04 May William Wisher
"No one lies on their death bed and thinks: I wish I had more money." At some point in life we reach a crossover point when we realize we have more money than time. Certainly we reach the crossover point in our last moments of life. But as each of has thousands of lives encapsulated as a life each day, we are at the crossover point soon after we awaken from our sleep....
03 May Kotodama 35
"Real eyes realize real lies." -- Tupac Shakur...
02 May Present-passed and True-present
The past is the past and what we perceive as the present is also the past. We consciously experience the present as "present-passed," not the "true-present." The true-present is the universe, waves of seemingly chaotic energy in an otherwise empty space. The true-present is the pre-sent, the universe before we consciously experience it. The conscious experience of the past (the past and present-passed) is our perception of the universe as reflections from our mind. The mind is a mnemonic device (etymology of mind: memory). Memories are illusions, stories we've created. The two constants in the universe are change and interdependence. Thus, the true-present cannot be described beyond saying that it is what it is whatever it is. Like God's response when Moses asks who God is: "I am who I am." Like the Tao, it is nameless. We experience the true-present when we are in the gap between true-present and present-passed. This is the space of nothingness. It is like breathing. After we exhale we pause before inhaling. That pause is the space of nothingness. When in that space, we are set to experience the true-present as it unfolds. The true-present unfolds as waves of light and sound energy; visually, like a kaleidoscope. It is overwhelming, like trying to drink water coming off a fire-hose. The purpose of the mind is to organize the true-present so that it's drinkable, not overwhelming. Experiencing the true-present is akin to hallucinating. The etymology of the word hallucinate is to wander in the mind. In our everyday life, we experience the world as reflections from a point along the perimeter of the pond-mind. As is our habit, every day we go to the same point on the perimeter which results in us having a consistent perspective of the world. However, the mind often is turbulent (a function of our lacking integrity and other distractions) and its reflections distorted. When we calm the mind (through practices like meditation), we can leave its perimeter and wade into the pond, wander in the mind. It is here we can experience the true-present. In experiencing the true-present, we realize that the reality we've heretofore experienced was not reality; just reflections, illusions. The true-present is curvilinear and rectilinear cosmic waves of images and sounds that overwhelming come upon us until we drown. Our drowning however results not in our personal demise; it's the demise of the various identities we've created that define us, the various stories we've made up about who we are. It is here when we realize that the past was just an illusion; that we are truly one of the waves, one with everything; as we've always been from before our beginning. Then, we fall down laughing as we realize the play of life and our roles in it are based on illusions. The play starts as a tragedy and ends as a farce when the true-present is revealed....
18 Apr God Plays Hide and Seek
Alan Watts in The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are: "God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive. "God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding. You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world." Everything is a manifestation of God. When we perceive God as something different than ourselves, we can never be one with God....
17 Apr William Shakespeare
"The play's the thing." Hamlet says "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." The king's guilty conscience will be revealed by the king's obvious embarrassment as he is watching the play. It's odd that an expression that's ambiguous to the point of meaningless is well-recognized. It must speak to certain truths. In the play of life, our intentions, actions and their consequences are revealed. So while the play is a fiction, it reveals the reality of who we are. The play's the thing; that is, something that cannot be described beyond "thing." It is what it is whatever it is. It can be anything we want it to be....
16 Apr Eckhart Tolle 1
“Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness.”...
15 Apr God’s Role
In the play of life I am who I am. I am god and so is everyone else. The only difference between us is that some realize we are god and others are oblivious to who we are before birth and after death and all times in between. It's the difference between being one with everything (eternally transitioning manifestations of God) and viewing oneself as finite in space and time (birth to death). It's the difference between realizing we are actors in a play for our own entertainment and taking our roles in the play seriously. In cannabis speak, it's the difference between being high and feeling stoned. Everything is a manifestation of God. As long as we perceive God as something different than ourselves, we can never be one with God, one with everything....