On your Marks, Get Set, GO...find Meaning

It's laughable when you think about the condition humanity finds itself in: we have no idea how we got here, who we are, or where we are going.  We have conflicting assumptions that lead to individualized quests for meaning.  What are the characteristic responses to this unknown?  Let's check it out.

People take various paths when facing the Mystery that is existence:

1) The Ostriches bury their heads in the sand.  The sand can take the form of materialism, gossip, mindless entertainment, and indulgence.  Like their bird counterparts, they adopt the chicken approach and run in the direction of denial.  They seem to still live under the juvenile belief system that says if I can't see you, you can't see me. A game of hide and seek that lasts a lifetime - meaning never finds them, and they never find meaning.  Well done, you um...win.  I'm not meaning to criticize the birds, it's just that they often end up getting eaten by the void of regret, and I want to make myself as untasty a morsel as I can for that beast! 

2) The Fundamentalists fight for a set of beliefs.  None of the fun, all of the mental.  In a way they are more noble than the ones who refuse to pick a side 'cos "Better hot or cold than luke warm; the luke warm will get spat out of the mouth of God"...type thing.  The problem is that if these belief systems arent based on a combination of rational and experiential enquiry, they stem from emotionality and theory respectively.  The emotion-driven need to attack those who believe differently than us stems from an insecurity that our ideas might turn out to be wrong.  God is big enough to defend Himself, and the desperate approach to resort to injustice to defend Him is a self-depreciating irony.

3) The Yes people believe in everything.  They believe that truth is relative and hey, if it works for you, then it's true.  Pantheism, Theism, Agnosticism...yip, all true.  "It's narrow minded to deny someone their belief system".  Well the self-defeating argument is evident: if it's narrow minded to deny someone their belief system, then it is narrow minded to deny Fundamentalists theirs.

Oh you might think I'm on this high and mighty rant, criticizing the above stereotypes and that I'm finally gonna launch into an obnoxious set of reasons why my way of approaching things is the best.  Ya, I'm just not :)

Reincarnation and the Collective Unconscious

Such diverging worldviews lurk in the background of our modern life.

Never before have we known as much about other cultures' perceptions of Reality...
and never before have we known so little about our own.

The previous ages were called the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Modern Age.  What would we call the era we live in?  The Scientific Age, the Information Age?
And are we closer to having Information about what really matters?
Are science and mythology mutually exclusive, or different lenses to view the same human experience?
What does psychology say to the East's insistence on cycle and illusion, and the West's insistence on one shot at individuation?

Fact: when certain people are hypnotized, they spout previously unrecalled memories that they claim come from previous lifetimes.  And sometimes these facts are uncannily verified.
Fact: no one can verify what the true implications of this are.

1) Is it that the individual consciousness/entity gets transmuted from lifetime to lifetime, growing in wisdom until it reaches it's Nirvanic destination?
2) Is the subconscious a gateway to a reservoir of human memory spanning the depth of time?
[Maybe, like science and mythology, these first two perspectives are different lenses to the same human experience.]
Or 3) Do people traverse the Karmic realms until they come to the Realisation that the price has already been paid?

These things are beyond words.
Maybe the only thing that is, is God/Life/Existence.  We survive through the connection with things that are eternal.  To the extent that our essence is God's essence, that part of us will never die.  Time is a construct that has gripped us way too tightly since the late Middle Ages, and it's hard to untangle our rational minds free from a concept that was birthed in rationality.

These individual existences of ours may try many paths.  And until we realise it's not our trying that shatters the paradigm, we'll keep trying.

Drugs and the Ascent to Truth

It's been said that Truth or Reality is this mountain that we all traverse throughout our lifetimes.  And that different religions take different paths up the mountain, but all end up in the same point.  Well the validity of that claim is something to discuss on a day other than Thursday.

But, being Thursday, I wanna talk a bit about drugs and their role in our meandering up that pile of rock.
Maybe drugs drop you near the top of the mountain.  Not the very top, but maybe like 2/3 of the way up.  I'm talking about psychedelics now.  And Ive never done anything besides weed,  but have extensively researched LSD and its family.  Ive also had LSD like experiences on weed.

The paradigm shift that comes with this new found perspective blows our minds, and there is a profundity that we lack in the cardboard box every day existence.  But here's the problem:

When we ascend by following the traditional ways of religion, we are able to gradually see the perspective change - trees become neighborhoods, become cities, becomes the horizon.  Things make sense through that wisdom rooted in Rock.  Also, assets like perseverance, patience, and muscles are developed from the grueling walk.

These all serve to ground us and protect us when we reach the top of the mountain and start getting into other realms.  People who have been dropped there by drugs are vulnerable and dont have the muscle and perspective to fight off the metaphorical mountain lions and creatures lurking up there to devour people.

Door can be opened that can never be closed.
They were right all along, don't do drugs.  Drugs are bad.

'On' Miserables of 2013

Let's not lose Life in amongst the plastic

The haunting childhood anthems ran back through my veins, this time surging them with the shivers that I have learned are from God.  My mom brought me the soundtrack to the play from London when I was 7, and I've been tantalized by the other-worldliness of Les Miserables since.

It's a world that speaks of something worth dying for, and living for.  Of the raw emotion that cries out from not so distant times, to a world that races through Big Macs and Adam Sandler movies.  Don't get me wrong, Big Macs are funny, and Adam Sandler movies are yellow, but we've lost a taste of what it means to be human in this age.

Our freedom was bought with blood, our height comes from standing on the shoulders of previous generations.  The Lamb has paid, we have been raised, and we eat.  Let's not get de-sensitized to the taste of food.

A Peter Pan play on the Play of Life

Im gonna write you a blog entry.  Yip, you.
Youre welcome.
 I mean it is a blog entry about you, cos there is a common thread of humanity that runs through you, Napolean, and your great aunt Gertrude.  It’s a uniquely Dynamite yet anciently modern story called Existence.  And it’s always been in a theatre near you.
 This theatrical drama that we’ve all been thrust into has all the ingredients that would make us happily pay $30 to see it – tears, fears, jeers, and sneers.  There’s crying and dying and smiling and lying.  And for some reason we can never see the whole picture cos of the tall guy’s head sitting in front of us.
Maybe that tall guy is tradition.  A certain deeply ingrained crevice that thought naturally runs into.  A paradigm that’s hard to shift out of.  Maybe that tall guy is our own height and ego getting in the way of 20-20 vision.  Whatever da brudda is, he’s annoying, and confusing, and I wish he would move so I can see what the hell is going on.
 Cos it all seems cyclical, and yet progressive.  A time for everything under the sun.  In this age, we’re starting to be able to view things from outer space, and step away from the sun.  And yet there was a time for that…under the sun.  We accomplish big old piles of dust, and then say “Here my child, Ive left you this big old pile of dust.  You’re welcome.”  Either we reincarnate and grovel in the dirt more, or we leave the dirt for the next adventure, which may or may not be just as filthy.  Does the drama end when our pulse does?  Doubt it!  Peter Pan said it best: “To die will be the greatest adventure!”  The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who never grow up, and you can never say never to Never Never Land.
 The paradox of Life – it is both paradoxical and logical.  The first will be last, the weak shall be strong, plants grow better when they’re trimmed, gold gets purer in the fire.

There you go, take that.  It’s a stream of thought plucked from my over-populated mind.
You’re welcome.

  

Hating the Rat Race

Wow, I'm in the process of buying a house at the moment, and what a mission and a half!

I've only been in the country for a year and a half, so it complicates an otherwise complicated matter.
But here's the point, and why I'm spending valuable synapse energy on it:  I can NOT handle working for someone 40 hours a week for the rest of my life!

We work to pay rent, and hardly get to appreciate the roof that the work puts over our head cos we're always at work saving for it.  Our lives are so full and so empty, and we never have the time to pause and properly delve into why.

Whether or not this first step on the property ladder is going to significantly change the course of my life, it'll save me $225 a month in rent, while I'm also building equity.  A choice that required effort to make, but is in the right direction.  Life's simple: make good choices.  God will open up the next rabbit hole once you follow the cat.

I wanna start my own business, but am stuck like a deer in the headlights of possibility.
A laser beam is useless if the ray is focussed too widely.  I need to hone my intention down on a specific field/opportunity, but I'm cautious about choosing the wrong pill.

Summer is a time for new life, new color, new vitality.

Link to: The Cyclical Revolutions of Evolution - Progress?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeZu8WqVozk

A link to my poem/video that I made that seems to be getting a lot of hits.  But since it wouldnt open when I tried it, here is the direct YouTube link.