Let Us Start Here

Hello everyone out there. I hope all is well for each of you.

I started this blog because I am interested in documenting the evolution of my soul to the extent that my small mind can work to manipulate some combination of words (words being as fragile and limited as my mind) that will bear some remote resemblance to the unstoppable force of Love that I am beginning to see myself to be. This blog will be very personal at times, but there will also be plenty of talk about things I observe outside of myself as well.

That may be the point: there really is nothing "separate" from me as that phrase "outside of myself" may seem to imply. Whatever I observe in the world, I look first to myself to understand that what I am observing is nothing more than who I am in that moment. From this viewpoint, I understand that even my commentary on the world around me is very personal. I know that I have to accept responsibility for what I see because I am what I am seeing. A simple example will bear this out.

The woman of my dreams leaves me while I am vacationing in the Bahamas. There are people around everywhere absolutely mesmerized by the beauty of the location. Yet, I see only gloom and darkness and betrayal and emptiness in every person, every tree, every ray of light, every grain of sand, and every drop of water. If each one of us could see the very subtle, yet all-powerful, secret Law of Life hidden in this one scenario, life on this planet would cease instantly to be the disgusting, atrocious, and banal charade that it has become.

The example of me getting dumped in the Bahamas and seeing all of the other tourists absorbing the grand scene while I attempt in vain to deflect the despair and loss I see in the same scenery as well as in the faces of those who are enjoying the scenery proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that no event, no situation, and no circumstance holds within and of itself any meaning except what we attribute to it. This is so plain to my eyes now whereas once I was blind - literally unable to see the obvious simplicity of this Life that was right before my eyes. How can any event - anything (and I mean anything) - that happens to any of us have any inherent meaning in itself if two people can see the same event in two different ways. Even more astonishing is that the same person can come upon similar events and one time react one way and another time react another! Can we not all look unflinchingly at what is staring right at us in this one small example I have provided and see that who we are being in the moment creates our experience of that moment. If I am the man who just got dumped, and I choose to be the thoughts about myself and the world that are negative reactions to being dumped, then I am darkness, hopelessness, and lovelessness in that moment, and my reality reflects that, and everything the others see as beautiful seems to me to be all part of one hideous creature eating away at the very fabric of my existence. On the other hand, if I am one of the other tourists sitting in silence on the beach, the Love, Joy, and Power that I am rises up to take its rightful place in the forefront of my being, and I behold the powerful ebb and flow of the waves and the joy of the laughter of the children and the love of the wonder of nature and its healing capabilities.

Emerson spoke of the "indifferency of circumstances," and Buddhists teach that all events are "empty" - of meaning and of self. Christ understood this Law and lived it, and living it allowed him to be Love even in the face of unconscionable hatred. It allowed him to see the reality of Peace and Compassion even in the midst of the most chaotic and destructive (how we would describe it) of events and behaviors (i.e. his "trial" and crucifixion). In fact, all true spiritual masters understood this basic principal behind this worldly life. (I will not get into the insanity of the limits we place upon ourselves by saying we are of one religion or another and denigrating or resisting all other "religions" because they do not fit into our "beliefs" in this article; however, if you like talking about these things, please stay tuned, because I will provide plenty of my own observations on this, and I certainly welcome any opportunity to discuss this and, for that matter, anything any reader wants to discuss.) This understanding is a necessary characteristic of any illumined individual. It is very easy to see that living with the wrong understanding that people and events create who we are denies the work of God in giving us our lives. But let us go even deeper than this. Many of us can agree that there is something special about the quiet love and fearlessness of individuals such as Christ, the Buddha, Krishna and so on and so forth. If events were intended to define us, then how would it be possible for any person to manifest this "specialness" as each of these individuals did? Would not even these spiritually awakened beings have been defeated by what was happening around them and to them? Are we so conceited as to believe that our lives are worse than theirs or anyone else's in this world?

Yet, see this from another view: these individuals embodied what is special about each of us, but we call them "special" from a worldly view of thinking they understood something, could see things, that we are not meant to understand. Their lives, behaviors, and teachings were literally "not of this world," and we have accepted that we are somehow less than them because we see only that we are "of this world." Yet, how can they, as human beings, have transcended this worldly nature in which we think we are so deeply mired if they were defined by what happened to and around them just as we understand ourselves (and all human beings) to be? If we all lived under a law that says we look out and see the world and what we see creates who we are, then it would be utterly impossible for one single human being - including Christ and the Buddha - to achieve what we consider to be Christhood or Buddhahood because what we see in the world through the viewpoint of that false law does not and cannot transcend life and death or pleasure and pain the way these individuals did. Nothing we see in this world can transcend that because this world is impermanence. Every part of it!

I tell you this: these individuals showed us what we are all intended to be! They could only show us this by first realizing who they really are. They could only first realize who they really are by refusing to believe that who they really are depends upon anything that happens or anyone they know. In refusing to believe this (and the very act that they could refuse to believe this proves that this impermanent world is not the only world we are living in), they were able to step outside of the worldly movement of this life in order to see there is no one there that is real when an observed event creates the observer because events will inevitably change and, with the change in those events, the observer changes. Seeing this then lead them to understand that, just the fact that they have the ability to see the impermanence of an observer created by the observed, there must be a source of permanence from whose view they are able to see the suffering of the impermanent "selves" they were witnessing within. Knowing these selves were impermanent, and therefore, not real, they were then able to see that all that was (and is) real is this source of permanence inside of them that allowed them to see the futility of believing they were these impermanent "selves."

This source of permanence - God's Life - inside of them is who they (and we) really are. They were then able to, for the first time, make a real choice of who they wanted to be - a suffering, impermanent, illusory self, or the Loving, Peaceful, Happy Self that is not born and killed by events because it is Permanent and that must exist by the very fact that we can clearly see all that is impermanent. Living from this Real, Permanent Nature - this God Nature - then allowed them to see that we all create our reality because they could now experience the Love and Compassion created by being this ultimate reality even while observing the suffering and fear taking place in the world. Thus, the perfect circle was complete.

So, if, as you can probably sense right now, this Truth is so obvious and so simple, and if it is indeed the very foundation of awakening from the nightmare of our conflicted existence, then it begs the question as to why more of us are not on this path to becoming true spiritual masters. Well, the answer to that is also quite simple: we cannot handle the responsibility that comes with knowing that we create everything we experience and it is impossible to experience anything that we do not create. To our minds, this is a ridiculously overwhelming thought: that even the pain, suffering, hunger, hatred, violence, and fear that we see in the world are our creations, and each of us are responsible for these creations. Our minds will run from this truth every time it encounters it like a woman runs from a shadowy figure in a dark alley. The mind cannot accept this responsibility because it knows it cannot think up a solution that can fix the problem. What's worse is that it cannot know that it is the only problem to begin with.

Oh, but the soul does not shrink from this responsibility. The soul knows that if we listened to it instead of our minds all along, we would not be in the sad shape in which we find ourselves. The soul knows that it has the power, being that it was created in the creative image of God, to clean up this mess in but an instant with its unparalleled creative abilities. The soul knows that the ultimate irony here is that, whether we "accept" this truth that we create our experience in our lives and become "enlightened" through such acceptance or not, we are always creating what we experience, which explains why the world is in the condition it is in today. When you have literally billions of people who live their lives confined to the dark room in their minds that is so dark it doesn't even know it's dark, then they all become that darkness as they blindly bump into life and fear and hate what they (we) cannot see or understand. Ah, yes, the Soul: it cannot be contained by any dark room nor be bound by any universe, and, therefore, changing this world is but a small moment's task for it.

Which brings me back to what started this whole very, very long explanation of why we are not separate from what we see either inside or outside what we call our Self because what we are seeing from (who we are being) in each moment actually creates what we see. In order for the Soul to do the creative work it so longs to do, we must be willing to see what it has been trying to show us all along: that we are responsible for the world in which we now find ourselves, and being responsible means we are also empowered to create it in a Whole, New Way.

This is why any commentary I make about events I observe in the world are always personal because my first and only intention is to see clearly my responsibility in creating those events and in creating what I see. Any thoughts that spill out of my being into this little blog spot are pointed directly at me, and, because we are not separate in any way, at everyone else as well. This is not a "pointing" of blame or judgement, but, for me, an acceptance of responsibility in order that I might allow my Soul to create the Peaceful change in me - and in the world - that it so longs to create.

Watching and Loving the ongoing process of rememberance of who I really am is the sole concern of this blog. Perhaps some will find this interesting and maybe others will even feel invited to share their experiences as well. I certainly welcome this. Until you or I write again, I hope all is well with everyone out there.