Hidden

For you died, and your life is now hidden

with Christ in God. 

-Colossians 3:3-4

I had the uncanny feeling a few days ago, that my life as I now know it is not my life. That one day I would exist, but not know that any of this had happened. And that this life, that I did not know, was in fact more real than the life I do know. I suddenly felt that it was not necessary or helpful, to concern myself with my life here as if it were important. As if it were the destination rather than the sideshow.

Now we shouldn't trust too much in uncanny feelings, but when that uncanny feeling starts resonating with all kinds of loose ends and puts them into place, giving you that context-unveiling "aha!' experience, it bears a closer look.

First there are two paradoxical assertions that need resolving. First, that some people find their way to spotless bliss (Heaven) without a shadow of sadness or pain, and second, that some don't (Hell). If you think about it, the second offers a bit of a challenge to the first. After all, people get to that spotless bliss by bucking the prevailing trend and becoming Children of God, who are distinguished by the fact that they are selfless, merciful and good. If they are all these things, they would almost have to be disturbed by the sufferings of those people who are still in "Hell" (actually this world).

And yet here I had this feeling, this seeming knowledge, that not only would I not know that anyone else was still suffering on this Earth, but that I in fact wouldn't remember my life, my name, or the sufferings that I myself went through. Nevermind anyone else's.

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. 

There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain,

for the old order of things has passed away.”

-Revelations 21:3-4

The first approach to this Heaven/Hell quandary is relatively pedestrian (to me), but I might as well get it out of the way. If one believes that the very existence of souls implies choice, and that the most important choice is between God and Self-as-god (rebellion), which we are equally free to choose, then actually being free to make that choice is important. Even if from an enlightened point of view, Self-as-god is folly; it only appears such to one who has already made that choice in favor of God. A soul is distinguished by the fact that it is free: the opposite of soul is automaton. Jesus was distinguished, among other things, by a total absence of coercion: Jesus didn't force himself on anyone. He didn't even defend himself against wrongful physical attack, and taught his disciples to be the same way. Forcing that fundamental decision is equivalent to removing from a soul that which makes it a soul: choice. Mercy in this case is neither possible not desirable.

This was not what blew my mind though. What blew my mind is the experience of the world as fundamentally unreal. It is one thing to think it is unreal, another for that unreality to become palpable in some sense.

No one is required to recognize the importance of an unreality. If you go to a Broadway play, you will see the depiction of all kinds of situations, emotions, drama and so on. You may in fact get very wrapped up in this play. When the curtains go down and the lights come on, however, you return to your actual life. You will probably soon forget what the play was about. But what if you couldn't ever leave the play, or didn't want to?

Taking the reality of the world ultimately seriously is in fact the prison bars of the reality we have locked ourselves away in. Now, obviously in a prosaic sense the world is perfectly real. If you hit me in the head with a broom handle, it will hurt. If you drop a piano out the window, it won't magically be suspended above the ground by pixie dust. It will really fall, and might really hurt someone. However, this "prosaic sense" is of course defined by the rules of the world itself. If in a video game I hit the "fire" button, the image on the screen will actually show a shooting animation and the appropriate realistic damage, but it doesn't mean that any of it is "real" in a higher sense.

(Interestingly, I had a sort of prefiguring of this experience decades ago, when for a period of a week or so I saw the entire world as made of pixels. Seriously. Where other people saw real objects, I saw pixels. I attributed it to too much computer gaming at the time though.)

Similarly, the world is perfectly real from the viewpoint of the world. From outside the world, it looks like that Broadway play. Everyone is acting as if it is real, but it isn't. Meanwhile, your real life is hidden from your view.

This idea is of course old hat. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato wrote his "Allegory of the Cave" about just such an appraisal of reality. The real question is, why should anyone believe it is true? Their senses, after all, tell them it is false. There cannot in fact be evidence for something that transcends the system of evidence, any more than the existence of non-numeric values could be proven by arithmetic.

To believe in God at all involves believing in a "higher reality" that you cannot directly experience with the senses. This reality, consequently, is a lower reality: i.e. "less real". Of course most believers in God take 1 step forward and 2 steps back in this respect. They believe in a God, whose job it is to make their lives in this world more agreeable. To get them a good job, a mate, excellent sex, intelligent and well behaved children, abundant food and jolliness, freedom from excess pain, and so on. They don't in fact believe in God per se, they believe in a beneficent zookeeper; the zoo in question being the World. I believe there is in fact such a zookeeper, but good luck getting treats from him.

You only have to take a gander at Luke 6:20-26 to see that this is in no way the God Jesus was talking about. If you look closely in fact, you will see that the real characteristics of a godly person as versus an ungodly one, is how seriously they take the directives of this reality. The godly person as Jesus describes him:

• Is probably poor (Luke 6:20-21 among others)
• Is nonviolent even in self-defense (Matthew 5:39)
• Is more likely to weep than laugh (Luke 6:21 among others)
• Is hated, excluded and rejected (Luke 6:22 among others)
• Is willing to sacrifice himself (John 15:13, Luke 9-24)
• Will give to those who ask him (Matthew 5:38-42 among others)
• Is not sexually lustful (Matthew 5:27-28 among others)
• Does not seek or enjoy human praise (Luke 6:26 among others)

In other words, these values are the inverse of those of the normal natural man who believes in this reality as the only one. These values in fact only make sense if you believe that this reality isn't that important, that there is another more important reality. The apostles had a label for the reality of our senses, they called it the World (which I capitalize to differentiate it from the mundane definition). The World as far as they are concerned is a bad thing.

Do not love the World or anything in the World. 

If anyone loves the World,

the love of the Father is not in them.

-1 John 2:14

What is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight.

-Luke 16:15

That's pretty unambiguous, right? Why not love the World? Even if it is a lower reality, why is that necessarily bad? If the World is a prison, those who are Worldly are the Trustees. They are following the system and want everyone else to follow it too. They are supporting the system that enslaves them. The godly ones are those who are digging behind the vent with a spoon, trying to escape. The World is a prison, and whether the inmates agreed to go in originally or not, the fact remains that they are slaves to an illusion. There are some who don't want to break the illusion, who want to remain in the prison. In the movie The Matrix, there was one of the rebels who had second thoughts. He wanted Agent Smith to plug him back in the matrix, and he was willing to betray his friends to do it. Not everyone wants out, but it is a prison nonetheless. A prison whose bars you cannot see. And what is it like outside the prison? What were we supposed to be, before we got in the slammer? What inheritance did we give up to humor this illusion? Being Children of God. Being angelic beings. Being like Christ.

I had a momentary preview of my life that was hidden in God, beyond the World.

 Dear friends, now we are children of God,

and what we will be has not yet been made known.

But we know that when Christ appears,

we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

-1 John 3:2

Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

 -Matthew 13:43

The Bones

 
I am taking care of my mother with Alzheimers: the lions share of the labor falls on me. She is unable to take care of the most basic daily tasks. Words cannot express how difficult it is; it is the hardest thing I have ever done. Hard emotionally, hard in terms of hours spent, hard in every way. I will spare you the details. You cannot imagine it unless you have lived it.

I am able to take a time out now only because my youngest brother is here from out of town today. The middle brother told me, "When you think you are at the edge of cracking, the edge of insanity, don't go over. We can work something out".

I asked him, "which edge is that?" The edge of nervous breakdown I was at yesterday, or the one today? I keep finding new edges, new breaking points. Every day, I think that I can't go on, I think that I am already at that breaking point, but I find new breaking points every day. Every day I stand at the cliff's edge, only to find that yesterday's cliff edge was just the lip of a larger cliff.

I mention this by way of explaining that I am learning more and more the truth of this saying:

"For we live by faith, not by sight." 

-2 Corinthians 5:7

By faith, not by sight, not by feelings, not by thinking. What we feel is a symptom of a problem. We need not to act on feeling but act on the problem, whatever it is. It is easy to say but hard to understand, that feelings are not nearly as important as we think they are.

In the beginning, I believed in my mind. After, I believed in my heart. Finally, I believe "in my bones": deeper than mind, deeper than heart, as deep as the soul. And I disregard my mind and even my heart, until there is nothing left but these "bones". The difference between believing in God and being a blank canvas for God to paint.

Belief counts for nothing in itself and feeling counts for nothing in itself. Belief and feeling are only steps on the road.You have to be broken, really broken, before you can get God out of your mind and into your heart. You have to be broken more to get God into your bones. Human beings are not naturally built to do this; the natural man keeps God at a distance, whether he admits to it or not. Man has an unseen primordial dread of God. You cannot admit to that which you yourself do not see or realize. It requires Light to even see the Darkness. It requires light to even know you are going the wrong way.

Then Jesus told them, “You are going to have the light just a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you. Whoever walks in the dark does not know where they are going.  

Believe in the light while you have the light, so that you may become children of light.”

-John 12:35-36

 
A sort of metaphor: the mind is me and that; the heart is I and Thou. The bones are only Thou. The furthest distance is the mind: but even the heart is a distance.

I don't know if I can ever explain it. That for me, intellectual belief does not matter and emotions do not matter, only actuality matters. And the actuality is that I am a leaf in the wind blown by God. And that it does not matter what I think and it does not matter what I feel, it only matters what is. God is, and I am not.

The Cross and the Desert

White Sands dust storm, New Mexico

And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan,

and was led by the Spirit into the desert...

Luke 4:1

There seems to be two poles in my life with God. They are the Cross and the Desert. 

The Cross is self-sacrifice through suffering for people and for the world. The Desert is selflessness through annihilation in God, through emptiness. These two are not the same thing. The Cross requires engagement with the World, the Desert requires disengagement from it. The Bible says in many spots that Jesus liked to withdraw from the crowds to solitary spots to pray. I don't visualize him as praying for individuals during these times, or even praying for himself, but in fact being in communion with God. This kind of prayer does not ask, it already has what it seeks. 

The Cross is easy to understand, if difficult to practice. It is basically loving your neighbor, even if that means pain and difficulty. There is no trouble in loving your neighbor when it is easy, there is no Cross in that. The Cross comes in when you have to love your neighbor even at great personal cost. I am being led to the Cross a great deal lately, with my mother's sudden illness, pretty much everything falls on me. No one else is able. But like I said, understanding the Cross is not at all hard in theory anyway, so I will leave it at that. Easy to understand, not easy to do.

The Desert seems to be leading me in a totally opposite direction, away from the world, away from myself. I once thought that an actual solitary place would be helpful, like those that Jesus liked to retreat to, but really the Desert is everywhere and nowhere.

I was sitting outside a few days ago, after being at the hospital every night for five days tending to my Mom who had a sudden and debilitating health emergency. I was absolutely exhausted: beyond being at the end of the rope, there wasn't much of the end left either. It was breezy, and I sat in the back yard watching a strand of my hair wafting back and forth in front of my face in a hypnotizing manner, and suddenly I was there. I was in the Desert, and I had gone away.

The Desert is silence. It is not literal silence, it is human silence. It is the absence of human BEING in a sense, you are no longer aware of having a self. We spend all our lives running away from silence, building lives and self-importance and our own version of "meaning", trying to make a noise. We are in mortal fear of silence, of the Desert, because we have been running from the Desert since before we were born. The Desert is the place where you meet God, and you can either meet that place with profound relief or with mortal terror. You can either dance with God or run from Him. Words are futile, it is emptiness, fullness, solitary and communion. The Desert cannot be categorized, it is beyond human existence, it is the opposite of it. There is a refreshing total absence of everything human. In the Desert, you are a spectator of God, you bear witness, but you are not. And yet you are with everything. You can only describe it with synonyms of emptiness, because it is empty of human evil and conceit.

And yet as a living being in the world, the Desert and the Cross have no conflict and in fact are inseparable. Jesus' words in the New Testament seem to partake equally in the Cross and the Desert: in practical love and in mysticism. I am not sure you can do the Cross without the Desert entirely, and if you could do the Desert without the Cross, you would no longer be a human being and no longer be in this world at all. The Desert informs the Cross, and gives it the power to do what it does.

God in the World is the Cross. God in Himself is the Desert. We are of both.

I've been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can't remember your name
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain 

-"Horse with No Name", the band America

Abandon Intellectual Security

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." 

-Rumi

In every religion, no matter what it is, the vast majority of its practitioners and especially its leaders want you in some sense to foreclose your accounts with God. That God is X,Y, and Z and not some other way. This is because a book or some other authority tells you that it is. They may be well meaning in this, to give you commonly accepted bounds for your life. What they are not doing, however, is bringing you closer to God.

To desire absolute security in your knowledge of God, is to obstruct God's will in creating in you what He wills to create. I do not say you should abandon security in knowing that He is, that is altogether different. Depending on your beliefs about God is not the same as depending on God. Security in knowing exactly how or what He thinks is neither possible nor beneficial. Limiting what God chooses to do in you is not wisdom but foolishness


It is possible to talk to converse with God, to interact with God, but it is never possible to know God completely. God is unknowable.  A God that was not beyond you, would not be God. It is possible to encounter God, to see His effect on your life, even to be swept up by Him, but not to know Him absolutely. Abandon logical thought where God is concerned, it is beneath Him.

A conversation requires that you neither stop listening nor stop talking altogether. Only the very wise can stop talking and just listen. If you stop listening however, it is no longer a conversation. In a sense, this is the story of our lives, the story of our conversation or non-conversation with God. And God may have a plot twist planned in this story that you know nothing of, and that you will miss, if you stop listening. If you stop being open to whatever it is that God wills to work in your life now. Maybe something wonderful, maybe something beyond wonderful, even if it is something you never thought of or planned or desired or willed.

"Knock, And He'll open the door
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything." 

-Rumi

Reason is fundamentally tied to self-will. We want reasons for God and we want God to be rational, because in so doing we take something wildly out of our control and think to put it under our own control. We have not thereby controlled God at all of course, we have deflected our primordial desire for God into a safe useful neutered container so that we can be rid of it. We have been sidetracked, if our desire was for God at all. The way to God is not control, it is surrender. Surrender, that He may recreate you. Surrender yourself, your will, your reason. God is not doing comfy, God is not doing secure and stable, God is not doing conformity, God is doing BLOW YOUR MIND. God is doing bliss. God is doing beyond your understanding.

This is the powderkeg that it is every organized religion's job to contain, because the people in them aren't prepared for it and maybe don't want it. God is a danger that must be contained in safe, comfy and cozy forms. Remember this quote from Jesus?

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. 

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

“Woe to you, blind guides!

-Matthew 23:13-16

We can pretty much make a general rule, that whenever Jesus is talking about the Pharisees, he's not just talking about them. He's talking about religious leaders generally, whatever their religion happens to be. It pissed the Pharisees off so much, they had him killed.

It is not however fair to blame them. Just like in the economic marketplace, when nobody buys a product, it goes off the market. When people buy a lot of a product, it stays. People complain about the malaise in the Church these days and the decline of membership, but spiritual sterility is not accidental. As computer geeks like to say, it is not a bug: it's a feature.

Knowing God is not about having something to hang onto. It's about letting go. Letting go and listening.

The Bridge

This is not a typical post for this blog. It isn't really a post about God, not really. I would say more that God has put this message on my heart, for those who do not speak for themselves.

You know this bridge I am sure. It's world famous. It might conjure mental images of streetcars, fog, hilly steep streets, great food, or even Rice-A-Roni (which ran many ads featuring San Francisco streetcars when I was younger). It has appeared in many movies. It is an iconic emblem of San Francisco: The Golden Gate Bridge.

What it probably doesn't bring to mind, is that it is the number one location on Planet Earth for suicides. Not just in California, or the United States, but it is the number one location for suicides IN THE WHOLE WORLD. Even the Aokigahara suicide forest in Japan only takes second place to the Golden Gate Bridge.

And yet, despite decades of attempts to have it built, there is still no barrier to prevent people from jumping. The fence at the edge is only 4 feet high. Some argue that anyone who would commit suicide by jumping would do it anyway: they are wrong. Suicide is an acute threat: someone who is prevented from killing themselves in a 72 hour period of their worst risk is actually unlikely to do it at another time. Every minute of delay or inconvenience could save a life. The Golden Gate Bridge is like having a publicly accessible loaded handgun in a public place, where everyone knows it is there and anyone can use it at any time.

Many people who are having a suicidal crisis believe that nobody cares if they live or die. While that is not true of their family and friends, I am afraid it is true of the public at large. The reasons that the barrier has not been put up on the bridge as of yet boil down to issues of money and power. The bridge is a symbol of San Francisco, a contributing factor to the tourist economy. Almost any barrier will be less aesthetically pleasing than no barrier. The appearance of the bridge is a financial asset that people want to protect: lives lost are not really a concern since they are lost "voluntarily". People are also largely very unsympathetic to the depressed, as to the mentally ill in general. People raising funds on the street for a barrier are often accosted by people yelling "Jump! Jump!" and people throw soft drink cans at them. It's sickening.

And in fact there was no problem building a barrier partly on the Oakland side, because it overhung the land and people were dropping objects like bowling balls over the side. It was a public safety issue then. Assisting the emotionally distraught apparently is not a public safety issue.

So the people who think that the world is uncaring, that nobody cares, sadly for the most part they are right. There is still a huge stigma on mental illness in this country. Most people are very unsympathetic to the suicidal, to the point of even encouraging these extremely distraught individuals to end it all. One suicidal man wrote a suicide note saying that if only one person smiled at him as he went up the bridge, he wouldn't kill himself. Apparently, no one smiled. Most of the people who jumped, had a treatable mental illness. If there were a 72 hour virus that could kill you, but which was very much treatable, people would be urging people to get treatment and would be sympathetic to their situation. Towards people with a treatable mental illness that could end their life, however, there is often a great deal of hostility. Even hatred. Even in liberal San Francisco. A city where you can find groups that believe that pets should have human rights, isn't quite as enthusiastic about the human welfare of some human beings. We have removed stigmas about all sorts of things, even stigmas against gays and those with AIDS, but this stigma it seems, too few have the heart to fight to remove.

Anyone who wants to keep up with the barrier project, the link is http://www.ggbsuicidebarrier.org/

For anyone who is suicidal who might stumble across this page, I want to say this:

******************************************************************
DON'T DO IT, PLEASE. THIS IS ONLY A TEMPORARY AND TREATABLE CONDITION. YOU CAN GET HELP.

I know that it might feel like you are nobody and nothing, but that is a lie. You are in fact special. You can in fact make a difference for somebody else, just by being here. Don't buy into the lies that the World tries to sell you, to your detriment. You may not think or feel that there is a God, you may in fact be adamantly opposed to the idea, but I know there is one, and He doesn't want you to leave before you get to know Him. God loves you, and there are people who are sympathetic and know what you are going through. Find them, and Him. The results of suicide are tragic and permanent.
****************************************************



Suicide Crisis Hotline:
1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433)
1-800-TALK (1-800-273-8255)

The Will to Power

"The World is a will to power, and nothing besides."
-Nietzsche

In order to understand where our hope lies, we have to truly understand this reality. We have to understand that if truth, love, harmony and peace are our guides, hope in this world (but not necessarily hope for all those within) is irredeemably lost. Lost from the beginning, lost by design.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the poet laureate of the Will to Power. Many people do not like to read him and see in him a symbol of evil, but this is mostly because he tells them a terrible truth (about this world anyway) that they do not want to hear. While Nietzsche thought of the will to truth as a variety of the will to power, in fact those who are the most interested in power hate the truth because it undermines their power. With this in mind, lets hear a few more words from him:

"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on"

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §636

Every living thing, in other words, strives to be God. Not to follow, love or obey God, but to be itself God. This process is by no means limited to human beings, but is implicit in every living thing. The first woodpecker with a beak suitable for drilling wood, its beak gave it a power over the grubs living in the wood and so it prospered over its neighbors that were without that power. The first bacterium that was able to eat its neighbor, extended its power over that neighbor and assimilated its material for itself. Human beings developed tools, to do what their weak bodies could not do. Because part of their success depended on cooperation and because of the advent of language, human beings became much more subtle in their methods of obtaining power, and power became much more dangerous. They used and twisted language to gain power over others. Their knowledge gave them power over the atom, allowed them to mitigate space and time, made them lords over all other living beings. The Will to Power didn't start with them, they simply took it to its logical conclusion.

But like Sauron's One Ring in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, power corrupts all, even those who say they want to use it for good. The nuclear power plants that we build to supply us with bountiful power in electrical form, are subject to disaster and poison the land and sea. Political power leads to war and destruction. Power over the ecology leads to ecological disaster. Power over men destroys mens lives and the souls of the ones who wields that power. Physically, power gives life: spiritually, power destroys life. And in the end, this massive all-encompassing Will to Power, is a plan destined to fail. Even if humans become immune to old age, extend their power over the stars themselves, become like gods, their end is unavoidable. Eventually the stars will grow dim and cold. Eventually the Universe and Power itself will die.

And yet to live here and now is to compromise with power, even to get what we need to keep surviving is part of that all-embracing Will to Power. To eat is power, even to breathe is power. Life itself in this world is a will to power. This is part of our nature, our original sin. The best thing we can do is to know this will to power for what it really is, to use it only when we must, to shed the light of God on the darkened world and in our own minds, to uproot the lies of power. In this, perhaps in this alone, Nietzsche was less than honest: his religious upbringing led to his thirst for truth (such as it was). The will to power only allows that truth that extends its power: shedding light on power itself undermines power. Human power hates the light, and lives in the darkness of lies and half-truths where it can work its evil will undetected.

Our bodies are slaves to power by birth. I believe our souls need not be.

We know that the Law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the Law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

-Romans 7:14-20

Culture of Death

There comes a time when you can no longer escape from the things you've done. And sometimes, often, what you do can never be undone. Until another heaven and earth comes to pass, that wrong can never be corrected. And we, human beings, are carrying forward such a burden of wrongs that it seems impossible that they will ever be righted. And they may never be in this world. The world grows dimmer, its burden of sin grows greater, as we shuffle towards some ignoble denouement. Enlightenment grows harder; ignorance easier. Truth and goodness are seen as weakness; lies and evil are considered strength.

What sparked today's post was a story I heard from someone I did not know, and I apologize if he ever sees this, but considering these issues are important to all of us. Important for the whole human race to consider. His teenage daughter put a pistol in her mouth and shot herself. He, the father, was apparently on the scene quickly and saw that the girl was choking on her own blood, so he tried to siphon the blood out of her airway with a rubber tube and his own mouth, spitting out blood and tissue, while waiting for the paramedics to arrive. She died sometime later, they took her off the respirator. Can you imagine, if you had been that father?

This story disturbed me so much, I felt I had to get to the bottom of why it disturbed me so much. I mean, sure, the story is disturbing in its own right, but it is not like I don't know that people get killed or kill themselves every day. I guess what disturbed me most, was the great ease and speed with which it was possible to end life. Filling out your taxes, drinking a cup of coffee, brushing your teeth, driving to work, most everything takes time. Handgun-initiated death, however, is instantaneous. As is bomb-induced death, machinegun-induced death, and all the other forms of death which are so prevalent and convenient. It is not necessarily so that the death itself is immediate, maybe it would take days, but the action of killing is instant.

And the worldwide culture of convenient murder, of a 7-11 store of instant mayhem, is an equal opportunity employer. Even those who invented the terms "culture of death" and "culture of life" are very selective in their use of those terms. The American Evangelicals who are so keen to save the unborn, and I think rightly so, are not quite as keen to limit firearms. In fact, they are dead set against it. Firearms in the home are much more likely to be used against a family member, than against anyone else. The father of the unfortunate girl I alluded to above, quite likely bought the pistol for "home defense" that his daughter used to end her life. These evangelicals are not so keen to protect the lives of those subject to the death penalty. A really "pro-life" philosophy would seek to protect all life, not simply the lives of a favored group. Anything less is merely politics, not ethics.

Those of a more liberal bent are quite ready to play God and end the life of the unborn, as long as the lives of the born are made supposedly more secure by gun control and abolishing the death penalty. Everyone looks to their own interests and not at what is right. And everyone doing this, for thousands of years, brings this world to its current state. A state of constant warfare, especially of more powerful nations against less powerful ones. A state where our abuse of the natural world threatens to disrupt millions of lives, with global warming and environmental degradation, massive oil spills and melting reactors. A Darwinian social condition where the ties that bind people together in brotherhood are overwhelmed by the economic war of man against man, leaving everyone isolated, leaving the least fortunate abandoned. A culture of artificiality, where important values are disregarded and artificial values revered. A condition where money and power are our true gods; pain, dehumanization and death their appointed sacrifices; and truth and goodness are either unknown or derided.

What had disturbed me so greatly is the stark dominance of evil, the enormity of it. The monumentality of evil, the degree to which the world has already been lost. There is no white-hatted cavalry coming over the hill at the last minute to save us from ourselves. How quick is judgement and murder, and how slow is healing and forgiveness.

And I knew this all along, and yet it still surprised me.

Sufi Poetry Part 2

A Palestinian Dervish, 1913

In the dead of night, a Sufi began to weep.
He said, "This world is like a closed coffin, in which
We are shut and in which, through our ignorance,
We spend our lives in folly and desolation.
When Death comes to open the lid of the coffin,
Each one who has wings will fly off to Eternity,
But those without will remain locked in the coffin.
So, my friends, before the lid of this coffin is taken off,
Do all you can to become a bird of the Way to God;
Do all you can to develop your wings and your feathers."

-Farid ud Din Attar, translation by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut - 'Perfume of the Desert'




The clouds gave my soul an idea
So I pawned my gills
And rose like a winged diamond

Ever trying to be near
More love, more love
Like you.

-Hafiz - “The Gift” – translation by Daniel Ladinsky




Hidden behind the veil of mystery, Beauty is eternally free from the slightest stain of imperfection. From the atoms of the world, He created a multitude of mirrors; into each one of them He cast the image of His Face; to the awakened eye, anything that appears beautiful is only a reflection of that Face.

Now that you have seen the reflection, hurry to its Source; in that primordial Light the reflection vanishes completely. Do not linger far from that primal Source; when the reflection fades, you will be lost in darkness. The reflection is as transient as the smile of a rose; if you want permanence, turn towards the Source; if you want fidelity, look to the Mine of faithfulness. Why tear your soul apart over something here one moment and gone the next?

-Jami, translation by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut - 'Perfume of the Desert'




The Jesus of your spirit is inside you now.
Ask that one for help, but don't ask for body-things...

Don't ask Moses for provisions
that you can get from Pharaoh.

Don't worry so much about livelihood.
Your livelihood will turn out as it should.
Be constantly occupied instead
with listening to God.

-Rumi, Mathnawi II:450-454




Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with a thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

-Rumi - The Essential Rumi - Coleman Barks




Don't speak of your suffering -- He is speaking.
Don't look for Him everywhere -- He's looking for you.

An ant's foot touches a leaf, He senses it;
A pebble shifts in a streambed, He knows it.

If there's a worm hidden deep in a rock,
He'll know its body, tinier than an atom,

The sound of its praise, its secret ecstasy --
All this He knows by divine knowing.

He has given the tiniest worm its food;
He has opened to you the Way of the Holy Ones.

-Sanai




'The Puzzle'

Someone who keeps aloof from suffering
is not a lover. I choose your love
above all else. As for wealth
if that comes, or goes, so be it.
Wealth and love inhabit separate worlds.

But as long as you live here inside me,
I cannot say that I am suffering.

-Sanai, translation by Coleman Barks - 'Persian Poems'



'The Beauty of Oneness'

Any eye filled with the vision of this world
cannot see the attributes of the Hereafter,
Any eye filled with the attributes of the Hereafter
would be deprived of the Beauty of Oneness.

-Sheikh Ansari - Kashf al_Asrar, Vol. 7, p. 511 - 'Maqulat-o Andarz-ha - Sayings and Advice' - A.G. Farhadi




Rabia was once asked, "How did you attain that which you have attained?"
"By often praying, 'I take refuge in You, O God, from everything that distracts me from You, and from every obstacle that prevents me from reaching You.'"

-Rabi´a al-Adawiyya, translation by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut - 'Perfume of the Desert'




In love, nothing exists between heart and heart.
Speech is born out of longing,
True description from the real taste.
The one who tastes, knows;
the one who explains, lies.
How can you describe the true form of Something
In whose presence you are blotted out?
And in whose being you still exist?
And who lives as a sign for your journey?

-Rabia al-Adawiyya




I have two ways of loving You:
A selfish one
And another way that is worthy of You.
In my selfish love, I remember You and You alone.
In that other love, You lift the veil
And let me feast my eyes on Your Living Face.

-Rabi´a al-Adawiyya. Doorkeeper of the heart:versions of Rabia. Trans. Charles Upton




The source of my suffering and loneliness is deep in my heart.
This is a disease no doctor can cure.
Only Union with the Friend (God) can cure it.

-Rabi´a al-Adawiyya, translation by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut - 'Perfume of the Desert'




I have made You the Companion of my heart.
But my body is available to those who desire its company,
And my body is friendly toward its guest,
But the Beloved of my heart is the guest of my soul.

-Rabi´a al-Adawiyya translation by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut - 'Perfume of the Desert'




If you are seeking closeness to the Beloved,
love everyone.
Whether in their presence or absence,
see only their good.
If you want to be as clear and refreshing as
the breath of the morning breeze,
like the sun, have nothing but warmth and light
for everyone.

-Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir - 'Nobody, Son of Nobody' - Vraje Abramian




Beloved, show me the way out of this prison.
Make me needless of both worlds.
Pray, erase from mind all
that is not You.

Have mercy Beloved,
though I am nothing but forgetfulness,
You are the essence of forgiveness.
Make me needless of all but You.

-Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil Kheir - "Nobody, Son of Nobody" - Vraje Abramian




Piousness and the path of love
are two different roads.
Love is the fire that burns both belief
and non-belief.
Those who practice Love have neither
religion nor caste.

-Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil Kheir - "Nobody, Son of Nobody" - Vraje Abramian




Let sorrowful longing dwell in your heart,
never give up, never losing hope.
The Beloved says, "The broken ones are My darlings."
Crush your heart, be broken.

-Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil Kheir - "Nobody, Son of Nobody" - Vraje Abramian




If you do not give up the crowds
you won't find your way to Oneness.
If you do not drop your self
you won't find your true worth.
If you do not offer all you
have to the Beloved,
you will live this life free of that
pain which makes it worth living.

-Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil Kheir - "Nobody, Son of Nobody" - Vraje Abramian




All that is left
to us by tradition
is mere words.

It is up to us
to find out what they mean.

-ibn al-`Arabi, Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, in The Mystics of Islam,
translated by Reynold A Nicholson





When my Beloved appears, With what eye do I see Him?
With His eye, not with mine, For none sees Him except Himself.

-ibn al-`Arabi, Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, in The Mystics of Islam, translated by Reynold A Nicholson




The one who knows becomes perfect only when
all else is removed from in-between him and the Friend.
Either he remains or the Friend.

-Moinuddin Chishti

Sufi Poetry Part 1

Dervishes spinning near Rumi's tomb, Turkey

So long as we do not die to ourselves,
and so long as we identify with someone or something,
we shall never be free.
The spiritual way is not for those wrapped up in exterior life.

- Farid ud Din Attar

It is an interesting paradox that perhaps the most exoteric and legalistic religion on Earth (and the religion with the fewest redeeming features in my opinion), also has some of the most vibrant and widespread esoteric traditions of any religion. I am speaking here of the Sufis. Just about the only places on Earth where you will actually see Muslims and Hindus worshiping God together in the same place, are the tombs of the Sufi saints and poets. It may be to their credit that the Sufis are currently persecuted in many countries in the Muslim world, including even in Turkey where Sufism is still technically illegal, and in Iran where there is a massive government campaign against the Sufis, including the imprisonment or execution of their members and the destruction of their tombs, places of worship and so on.

If you remember the history of Islamic expansion though, it is perhaps not so remarkable that the Sufis arose in Islam. When the Muslims conquered Persia in 651 AD, they invaded an area that was the homeland of Zoroastrianism and of the Manicheans, who were non-Christian gnostics. Much of the previous religious practice of the inhabitants most likely went under cover, adopting an externally Islamic guise. When the Ottomans conquered the Byzantine empire, they conquered an area that was home both to Christian gnostics and mystics and also to Manicheans.



Manichean priests writing at their desks. Note similarity between the caps of the
dervishes in the picture at top with the headgear of these Manichean priests.
Probably coincidental but interesting nonetheless.

The status of Sufism both within and without Islam is subject to debate, with some Muslims saying that the Sufis are not Muslim, and some Westerners saying that they are part of a mystical strain that predates Islam. Most Sufis though place themselves firmly within the Islamic tradition, though in contrast to mainline Islam they are noted for their humanity and tolerance.

The most visible aspect of Sufism, and the aspect that most Sufis would probably say is the least important, is their tendency to spin. ;) This practice derives from the tale that Rumi, the great Sufi poet, started spinning spontaneously upon achieving enlightenment.





Sufis like all mystics properly understood, are non-literal. Which is to say, that they believe that what they have to teach is not susceptible to direct literal exposition, unlike, say, car mechanics or computer repair which in order to exist at all, must be explicable in language. Every mystical tradition has a different way of dealing with this. For example in the case of the Buddhist scripture The Diamond Sutra, the Buddha will go ahead and say something intended to be taken semi-literally, or "taken seriously", but preface it with an exposition of how unreal it is to say that words refer to real things. ;) Others use language while emphasizing that the language is not where "it is at." The 2500+ year old Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) uses a sort of prose poetry. For the Sufis, poetry is their main medium of expression. The most revered places of Sufi worship are the tombs of their poets.

Now that I have gotten the introduction out of the way, next up is the actual Sufi poetry itself.

The shadow of His wings

You are my God
I seek after no other
My whole being is full of longing
I thirst for you in a dry and desert land
where there is no water.

I have seen you in the high place
and have seen Your glory
Compared to the Beloved, life is nothing

In the restless nights I remember You.
As I toss and turn I think of You.
Because You are the heart of my heart
I sing in the shadow of Your wings

-Psalm 63, respoken in my own words
.
.
.
.
.
.

The Hereafter Here

We have a language for describing common human experience. When I say the words "happy", or "sad", or "peaceful", or "suspicious", you feel like you know exactly what that feels like without ever having been inside my head. By virtue of being human, you know what these feel like.

Religious experience is different from that. For starters, not everyone even has religious experiences. Some have them so rarely that they count them as anomalous malfunctions of the otherwise smoothly operating mind. Others might have them but not recognize them as such. So you may say, there aren't words for that experience because it is uncommon. It is unclear to some extent what experience the terms "religious experience" might refer to, or it might refer to many different things.

It is much more than that, however. No matter how much religious experience is part of your life, every time it is to some extent new. When something is completely new, there is no possibility that language already exists for it, since the event is prior to finding words for the event. An event has to be common, identifiable and reproducible, before there can be words for it.

Think about the most significant conversation you ever had, with the most interesting person you ever met. Did you feel like new worlds were continually unfolding before you? Interacting with God is a continual unfolding, and unlike with people, there is never a point at which there is no more to unfold. The revelation constantly regenerates, it is always new. Even if the experience were to last an hour, a day, 100 years, or 1000 kalpas, it would be continually new, because its source is inexhaustible. It's source is also outside time, so it is not that it is new in time and later it would not be new. It is new inherently, although all religious experience shares its source and so they all have the same subject, as it were. But these are all words. The loved one looks into the eyes of his beloved, and time stops. How much more, when the beloved is God?

I often speak of the world as a trap we have to escape from, and so my focus is often on not coming back. Not reincarnating here. And I do think that is important, but how could we achieve that if not by experiencing God here and now? So the distinction between hereafter and here are not as absolute as we might think they are. We have to already be walking the path out of the World while we are in it, in order to keep walking it after.

Clarification

You may notice that I don't have comments enabled on my blog. That is not because I don't want to hear from my real readers, my proper readers, I think that would be lovely. Unfortunately, since my real readers are a miniscule minority of the human population, I think that my comments are unlikely to be used for that purpose, so I have turned them off.

I thought I sort of covered this in a previous blog post, but maybe not, so I am going to clarify. I am not interested in debating anyone or converting anyone to my point of view. And unless you are one of that miniscule minority, I am frankly not interested in what you have to say about what I write. I have heard those words my whole life. It speaks with many voices, but always says the same thing. I hear its droning all day long.

Would that there were someone who would speak to me with other voices, I would cherish that. But since there is not, I will be that other voice for you, my real reader.






Consider me a book on your bookshelf. If you want to read the book, you pick it up and read it. If you don't want to read it, it stays on the shelf, or in the trash bin. You don't argue with the book, you read it or not. Debate is overrated.

The difference between this blog and a book is, book publishers have to publish books that they believe will be read by enough people to cover the costs of publication and give them a profit. In my case, if only one person believes that what I wrote here has value to them, that is sufficient reason for me to continue writing it. I am writing it for you, that one person, or two. For everyone else, I can almost guarantee that they won't like what I am writing, because it was not written for them. I don't say they need to hear what I am saying, it is their choice to make. As it is my choice not to bother to debate them.

Meno's Loop

Help is available.

"Let me help". A hundred years or so from now, I believe,
a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme.
He'll recommend those three words even over "I love you."

-Star Trek TOS, City on the Edge of Forever

In Plato's dialogue Meno, Plato's old teacher Socrates is challenged by Meno with what has become known as the sophistic paradox, or the paradox of knowledge:

Meno: And how are you going to search for [the nature of virtue] when you don't know at all what it is, Socrates? Which of all the things you don't know will you set up as target for your search? And even if you actually come across it, how will you know that it is that thing which you don't know?

Meno is saying that you have to know about virtue already in order to discover virtue. If you don't know anything about it, you won't recognize it even if you are staring it in the face. Conversely, if you already know about it, you don't need to find out about it. This is called the Paradox of Knowledge.

In response, Plato (or Socrates) develops his concept of anamnesis. He says that individuals are reincarnated, but before they come back to the world (and this is part of the larger Greek mythology), they are somehow compelled to forget what they have learned. In Greek mythology, souls drink from the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, before they return to this world. So for Plato/Socrates, learning is not so much the acquisition of new knowledge, as the remembering of knowledge you already have in some sense, but forgot.

While Plato might have a point, it begs the question of how the knowledge ever got into anyone's head to begin with. At some point, someone has to know something they never knew before, and that no past life of theirs ever knew either. Of course, Meno's paradox is a false dichotomy. We can know enough to know that we don't know as much as we would like about something, and we go seek that knowledge from someone who does know more. Happens all the time.

And yet, in a larger sense we can very easily get stuck in Meno's paradox. We know what we know, and what we know shapes what we can know. Certainly, people willfully choose only to believe what they want to believe; only learn what they already think they know. Meno's Loop, as I would like to call it, threatens to enclose everyone.

In spiritual matters, the only way to break Meno's Loop is to realize that you don't know what you need to know. That you need help. You have to realize that you don't have the answer, and you have to realize that on your own you will never have the answer.

You have to realize that you yourself don't have the resources that you need, and open yourself to help from above. The information I am speaking of is not information from this world. Information from this world can help a great deal, and people can help (and also hinder), but ultimately we need information from God or God's agents (angels) or something of that nature. We need help. We need to surrender to the fact that we need information that we ourselves cannot get to alone.

How do we ask for that help? In a way, the Christians have something to teach us in that regard:

"Dear God, I am a sinner. I have tried to run my own life and I have failed.
I have tried being in control of my life and I only screwed it up.
I turn my life over to you."

This kind of statement is very common in Christian circles, and it expresses a real truth. A truth that Christians themselves far too often fail to heed. As long as your greatest good is your own self, you will always believe what the Self wants you to believe, and there will be no room for God's truth. You will be too full of your own truth, to see the truth. You have to irrevocably give up on the idea that you can save yourself by your own unaided efforts, from the fate you are in. You have to surrender yourself to something higher. You have to find a God outside of your default god, which is the Self. Otherwise you will be thoroughly trapped in Meno's Loop.

After that, you can get help. Knowledge from outside yourself, knowledge from outside this world. Knowledge to one day free yourself from the trap of this world.

I don't know exactly how that help works. What I do know, is that there is help.

Who is God? Why are we here?

God is absolutely, unconquerably, supernally, good, true, beautiful and loving.

Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon;
and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated
and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.
-Book of Revelation

What is God, to us? While a lot of people will deny this, God is everything that makes existence in this place remotely meaningful. God is not limited to being that, he is not only that which gives us meaning, but without God you might as well exchange the Sun for a black hole. God is all meaning, all good, all truth, all real beauty (beauty in itself not beauty of appearance), all love. God is that which endows meaning to existence, without which we are merely absurd monsters, or machines without a valid function. A reality without God would be a reality that morally ought not to exist. It would be suffering without purpose, a cosmic mistake. God is radiantly, absolutely, superlatively without shadow, without evil, without lies, without wrath. God is perfectly absolutely good. God does not get mad, God does not hate, God does not judge, God does not strike anyone down or cause any bad to happen to any being. We do that.

And yet the three major Abrahamic religions portray a God that is implicated in some pretty seriously heavy shit. First off, he is directly responsible for creating this world, a place full of horror, fear, death and suffering. He wiped out the vast majority of the human race in a flood, making God directly responsible for one of the most appalling genocides in human history. He commanded Moses and his successor Joshua to perpetrate what can only be described as crimes against humanity, including the murder of defenseless women and the rape of girl children. Moses bears more resemblance to Pol Pot than to a prophet. The Abrahamic God supposedly smites people pretty regularly. Last but not least, there is hell. A place where the Abrahamic God demonstrates His extreme vindictiveness. Even the Inquisition only tortured people over a limited time period. The Abrahamic God does much better: you can be tortured f o r e v e r. This in itself is proof enough that the spoiled monster that is the Abrahamic God is not worthy of being called God. Abraham's god may very well be the chief of all devils, but he is not God.

What all religions have to address in one form or another, is why the perfectly good God allows this extremely messed up world. The Abrahamic religions only give lip service to this concern: "why is it this way? You did it." Which is to say, Adam and Eve did it, but God holds you responsible. It is like a parent with an untidy child saying, "it's your mess junior, clean it up!" Except of course this mess is on a planetary scale, committed by 2 illiterate naked people who would not have been able to write their own names, had paper and pencil even existed. Yet we are all somehow responsible. How members of Abrahamic religions can even believe that there was an Adam and Eve in this day and age is beyond me, and yet their explanation for why God allows suffering absolutely hinges on it.

Buddhism doesn't even touch this issue at all. Nowhere does the Buddha speculate on why existence is suffering. He doesn't even look at the problem. How did things get so screwed up to begin with? He just took it as a given that things suck, and went on from there. As with everything, Buddhism is very practical and analgesic in focus: it only cares about making the pain go away, not why it is there. Why the world is full of suffering was never in the scope of its interest.

And make no mistake, this world doesn't just have some random suffering here and there. It runs off of suffering. Suffering is part of the operating system of existence, the screaming gasoline in the engine of Life. Not just suffering of human beings, but of all creatures capable of feeling pain.

I think this world exists in the way that it does, because the creation of something extremely important and good created the possibility for it existing, and that thing was so very important that it was worth allowing a world full of suffering to exist, in order that this wonderful thing would exist. What was that thing that was so important that its existence took precedence over the existence of all the suffering in this world?
.
.
.
.
.
.
Souls.
.
.
.
.
.
.
An automaton has no soul. It cannot make its own decisions. You cannot love it, nor can it ever really love you. A soul on the other hand is sort of like a micro-god, a tiny piece of God. With souls comes a terrible possibility though, the possibility that you would go your own way. The possibility that you would be god to yourself, instead of loving the real God.

The first ensouled being that went its own way, might not have been a human being. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, there is a war in heaven and some of the angels went their own way (became god to themselves) and others didn't. Curiously, there is mentioned very little connection between the fall of the angels and the fall of Man, as if they were unrelated facts. The Serpent in the Garden of Eden was never referred to as other than just that; a snake, not a fallen angel. To the Gnostics, these fallen angels (Archons) are directly responsible for the existence of the Creation. The chief Archon, called the Demiurge, created the World which we subsequently became trapped in (or our wayward souls voluntarily entered). Not only that, but they believe that the god of the Old Testament and of Islam is the Demiurge. Which would explain some of his aberrant behavior.

Whether the universe exists because the Archons made it, or for some other reason, the very existence of souls entails the possibility of their (hopefully temporary) fall into ignorance and evil. What was the greater good for which God was willing to risk the existence of this suffering world? We are. God wanted us to exist, and implicit in our existence is the possibility that this place would exist.

This world is the only hell that exists, and we only stay here until we can break our addiction to it and realize who God is. In the meantime, we are subject to the demonic rulers of this realm, whether those rulers are the gnostic Archons or our own evil will, desires and cravings.

.

Hymn of the Pearl

Lovely, truly lovely. The Hymn of the Pearl or Hymn of the Soul is from the gnostic text Acts of Thomas. I would like to memorize the abridged version of it sometime, the full version is rather longer.
.
.
.

selfworld

Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.

-Henry Van Dyke, The Prison and the Angel (Poem)



For whoever wants to save their life will lose it,
but whoever loses their life for me will save it.

-Luke 9:24

This is a long post but an important one, please bear with me.

Psychologists think of the "self" as a structure of human psychology. Others think of their "selves" as their whole being, body and mind. Some people speak of inner selves, outer selves, and even multiple selves. These are individual trees in a much larger forest.

Self is the fundamental operating system of all life on Earth. It is the software of life. The cell is hardware, DNA is hardware designed to store information. The information itself, how that information is encoded on the DNA, is what makes you different from a cow, a lamb, or an elephant; and different from every other human being on Earth. This system is the underlying process of this stage of existence, which I call the Selfworld.

Now, by self I most specifically do not mean soul. Self does not have anything to do with soul, self is information. Information is an interesting and even mysterious substance sometimes, but it pertains to this world. Nevertheless, people mistake selves for souls all the time, because they are dominated by the selfworld, which is centered on selves.

"The Selfworld is a system, Neo...."

If you will excuse a computer simile, the information encoded in DNA is like the ROM (Read Only Memory) of our systems, in this case containing the operating system. What we normally call the Self, the psychological self, is merely the contents of our RAM (Random Access Memory), our brains. When the computer is turned off, the information stored in RAM goes away unless it is stored in a more permanent external memory. For computers, that might be a hard drive or other external media. For humans, this external memory is the knowledge stored in books, on the internet, in computers and elsewhere. When we die, what we think of as our “selves” may go away, but the instructions encoded in DNA continue on, changing slightly with each new generation.

The dominance of this Self is so great, that very often one animal will fight another of its own kind, a creature that is 99.9% identical to it, for the right to pass on that .1% difference. It is willing to kill the other creature, its genetic brother. It is willing to be killed. Why? DNA demands it. The Self demands it. The story and drama of life on Earth is pretty much the story of each species, defined by the information in DNA, and each individual of that species, attempting to dominate and survive at the expense of other individuals and species.

I am not bringing all this up because I am particularly interested in wild moose butting heads in some forest somewhere. The point of all this is to understand us.

We ourselves are very ready to subject creatures that are 95% genetically identical to us to grossly inhumane conditions for our own food. The conditions that prevail in factory farms for many of the creatures we eat, make Dachau look like a kiddie park. We don't usually have too many qualms about it (with some notable exceptions) because, well, they aren't us. They aren't even human. We hear the voice of the Self, and close out compassion for creatures who feel fear and pain much like we do. I am not done yet however.

We subject creatures that are 98% genetically identical to us (primates) to medical experiments because, well, the corporations want the results and they are not us. They are not human so their lives do not matter. But this is not yet the kicker.

We wage wars with other human beings, 99.9 percent genetically identical to us, by any count our brothers, because they are another race of human being than us. Or even just a different national origin. Or they speak a different language or worship a different God.

Lest you think that genetics have a monopoly on this, the short-term memory banks of Self do even more terrible things. We wage war on people who have pretty much the same culture, the same color of skin even, because they think differently than us. Maybe even we just think they think differently from us. The most terrible wars in history were between groups of people who were culturally very similar. We want something, they stand in our way.

We are very ready to think of other human beings as sub-human beings, as a prelude to killing them. The Nazis were all-time champions of this. They killed people who were born German, who for the most part looked like Germans, who spoke German. Yet these Germans were subhuman scum that had to be exterminated. If the people responsible had to face the truth, that these were Germans and human beings just like them, it would get in the way of what they wanted to do. What they wanted to do, no matter how many innocents would be killed.

Why do we do it? Because we value that .01% difference in us, completely and totally out of all proportion. It may not even be a genetic difference worth mentioning, it may be a difference in the information in our heads. In other words, we are so dominated by our Selves, that we would do anything, any horror, and justify it until doomsday. We would rather see thousands die, than disadvantage ourselves by even a tiny amount. It has happened time and time again.

We would rather see 100,000 foreigners die horrible deaths
rather than miss our morning tea.

We justify these things by twisting the language, among other things; human language can become very malleable when self-interest is involved. Here is one example - I am not talking about politics here, I am talking about human beings. We invaded Iraq to give the Iraqi people “freedom”. Freedom is one of the most abused of these words in the United States, used to justify American self-interest, or rather the self-interest of those who control powerful commercial entities in the United States.

So lets see. Approximately 100,000 civilians have died in the Iraq War, according to most sources, and all of them are directly or indirectly tied to the presence of US forces in that country. So One Hundred THOUSAND people were deprived of the freedom to continue living, in the dubious hope that Iraq might some day be a “free” country?? And what kind of “free country” are we talking about here? Is America a free country?

No, the kind of freedom meant here is the freedom of US corporations to access Iraqi markets and resources. This is the kind of perversion of language that takes place, when the Self gets involved.

Again, I have no interest in talking politics whatsoever. My point is that people will go to the greatest extremes, they will kill, they will mangle the language and their own minds, they will even risk death, for this “Self”.

Before we take our leave of this little cavalcade of evil, we need to talk about the Milgram Experiment.

An experiment started in 1961 at Yale University, to see to what degree people would obey authority figures and ignore their own conscience. Basically, there was a person in charge of the experiment, a person (the teacher) who asks questions and administers electric shocks in response to wrong answers, and a person (the student) who was actually an actor in league with the experimenters who would act like he was being shocked at the appropriate times. The shocks would increase by 15 volt intervals up to a lethal 450 volts. As the voltage increased, the actor would pretend to be in more and more distress, complaining of a heart condition and finally beating on the walls and begging for mercy before falling completely silent after the supposedly fatal voltage was applied.

Every “teacher” did in fact show signs of great distress when applying the higher voltages, offering to refund the money they were paid, asked to go in the next room to check on the “student”, ect., but most elected not to disobey the experimenter. Most, 65% of them, elected to shock to death an innocent person rather than disobey the experimenter. Milgram summarized the experiment in a 1974 article:

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

This has been explained as a resistance to disobey an authority, but the matter is much deeper than that. The truth is, the participants were more willing to kill an innocent person, than they were to bring personal consequences on themselves. Even minor consequences, even if the only consequence is having to alter their own ideology or dissent from their peer group. Like I said in a previous paragraph, people will let others die rather than give up their morning tea, or disadvantage themselves in any significant way, as long as those persons are sufficiently different from themselves. To bring up the Iraq example, people will willingly submit to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians: overtly in the name of a “freedom” that has been emptied of all real meaning and distorted into a slogan; unconsciously for significantly less abstract reasons.

The Milgram experiment has been repeated many times, and always with essentially the same results. People are more willing to hurt other people than they are to resist peer pressure or authority, and more willing to hurt other people even in violation of the moral codes they think they believe in, than to question themselves and their actions. Further confirmation of this effect, if any were really needed, comes from the Abu Graib scandal. Ordinary people, reservists, not even regular military personnel, were willing to do the most atrocious things once they found themselves in an environment which approved of torture. Perhaps we can even think of examples from our own lives, when we did the wrong thing because we put the opinion of the group or avoidance of consequences above ethics. The only way to resist such things, is to be armed with knowledge about how easily they can occur. In other words, not to blindly believe the best about ourselves and other people, but to understand the very worst. The behavior of ordinary Germans under the Nazis was not some strange abberation, it was reprehensible but not at all incomprehensible. The Milgram experiment shows that the majority of average Americans, or Europeans, or anyone else under the same conditions, would do the same thing.

Here we come to the heart of the matter: if people will kill to avoid relatively mild consequences to themselves, what will they do to avoid truths they would rather ignore? What will they do to shore up belief systems that they (unconsciously perhaps) consider to be in their own best interests? Can anyone see the truth, so long as self-interest is so dominant?

This is the fact that we have to accept, going into this. For the vast majority of people, self-interest is a far more dominant motivation behind what they think and believe, than goodness or truth or any other such desire. Most people will defend their thoughts like a fortress. Some are even willing to kill for them.

It is important to emphasize the negative aspects of the selfworld, simply because most people are very much mired in it to the point of not even being able to see it. How you view it, very much depends on where you are in your journey into it or out of it. It is both a path and an obstacle. The selfworld is evil from the point of view of someone trying to counteract its negative capabilities. The selfworld is also the sphere in which we can evolve into something better.

I spoke earlier in the "Existence Loop" that some people will choose to return to the selfworld, return again and again to it. For them, it is what they want. The people I am really speaking to, are people who want out of it. To them, the selfworld must inevitably be viewed as evil. To say that it is evil in itself, is to say that are viewing it from a higher state of mind in some sense, and from that viewpoint, it is indeed evil. When the Gnostics said that matter and the world were inherently evil, that spoke more to their own state of spiritual evolution than to the world. Most people choose to return to the selfworld; for them it is much desired. Those like us who want to leave it, can find our way out.