Creating Your Landscape with Karma, Intention, and Ego

...let's dance

"Everything...is made by mind. If one speaks or acts with with a pure mind, happiness will follow..." 

 Buddha, The Dhammapada

In the course of our time here as our path takes us towards what some call self-realization, there is a kind of leveling of the landscape of our life, so to speak, as we get more and more accustomed to simply being alive and getting along. That which didn't kill us has not killed us – yet. When we look back at the past, the rough features of that daily existence, which at the time seemed so difficult to maneuver, the power of all those dramas we took part in unconsciously diminish and the landscape our road has taken us over seems to smooth out into a calm, even plain of being. Of what once was, back then. Just as the future arises unpredictably out of nothingness, the past simply returns to the uncreated, only popping up occasionally like a whack-a-mole when we need to re-learn the same lessons we've forgotten. 

 The landmarks left standing behind us are just the ruins of those "great dramas" that shaped us, that changed us. Their matter and mass blow away like sand castles in time-lapse photography. We intuitively understand our quantum reality, the way it builds and deconstructs – packets of energy and information that become real when they react with our consciousness, and one another. Nothing is actually solid. 

 Ahead, the landscape likewise appears even and smooth – except for potential obstacles arising that will only show up as difficult life-events if we invest them with too much of the wrong kind of energy, and turn them into monuments of future drama, future suffering. There are those inevitable sorrows and losses of life – the death of a pet; the loss of a romance; a career disappointment; the passing of a parent. But as we go on, we learn that we can avoid a lot of the difficulty in those obstacles by approaching them a different way, maybe with love this time. We can climb to the top of those monuments to past or potential dramas and put them into perspective. We can energize their becoming real with positivity.

Look out over the views behind and ahead of you, and notice that the landmarks on the geography of your past are the same shape and made of the same stuff as the potential obstacles that lay ahead. Become a geographical detective. What do those patterns mean, and where do they come from? Why are they always so familiar? You know you have built those forms out of potential energies, and going forward you know that you can strongly influence the way something comes about by focusing your energies on it. That's "The Secret."

Once you determine your patterns, you can build your life landscape based on the three great life factors: Karma, Intention, and Ego:

Karma is practically self-explanatory at this point, the average person's consciousness now being evolved enough to almost automatically understand that each soul labors towards it's inherent completion, and the cause and effect generated by one's life or lives determines what's needed to complete the lessons. There are things you need to fix, and things you need to build. Life is the result of cause and effect. You have to do something because you have to learn that. Your life sets itself up with certain conditions, the luck of the draw and the seeds that you plant, so to speak. Life doesn't happen to you, it happens for you. It's evidence of the spiritual evolution of our species that this formerly esoteric Eastern concept is now pretty well part of the global mainstream of thought. What goes around gets around.

Intention refers to the fact that we live in that thoroughly plastic, quantum world, where whatever you set the focus of your intention on, and follow the event stream of your life diligently and with passion, you can manifest out of the potentially limitless material field of being. The trick is that you have to show up, keep trying, and believe. There are greater powers at work than meet the eye, and they are quite capable of producing your wildest dream, just as you are quite capable of preventing it by your own resistance and negativity. Which leads to the last of the three, Ego.

Ego is simply the mechanism by which one remains fictitiously attached to the visible, superficial, material aspects of the world. It fears the underlying change, which is life. It's the false self that keeps you out of alignment with The Divine by convincing you that you're separate from it, often because you "don't deserve it," when you naturally deserve to manifest your dreams as much as anyone. If you can put this Ego (judgment and comparison) aside, you'll immediately develop insight to being. Using this insight, life will show you your karma; and then when you focus your intention on following your life, you can take short-cuts along your karma path simply because your soul is learning the lessons it requires for completion. Jung called it Individuation. Some of us tree-huggers call it finding yourself.

"Samsara, the transmigration of life, takes place in one's mind. Let one therefore keep the mind pure, for what a man thinks that he becomes."

 Maitri Upanishad 6. 24

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

Stick With the Love Group – "The Secret" To How It Saves Worlds

If you know me, you know I'm a pretty regular guy. I like baseball, and westerns, and swordfight movies. A big thick seitan steak, hot off the grill. Why, I even spit, occasionally. So why is it that, like some romantic schoolgirl, I always want to talk about Love? Well, it's because of what happened in here (he says, pointing to his heart).

In all of my very varied experiences, even to Hell and back, you might say, I have never, in all of my life, known a force to be even a fraction as powerful as Love. It's absolute. It's all-encompassing. Not only is it:  a) the purposeful power that animates every experience, interest, and expression of value in our lives;  b) the eternal, trans-dimensional quantum field of creation and communication; but it's even  c) the clearest, simplest solution to every misdirected ill and injury ever perpetrated on our planet (and beyond). Not bad, eh?

Think of your life (think of anyones life), and you'll find there isn't an episode of deep significance that wasn't created in the search to express Love – or in the struggle caused by a lack of it. Its presence, or absence is what drives, and has driven, every great accomplishment, and every sad passage in the roller coaster history of humanity. It's the truth of our lives – our families and friendships, art and culture, successful careers, unimaginable feats – all inspired by the search, or scarcity, of Love.

So what does that mean to us, really? It means you can quit overlooking the simple fact that Love is the foundation of everything. You can honestly acknowledge that solid bond in your heart, that unshakeable understanding that everything you do is really a means to find it, express it, experience it. Every encounter is an opportunity to engage, and depend on that energy. You can just start living that way.

"The love that you share is the only thing you need to know. It is the green place from which all good things grow and spread into every part of your life. That is where God lives and constantly cares for you, so that all your worries may disappear."

                                             Anne 

Do you believe in guardian angels, the spirits of your ancestors, or the Sweet Hereafter? Do you believe that by holding the focus of a dream in your heart, you can bring it into reality in your life? It doesn't matter, really, whether you believe those things or not, they're still real. If you need proof, if you want science, then you could consider the first law of thermodynamics – that energy is never lost, it only changes form. That's the energy of your ancestors' spirits, or the energy you put into making your dreams come true (hint: they're the same energy). Love is the source and channel of that creative focus; and the bridge between life and "death."

You can actually talk to your angels and ancestors – extra-dimensionally – but only if you've engaged them via the field of Love. Only if you believe in, and utilize the technology of the heart, that gives us access to that deep channel of communication, flowing through everything. Love provides the pathway to the light, like opening a gate, or like tuning it in, station-to-station. Carefully, too, Love can open the channel into the darkness, where curative mysteries lay suppressed – in which case, it is essential to be thoroughly grounded in Love, and use it as a kind of secure platform, or as a shield.

You can bring whatever you wish for, whatever you imagine, into being through Love – but not in the material way that usually leaps into mind. (There's a secret to "The Secret") You're not necessarily going to receive the obvious spoils of a material life (though they may come too), because you're not writing the story of your external life, you're forming the foundations of your inner life. You won't make a treasure appear by just thinking about it. Your most magical manifestations may not even be in a form you recognize, at first; you will have to get your material expectations out of the way. Listen to this lesson about how to use Love to get what you wish for from Krishna in The Bhagavad Gita, 7:21:

"When a person is devoted to something with complete faith, I unify [their] faith in that. Then, when [their] faith is completely unified, [they] gain the object of [their] devotion. In this way, every desire is fulfilled by me. Those whose understanding is small attain only transient satisfaction…"

Some people love the idea of something they want, then close their eyes, ball their fists, and try to will it into being – then resign themselves to disappointment when nothing comes of it. But that's not being devoted with Love. The real secret often lies in what a person already has. Love doesn't give them what they try to will into being, it has already given them the object of their deepest devotion. "The box you've been sitting on for so long actually contains your greatest treasure." Love is always providing purpose, and a deeper sanity and clarity, that empowers us to choose our path to fulfillment, in every moment. 

"None of the means employed...has a sixteenth part of the value of loving-kindness. Loving-kindness, which is freedom of the heart, absorbs them all; it glows, it shines, it blazes forth."

                                            The Buddha

And there is the solution to all the troubles of the world! The sanity and clarity that engaging the field of Love gives us, 'hidden' in plain sight, just beneath the layer of self-delusion that seems to be our deepest human [de]fault. In that clear light of Love's sanity, the insane elements of our destructive tendencies are revealed. With great wisdom and directness, Love segregates the 'evils' of willful ego, guiding each and every one of us to the proper actions we may take in our personal, and collective, lives.

For examples of the kind of boundaries Love can set, consider this: It is destructively insane to allow corporate interests to murder the most modestly powerful creatures of the world, pollinators like bees and butterflies; the base of the oceans food-chain, like krill and plankton. Love empowers you, personally, to refuse to allow it.

It is destructively insane to poison the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, when the solution is already viable and attainable. Love empowers you to support that solution, and reject the archaic (and criminal) motivations of a relatively small number of corporate profiteers.

It is insanity to continue to embrace the ignorance that limits our greatest potential – the recognition of our spiritual connection, and responsibility to our planet, and all of our fellow creatures. Love provides us the means to realize our sacred agreement – the dependence we share, and the real contributions we can make to the divine dynamic of this world, and any world we will ever inhabit.

So, when you want to make your dreams come true; or, when times get tough (and they will…), stick with the Love group – those with whom you may share the path of Love – for direction, protection, and your real life's purpose. 

"The deepest wisdom and power that Love can give you, lies in the energy you hold in your heart, and how you project it into your world." 

                                    Anne

Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

Why is Love So Hard to Find When It's Everywhere? Realizing the Obstacles We Create

The idea that Love is everywhere is enough of a challenge since everywhere you look there are terrible examples of "man's inhumanity to man."  But all that sadness really serves to demonstrate where Love isn't, so we are talking about the same thing, really.  It's not that Love isn't everywhere, it's that we are actively creating obstacles to it – in our big, collective unconsciousness ways, and then on a personal scale, in each of our own little heads. 

Why does it happen? Why do we tend to separate ourselves from that one beautiful thing we really want more than anything else? The answer is that we actually train ourselves to do it, a lot of the time completely unconsciously. It's a kind of mental self-sabotage that has a lot to do with our easiest to overlook, biggest challenge – the way we think.

When we train a dog, it's taken for granted that the most effective way to achieve success is through the classic Pavlovian model of conditioning, or Behavioristic approach of rewarding good behavior. Now, so that you don't get offended by my comparing you to a dog, I'll pick on myself. Let's pretend that I'm a dog:

A dog is (I am) hungry pretty much all the time. A tasty morsel to munch on always makes for a welcome repast – and I'm afraid I can personally reward myself that way all too easily. Especially with potato chips, and even when I haven't done anything to deserve it. The dog thinks he's going to eat when the bell rings, and then he eats when he can. With a human like me, on the other hand, when the bell rings, he may begin making elaborate, completely unnecessary justifications for eating the wrong thing at the wrong time. I mean I may do that. Woof.

My dog self, or I'll say my natural self, relates me to the world in a pretty simple, direct way; but my artificial self – my human ego – is almost always seeking some level of nonsensical self-enhancement, or unnecessary self-protection. Most of the time my ego is reacting in ways that were conditioned into me as a child, before I really had the awareness to realize that later on in life, those childhood self-preservation instincts may start working against me instead of for me.

 For example, I was raised in a very unsettled and insecure world, where adults sometimes behaved in inappropriate ways. As a result, I felt unprotected. I assumed a profound unfairness was at work in the world (because it was, in my world) – but that experience constructed obstacles to my ability to see the Love there. Obstacles my ego continues to habitually impose on my life, often with no reason whatsoever, if I let it – just out of habit.

It's my human ego that's being fed, rewarded by the comfort of habitual thought, and the feeling of being right – not my authentic, natural (spiritual) self. I end up reacting to the world subconsciously based on old,  warped childhood instincts. I respond to what I can see as "unfair" situations by automatically thinking that I need to enforce a sense of rightness, a proper sense of fairness in an unfair world, again and again. And, since our world tends to become what we think it is, my "unfair" world continually requires more of my ego reactions – my desire to control things I can't control. 

"As you think, so you are."  "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."                 

            The Buddha and Proverbs, 23:7 

So when that "bell" rings – a challenge, an affront, a desire – my ego begins to salivate. I can be sent into my irrational behavior over and over, until it's really the only thing I'm really good at. My human ego has built a perfect, very personal obstacle to Love again. So I'll go on and on, missing the point, missing the Love that's alive in everything. Or missing the opportunity to bring Love in where it's most needed.

In Hindu spiritual traditions, these obstacles are called samskaras, from sam meaning "intense," and kara from the root "to do." They're automatic thoughts. Thoughts that think themselves – automatically grounded in the psychic constructions of our earlier life experiences. Whatever we tend to resent, to brood about, whatever kicks up a compellingly dramatic reaction – fearful feelings of victimization or entitlement – those set off samskaras; unnecessary automatic thoughts that can, and will, define our lives. Thoughts that create our personalities, whether we like them or not.

I, for one, would rather be more like a faithful, loving dog than a willful, love-starved human...but how? The great teacher, Eknath Easwaran, compared samskaras to furrows, eroded out of our consciousness by habitual thoughts we let run like little streams. Resentments and desires that cut furrows deeper and deeper into our psychic ground. We have to re-route those streams, and the best way to do that is to start by becoming aware. By noticing how your thinking is following that same pattern that results in an uncomfortable feeling, even when we think we're right. That's the thinking that separates us from the Love that's alive in every body, and in every situation – if we can get out of our own way and allow it to arise.

There is fresh ground in each of our conciousnesses (and so in our collective culture) that we can divert those old streams of thinking towards. Thoughts of acceptance, tolerance, and Love that can gently erode and irrigate happier results in our own lives, and in everybody else's. As always, meditation is how we come to recognize those particular tributaries, and so put our natural, spiritual selves at the helm, heading downstream with the flow of Love.

"...at a deeper level of consciousness, we can learn to go against these conditioned ways of thinking and actually change ourselves from the inside out."

Eknath Easwaran, Essence of the Upanishads

The Selectivity of Religious Myth and the Resurrection of the Easter Bunny

At the time of the earliest stirrings of the philosophy that was to become Christianity there were numerous centers of nascent world religion, from the Gandhara region of India thru Asia Minor, Persia, and Greece, to Alexandria and Jerusalem – and other spots within and beyond the Roman Empire and the rest of the known, civilized world. To literate religious academics of the early Christian era, all of this knowledge was available. Christianity, like all religions, was not born in a vacuum.

You'll notice in the retellings of the Passion Play that Christians celebrate each Spring, as well as throughout the New Testament, there are plenty of references to the Pharisee sect of Hebraism, the proletariat and middle-class Jews of the time. The Sadducees, the bourgeois, aristocratic sect get very little airtime comparatively – despite making up most of the temple priesthood. Edited out of the story completely are the Essenes, which were not actually a single sect but instead a collection of differing gnostic beliefs grouped together generically.

Beyond their numbers, which were significant throughout the middle east at the time, the Essenes were the original Christians, eschewing sacrifice and materiality, living simple lives based in practices of healing and service. They were dedicated to cleanliness, to communal, all-inclusive dining, to the practices of foot washing, vegetarianism, and holistic herbal healing. Their "inns" and white robes were the inspiration for our present-day hostels and hospitals, and doctors' white coats. It's likely that the Jesus of mainstream Christianity was drawn from this model. 

Most sects labeled "Essene" fully embraced a more personal, inward, mystical path to the realization of a divine simplicity, and so were the foundation of the esoteric forms of Gnosticism and Kabbalistic practice. In some groups, Buddhism was very influential, and in fact "Theraputae" Essenism was likely one in the same as the Buddhist community located near Lake mareotis, outside of Alexandria (from Theraputta, sanskrit meaning "from the old ones"). Buddhism was alive throughout the region for hundreds of years prior to Christian mythology, and it's very important to note that the Buddha sat in the wilderness alone and was tempted by the devil, walked on water, fed the multitudes from a single basket, and drank at the well of an outsider (and more) 500 years before the Christ story came about.

It's very likely that the teacher Yeshua, whose philosophy – resurrected in the  discovery of very early pre-canonical scripture like The Gospel of Thomas – serves as the basis for the teachings of the Jesus of the canonical, Roman gospels.

The selectivity of Christian myth runs roughshod over much of what is actually known – as is the case with most inventions of organized religion. This is not limited only to religion, the same is true for organized historical dogma, organized cultural dogma, and organized social dogma. In a contemporary American context, for example, we have the assertion that Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union, or that John Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin; both nascent myths that aren't based in fact, but still canonized as historical truth by many. 

Likewise, American frontier identity was actually rooted in the genocide of the indigenous Americans, whose culture was, so to speak, crucified by "Rome." The positivity and popularity of much of contemporary American culture is based on the transcendent adaptations of African people held in slavery for hundreds of years. The implications of these truths are truly biblical, but not in the self-enhancing way traditional white male American historians would have us remember it.

So the suggestion that the Christian Passion Play is mythic, and was created in the centuries following the decline of Rome to serve political purposes by commandeering an authentically mystical path actually makes much more sense than the assumption of the canonical gospels as historical fact. The first big tip-off is the fact that the eventual authors of those gospels weren't actually named Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John – those were pseudonyms of journeymen writers of their day. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are you better duck.

More recently there are the examples of Mormonism, whose co-creator Joseph Smith is a proven plagiarist, philanderer, arsonist, and possibly worse – but not at all proven to be a prophetic witness to an early ancient American Judaic civilization; Scientology, whose inventor was unquestionably a hard-drinking, womanizing, egomaniacal science fiction writer – but highly questionable as an enlightened channel of godlike alien entities; and, going back a little further, Islam, the transcendent, mystical heart of which is regularly betrayed by random acts of violence. 

Sadly for true believers, the historical references to the actual existence of the Jesus of the canons is still limited to the scant testimonies of Pliny, Tacitus, and Flavius Josephus, whose less-than-second-hand accounts came well after the fact, and were subject to powerful political and cultural influence, and countless subsequent rewritings. The most compelling testimony of Josephus has been known to be a forgery for a long time now, while Judeo-Roman historians contemporary to the times, like Philo, never mention the man or events, despite having every reason to. Josephus, in all his authenticated accounts in fact, mentions at least twenty different people named Jesus.

Then what should we really be resurrecting today? If the religious establishment now neatly sequesters the whole of the ancient Essene world into the austere walls of the community at Qumran, and the timeless teachings of philosophers like Gautama and Yeshua are respectively redefined as platitudes and tragic morality plays, rather than as the radically effective calls to action they truly are, then clearly what requires resurrecting is the spirit of divinely shared consciousness that Aldous Huxley called the "Perennial Philosophy." 

"The All came forth from me and the All came into me. Split the wood, and I am there. Turn over the stone, and there you will find me."

The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 77  

It's forgivable human nature to transmute certain realities into conveniently avoidable practices, or for people suffering from the fearful manifestations of low self worth, greed, and delusional self-centeredness to act out in our shrinking world, but what we really need is to rebirth the elemental compassionate unity, the eternal springtime of human spiritual evolution alive in each Easter every day, if possible. That is the message continuously carried by the spirit of Yeshua (not to mention the Buddha, Krishna, Gandhi, et al).

We can all "sit in the wilderness" – take the inward path to realization of our shared being; "walk on water" – rise above and make foundational our psychic afflictions;  "feed the multitudes" – know that we have plenty with what we always have;  and "share water from the well" – understand the eternal that unifies us, regardless of our outward labels. The Jesus of the Christian Easter is purely a symbol for the real power for tranformation each of us carries within – all the time, not just in the Spring.

"Whoever seeks will find; whoever knocks from inside, it will open to them."

"When you bring forth that within you, then that will save you."

"What you are waiting for has already come, but you do not see it."

"Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me and I will become them and what was hidden from them will be revealed."

The Gospel of Thomas, 94, 70, 51, 108

Since I believe that we all only die to this world, and so resurrection is a simple, personal realization that we will all get to experience, is it possible that the spirit of the Easter Bunny could actually be a better shepherd? The brand we want to revive each Spring? Could that be a better metaphor than the image of a good man suffering – the gentle lapine, the playful, prolific, vegan creature of the woods and meadows? Could a bunny be smart and wise enough to easily share that level of consciousness? For the answer to these, and possibly other questions, I invite you to watch this video:

 http://www.dogwork.com/buhr9

Happy Easter 

Cheers & Blessings!

We Are All Plastic (In a Very Real Way...)

....................................................................we're all a little bit plastic

Now and then (when we're not being particularly kind) we might refer to a person as being "plastic," meaning that they don't seem to be very authentic, or that they're overly concerned with surface ap-pearances. While we usually mean it in a mildly derisive way, it's really an entirely accurate description, not of just some people, but of everyone, and in fact, of every thing too. As an adjective, as a con-cise description, the whole world is plastic.

It's plenty easy to see in ourselves, these crazy viscous, cellular bodies we ride around in are always changing. Regenerating, re-arranging, building up, breaking down. Aging. Ripening. Come to think of it, I'm getting pretty ripe myself. I'm being rearranged in ways I never really wanted.

"As you think, so you are." The Buddha

The truth is, that like most physical conditions and material cir-cumstances; even life events, attitudes, and emotional states, I can change my state of being. Mold it – like plastic. Our acceptance of this concept is obvious in the language we commonly use, usually when we describe the potential in things. You can "make something of yourself," or "make a mess of your life." You can make a promise to get in shape (promises, promises). No one has much of a problem with this concept of malleability, based on our focus, our intention, our possibilities, and of course, our actions. But what if we take a closer look, beneath that superficial sense of plasticity?

Look at a time-lapse film of a big city the next chance you get, and you'll see a constant flux of matter coming into the picture, coming into being, and then going out of it. Buildings pile up and wear down like sandcastles. People flock and file by, suddenly accumulate, and then vanish, like raindrops evaporating in the sun. Those were important places. They were important people. Where does it all come from, where does it all go?

Past mystics called it "the ether." Buddhists call it emptiness. A physicist might call it the Quantum, or Higgs Field. Whatever you call it, it is an ocean of invisible fluctuating energies from which and into which everything we see and know precipitates, takes form, and exists "here," at least for a little while until it returns back. I plan on doing that very thing myself.

"The fact that the mass of a particle is equivalent to a certain amount of energy means that the particle...has to be conceived as a dynamic pattern, a process involving the energy which manifests itself as the particle's mass."

Fritjof Capra

Before I really get personal with it, let's consider this plasticity on a geological time scale, like an archaeologist might. Over what seem to be great expanses of time in our perception, these energies manifest themselves in broad cultural movements, and massive re-arrangements of man-made stuff. A lot of people all suddenly seek and find the same solutions for their life needs, and they swarm, like those great, organic flocks of birds undulating through the sky. They get busy, like ants. The plastic surface of the planet evolves – waves of biospheric change spread, peeling over the Earth's surface, re-forming entire continents. For example, lots of people once lived in the green region that is now the Sahara Desert. Human actions are adding to these processes as we speak.

If we just allow our evolving consciousness to lift us to an adequate vantage point, where we can gain a perspective on this change, we can see ourselves not just as a part of it, but of even determining it through our participation. So our participation has direction, and creates our constantly shifting state of being. If we can manage this big mind, we can see the direction we want to be going collectively, and focus our own plasticity in accord. Now it's getting more personal.

Have you ever walked into a room or a space, and just not felt right? Or experienced a "weird" day, when you, and everyone you came in contact with all noticed something off. What you're experiencing are real perceptions that our expanding consciousness gives us. An awareness of the invisible fluctuating energies I'm talking about. Tuning in to these energies changes and informs all aspects of your personal life, and reconnects us to the world in a less self-centered way. We engage in a more external way, and by doing so, engage ourselves with that greater underlying energy.

Then you might suddenly see that things aren't going great for anybody. Or that someone isn't really being a jerk – they're suffering. Or, more importantly, that you can contribute to changing those states of being in yourself and others, those plastic attitudes and directions, by just exercising your awareness, adjusting your focus, aiming your intention, and taking the right actions.

Have you ever had a flurry of synchronicitous events take place in your life? Coincidences that really couldn't be completely coincidental, usually guiding you towards positive connections, places you need to be, people you need to meet? Those situations are opportunities to join with this source dimension that you access by accepting this invisible spiritual mechanism. This is the definition of faith as "the evidence of things unseen."

Coincidentally, when you become willing to allow your normally constrained perceptions to expand into the shared "field of being" that lives right under the surface of things, the actions you'll intuitively want to take will contribute to the spiritual evolution of all Life on Earth, and you'll become part of the collective conscious co-creation of a positive, abundant, sustainable future. You'll become part of our greater solution.

"When you make the two into One, you will be a Son of Man,

and when you say: Mountain move! It will move."

Logion 106, The Gospel of Thomas

All you need to recognize, to become fully aware of, is that the two most powerful of all the underlying energies – the ones you want directing all of your important decisions (and unimportant ones),  are Love and Truth. Then try to occupy these two ideals as the medium of your life, the very best way you can.

"Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"

doesn't make any sense."

Rumi

Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

Tales: Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! Finding Your "Right" Brain.

......................................you see, meditation is not boring!

It's easy to see how someone might think that sitting in meditation would be a terribly boring thing to do, sitting there, doing nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Trying to think of not thinking. Of course, that thought (like most of them) couldn't be farther from the truth.

When we just sit at first and try not to think, we naturally fail, and so we start thinking of all sorts of things. Everything comes up. Everything. Like: What your father said to you twenty-five years ago. The money your Ex still owes you. That guy who was on Oprah. When will the landlord finally fix that leak upstairs? Things in the Mid East will never get better. Is there an asteroid heading directly for Earth? What are we having for breakfast?
 

That's one of the really great things about just sitting in meditation, thinking about nothing is an endlessly interesting and entertaining thought show, and we have the best seat in the house.

All these different crazy kinds of thoughts occur in a serial fashion, that is, one after the other after the other. One leads haphazardly to the next, sometimes connected by the barest thread that only makes sense right at the moment it connects. A few more turns of the wheel down that road, and you can't even remember how you got there, or why. Because there is no why.

How you got there is simply caused by the incessantly demanding nature of your "thinking organ," your brain, which like some kind of wild, prehistoric shark, insists on relentless movement, the continuous exercise of thought, that overlying process that we often confuse for ourselves. Descartes was a little off on that one, "I think, therefore I am." We are, whether we think – or not.

Thought requires consciousness; Consciousness does not require thought.

"Serial" thought, the kind most of us often find ourselves and our identities tied to, is an apparent function of our Left Brain, the left hemisphere of our thinking organ, which is our serial processor. It's job is to process, process, process in that con-tinuous shark-like motion, joining one thing to the next, relating each significant fact (or not so significant lie) to another. Often, the best we can manage is to discipline our mind to think things that we want to think about. Like to focus our thinking on problems that need solving, say building a bridge, creating a Unified Theory of Everything, or figuring out how to get the TV remote to work. As long as it's something we want to think about – hopefully something productive, or creative, or at least painless.

The simplest form of this discipline is the common self-request, I don't even want to think about it.

When we sit, all we're really trying to do at first is to witness this serial inner monologue, try to wear it down a bit, until it gives in. Or best of all, to side-step it completely. That's the best way to put it, because it describes what the (very appropriately named) Right Side of our brains are doing while all that exhausting thinking is going on. It's functioning concurrently as a parallel processor, connecting everything to everything, simultaneously. Processing our entire sensory experience holistically, with a kind of quantum perception, which for the most part appreciates Life. It's the part of our brain power that gets short shrift because of the sequentially demanding nature of contemporary life, but you're using it every time you find love, beauty, melody, serenity, and joy.

As we sit longer, we try to engage our Right Brain experience, and to live in it for as long as possible. When, in this state, we're collecting beauty, creative energy, and Love in our hearts, suddenly, your serial thoughts no longer have all that urgency. Life can be experienced in a more realistic way when we are in this way less realistic, because we recognize that the moment is always fine, as it is, not full of demanding or threatening "realities." Nothing really needs to happen right at the moment, unless the doorbell rings, your butt is getting wet, or the kitchen is on fire.

This escape from serial thinking, to the Right Side of our brain is a much more pleasant state of affairs, when we can experience a presence for life that's only possible when we give the crazy person in our heads the day off.

In the popular myths of religion, this is the same experience that was reached by Buddha, when Mara the Tempter assaulted him with all the allures and fears of the world (see illust. above); or by Jesus, when he was in the wilderness, and Satan offered to make him the King of Everything.

Neither of them even wanted to think about it.

"What have you gained from meditation?"

"Nothing at all."

"Then what good is it?"

"Let me tell you what I lost through meditation: sickness, anger, depression, insecurity, the burden of old age, the fear of death. That is the good of meditation, which leads to nirvana."

The Buddha

Visit other postings about meditation. And check this talk by Jill Bolte Taylor!


Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore! 

Tales: Why We Should Never Eat the Easter Bunny

Each Easter, we have the opportunity to observe the intricate mythology of the Jesus of Nazareth story in it's full flower, but the nature of the myth will never be the same in the wake of the Nag Hammadi and Qumran discoveries, whose effect these many years later, is still just beginning to percolate through Christian consciousness. Through layers of dense imagination and irrevocable deception.

One of the great beauties of memory is it's editing and art direction. Important memories are seldom pale, seldom lacking in romantic significance. The tremendous power of the Jesus myth comes from a powerful fleshing-out of such romantic, spiritual ideas, on an incredibly personal level. The idea that one pure, com-passionate soul can serve as a stand-in for every human experience - innate understanding and forgiveness; utter humiliation and defeat; glorious transcendence, and victory beyond imagination - is a brilliant, though most probably, accidental construction on the part of the early church fathers, who were led to their form of the myth by popular opinion, and unscrupulous intentions.

As consciousness, and information accrues in our world of ever-more detailed discovery, a number of different mythologies can emerge from the same set of limited facts. So, as long as we're allowing our imaginations to take over, which we are always doing when it comes to "The Greatest Story Ever Told," I'd like to try one on you myself. It's why we should never eat the Easter Bunny.

There were three branches of the Hebrew faith during the period of the second Temple of Herod in Jerusalem: The Pharisees and the Saduccees occupied the center of political power. The Essenes occupied the political fringe, being too sincerely spiritual to take part in the power struggles, misinterpretation of basic scripture, or schedule of incessant brutal sacrifices. The Essenes were the Christians before Christianity, believing in "Thou Shalt Not Kill" without exception, as well as social equality, compassionate sharing, and most all the other characteristics ascribed as principles of Christianity.

Yeshua Ben Yosef, the Essene teacher most likely at the heart of the Jesus myth, was not from Nazareth, there was no Nazareth – it was formed later, when members of the Nazarene branch of Essenes settled in that area. Yeshua himself was most likely from the area near Galillee, spent some childhood between Jerusalem and northern Judea, possibly coming under the influence of the Theraputae branch of Essenes at Mt. Carmel. As a youth, he was very likely relocated from the regional control of the "corrupt" Temple in Jerusalem by his parents to the Essene settlements in the Nile Delta of Egypt, near the temple there, where he would have been influenced by the cultural crossroads of Alexandria, and possibly learned about Theravedic Buddhism from the nearby mission. It was there, near Lake Mareotis, where the practice of baptism originated, that the young Yeshua may have developed his unique synthesis of pragmatic, mystical spirituality, grounded in the Tanakh, and that regions particular branch of Essene Hebraism, which was steeped in Theravedic Buddhism. 

The extent of his travels are unknown, but it is known that in middle life, the Rabbi returned to Galillee to teach, setting off the possible course of events roughly described in the narrative gospels. If we consider this possible origin of Yeshua, and believe the narratives to be fundamentally true, then a further re-interpretation might make sense too:

His awareness of East Asian philosophy would contribute a great deal to his unique teachings, particularly as described in the non-narrative "Gospel of St, Thomas," unearthed at Nag Hammadi in the 1940's, after nearly 2,000 years of suppression. The principles of the Essenes also mesh perfectly with the thoroughly pacifistic notions of basic Buddhism, including complete temperance in the ingesting of intoxicants, the rejection of pagan rituals of sacrifice, and the strong tendency to vegetarianism, which was a strict Essene practice; though to Yeshua, same as the Buddha, it was somewhat dependent on what a mendicant could find to eat, as long as the killing wasn't intended solely for their consumption.

What would have been certain though, would be the utter disgust an Essene teacher would experience returning to the Jerusalem Temple to find it's outer yards filled with animals being traded for sacrificial slaughter. As the temple devotee would find upon arrival, their sacrificial animals did not meet rigid temple requirements and would have to be traded, at a fee, for ready-to-sacrifice animals. Hence the "money changers," changing animals for money. The sacrificial firepits were huge barbeques, where cooked meat was used as payola to buy allegiances, and reward the elite. Animals were treated ruthlessly, as many "devout" people continue to treat them today. The whole place was run by a conspiracy of Hebrews and Romans. An Essene activist could get pretty upset by such a scene, as did many observant Hebrews.

An alternative explanation for the true meaning of The Eucharist comes about from this re-telling also. While it was a strict Essene practice to ritually share meals communally, it is extremely unlikely that a humble, Eastern-influenced mystic Rabbi would resort to pagan quasi-cannibalistic ritual to commemorate himself as being "God on Earth," while it is quite likely that in the context I suggest, he would hold up a piece of bread and say: "This is my flesh," meaning not that bread was to serve as a stand-in for the body of a man who clearly did not wish to be deified, but was meant as a vegetarian's replacement for [corrupt] meat like that from the barbaric temple rituals. (Essenes didn't drink wine, so the "blood drinking" is highly unlikely as well). This may just be conjecture, but in reality, every other retelling is too.

It would also explain why the closest followers and companions of Yeshua in the wake of his departure, the Ebionites, were absolute vegetarians: Yeshua was very likely a vegetarian Buddhist Hebrew. That's why we should never eat the Easter Bunny, or any other animal. Thou shalt not kill is as hard and fast a rule to a Buddhist, as it was to an Essene.

I'll save the alternative story of resurrection for next Easter, as long as we'll be  making things up then too.

"The Kingdom is inside you, and it is outside you."

Logion 3, The Gospel of Thomas