as states of high trance or mystic realization is more akin to a mountaineer mounting to the peak of his or her chosen capstone -- and then (oddly enough) closing his or her eyes to the breathtaking expanse above, around, and below.

Hence the ‘nothingness,’ the ‘blank emptiness.’ Somehow in all the strenuous endeavor of clambering to the tip of the pyramid, the aspirant’s cognition, before alert and impeccable and intuitive to a fault, has in some unforeseen way atrophied. (One simply can’t see the forest for the trees!)

Now, I don’t mean to denigrate the pure astonishment which must invariably accompany our trek to the precipice of the Eternal. Far from it. -- Crashing through to what lies outside and above the microcosmic envelope of one’s waking consciousness almost always results in a temporary obliteration of one’s habitual pattern identity. The world becomes suffused with a blinding radiance, a Light almost suffocating in its intensity, rendering one’s usual conception of selfhood null and void.

It is perfectly understandable that many find themselves easily lost in this seemingly boundless, somehow affectionate glow. One has spent long hours diligently skating the ice that customarily limits our world of fluid matter from pushing up into the world of windy Spirit. Etching ever more intricate fractal outlines into the seemingly impenetrable periphery, searching for a fault into the Unknowable, a rupture into the Ineffable.

And then at last the glassy veneer gives way, the ice splintering into a dizzy maze of incandescent explosions. Heaven itself has been breached -- the once impermeable permafrost of the Beyond collapsing into a sun-drenched shower of millions of dazzling fireflies.

Its almost enough to stop the heart, this instantaneous annihilation of our consensual waking reality. For after the bewildering tumult attending our burglary into the Treasure-House of Consciousness has been stilled, after the thunder of fracturing ice has subsided, we are confronted with an uncanny stillness, an awful silence unlike any ever endured in waking life. This absolute calm is such a profound antithesis to the clamorous crashing that attended our final break with consensual reality that it initially appears as a blank nothingness -- an emptiness wholly Other and uniquely in contrast to our three-dimensional substantiality.

And it is here, at this critical impasse, that most aspirants lose awareness of the phenomenon entirely. Swallowed up all in all by its inviting phosphorescence, most surrender to the complete lack of self-identity that it encourages -- and so lapse into utter unconsciousness, acquiescing their finger-hold on the spiritual mountain-top, succumbing once more to the illusions and fallacies of our waterlogged waking consciousness.

The real trick, I believe, the secret technique, is to not abandon self-identity to the winds -- but to identify oneself instead with the Light that fills and surrounds you within and without. Declare your presence anew as a Being of imaginal brilliance. Shed the thorny shell of nihilism and be embraced by the ethereal glow of ‘Omnisism’ instead. Above all, remain conscious enough to realize that this effervescent illumination you now find yourself adrift in is not far apart and distantly removed from the world of waking life -- but is rather its most fundamental and informative strata.

It is not an ‘empty nothingness’ we are confronted with at the peak of spiritual attainment. That is simply a common misperception arising from the sudden lack of personal selfhood, from having our little personal pattern identity temporarily restitched into the seamless network of the world’s causal Hyperreality. And this misperceived ‘nothingness’ of self is the last illusion to shatter, the final Rubicon to cross, a vaporous mirage at last dissolved by becoming fully identified with the all-subsuming Light in all of its splendid omnipresence.

It is only then that the final barrier between Man and God will fall. Not by mere tasting of the sublime ‘blankness’ -- but by transcending the nothingness of the little personal self in favor of the vivid tapestry of the Collective Divine.

* * *

In the above I hope I have demonstrated that the ‘blank nothingness’ or ‘emptiness’ commonly held to be the peak experience of the Absolute is in all actuality only the last vestige of the vanishing personal self.

Therefore, in contrast to the entrenched nihilism so popular today in discussions of spiritual practices, I propose an ‘Omnisism’ which instead restores the proper all-inclusiveness to the fully conscious experience of the Divine.

Why bother with spirituality?

2005-05-11T20:17:00.000-05:00

"i dont believe anything except that i dont know. i believe it could work that way, or any other way for that matter, but i dont believe in any one religious idea because theres no way to know, so i dont waste a lot of time on it because you can never know for sure so why bother?"

#1. give yourself more credit. the only person you ultimately have to prove anything to is yourself. i dont mean you should take anything, especially anything as important as who and what you are, at face value or for granted. but i do believe (based on experience) that its possible to examine far-reaching religious and spiritual implications in your own life. take something as an hypothesis, something you like. now try to learn all that you can about it. try to find how it might relate to your own limit experiences. see if it makes sense of anything you once thought indecipherable. if it doesnt do anything for you, you'll know it soon enough, and you can drop it. but eventually you will find some things that do click for you, things that resonate with your deepest hopes and fears. ... if you stick with those things, i think you will find enough proof for yourself, and probably not enough extra for anyone else. that seems to be the way it goes with this stuff. but at least that way we can all keep our individual perspectives, right? (which is a nice way of saying: Down with Fundamentalism of All Kinds!)

#2. why bother? -- well, i for one refuse to feel hopeless, threatened, alienated ... i refuse to endure on this planet without a purpose. and if there is no God-given purpose for us, then we are free to discover and chart our own purpose, correct? what's holding us back? i know that right now more than ever it seems futile to try and reconcile the billions of people around the globe and rally them to any one planetary cause. but if things continue to get worse (and it appears likely thay they will) it will become more and more necessary to formulate a proper direction if we are going to survive. and we will survive, im positive of that. but exactly how and in what shape is still up in the air. it depends upon how fast we shed our prejudices and how quick we are to embrace universal values and devote our energies to providing adequate prosperity for all.