BOOKS by MERLYN
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READ
o 40 YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS
( Looking for God in All the Wrong Places)
o INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
(A Primer For a Successful Life)
o MERLYN'S ESSAYS
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December 2014
WOW Here's an attempt by that Wily Old Wizard, Merlyn,
to wake us up with a new approach in 2015.
********
Greetings! It's good to be back. We are going to try to re-invent this website
in the coming Earth year. It is quite clear to us that the need for a time-less
perspective on this planet has not diminished. If, by presenting our thoughts in
a different form we will reach a greater number of receptive minds and souls,
then our efforts will be justified. While it is true that the world is in the midst of
a great awakening, and home to more and more enlightened individuals each
year, there are still millions who have not yet even begun to ask the right
questions, and so are struggling with unsatisfactory answers.
The organized religions, as well as much of the "scientific" community, are
so locked into some one-dimensional ideas that they cannot ever hope to
understand the the vast, infinite, time-less, multi-dimensional reality we live in.
On a practical level, mankind has repeatedly tried to cure society's troubles
with first political, then economic, and finally military efforts. The cycle merely
repeats itself endlessly, because the problem is of a different nature.
We have before us a book which addresses this issue. It was written several years ago by Ben Bolt, never published, and It is entitled "Individual Responsibility", We will be publishing one chapter of it each month on this website in 2015, and we sincerely hope that it will open some eyes, alter some thinking, and perhaps push our readers in a happier, more successful direction.
... Merlyn
It's now January of 2016, and we've decided to move all of Merlyn's
books to this new page to make room on other pages. Beside this you will find the Introduction from "Individual Responsibility" Enjoy.
______________________________
INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
(A Primer for a Successful Life)
by Ben Bolt
Introduction
How is your world? Is it perfect? Probably not. At least I bet it doesn't seem like
it is. Even if you have achieved a certain level of contentment, you are still likely to have
some future goals. I'll wager that you still have a list of things that you want to do for
yourself or someone else. You might want more material things, better health, more
security, more friends, or any one of a dozen other things that you believe will make
your life richer and more satisfying. Wouldn't it be nice if you woke up every morning
glad to be alive and feeling great?
What about those of you who have little or nothing to be glad about? You may
have poor health, or you may have no money and no apparent prospects for getting
any. Some of you do not even have enough to eat, have lost someone who was dear
to you, or are being victimized by others who seem to have power over you, and won't
let you control your own life.
This world has an endless variety of life situations, and they can certainly be
vastly different. Some seem to have everything, and it may or may not be enough,
while many others have a reasonably comfortable life, and some have practically n
nothing going for them. Why is this? What's going on? Why does it look like some
people never get a break, while others are coasting through this world almost without
a care? It's not fair! Somebody should do something about it, right? Call 911!
Yeah, that's what we'll do. We'll call 911. We'll write a letter to our congressman.
We'll organize a protest march. We'll go steal something. We'll go to church and pray.
We'll build a bomb and blow up something - or somebody. We'll get a gang together
and go harass someone else to make ourselves feel a little better. We'll go to the
doctor. We'll take some pills. We'll call somebody on our cell phone. We'll go to the
gym and work out. We'll get something to eat. We'll go to a city council meeting and
demand some changes. We might even volunteer to help someone else. We'll drink,
or take some drugs. We'll go buy a book. We'll have sex. We'll all lean out a window
and shout together, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!"
There now, don't we feel better? Now we can go back to living our life just like
we used to until the next crisis comes along. I sure hope the terrorists don't come to
my neighborhood, or my state doesn't get hit by a tornado, a hurricane, or an
earthquake. Have you ever thought, or even done some of those things? Sure you
have. We all have. Unless you are one of those unfortunate people whose life revolves
around just trying to find the next meal, or you're in prison or a hospital, "doing
something" is your life. So what's the problem?
Here's the problem. The world is a half-full glass. Of course, that means that it is
always also half-empty. Your life is the same way, and you are either in the process of
emptying it out or filling it up. The people who are caught in the half-empty part of
the world usually can use some help to get out, so the others need to be helping. If
we are not somehow working on the solution, then we become part of the problem.
We have no choice about this. The world is a lot like a school, and it is up to us to
determine the form that the lessons will take. They can be enjoyable challenges or
miserable drudgery. That is the part we get to choose.
What is wrong with doing any of the things on the list of options we mentioned?
Well, a few of them, such as exercising, reading a good book, helping someone else,
having sex (at an appropriate time and place with the right partner), or some other
pro-active effort, are positive steps in the right direction, and contribute to the half-
full part for ourselves and for the world. That's a good thing. Unfortunately, most of
the others are simply a means of shifting the responsibility for our lives to someone
else so we do not have to think or do anything about it ourselves.
Let's examine the list a little more closely to try to get an idea of what is really
happening when we do these things.
Example #1: Calling 911
The 911 emergency response system is a great idea. It has saved many lives
and expedited help to people who were caught in a crisis that seemingly was not of
their own making. The help, medical or otherwise, was sorely needed and greatly
appreciated at the time.
However, what if the emergency was the result of an "accident" that we
ourselves caused by carelessness, inattention, or just plain indifference. Having
someone else bail us out of the mess we have caused may not be productive at all
in the long run. After the immediate crisis has been cleared up, what lesson was
learned from the mistake? Did we learn never to make the same mistake again,
or did we learn that someone else will always be available to come and fix the
problems caused by our carelessness? It's a critical lesson, and needs to be learned.
Example #2: Pills, drugs, or alcohol.
Is it fair to lump these things together in one category? I think so. Whether a
product that is designed to alter the body's chemical balance is called medicine,
recreational drugs, a social drink, or a dangerous mind-altering illegal substance, the
result is the same. A physical change is effected that also produces a mental alteration.
The two things always happen simultaneously, because the mind and the body are two
halves of the same thing. They are yoked together like two oxen pulling the same cart.
We cannot push or pull either one of them without affecting the other.
A lifetime of negative thinking of one kind or another will inevitably bring about
physical problems, and treating these problems with a physical substance of any kind
is the worst form of cop-out. In the same way, physically abusing ourselves with
negative activities or chemical "treatments" will show up as a troubled, depressed,
or confused mind. Whose fault or responsibility is that? Should the troubled person
see a doctor, a therapist, or a counselor? Or should the "victim" simply change their
life style or negative thinking to stop the downhill slide?
Example #3: Write Congress or complain to city government.
Far too many of us, when confronted with one of society's frustrating problems,
respond with the attitude or the statement that "somebody should do something
about it", or "they need to get busy and fix this". Who are "they"? They are the
doers, the problem solvers, the entrpreneurs, the pro-active people who get them-
selves involved in negative situations affecting not just themselves, but others around
them, or even society as a whole. They pitch in and try to make a difference. They
are not the ones who march around in the streets carrying signs and demanding that
the government, a corporation, or some other group make changes for them. They
are not the ones who are first in line for any form of governmental hand-out, and
then complain loudly that their taxes are too high.
If you live in a democratic society, as many of you do, then you must realize that
while it is necessary that we communicate with our elected officials, the downfall of
our system begins when everyone is trying to vote himself a larger and large slice of
the pie. Certain group responsibilities are sometimes best handled by a collective
"government", but they are few, and must always be limited, or the government
becomes a master instead of the servant it is meant to be.
The only way to stop the growth of governmental power, no matter the form, is
for individual citizens to take the responsibility for their own and others welfare. Many
people do. They are the problem-solvers of the world. They are the builders, not the
destroyers. They can be captains of industry, the lowest menial laborer, or a mother
who cares for her children. It is not the position that matters, it is the attitude.
In the pages to come, we will try to expand on these and other thoughts about
our common status as human beings, and the responsibilities that go with that status.
We will attempt to be positive, helpful, and specific. None of the ideas expressed in
this writing will be brand new. There are no new ideas, only new ways of stating the
age-old facts of our existence. For some reason, we feel the need to re-state some of
these truths in our own words. Maybe we can be of help to some readers, and by
planting a few seeds, make the whole garden more beautiful.
from "Individual Responsibility"
CHAPTER ONE
WHO ARE YOU?
"Each life is charmed (Seven said), yours, and
everyone else's, and you must never forget it.
.....And there is a secret, a very simple one. Really,
it's not a secret, but YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER
that your life is charmed." ... Jane Roberts
Who are you? What are you? Do you really know? All right then, tell me.
What if someone asked you these questions, and you were required to answer them
as honestly as you can? What would you say?
Let's examine some possible answers:
(#1) Your name: The first answer most of us give to the question "who are you"
is our name. We all have one. Why? Because we were given one at birth, usually by
our parent or parents who decided that it was what we should be called. Most of us
also seem to have acquired a "nickname" at some point, often a short version of our
"real" name, but sometimes quite different. Some of us like the names we have, but
others don't, so they must decide whether to change them or just live with them.
The real question is, are you your name? What if you had been given a different
name in the beginning? Would you now be a different person? What if several of you
have the same name? Does that mean that all of you are alike? Obviously not. We
could gather up as many John Smiths as we can find in the English speaking world
(probably thousands) and no two of them would be exactly alike, so we would
immediately be forced to find some other way of differentiating them. Name tags
would be useless. All right, then, your name is just part of who you are, especially if
you've had it for a long time, but it is not all of you. You would still exist if you didn't
have a name. Let's try another answer.
(#2) Your parents: Suppose you answer "who are you" by saying, " I am the
son or daughter of so and so and so and so. These two people did what people have
always done to become parents and they brought me into the world, so that's who I
am. I am a direct descendant of their genes and chromosomes, just as they were
descended from their parents, grandparents, etc."
This is probably a slightly better answer than your name, because if your parents
had not "created" you, either purposely or accidentally, it is true that you would not be
here in your present form. There is definitely some reality in the genetic sequence
that gives each of us part of our uniqueness. Of all those John Smiths we mentioned,
no two of them were born at the same moment of the same parents. Only identical
twins come close to that definition, and somehow even they are different. We'll get to
them later.
However, let us suppose that at the moment of your birth you were abandoned
by your mother and never again saw her or learned her identity, or that of your father
either. Do you still exist? How can you identify yourself? Modern science has, of
course, come to the rescue by discovering that each of us has a unique DNA "blueprint"
planted in the cells of our body, but who wants to be called by the number designation
of a laboratory sample? What about the products of "artificial" insemination, or
surrogate mothers? Who are these people if we cannot be sure about their exact
parentage? Let us continue our search>
(#3) Your country or nationality: What if I said "who are you", and you answered
me by saying "I am an American", or "an Englishman", or Chinese, Japanese, or any
other nationality? There are many people in this world who are very proud of their
national heritage. It is a matter of great importance to them and they are often quick to
refer to the fact that they are Russian, Polish, Irish, or a similar term of identification.
The diverse cultures of the world are one of the features that make it such a
fascinating place to the social scientist. What a boring world it would be if we were all
alike. The rich mosaic of nations, societies, life styles, and types of attire make living
on earth an endless source of delight. That is, until some of us begin taking our
differences too seriously and escalate them into arguments, confrontation, or war.
Consider this, however. Some of you have been in a situation where you were
in the presence of a new-born baby and that baby was in a different room or otherwise
out of your sight. If and when that baby began to cry, there is no way you would be
able to determine the nationality, race, or sex of that infant. They all sound the same
when they cry, as any nurse in a maternity ward can tell you. (Incidentally, this is also
true of laughter. No-one laughs with an accent.) All the differences in language or
speech patterns and habits are learned later, usually from family members. Culture is artificial and changeable. All of us start out the same.
Furthermore, anyone who has ever flown in an airplane over one of the vast
number of national boundaries we have created can vouch for the fact that the
boundaries, unless they are caused by an ocean, a river, or mountains, are not there
at all. We do not have one pink country, one blue country, and then one green
country as is often shown on our maps. There is only one world, most of which is
covered by water. We'll have to try to find another way to identify ourselves. It appears
that nationality, if not imaginary, is merely an "accident" of birth, and doesn't really
explain who we are any better than our name or our parentage.
(#4) Your race or sex: Now we're getting somewhere. If you are a black male,
or a white female, that is an obvious way that anyone can identify you on sight, isn't it?
Of course, there are lots of black males and white females, so we need to be more
specific than that. If you talk, your voice is often a dead give-away to who you are.
Others can perhaps get your sex, your race, your nationality, and even what part of a
country you come from by hearing what you say and how you say it. We have still not
arrived at your individuality, however. We haven't pinned down just who or what you
really are. No matter what group you belong to or what neighborhood you grew up in,
there are probably still a whole lot more folks around who answer to the same
criteria, and are just like you in a lot of ways.
What about the exceptions? There are women whose voice sounds male, and
men who have female inflections in their speech. If I happen to be blind, then I
certainly can't tell by looking at you if you are black or white or male or female, unless
your speech gives it away. There are also many people who have a certain national
heritage, but who have grown up in a totally different part of the world, and have no
trace of any accent or speech patterns that would betray their biological connections.
A black man from South Africa who speaks with an "English" accent does not sound
anything like a black man who grew up in rural Mississippi.
If we are in a sports arena with thousands of people cheering, can we tell from
the sound how many of them are male, female, Arabic, Oriental, or Caucasian? The
roar of any crowd seems to sound just like the roar of any other crowd, unless they
all happen to be male or are all female. What if we look at a picture of this crowd, or
even a larger crowd of perhaps a million people? A crowd picture taken from an
airplane or a tall building shows no individuality at all, no matter what the make-up
of the crowd is. All the little people look alike in any crowd. Only distinctive clothing
could help us identify them, and certainly we would not like being thought of as only
our clothing, would we?
(#5) Your religion, or belief system: Well, wait a minute. There are a great
many people who spend a lot of time and/or money on picking out exactly the right
apparel to give themselves a special "look", so that someone else knows who they
are. Priests dress in a certain way, devout Muslims have special dress codes,
motorcycle gangs and sports teams have their uniforms, and even teen-agers as a
group tend to be identifiable by their attire. Actually, if one dresses in a manner that
is totally distinctive and doesn't appear to belong to any group, one tends to be
regarded as some kind of "kook" or "weirdo"' We are almost expected to dress
ourselves in the same way as the other members of our country, religion, or age
group. Why is that? Who makes these rules, anyway?
If i say that I am a Catholic, a Protestant, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, or any
other religion at all, does that mean I must put on certain clothing so that others can
see it at a glance? There are many who try to do exactly that, but it is not universally
true, so we cannot depend on it for identifying who you are.
You can say that you are a Sikh and wear a beard and a turban (if you're male)
to prove it, or you can have the "dreadlocks" hair style of a Rastafarian and come
from a Caribbean island, but does that really tell me who you are? It is more apt to
tell me who you are trying to be. Our observation of many of the people in the world
who call themselves "Christians" has been that if they didn't say they were, one
would never be able to tell it by the way they act. In truth, there are so many
different forms of religion practiced in such a vast variety of ways, that labeling any
of us in such a way is never very much help, and that doesn't even include those
who call themselves atheists.
(#6) Your mind: All right, I give up. We are all different. We are all unique
(just like everybody else). We are individuals, and almost any attempt to classify us
turns out to be useless upon examination. But that still doesn't help. If we are
individuals, then we are individual what? Rene Descartes wrote, "Je pense, donc
je suis". (In Latin, "Cogito, ergo sum."), which means "I think, therefore I am". If he
was right, then it is our organ of thinking, which we call our mind, that gives us our
reality. Our minds also seem to give us our individuality because, at least of the
level of our conscious minds, there is a separation between us. Your thoughts are
not my thoughts, and mine belong to no-one else. Maybe elsewhere we can, but
here on earth, we are not very able to read each other's minds.
So is it safe to say that you are your mind, and I am mine? Before we say that,
I suppose it would be wise to define just what we are talking about when we use the
word "mind". Here we are in a little bit of trouble, because in my Webster's dictionary
there is a whole column of definitions of, and uses for the word "mind". Obviously, it
means a lot of things. To begin with, the original English word mynd and the Anglo-
Saxon word gemynd meant what we now call memory.
That makes sense to me, because I can't imagine an information processing
device that cannot remember the information it processes, even for a short time.
A human mind that doesn't recall a lot of stored information is not of much use to
it's owner or the world, and is generally regarded as defective in some way. So we
can conclude that the mind we are talking about is at least a data processing tool
and a remembering tool, if it's working properly.
There are also two other functions that are generally attributed to our minds.
Those are learning, and creating. This is very interesting because, as we shall see,
it is possible that both learning and creating are merely other forms of remembering.
While it is true that there is some sort of separation between our conscious minds,
it is also fairly well established that there is something called "collective consciousness",
or "universal mind" that includes all of us. Because of this connection, there is a
constant circulation of information going on involving what appears to be an infinite
data bank, and we all have access to it to one degree or another. That quality we
refer to as intelligence may just depend on how well each of us can make use of the
available data.
Let us not digress. We are trying to define our status as individuals, and we
have already concluded that your conscious thoughts are yours and mine are mine.
We might also fairly state that your memories are not the same as mine, because
your life is different. It's not even a big stretch to conclude that the only thing that
separates us at all is our memory, because at the end of a lifetime of experiences,
memories are all we have left to take with us if life goes on. So is that all we are?
Memory collectors? You collect yours, and I'll collect mine?
We began this chapter with a different question: namely, "who are you?"
I will now suggest another way to look at this question that I believe might alter
your own idea of yourself if you seriously consider it. As previously mentioned,
this is not a whole new concept, and many of you understand it, and live your
lives accordingly. This book is aimed at the millions of people out there who do not
understand who they really are, and believe, like Hamlet that they are "suffering the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Most people would agree that one of the
more effective minds of the 20th century belonged to Albert Einstein, physicist,
philosopher, and all-around genius. This is what he said:
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'universe'. A part limited
in time and space, he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something
separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This
delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to
affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from
this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and
the whole nature in its beauty."
All right, let's get to the point. If we are not our name, our parents, our country,
our race, our sex, or our belief system, and we are obviously more than just a mind,
then who, or what, are we?
WHAT YOU ARE, AND WHAT I AM, IS A PERSPECTIVE.
We are each a different point of view from which to experience the thing we
call Creation. Not only that, but we are also a part of the creative process itself.
We have been entrusted with the ability to help make our own reality with our
limitless consciousness, and then to experience it, and yes, collect memories. That is our function, and our reason for being. If the experiencing and collecting are not joyful, it is merely because we have been doing it wrong. We have violated rule
number one, and we are paying the consequences of our mistake.
from "Individual Responsibility"
CHAPTER TWO
THREE SIMPLE RULES
"Live as if you were living already for the
second time and as if you had acted the first
time as wrongly as you are about to act now."
... Victor Frankl
What is rule number one? Here it is. Write it down and hang it on your wall.
RULE NO. 1:
ALWAYS TREAT EVERYONE ELSE THE WAY YOU WANT TO BE TREATED
Now, where have we heard that before? That's old. I learned that when
I was in kindergarten. That's what you're saying, isn't it? Everybody knows
that. It's called the golden rule. Why is it golden? Come on, the answer is
obvious. Because it is probably the most valuable piece of information your
mind is ever going to process. That's why. Have we always done it? You
tell me.
If you haven't always obeyed this rule, that's a big reason why your life
might be screwed up. i know I haven't, and I have the physical and emotional
scars to prove it. I'm going to expand on this rule, because it is so important.
I'm going to try to help you all understand why it is important, and what happens
when we break it.
Let's talk a little bit more about who you are, because once we understand
that, it becomes pretty clear why we have to treat everyone else with the respect
they deserve. Perhaps you have always thought of yourself as a "human being",
a sort of higher animal who is different from other animals because you have a
thing called a soul. That's not too far wrong, but it's backwards. (Incidentally,
animals have souls, too, but they're not the same as ours.) You are not an
animal that has a soul. You are a multidimensional timeless soul/entity that is
temporarily using an animal body. You have not always been an animal, but
you have always been a soul.
The creation we are part of is a continuous process. It has always been
going on, and the thing we call "time" has nothing to do with it. Your soul didn't
just suddenly appear when your body was born. It is an eternal part of the
creative force that is sometimes called God (or Good). Among other things, it is
the "experiencer" part. If you build something, you want to use it, don't you?
You want to at least look at it and enjoy it in some way. The reason you are
like that is that the Creator is like that, and you are part of the Creator.
When this "God" creates, he/she automatically becomes two things: the
creation, and the means of observing or experiencing it. You are that means.
There would be no creation if it could not be observed in some way, so that
makes you important. Every single one of us is important for the same reason.
We are all just different points of view from which the creative force can enjoy
the creation. It's critical to realize that no one "point of view" is any more
important than any other.
One more thing we better get clear right now is this: Since we are all
part of the creative force, we are not just "experiencers". We are also
constantly creating our own reality with our multi-level consciousness. If we
don't like what we see, we have the power to change it.
How did we get here? Well, that's a long story, but here is the simple
version. Our solar system is only one part of the limitless and on-going creation
that is to be experienced, and some of us have dropped in to do that, and learn
from the visit. Your soul, any soul, being part of the Creator, can do pretty
much anything it wants to do within the rules of the "Uni-verse" (literally, "one
word", or"one voice"), so some of us just decided to hang around here for a
while. The little planet we call Earth is made up of energy forms we call water,
minerals, plants, animals, etc., so in order to be here, we had to assume these
properties.
This is an over-simplification, but basically what happens is this. First,
there was an involution as various soul/entities began to try to experience the
life of this solar system, then, through a process of trial and error, and animal
body was formed that would be a suitable vehicle for our use, and we became
part of the world. Also, since the energy level we call physical has among its
characteristics "space" and "time", we have to deal with them, too. They are
not a factor for some other levels of our existence, and that is basically why
` the hardest lesson most of us have to learn while we are here is patience.
We're not used to the limitations of time and space.
As mentioned, this process has been going on "forever". We're not going
to cease to exist just because we don't happen to be here on earth for a while.
There are no limits to this creation, so we will never run out of places to "be"
or things to experience. The only thing that can cause problems for us is
using our creative rights, or "free will" to interfere with those of another soul/
entity who has the same rights as we have. Every time one of us does that,
it's like throwing sand in the gears of creation, and things stop running smoothly.
There is also no limit to the number of souls available, and so many of us
have come here and interfered with each other for so long, that it appears that
the entire earth is at risk. That has happened before, and may happen again.
Earth has its own life cycle, just as each one of us has while we are here, and
in the long run we will not change it very much. We do have an obligation to
try, however, because we are not only the experiencers of the earth while we
are here, but also its stewards. Another basic rule of the creation is that "for
every action there is an equal and opposite reaction", so every mis-deed, no
matter how small, has its repercussions.
So you see, the "golden rule" really cannot be broken. We can only break
ourselves against it, because it is not going to change. The truth is, whether our
organized "religions" accept it or not, having involved ourselves voluntarily with
each other and the world, we are going to have to keep coming here as long as
it takes for each of us to get it right. Killing each other does not solve the
problem, it merely prolongs it. God is in no hurry. We can make ourselves
happy or un-happy as long as we want to.
RULE NO. 2
BE HERE NOW.
Be here now. This is the title of a popular book that was written a half-
century ago by a man named Richard Alpert, who now calls himself Ram Dass.
it is more than a book title, though. We believe it is one of the three funda-
mental rules of living well in time and space. It is a beautifully succinct, three
word sentence that says it all.
We must BE, because that's who we are. DO-ing is only the natural result
of BE-ing, but we can't stop BE-ing even if we DO nothing. We must be HERE,
because in order to function in a limitless realm, we have to focus on it one
part at a time. That's why there are so many of us, so we can each concentrate
on our own little corner of creation. We must be here NOW, because NOW is
all there is. Getting caught up in an imaginary past or future just confuses us.
As far as one's conscious mind is concerned, the past is memory, and the
future is a dream. It is always NOW. Religious leaders like to talk about
eternity as though it were an endless extension of time in only one direction -
the future. That's misleading. Eternity is the complete absence of time. It is
NOW. There is no time. There is only endless change, and time is how we
measure it when we are HERE.
What about BE-ing? What's the difference between BE-ing and DO-ing?
This is a world where something is going on all the time. Something or some-
body is always DO-ing. Doing something is how you know you're alive. Rocks
don't appear to be alive, because they look like they're not doing anything.
They just sit there, and we don't want to be just a rock. Actually, rocks are
alive, too. They just change at a much slower pace than we do, so it's hard to
notice, but that's not the point.
You and I have chosen to be human beings, not rocks. We have to act
like the caretakers of the earth that we have elected to be. That means doing
something. Plants grow. Animals live and die. Whole species come and go in
the blink of an eye. There's a lot going on here. What are we supposed to do?
It might be easier to describe what we are not supposed to do.
Since each of our souls has become entangled with the genetic coding of
a primate animal, we are now tempted by the primate instincts of survival, sex,
and social standing. We now have a hybrid consciousness, called the EGO,
which can align itself with the primate instincts or the eternal soul/entity. Our
ultimate goal is to learn to manage these instincts so the soul is as free in the
body as our of it. When we can do that, we can experience the blissful BE-ing
of an entity that knows it will never die, and that it is a part of a creation of
endless beauty and wonder.
The way to accomplish this is to periodically stop DO-ing on a regular
basis (as in sleep or meditation) and become aware of the I AM inside of you
that is merely the observer of what your ego is doing. With practice, we can
all do this. The path to goodness for us and for the world is for each of us to
search for and find the eternal soul that we really are. While we are engaged
in that BE-ing process, we can do no wrong.
How can we be HERE, and why should we? This is fairly obvious, and to
a certain extent, we all do it. Every time we focus our attention on one thing,
or concentrate fully on what we happen to be doing, we are being HERE. Our
minds are so active that it seems we are always thinking about several different
things at once, but in fact that is not true. The conscious mind can only think
in a linear fashion, so all of these thoughts are merely appearing in a single-
file sequence, one at a time.
Being HERE is merely a matter of stopping the procession of thoughts for
a short time, and giving our attention to only one of them. This is a tremen-
dously important ability to develop, because ones productivity increases ex-
ponentially along with their level of concentration. It is also just plain common
sense. What good is a beautiful sunset if we don't notice it? No matter what
we are experiencing, if our mind is elsewhere while we are doing it, we missed
it. We have just lost a life opportunity that may never come again.
The trick is to teach ourselves to concentrate, moment to moment, on
what is happening around us and to take in as much of it as we can. Even if
it is painful, totally experiencing it may mean that we never have to do it again.
Only by doing this can we say that we are truly alive, and the people who do it
best are invariably the most interesting souls you will meet.
Incidentally, that is why sex often reaches the level of a religious
experience. It is virtually impossible for most of us to think about anything
else while we are occupied in a sexual encounter. That's the kind of concen-
tration it takes to bring new souls into the world, which should give us some
idea of how important that process is.
Be here NOW. Well, of course, we can't help it. We are here now,
whether we like it or not. You often hear people say when they are frustrated
with the world, "I didn't ask to be born". That is simply not true. They did
too ask to be born, or at least they agreed to it when they were convinced of
the wisdom of the choice. We all were even intimately involved in the selection
of our parents, so that cannot be blamed on someone else, either.
It does no good for any of us to whine about our circumstances, no
matter how unpleasant they may seem. To an almost universal level, we have
each created our own reality, and it is our challenge and our privilege to find
a way to improve it. Blaming one's parents for our present life situation is a
perfect example of living in the past, and day-dreaming about some distant
future life that we long for is almost as unproductive. Since the entire creation
really consists of one big fat eternal NOW, it behooves all of us to remember
that and focus our attention on fixing the NOW we can see. The NOW that we
have in the future when we arrive there will automatically be improved by
dealing correctly with the present.
The fact that many people at any given time do not seem to have control
over their present circumstances gives the rest of us a golden opportunity to
find ways to help. If we can help, we must, or run the risk of finding ourselves
in that position in some other NOW. There are endless ways to help each other
in this world, and no matter how we do it, we cannot avoid helping ourselves in
the process. We must learn to BE who we are, an eternal part of a creator
whose very name is Good, and we must do it in the HERE and NOW that we
have, so that we can move on to others that are even more exciting.
RULE NO. 3
ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT EVERYTHING IS ENERGY
What is energy? You are. I am. A rock is. A thought is. A tree is.
An animal is. Energy is all there is. What's the definition of ENERGY? In
Latin , ergon is the word for work. To be en-ergos is to be at work. The
Creator is at work here, and the forms of that work are infinite in number.
One more thing. The various forms of the Creator's work, or energy, are
interchangeable. You will learn, or you already have in your school physics
class, that energy cannot be destroyed. It can only be changed into some
other form of energy. This is definitely one of the most vital pieces of
information that our minds can absorb. Once we understand that the
process we are calling life is merely the process of rearranging energy, then
there is nothing that we cannot accomplish.
What many of the physics teachers have often overlooked, however, is
that thoughts are energy, too. Every single thought that you or I or anyone
else thinks has electro-magnetic reality. Therefore, thoughts can also be
transformed into other kinds of energy. Not only can thoughts change into
other energy forms, but because of the creative forces behind them, it is
impossible to stop them from doing so. I'm going to repeat that. NOT ONLY
CAN THOUGHTS CHANGE INTO OTHER ENERGY FORM, BUT BECAUSE OF
THE CREATIVE FORCE BEHIND THEM, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO STOP THEM
FROM DOING SO!
How important is that? It should be deeply impressed into the mind of
every child as soon as they can comprehend it. MIND is the builder. The
physical world is an out-growth of the mental one. It is never the other way
around. A little clarification might be helpful here. Every thought that we
have does not find its way into physical reality, but there are other worlds
besides this one, whether we can see them or not. The important thing to
know is that the thoughts we repeat over and over, and especially the ones
with emotional intensity behind them, are the ones that will eventually
become physical. Think of a train with your mind as the engine and all the
rest of the world as the cars of the train. It is possible to bring the train to
a halt by putting the brakes on in all of the cars, but it is not possible to
start the train moving without first firing up the engine.
In the same way, your mind can be overwhelmed by too many negative
influences (brakes) in your world, but it is the only thing that can get your
life moving in the right direction again if it stops. All of the problems in the
world, and by extension the whole world, can ultimately be traced to the
incorrect use of someone's or everyone's mind. All of the real progress in your
life or that of the world is a final result of the proper use of mental energy.
It never going to be otherwise, no matter how hard we try.
This is no idle theory. Lets talk physics for a moment. Today's top
empirical scientists are involved in the study of a process they can "quantum
mechanics", a complicated attempt to understand the basic movement and
changes that take place in physical energy forms. They deal with ever smaller
and smaller components of matter, going farther and farther "down" from
molecules to atoms to electrons, to quarks, mesons, bosons, etc. in an attempt
to find the ultimate source of life energy. It gets to the point where they can't
agree on whether light is composed of waves or particles and the various
definitions of each. What has been discovered, however, in this quest is that
there are some energy "particles" that are so small that they do not exist until
some attention is paid to them. They seem to come into being only when made
use of in some experiment. If that is not changing thoughts directly into matter,
then what is it?
Those who take a "holistic" view of medical science are daily finding more
and more relationships and inter-dependence between their patient's minds and
bodies. Certainly the energy of ones mind can be altered by physical forces,
drugs being one of the more obvious influences, but where does the drug's
energy come from? Is it inherent in the chemical formula of the substance, or
is it the result of a mass belief in the properties of the product? It it's all about
chemistry, then why do placebos often work?
There are endless examples of the transfer of energy to and from the
physical world and the mental one, to say nothing of another level of energy
that might be called emotional, or "spiritual". It has been shown, for instance,
that meals prepared "lovingly" are more nutritionally beneficial that the same
meals created with indifference. How can we explain that? We will have more
to say on the subject of the force called "love" later, but for now we must admit
that there is a lot left to learn about the "vibes" in our world.
What has all this got to do with responsibility? It should be clear by now
that we cannot help influencing the world around us not only by what we do,
but also profoundly by what we think. Every single thought entertained by
every one of us is like a pebble tossed into a pond that creates ripples in all
directions. Powerful or sustained thoughts are like big rocks that make a big
splash. Only by controlling the energy of those thoughts can we hope to improve
our world.
One statement I made earlier is that "God is Energy". I know that is going
to offend some folks who are caught up in a belief system that stresses a
personal father-type God. I see no conflict here at all. Christianity for instance
is fond of saying that "God is Love", and most would have no problem admitting
that love could be called a force, or form of energy. If that is so, then the words
GOD, LOVE, and ENERGY are almost interchangeable. The fact that each one of
us has a thing called a personality merely shows that we are replicas of a
creative force or energy that probably has one, too. If our lives don't express
the LOVE of the creative force, then the fault is no doubt ours, and we should
fix it. That's pretty much all that the world's great religious leaders have always
been saying.
Think of your Creator, whatever you call it, as the power company and
yourself as a light bulb. Your effectiveness as a human light bulb depends
entirely on the quality of your connection to the power company. No connection,
no power. Electrical energy, or love, whichever term you use, cannot flow
through a broken wire or a corroded circuit. It is the responsibility of every one
of us to maintain the circuitry so that all of our spiritual, mental, and physical
matrices are running smoothly. How can we do this?
1. TREAT EVERYONE ELSE THE WAY YOU WANT TO BE TREATED.
2. BE HERE NOW.
3. ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT EVERYTHING IS ENERGY.
CHAPTER THREE
INFINITY
"If you're looking to find the key to the universe,
I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is: There is no key to the universe. The good news is: It has been left unlocked."
... Anon.
"In nature's infinite book of secrecy, little I can read."
... from Antony and Cleopatra, by Wm. Shakespeare
Infinity is a word with which we are all familiar. There is even an automobile
with this name. It's a common term, but we all seem to have a difficult time work-
ing with the ideas of limitless time, limitless space, or an un-ending number of
individual souls.
At the end of Thomas Sugrue's wonderful biography of the seer Edgar Cayce,
called "There is a River", there is a chapter entitled Philosophy. It begins with the
sentence, "man demands a beginning and a boundary". It's true. That is the
problem. We do insist on having limits to everything so we can measure it and
somehow understand it better. The difficulties we create for ourselves by this
insistence are, if you'll pardon the expression, endless.
If we have any hope at all of grasping the meaning and purpose of our
existence, we are going to have to work through this problem and shake ourselves
free from the restrictions caused by our own ideas of limitations. Let's get this out
of the way right now. The human personality has NO limitations, except those which
it accepts. Whatever we can imagine, we can bring about. Period. There are no
restrictions other than those we agree on. We are capable of creating a heaven
right here on earth, and we are also capable of causing the destruction of the planet.
However, because of the vast amount of "time" programmed into the earth's life
cycle, none of us are apt to see either of these conditions in our "present" form.
Did you catch that? I used the word "time", and we both know that there is
no such thing. So how are we going to talk about such things as time, space,
infinity, and numberless souls at all? It will be difficult, perhaps, but we'll have to
try. We are here to discover what our responsibilities are as human beings, and we
can't very well do that unless we are pretty clear about what a human being really is.
Here's an idea of what I am talking about. I'll bet many of you have never
thought of this. Where are you now? I'll tell you. No matter where you think you
are, you are in the exact center of the entire universe. The whole thing is revolving
around you at every moment. Of course, that's true about me, too -- and your
neighbor, and your friends, and even your enemies if you have any.
How is this possible? It's simple. The universe is infinite. There are no edges
or boundaries anywhere, so that means that everyplace in the universe can be the
center, and always is. That's a hard concept if we insist on thinking about the uni-
verse in only physical terms, but remember Rule No. 3 - Everything is energy. That
which we insist on believing is matter is really just an endless field of potential energy,
and you and I are right in the center of it, helping to create it with every little thought
that pops into heads. Does that make you feel responsible? It certainly should, but
don't get too excited. So is everyone else, aren't they?
While we are discussing endless space and time, there is one other little matter
I would like to clear up before we go any farther. Our empirical scientists, relying on
their five wonderful senses, have for centuries been studying our world, our solar
system, and now "outer" space to get some grasp of what it's all about. What they
have learned and accomplished is very fascinating to be sure, but only the wisest of
them have really caught on to what they were seeing.
The only way to really understand this creation is to go beyond the five senses
entirely and begin to see it with our minds and our imagination. We cannot measure
infinite space with finite technical equipment, and it is a waste of time to try, but we
can imagine it, and thus begin to work with the concept. We hear a lot of speculation,
for instance, about whether there is or has been, "life" on other planets, either in our
solar system or another. How silly is that?
Look, the creation does not have an end, so it cannot be counted or measured
in any way. If we insist on finding planets that have "life" on them, we are going to
find billions of them, and we will still be looking. There might just be a more pro-
ductive way to spend our time, like improving life on this planet. Unfortunately, a
lot of the effort we spend to improve our own lives is focused on extending the years
of out visit here, and not on finding or fulfilling its purpose.
Enough about time and space and solar systems, etc. Time is really just a way
of measuring space, and space is a means of measuring time. They go together, like
all the other apparent dualities in this creation, and they only apply to the energy
level we refer to as physical, anyway. Let's talk about souls. How many are there?
Right, you're getting ahead of me now, aren't you? An infinite number. Why don't
we stop trying to count them and start trying to get a better understanding of what
they are? Wait a minute, that's what we are, isn't it? So all we have to do is
understand ourselves, and then we will understand all the other souls, won't we?
Wow, what a concept! Where have I heard that before? Well, we can quote Plato,
for one. In book VIII of "The Republic", he says "You cannot conceive the many
without the one".
Why would this be so? Because the many and the one are the same thing.
You and I are self-contained holographic models of the Creative force, whatever we
choose to call it. We cannot help creating, because it is our nature. We can postpone
creative activity forever if we want to, because it is our choice, but in the end, the
overwhelming pressure of creation will force us to grow whether we want to or not.
The creation is like a great river with a mighty current. We can only swim upstream
for so long without getting very tired, and then we realize that it is much simpler to
go with the current.
Deep inside all of us, well below the level of our conscious minds, is the eternal
I AM that is the essence of all things. If we are not aware of it, it is only because we
have forgotten it in our passion to be separate from all others like us. It's all right,
because in the symphony that is life, the flute is not supposed to sound like the
cello, but the illusion of separateness is the cause of most of our pain and frustration.
In the interest of simplicity, we will try to create a model for the human
individual. Bear with us here. These are concepts that might stretch credibility to
the limit. Our poor little linear conscious minds are not very well adapted to limit-
less thinking, but let's imagine for a few minutes, anyway.
We'll start with a creative force that we'll call "All That Is", a generic term for
which you can substitute any name you prefer. This creative force becomes Yin and
Yang, positive and negative, creator and creation, or however else you want to
divide it. This is no doubt an over-simplification, but the concept is the same -
a creation, and the means of experiencing it.
We will call this means "souls", or better yet "entities'. Each soul-entity has the
full potential of the creative force, but the ability to assume a limited viewpoint from
which to see the endless project. There are, of course, and infinite number of entities,
or viewpoints. Because of their potential, these entities also have the ability to sub-
divide into multiple viewpoints, as well as the power to develop their own agenda
for creation. We call that part 'free will".
Since we at present are not intimately concerned with those entities who do
not inhabit our corner of the universe, we will simplify this model even further by
focusing on the relatively small number of us who have become involved with the
planet Earth. This involvement, incidentally, includes all the other planets in our
solar system as well, but not in "physical" form, so it is difficult for us to understand.
We, as individual soul-entities, have chosen to experience this system with
part of our multi-dimensional reality, and in order to do so, we have accepted some
of the limitations that go with it. Experiencing physical reality is very much like the
situation you have when you dive into a lake or a pool and become completely
submerged in the water. To begin with, you can only stay there for a short time
without drowning, which is similar to a life-span on earth as a human. In addition,
you can now no longer see what is going on above the water's surface, and you can
only hear a little, and understand even less. You are forced to find a new way of
getting about (we call it swimming), and you are in an entirely different environment
than before you took the plunge. The only way you can resume your life outside the
water is to climb back out of the lake or the pool back onto "dry land". We call that
"dying".
As you might expect, it is much more complex than that in actual practice. To
begin with, the soul-entity, with its ability to sub-divide its consciousness, does not
invest all of its energy in one life form at a time. Your human ego (the combined
personality and primate consciousness that you have adopted) is only a portion of
your soul's total energy. There may or may not be other personalities, here or else-
where in space and time, that are part of the same entity, as well as the part of you
that is not focused on the physical level at all.
This process can vary tremendously, so we cannot make a lot of assumptions
about ourselves or anyone else, but it can be stated that there is always a lot of
internal communication going on with our parent-soul and any or all other parts of it.
This can take the form of dreams, intuition, hunches, memories, fears, tendencies, or
other thoughts and feelings when filtered down to our conscious minds. Our
conscious thoughts have a directive effect, however, which communicates in the
other direction, so we are back to the idea of responsibility.
Many people these days are re-acquainting themselves with the idea that they
call re-incarnation. This is definitely not a new concept, having been understood
much more fully by other generations for thousands of earth-years. It is simply a
time-represented example of the soul's ability to exist in more than one place (or
time). At any rate, all time is simultaneous anyway, so therefore all "lifetimes" exist
at once as well. They only appear to be sequential because of our conscious focus.
The best analogy we ever heard about this situation is the picture of a multi-
level chess game being played on a stack of boards, where every move on every
board has an effect on the game being played on every other level. The idea of
"karma" where one's "present" lifetime is influenced by past action is very mis-
leading. All our soul-entity's activities effect all one's other thoughts and actions,
whether considered to be in the past, the present, or the future. A more accurate
view of re-incarnation would have to include all "future" lives, at any rate.
Consciously it does little good to worry about other lifetimes on earth, because
we have all deliberately come here at this point in space and time to work on
specific areas of our development which require our attention to be focused on the
HERE AND NOW. Like a tree which must have its roots in the ground as well as its
branches that reach for the sky, we need to expand our awareness in both directions
simultaneously. Pay too much attention to the ground, and the leaves will wither and
die. Ignore our roots, and the whole plant will perish.
Having come here, we need to care about the earth and its life. It is part of the
grand scheme, and equally as important as any other part. We are not, however,
supposed to become trapped here by refusing to see that it is only one place to "be",
and clinging desperately and blindly to physical life. The earth will be here long after
we have left time and space for good, so let us try to remember who we are. In
remembering, we will find the bliss we think we have lost.
In the same way that it is not very helpful to try to measure infinite time or
space, it is also not very productive to count "people", who are only fragments of
souls, when the number of souls is endless. With our narrow view of the world,
we have a tendency to worry about Earth's population and what we perceive of as
threatening population growth. We must understand that the number of person-
alities here at any given earth-time is infinitesimal in comparison to the total number
(infinity) available, no matter how crowded it seems.
Earth's population ebbs and flows over ages and ages of Earth's years, and
the one we are seeing now is only the most recent gathering. It is true that we can
do temporary damage to the planet by our collective ecological choices, but it is far
more likely that we will drastically reduce our own numbers for a while if we insist on
being destructive. In either case, the planet will survive, and continue on its own
evolutionary course, with or without us.
Earth, along with the rest of our Sun-system, has its own energy, its own
purpose, and its own life span. We are merely visitors who have been here for a
relatively short time in earth years (even a million years is short) and of course,
should conduct ourselves as well-mannered guests are supposed to. This alone
would make more of us happy while we are here, and the earth would flourish
with abundance. We have merely scratched the surface of the planet's limitless
potential. It is capable of supporting far more of us if we just behave ourselves.
Again, because of our insistence on thinking with only the linear conscious
portion of our minds, even though we instinctively know that there are other worlds
or realms "out there" somewhere, we expect them to be like this one in some way.
No doubt there are many other solar systems that are similar to ours, but the whole
objective of this creation is endless growth and diversity, so why should we care?
We simply need to immerse ourselves in the wonders that are immediately apparent
to us, and watch them unfold into even greater miraculous discoveries.
We cannot see infinity with our conscious mind. It is not designed for the job,
We can only imagine it, and imagination is the doorway into greater awareness. A
conscious mind is a specific tool for a specific job. Its function is to assimilate the
input from the body's five senses, make sense of it, and relay it to our mind's inner
levels. We are also supposed to make use of the vast data available on these levels
by paying attention to it, which will add amazing richness to our physical life. The
objective, as we have said, is infinite experience and growth for the soul, and thus
for all creation.
If we can begin to look at this world and others from our soul's perspective,
then the infinite nature of our real home will become more and more apparent to us.
Our temporary blindness is our own choice. We can cure it. We ultimately will
cure it. How long that takes is up to us.
CHAPTER FOUR
PHYSICAL RESPONSIBILITY
"No snowflake in an avalanche feels responsible."
... Anon.
All right, we have established who we are and we have considered the reasons why
we might be here. We have laid out three rules for conduct that will presumably give us
progress and/or happiness. We have discussed the infinite nature of the creation we
inhabit. Now let's get down to business. There is a lot more to cover.
We need practical, every-day instructions on how to get along in this world at least
as much as we need grand philosophical ideals. This chapter is called "Physical" Respons-
ibility, but we know that the world physical is just a label for one of the many energy
levels that we can inhabit. It is a fundamental error to assume that physical life is some-
how less important than our mental or spiritual realities.
It is not less important. It is merely different. In the diatonic musical scale, is the
E less important than the F? No, they are simply sounds produced with different vibration
rates, and are both needed. In the same way, physical reality is a different rate of energy
vibration than mental or spiritual reality. Let us not forget also that none of these differ-
ent energy levels is more or less real than any other. The fact that we can only see the
physical world merely proves that it is the limited function of our physical eyes.
Having said that, let's concentrate for a while on this three-dimensional physical
level so that we can figure out exactly what our responsibilities are while we're here.
That won't be hard for most of us, because we have been instinctively focused on this
world almost every waking moment since we were born. Waking minutes, of course, are
not the same as sleeping minutes. Our dreams, when we are asleep, are the result of
concentrating on another non-physical level. We'll talk about that, too.
We have a problem here. It's going to be very hard to be specific about our
responsibility when everyone's job here is a little different from everyone else's. We all
have our own soul-history and specific soul interests or problems that we are working on.
There are groups, categories, and general responsibilities to be sure, but the fascinating
truth is that never has been or ever will be another person just like you or me or anyone
else. We may look alike, and even act alike, but just like the flowers in the fields, we are
never exactly the same.
How shall we subdivide humanity to make this project manageable? We can con-
sider age groups, for example. The responsibilities of a child from age 1 to age 10 are
certainly not the same as those of a teen-ager, and neither of those groups can be
expected to act just like a 20 or 30 year old adult. People change, sometimes radically,
with every passing decade, and so do their day-to-day responsibilities.
What about social groups? A person born into a nomadic, or even a completely
agricultural environment cannot be expected to have the same priorities as an urban
child or adult. And of course, there's the matter of sex. Men and women are so
obviously different in so many ways that we certainly must have different rules for their
behavior, unless like many, their sexual focus has become more complicated than that.
What do we say about those who seem to feel that their body's sexual equipment does
not match their point of view?
And so on and so on. Black people do not feel like white people, who do not feel
like Asians, who do not feel like Caribbeans or Polynesians, who do not feel like Middle
Eastern Arabs. Catholics do not want to be Protestants. Muslims do not want to be
Buddhists or Hindus. We have virtual warfare going on between those who align them-
selves with different religious points of view, and that doesn't even begin to consider the
position of those who call themselves Jews. Nobody seems to agree with their perspective
of the world.
Are we going to try to cover all the varying possibilities of every person's situation,
or are we going to focus in on the similarities we share and concern ourselves only with
general rules of conduct that apply to everyone? The answer is yes. We are going to do
both. Let's start with the general rules.
In chapter two we made a point of trying to simplify this problem as much as
possible by reducing our recommendations down to three simple rules. They are
important even if they are not simple, so we will refresh our memory by repeating them.
#1. Always treat everyone else the way you want to be treated.
#2. Be here now.
#3. Remember: Everything is energy.
There is no doubt that if suddenly everyone on the planet began to live their life
according to these three concepts, the change in society would be immediate and
profound. Expecting it to happen is the same as believing that in one 24-hour period,
all of the second-grade students in an elementary school would become as smart as
eighth graders. It's a nice idea, but apparently this is not how the world works. Our
purpose in stating these rules is based on the belief that if enough people read and
consider them, a few will actually try to apply them, and if it's done even on a limited
basis by a few, the results will be positive.
Another of the basic concepts that we have come to accept because of our own
observation is: There is no such thing as wasted effort.
Because of the principle of equal and opposite reaction, it is impossible for us to
apply ourselves to anything, good or bad, without eventually producing a result. A
better understanding of this fact might begin to cause second thoughts in the mind of
someone who is planning to do something that they know is not right. It would also
help to eliminate the discouragement we feel when the hoped-for positive results of our
efforts are not immediately forthcoming.
This idea also bears repeating. Nobody expects to plant a seed in the ground and
then stand back to immediately watch something grow. We are accustomed to tending
our gardens and then waiting for sun and water and time to nurture them to maturity.
Why should we expect that any other kind of seed we plant should work otherwise?
Not only will most of our efforts grow into physical reality in time, so will our thoughts,
and they will produce fruit of exactly the same kind as we planted.
Much of the misery in the world is created by people who have the mistaken im-
pression that they can continue to do or think the wrong things and somehow, miracu-
lously, they will eventually receive positive results. Short term benefits can often produce
long term problems, and conversely, concentrated positive effort, though sometimes
painful, can work long term wonders.
This idea of printing up a set of rules for human behavior is not exactly new. The
Old Testament in the Bible has a famous set of ten "commandments" that supposedly
came right from the home office through the intercession of Moses, one of God's right
hand men. Paraphrasing the words of my RSV, they go something like this:
1. You shall have no other Gods before me.
2. You shall not make any graven images (to worship).
3. You shall not take the Lord's name in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
5. Honor your father and your mother.
6. You shall not kill.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10. You shall not covet anything that is your neighbors.
The God of Israel, as presented in the book of Exodus, was a rather vengeful
judge who kept track of what everyone was doing and meted our punishment on a
regular basis to anyone or any group of people who did not behave themselves. This
list of rules was appropriate for people who were very concerned about possible
retribution for all of their mistakes. Several years ago, we wrote a little essay called
"The Ten Suggestions" in which we further amended the original commandments. It is
self-explanatory, so we thought we would reprint the whole thing here.
THE TEN SUGGESTIONS
It has been said that God gave man ten commandments, and man has passed
millions of laws trying to enforce them. Maybe the reason for this is that the ten
commandments, as stated in Exodus, are largely negative. Most of them begin with
"Thou shalt not". Nobody likes to be told what he or she cannot do. Most of us react
to "you can't do that" with an instinctive "who says I can't?" What if we were given ten
practical, positively worded suggestions for conduct that basically said the same thing?
Would we react any better?
***
1. Remember that, like Pinocchio, you are the product of a Creator. You are
asked only to respect "Gepetto's" judgement and authority until you earn the right to
become a real boy yourself.
2. Your allegiance must be only to your Creator. Substituting other objects of
adoration, such as wealth, fame, power, romance, intellect, or religion merely delays
your progress and contributes to your unhappiness.
3. Give your Creator respect in your words and deeds. You will be rewarded
with the greatest treasure of all - peace of mind.
4. Allow yourself regular periods of rest and concentration on things spiritual.
One day a week is a good practical formula, and will result in greater efficiency on
the other six.
5. Parenthood is a physical representation of the amazing creative process.
Respect this process by treating parenthood with honor.
6. Revere life, in all its forms.
7. Loyalty to one's spouse for life is incredibly difficult. Because of this, it demands
the best qualities of unselfishness we can develop. It's reward is self-control.
8. There's plenty for everyone. Learn to share. Taking what you don't earn costs
you self-respect, and that's too high a price for anything.
9. Always tell the truth. It saves a lot of time, because the truth will make itself
known sooner or later anyway.
10. See number 2. The grass isn't greener anywhere else. The only satisfaction
there is in having anything comes from the effort you spend to earn it.
***
There is one more general truth which we can consider a responsibility, although
it really is more of a privilege when fully understood. It is a fact that is already totally
or partially made use of by many, but so often forgotten or ignored that it should be
printed and hung on everyone's wall. At the risk of being considered a Bible-thumper,
we are going to make one more reference to it here, this time from the New Testament.
In Acts 20:35, Paul is quoted as saying, "Remember the words of the Lord Jesus,
how he said, it is more blessed to give than to receive." What a shame that the RSV
and other translations have used the word blessed here. All of the power and most of
the sense of this sentence has been lost because of our reaction to that one word.
We all appreciate the things that we call "blessings", but the vague idea that God will
give us a pat on the back and a few favors in return for our giving something of our own
is a watered-down distortion of how it really works.
Millions of people are out there every day stealing "things" from other people
because they just don't get the idea. It is not just more "blessed" to give, it is more
EFFECTIVE. It is more PROFITABLE. It is more PRODUCTIVE. It is more CREATIVE.
It is exactly the same as planting the kind of seed you want to get the fruit you want,
which can turn one seed into a whole tree. It is a fundamental principle of the whole
creation.
I don't know what Aramaic word Jesus used if and when he made the statement
Paul is quoting, but whatever he said, this is what I think he meant: "Don't waste your
time worrying about what you're getting. Just concentrate on what you are giving, and
what you get back in return will far exceed your gift." Jesus was a teacher, and a very
good one, from all reports. He was speaking from a deep knowledge of his subject, and
he was trying to be helpful, not create converts.
Just imagine how the world might be changed overnight if every parent taught every
child from day one that the way to get along and be prosperous in this world was to make
as many contributions of their time and talent as possible, and just watch the miraculous
results. This should be right alongside rule No. 1, and it should be pounded on in every
home and every school until everyone gets it.
How much time, effort, and resources are wasted globally on "security" concerns
because so many of us think that the way to get ahead is to take something that
belongs to someone else? Try to picture a world where there are no locks, no fences,
no guards, no police looking for "perps", and ultimately no armies because they are not
necessary. All of the real progress made by civilization to date has been made by those
who understood the "secret" of giving. What is this secret?
It is absolutely and literally guaranteed by natural law that we always get back
more than we give, and in the same currency - no exceptions! What could be plainer
than that? Those who do not grasp this concept, and keep giving negative input are
merely part of the problem, and the fruit of their efforts is ultimately sadness, both for
themselves and for others.
Now let us examine some specific examples of how people in different circumstances
can respond to their challenges by accepting personal responsibility or by trying to
avoid it, and see how the system works.
CHILDREN
Interestingly, the books that have the most accurate information about the entry of
souls into the earth's environment don't talk a great deal about the responsibility of
children. Apparently, the main objective of childhood is to prepare for a productive
adulthood. Of course, a lot of the burden for this preparation naturally falls on the parents
of the child. Therefore we do not have just one soul growing in experience, we usually
have three.
It is a cooperative effort even in a much larger sense. Contrary to accepted belief,
the "child" does have a lot to say about who his or her parents are. Each soul comes here
after considerable discussion with others who are more experienced, and have only his/her
best interests in mind. A situation is selected where the parents will provide the optimum
circumstances in terms of heredity, environment, and often prior commitment, for the
soul to work on one or more areas of growth.
There is no such thing as a perfect arrangement. There are always challenges
because of the limitations of family and society conditions, and the soul's own tendencies.
Sometimes the circumstances change so radically after the "birth", that the opportunity
for growth is negated by the new complications and the soul might withdraw in favor of
another situation. This results, from the earth's point of view, in the "death" of the child,
and is often a traumatic experience for the family.
How the parents and others deal with their loss can enhance or retard their own
growth, and there are many souls who come here for a short time specifically to provide
that experience for the parents. The death is not a painful process for the soul/child
involved. It is difficult only for those who do not yet see the grand plan unfolding.
From the child's point of view, the first few years of life on earth are a huge
adjustment from a place with few limitations to the stifling environment of time and
space where even walking and talking have to be learned. There is the need to establish
cooperation between the animal consciousness of the new body and the eternal
consciousness of the soul with it's own long-term agenda - no small task. There is also
the need to learn to get along in a society where very few people are consciously aware
of the whole process, and consequently are not always helpful.
Learning to cope with limitations is what childhood is all about. Some limitations
are absolutely necessary for the welfare of the soul and the society. Others are "artificial",
and should be changed or eliminated. We all have to discover the difference. If parents
are too tolerant, the new child will be unprepared for the rough edges of society. If there
are too many restrictions, the frustration might produce bitterness or rebellion.
Everyone is learning here at all times, and if the child-rearing process is relatively
successful, then the soul can become a responsible adult who can make his or her own
decisions, right or wrong. The level of individual responsibility for the soul moves up, and
some meaningful growth can take place.
YOUNG ADULTS
We're going to use the term "young adults" to include everyone from approximately
age 13 to age 30, because the rate of maturation into adulthood varies so widely that it
is impossible to say when or if it happens. Some children are thrust into adult situations
with adult problems at a very early age, and if they survive, become wise beyond their
years. Others get so caught up in childish attitudes for one reason or another that they
never seem to grow up. In any case, growing up, to a certain extent, means learning to
cope successfully with one's situation in life, and everyone's situation is different, so
"maturity" becomes a very subjective matter.
Since the specific responsibilities of a young adult can only be determined by
examining each life individually, we are again going to have to attempt to find some
general rules that apply to all, or at least most. We can start by remembering again
that the whole purpose of human life is to learn from the experiences to be had in the
world of time and space, and that even though it appears that we are individuals, there
is really only one of us in many forms.
In a perfect world, every young adult would have two perfect parents who
completely understood the situation and always provided wise counseling along with firm
and loving direction. This of course is almost never the case, so the adult-in-training has
to accept some of the responsibility for his or her own growth.
The truth is, and you can put this in the bank, THE WORLD IS PERFECT. It is
functioning at all times, with no exceptions, exactly the way it is supposed to. The so-
called problems that are encountered by young adults, young parents, and everyone else
come under the heading of growing pains. Just like the "problems" that are handed out
in math class at school, their purpose is to teach us how to solve problems. They are
not insurmountable obstacles, they are stepping stones.
The first necessity for a successful life is the realization at the earliest possible age
that this is how the world works, and instead of focusing on the difficulties we encounter,
we need to focus on our reaction to those difficulties. Only by the slow, day-to-day
efforts to understand ourselves and the others we contact will we make our current
problems dissolve as if by magic so that we can move on to the next ones. Anyone who
has survived the difficult transition period from childhood to adult status realizes that all
their problems didn't disappear, they just morphed into different, sometimes larger ones.
Our problems do not keep us from living, they are our life.
When young adults begin concentrating on the solutions to the problems that they
and others face, they suddenly become mature, for that attitude is maturity. Many of
them do, and for that reason alone, the society of human-kind can, and does at times
make real progress. Young people have a strong tendency to think that they are smarter
and more capable than the generation that came before them. There is nothing wrong
with this idea. They simply need to prove it. It is the ultimate responsibility of every new
generation to leave the planet and its life in better condition than they found it.
MATURE ADULTS
The dictionary tell us that the word mature means "fully developed". If not an
oxymoron, "fully developed" is at least a misleading expression because personal growth
never really stops. There is in most lives, however, a point at which maximum vitality
is reached, and the process of improvement slowly reverses and becomes entropy. This
need only happen on the physical level, and even then with wide variations of experience
between individuals.
Mental maturity is another matter, and we will be talking about that at some length
in chapter 5, so we won't dwell on it here. We will only remind ourselves that we human
beings do not have just one body. We have at least three: a physical body, a mental
body, and a spiritual body. It is very unusual for all three of these bodies to mature at
the same rate in anyone. Which of our bodies is in the best shape at any point is mostly
a matter of where we have placed most of our attention.
The world, or at least the human society, has other ideas. In general, the western
world considers us adults when we have lived here for 21 years. At that point we are
legally and morally responsible for our own choices. This is an arbitrary decision based on
society's need for order. We all know that many people are not very grown up at age 21,
while others act very responsibly much earlier than that.
The matter of personal responsibility, of course, is what this book is all about, and
it is clear that at some point in our lives we all have to be held accountable. The extent
to which we properly handle our own responsibilities is probably the best measure of
maturity. Those of us who won't be responsible are almost always in some kind of
difficulty, and the extreme cases usually end up being incarcerated in an institution where
their choices are limited. The message of society is clear. Make good choices for yourself,
or someone else will end up making them for you.
It's a pretty good system, and it's a microcosm on the physical level of what goes on
with our "souls" on a larger scale. In order for the creative force (God, if you prefer) to
truly experience the creation from every conceivable point of view, these individual points
(us) have to be allowed to make creative decisions of their own. This is called "free will",
and we all have it. Our choices are only limited by some of the features of the environ-
ment we have chosen to experience. If you dive into a swimming pool, you can choose to
stay submerged for as long as you want. Your free will determines whether you come up
for air when you need to or you stay there and drown.
The mature person will probably choose to swim to the surface for air so that he or
she can continue to enjoy the water. That's what grown up adults do in the real world.
They make choices that take into consideration the probably consequences of their action.
Sometimes this might indeed involve physical risk, but that can still be a mature choice if
it is done for the right reason.
A "fully developed" adult, whether 21 years old or 70 years old, will never say, "I
don't care how this affects anyone else, I'm going to do what I want to do"' What if
everyone did this? As we have said, we are all in this together, and it is quite impossible
for any of us to do something that does not affect someone else or the world in general.
Understanding this fact is , by definition, maturity, or "individual responsibility"'.
"SENIOR" ADULTS
By the time a person has reached "senior" status in the eyes of the world, it is
logical to assume that he/she has accumulated enough information and experience to
make mostly correct life choices. While this is often true, and some cultures give special
attention to their elderly to tap this valuable resource, it is certainly not a universal
phenomenon.
There are, unfortunately, many who have reached the age of their "declining" years
without ever accepting the responsibility for their own lives. If one has lived a long life
without placing emphasis on the development of all three aspects of their reality
(physical, mental, and spiritual), then the resulting imbalance in their personality is very
likely to have caused one or more kind of dependence.
The person who believes that the only life they have is the physical one bounded by
birth and death can become preoccupied with prolonging physical life at all costs, and
often throws that life on the mercy of medical science. While highly trained and caring
medical experts are a great blessing to society, they do not possess magical powers, and
can only work with the tools they have and the real condition of their patients.
A patient whose rigid, unbending attitude for an entire lifetime of 60 or 70 years
has produced physical symptoms such as arthritic joints cannot be "cured" by the
external application of any form of drugs or potions. By the same token, an individual
who has spent years in self-indulgence without much effort to be of service to others will
have a hard time avoiding loneliness in their old age, because the seeds of companionship
were not planted.
There is wonderful joy to be had in a long term of years on the earth, and oppor-
tunities for growth abound right up until the end. As we have said, even adversities like
the loss of loved ones or personal illness are powerful growth opportunities if they are
seen as such. If life on earth teaches us only one lesson, it should be the obvious one
that nothing is permanent. Change is the only reality. It is up to us to determine the
direction of the changes. Things will get better or worse for all of us depending on our
expectations and our daily thoughts and intentions.
The most evident change being faced by senior adults is the one referred to as
death. If one has done his or her homework, then this change will be accepted with
dignity and understanding instead of fear and regret. Old age has a responsibility to
set and example for ensuing generations, and leaving this earth with the right attitude is
one of the best legacies we can bequeath. Death, of course, is not death at all, but
merely the passing on to another of the endless wonderful rooms of this mansion called
creation. We will all get there, so it would be wiser to forget about it and concentrate on
what we are doing right or wrong while we're here.
This, then, is the ultimate responsibility of every human being, no matter what age.
To live each day in such a way that we, and everyone around us, grows a little closer to
the one-ness we share, and that we leave the world in better shape than we found it.
What if everybody did?
. CHAPTER FIVE
MENTAL RESPONSIBILITY
"You cannot understand perceived events unless
you understand who perceives them."
... Seth
"The Unknown Reality"
What if there was a large community of people living in a physical environment
that was usually pleasant, but sometimes very hostile, and they had no shelters?
Let us further suppose that in this group there were those who had the ability,
like architects, to design appropriate houses or buildings to provide the needed
shelter, but no-one who would or could build them?
Would our theoretical community be improved if the architects' designs were
never built, or if they were built, it was done so poorly that the buildings collapsed
with the first bad conditions? In this situation, it is fairly obvious that just designing
shelter isn't enough. Someone has to build it and do it correctly so that it actually
works. Without proper construction work, the community could all perish in a
severe storm.
What is the real point? On an individual basis, your eternal soul-entity is the
architect, and your physical self is the community at risk. That leaves your mind to
do the necessary building, and that is exactly what it does. But here's the catch.
Unless your mind, the builder, follows the architect's plan with care, the physical
life that is created is apt to be an unstable mess. It is absolutely critical for each
of us to find and refer to the blueprint for our life on a regular basis. Since the
whole society is nothing more than a collection of individual entities, our world
becomes a reflection of how well we do that.
If that is not a responsibility, what is? Looking at the world around us, we see
a vast assortment of mini-societies, some of which are functioning fairly well, but
others that truly are involved in mass confusion. What is the reason for this?
There are too many individuals who are ignoring basic construction principles and
and building, with their minds, lives that will not work.
Let's talk about those basic principles one more time. Just what is the soul's
blueprint, and how do we read it? Make no mistake about this. There is a plan for
every life, no matter how haphazard it may seem from this angle. Your soul didn't
just drop in here on a whim. It came here for a reason, and it is up to your mind,
the builder, to discover the plan and implement it to the best of your ability.
Principle #1 There is only One of us.
There is nothing that you or I can ever do or think that does not have an
immediate effect on everyone and everything around us. Every thought counts.
If we begin to think that we are separate from the rest of society and that we can
go on our own way without being concerned about others, the whole system
begins to break apart. If many of us think that, it is a given that confusion will
result.
Principle #2 The physical result is a result, not a cause.
Just as a house is the end product of architectural design and the builder's
effort, our lives' circumstances are the result of our mind's proper or improper
construction work. Positive, constructive thinking creates positive results and
contentment. Negative thoughts create the opposite. It is a beautiful system
that works perfectly. We can create our own happiness just by learning to
control our thoughts. In the process, we learn patience because of the time
lag between the thought and the physical result.
Principle #3 The power of your mind is un-limited.
Mental energy is, in a very real sense, electrical in nature. Just as uncontrolled
electrical power can be tremendously destructive at times, so can the combined
force of many mis-directed minds. Each of us has an individual consciousness to
work with and a will to control it, but we are also closely connected to the vast
network of consciousness that is humanity.
If our individual minds make constant changes in our own physical world, just
imagine the combined effect of thousands or even millions of minds working in
concert, whether for good or ill. It is not commonly known yet be empirical
science, which tends to ignore mental force, but even our weather patterns are
are severely affected by our collective consciousness. A period of conflicted
chaotic thinking that causes social upheaval cannot fail to also generate corres-
ponding disturbances in the very atmosphere that surrounds us. We think we are
the victims of nature's power, but we are often the cause of violent storms,
earthquakes, etc. with the power of our out-of-control collective thinking.
Our beloved scientific community has barely scratched the surface when it
comes to an understanding of our mental processes. There has been, of course,
even in our limited history of man's progress, a lot of interested study of the
human mind, but we are talking about a limit-less subject here. We are never
going to understand it completely, because there is no such thing as completeness.
A lot of our lack of understanding could be corrected if we were not so short-
sighted at times. Many believe, for instance, that the "progress" of our physical
and mental environment has been one continuous upward climb dating back to
the beginning of our evolution from a higher animal form. The truth is
unbelievably more complex than that.
There has been a climb, all right. As a matter of fact, there have been many
of them, with alternating waves of progress and regression. There have been
civilizations similar to ours on this planet as recently as 12,000 years ago that had
a better grasp of how our minds work than we do now. It is a tribute to the power
of the mind that they did such a good job of obliterating their societies that we
can hardly find traces of them. We are again trying to build a new and better
world where we can live in peace and prosperity, but in the process we have also
produced our own means of self-destruction. We learn very slowly, but we will
learn..
Mankind's progress or regression, however, always depends on the collective
effort or the growth (or lack of) of each individual soul that takes up temporary
residence here. This is where our individual responsibility comes in. It works
like this:
Your soul or mine, which we will call an "entity", decides, with the cooperation
of others, to come to this planet for a sojourn of a "lifetime" because there are
lessons that can be learned in a time and space environment that cannot be learned
anywhere else. A plan is made for the entity to work on one or more areas of
soul development and/or to help someone else do the same. Some appropriate
parents are selected, and the soul gets "born". Within a short time, the soul's
memory is obscured so that the new body/mind can concentrate on the job at
hand without the distraction of too much history.
The body that is inhabited is a new creation with its own limitations and its own
physical consciousness. Gradually in the early years a working agreement evolves
between the soul, which operates outside of time, and the new animal form, which
is confined to a limited number of earth years. This agreement results in a new
temporary imagined consciousness which we call a "personality" or "ego". it is a
hybrid that is neither soul nor animal, but a combination of both, and it has its own
level of consciousness which we call a "mind".
This mind, like all of creation, contains unlimited potential because of its con-
nection to the universal mind or force that created it. It also has the freedom to
decide whether it will be more in tune with the soul's plan or aligned with the
objectives of the primate form it inhabits. The primate instincts are survival,
reproduction, and social inter-action, and they are quite powerful, as we know.
The new mind, with its freedom and potential, is sometimes overwhelmed by its
own importance, and if not kept aware of its soul connection, can ride of in some
very startling directions. The same creative attitude that produces new and better
methods of agriculture can also produce new and more destructive means of
warfare, and convince itself that they are equally important. Our so-called rational
minds can rationalize anything to the point where it becomes acceptable.
The out-of-control mind of a serial killer is functioning just like the mind of a
scientific pioneer. Both are devising and creating ideas as fast as they can, often
without any regard for the ultimate consequences. Much direction come from the
soul, which sees the mind's creations from a time-less perspective, and is totally
aware of possible "future" results of our choices.
If our minds do not constantly refer to this built-in moral compass, we become
like wild horses stampeding in whatever direction appeals to us at the moment.
Little real progress is made if we build huge societies that are so misguided that
they self-destruct from the weight of their own folly, but such has been the history
of mankind.
So what is happening? This is the bottom line. The experience of mankind is
not about building societies at all. It's about providing growth opportunities for
individual eternal entities - each a part of the one creative force. Society is nothing
more than the day-by-day, person-t-person choices that are made by individual
minds.
Regardless of the choices, there is learning going on. We determine only the
nature of the lessons, and some are much more painful than others. A properly
prepared meal, made lovingly from healthy foods, produces a feeling of contentment.
Over-indulging in the wrong kind of food will usually result in a severe stomach-
ache. Either way, there is an opportunity for the mind to see the effect of its choice,
and eventually most minds will begin to make better and better decisions to avoid
painful results.
The same process takes place on a much larger scale, where nations have the
option of peaceful cooperation towards mutual goals, or out-and-out war to settle
their differences. The fact that we so often choose war with its awful consequences
proves that we cannot trust our minds to always make the best decisions. It's
apparent that the mind is not much concerned with the body's comfort. It has it's
own agenda, and needs to be trained like the wild horse we have already mentioned.
How can we train these amazing minds we have been given? Let's start by using
them to analyze themselves. The first thing we have to realize is that your mind is
not you, any more than the hammer is the blacksmith. It is a tool of limitless power,
and just like the blacksmith's hammer, it can create useful horseshoes or immense
destruction, depending on where it is aimed.
It's very easy to fall into the trap where we believe that we are our minds. The
external world tends to lead us to that conclusion, and our egos are determined to
convince us that they are all-important. But just who is doing all of this thinking?
Where are the "thoughts" coming from? Take this simple test. Close your eyes
and put your fingers in your ears, thus more or less shutting down two of your most
important senses, sight and hearing. You still have three others, but if you are doing
this in a relatively private spot and remain still, you can almost ignore them. Are
you still there? Of course you are, but who is there? Now try one more thing. The
next thought you have, just observe it like it was a passing cloud in the sky, and
you are watching it. It will soon be replaced by another thought, but that's just
another cloud.
If you keep doing this, you will suddenly realize that those thoughts are not you
at all, and that the real you is just observing them. If you have never done this
before, it can be a shocking revelation. Those who engage in this process artivicially
with the use of drugs are literally playing with fire. The mind does not want to be
found out, and will resort to all kinds of mixed-up rationalizations to preserve its
importance. We call it "scrambling one's brain".
The truth is that beneath this mental layer of energy that we identify with, there
is a real individual whose name is "I AM", and he/she is connected to all the other
I AM's in the universe. You can't get rid of this I AM. That's who you are. So am I.
So is everyone else. Most of them just don't know it, that's all, because they have
been mis-led by their own ego-mind.
Once you learn this, you will never again be the victim of your own endless poor
decisions, because you will begin to see your life and the world from a completely
new perspective. You will begin to use the power of the hammer that is your mind
for more constructive purposes. You will probably become physically healthier
because you will stop listening to your mind's negative input. One day you will wake
up and realize that you are actually happier than you were before because you feel
like you are on the right track.
This is mental responsibility, because if you are going in the right direction, and
so am I, and so are many others, then so is the world.
CHAPTER SIX
SPIRITUAL RESPONSIBILITY
"This is the key. If you don't give attention to
the source of love within you - the Spirit within - it is
as if it didn't exist, because it makes no demands on you.
Yet it is the greatest power in the universe in infinite supply
within you, waiting for you to release it and let it flow."
... Bruce McArthur
The word "spirit" is a real turn-off for many people, because it has had so
many strange interpretations throughout the centuries. A so-called "spiritual"
life has been seen to be somehow less relevant to, and out of touch with, the
"real" world. Talk of spirituality make so many people uncomfortable that we
usually tend to avoid it in our everyday conversation.
That is not true of everyone, of course. There are those who are very
interested in the subject we call "religion", often to extreme lengths. For
most, however, certain days of the week or year are set aside for paying
attention to a greater or lesser degree to their spiritual side, and they are
satisfied with that arrangement.
If there is a problem with this, it may be that we tend to confuse the
terms religion and spirituality with each other. If you ask someone what their
religion is, you are apt to get in reply the name of one of the world's great
"religious" groups - whichever one the person feels comfortable with at that
point in time. If you ask them if they are a spiritual person, you might get
anything from a blank stare to a long dissertation on the merits of their
religion.
There are also many people who consider themselves to be spiritual,
but who are not particularly impressed with any of the world's organized
religions. We are faced with an interesting question. Which of these organized
groups, if any, are right, and which of these people are acting responsibly
with respect to the spirit in all of us? We believe that the answer to this
question is to be found in the title of this book, which contains two words:
individual, and responsibility.
Up to now, we have been stressing the importance of the second word,
responsibility, but have not placed our emphasis on the individual part. The
plain truth is that there are as many religions as there are individuals on the
planet, and we all have one, whether we talk about it or not. RE-LIGION
literally means the re-uniting of something that has come apart, and we are
all involved in that process every day, even if we are sometimes going about
it the wrong way.
We are all familiar with the quotation, "all roads lead to Rome". We might
paraphrase that quote by saying, "all paths lead to heaven", and despite our
preoccupation with concepts like Satan, or Evil, etc., this is true. We are all
on our way back to the "Garden of Eden". Unfortunately, many have chosen
extremely long and rocky paths. The problems and suffering we create with
our freedom of choice can be seemingly endless and exceedingly difficult and/
or painful.
Some people, in the midst of their struggles, even blame their God, or
Gods, for the pain. That doesn't help much. It merely postpones the solution
to the problem. Suppose a kind mother sent her son outside to play one day
with the admonition, "have fun, but be careful, and don't get hurt". The boy
proceeds to climb a tree, fall out of it, and break his arm. Whose fault is that?
Should we blame the parent for not keeping the child in a cage?
It's a distressful situation, to be sure, but what is the bottom line? The
boy is given medical attention, the arm heals, and he has learned a valuable
lesson. "Be more careful when climbing trees", for instance, or "maybe he
should pay more attention to what his parents tell him". That's basically how
the system works. It's all about experiencing this world without hurting our-
selves or someone else in the process. There's nothing spiritual about it, or
is there?
What is spirit, anyway? Remember that way back in chapter 2 we said
that "Rule #3 was: everything is energy"? Well, if that's true, then spirit must
be made of the same stuff. In school, we learned that there are two kinds of
energy. There is potential energy that is static and inactive, and then there is
kinetic energy, which is moving, acting, and creating some kind of result or
reaction.
Isn't this a perfect replica of the un-manifest and manifest God forces
that serious divinity students of all faiths have always talked about? The
un-manifest Creator is potential, and the manifest is kinetic. It is energy
without any limits. We put a face or a personality on this force and call it
God, or Allah, or some other name. We give a purpose to the transformation
from potential to kinetic creation, and call it Love.
Our wonderfully active minds might try to convince us that all this is
merely academic, and that concepts like God and Love are not real, but we
have already seen that our minds cannot be trusted. You have a personality,
don't you? Well, then, your Creator must have one, too. You are capable of
emotions like love, aren't you? Well, then, your Creator must be, also. Why
would we think otherwise?
So let us set up a hypothetical creation where the Creator is a personality
with limitless potential, and who is motivated by a powerful force (which we
will call "love") to see what it can create. Maybe we can make some sense out
of our little story of the boy falling out of the tree. Remember that before our
Creator decides to create, its energy is just potential. Nothing has happened
yet. The minute something happens, we now have another (kinetic) kind of
energy which we will call "mind".
Our all-powerful mind begins to imagine what it can create, and all
heaven breaks loose (sorry about that). Universes, galaxies, suns, planets,
etc., etc. You name it, what can you imagine? This is interesting, though.
Once we have imagined something into existence, we also have a third kind
of energy to deal with. We'll call it "matter".
Let's back up and see what we have so far. We have the creative
potential force, which we will call SPIRIT. We have the moving, imagining
kinetic energy we will call MIND, and we have the result, which is MATTER.
Spirit, mind, and matter (or body), but wait a minute. Which one came first?
In the creation we have just set up, it's obvious that the energy we are
calling SPIRIT is the most necessary, because everything starts there, and
the other forms of energy are not causes, they are results. But the results
are part of the cause, and they give it form and substance, so it is probably
safe to say that the creative force is really triple in nature. Where have we
heard that before? Almost every one of the world's recognized religions has
some sort of trinity for a God.
To me, that means that we are probably on the right track here, and it
also means that since we are part of this creation, then we are also replicas
of this trinity. It seems that, as we have said before, each of us is a three-
part copy of the force that created us, and we let our minds ignore this fact
at our own peril. Furthermore, since SPIRIT is the moving force behind our
situation, we'd better make sure we don't forget about it in our big rush to
be successful human beings.
It's not so much a matter of the relative importance of each of the
three parts. Without a creation, there is no such thing as a Creator, so they
are all important. In a three-note musical chord, which note is most valuable?
Take any one of them away, and the music changes dramatically. Our
spirits, minds, and bodies work the same way. Whatever affects one of them
also affects the other two, but the energy level we are calling SPIRIT is
literally the stuff we are made of. It's the raw material of our lives.
Whether you or I have a successful life is really based on what we make
out of the raw material we have. We use our minds to build with, and our
life is the result. The whole of creation is very much like a great symphony,
and each of us has his/her own instrument to play and his/her own part of
the arrangement. If we all study and practice our own parts, then the music
is harmonious and pleasing. When we don't, we just make noise.
Here is the really troubling question for many of us. If our spirit, or
creative force, is so important, why is it so hard to see? Wouldn't it be much
simpler if we had a God whose presence was obvious, and whose plan for each
of us was spelled out in big letters so we couldn't miss it? Wouldn't it be more
fun if we could just sit down and play this symphony without having to practice
it?
The first answer that comes to mind for these questions is this. All of us
know that the greatest satisfactions in our lives come from the achievements
into which we have put the most effort. We very quickly tire of anything that
is too easy for us. The universe we have been given to experience is infinitely
complex and and mysterious in nature for the very reason that it's more fun
if we can never figure it all out. If we already knew all the answers, what
would we have to strive for? A treasure hunt is only enjoyable if you don't
know where the treasure is hidden.
A second answer comes from the prolific mind of a man named Ken
Wilber, one of our better current philosophical writers. Mr. Wilber says that
we can't see all of our creation because we tend to use only one pair of eyes,
when we actually have three pairs. Our physical eyes are only capable of
discerning physical truth, and even that is sometimes an optical illusion.
Since we can't solve mathematical problems, for instance, just by looking at
them, we also need mental eyes to work with for this purpose.
Quite often it actually helps to close our physical eyes when we are trying
to "see" the answer to a mental problem. Seeing the physical world is impor-
tant, but as any capable "blind" person can tell you, it is not essential for
survival. If one is trying to concentrate on mental or spiritual matters,
looking around at the physical world at the same time can be a distraction.
In the same way, attempting to understand the creative force, God,
spirit, or whatever else we call it, is virtually impossible with a human
conscious mind. Our mental pair of eyes is not equipped for the job, either.
The only way to really get a glimpse of spiritual "truth" is to close our mental
eyes, which usually takes some practice, because we are not used to doing it.
That's why there are so many differences of opinion about spiritual truth.
Every time we try to describe spirit in words, which are mental tools, we
automatically create some sort of distortion because of our own mental filters.
Interestingly, anyone who has succeeded in quieting their mind enough to see
spiritual reality will nearly always try to describe what just like anyone else
who has done it. They all see the same "vision". They just have trouble
putting it into words, because it is beyond words.
Incidentally, let's not forget that it works the other way, too. We cannot
instantly solve our math problems with prayer, either. Even though there is
definite interaction between the differing energy levels, it's most efficient if we
use the pair of eyes that suits the problem. It would not be wise to drive a
car with our physical eyes closed.
If we have said this before, we apologize for the repetition, but it is so
critical to our understanding, that it bears repeating. Our conscious minds,
while they are constructing our lives, are always walking a tightrope between
the long-term interests of the soul and the short-term concerns of our
primate form. The only way we can successfully navigate a course through
our visit here on Earth is to give equal attention in both directions.
This comes more under the heading of mental responsibility, but so many
of us are focused too strongly on our physical or animal needs that the soul's
purpose, which is the spirit part, is badly neglected. It is possible to complete
an entire lifetime and make absolutely no spiritual progress at all, or even to
regress. The soul-entity comes here with a plan and a purpose, and it is up to
us to pay enough attention to discover what that purpose is. That is our
spiritual responsibility, and it is the true mark of a successful life.
If we participate in an organized "religion", then we must be sure that
our participation is actually helping this process, and not leading us down the
wrong path. Too many people get caught up in the dogmatic beliefs of their
particular group and lose sight of the real objective, which is the re-union of
their own entity with their Creator.
Even worse, some organized so-called religions of the world are often
engaged in a campaign designed to convince or even force everyone else to
join their group. This need to change everyone else and not ourselves has
often resulted in open warfare, with many people being murdered or
incarcerated in the name of religion. Nothing could be farther from the
Creator's plan. It is definitely not the responsibility of each soul to try to
force other souls to walk the same path.
If one has truly caught a glimpse of the light of truth, then it is sufficient
to make sure that the light is on in one's own life so that others can see it.
Fortunately, there are also many religious groups who make genuine service
to others their work, and without them mankind might slip backward again
into the "dark ages".
This chapter needs a summary, so let us try to present one. What is
your spiritual responsibility, and mine? To begin with, we must be aware
that, much like children of a parent who places his sons in positions of
authority in the family business, we have each been given the power of our
"Father". This power has no limits, and with it we can create heaven on
earth, or mass destruction. The choice is up to each of us, because the
Father's joy comes from seeing his "sons" succeed on their own and become
true creative partners. He can wait forever for us to get around to it, because
time is not a factor.
The other thing we must remember is that each of us is on his or her
own pilgrim journey. We can certainly help each other, but the ultimate
responsibility for our life is solely our own. We are all equal in the Creator's
eyes, and all will be given the same lessons and gifts. Our soul-entities are
eternal, like their Creator, and unlike our temporary physical form. We can
take as long as we like, and make our journey as difficult or as pleasant as
we want, but we must eventually return to the "garden".
Jan 2016
HERE'S AN INDEX OF WHAT YOU WILL FIND ON THIS PAGE SO FAR
BOOK BY Ben Bolt "INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY"
A Primer for a Successful Life
Chapters Eleven and Twelve (and the Summary) are still on the "Archives" page.
Sorry about that - we're trying to get it fixed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
GOOD AND EVIL
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously
committing evil deeds, and it were only necessary to
separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But
the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of
every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece
of his own heart?"
... Alexander Solzhenitsyn
from "The Gulag Archipelago"
I just finished reading two lengthy newspaper articles about the role of God in
a recent natural disaster that has killed upwards of 150,000 people and completely
disrupted the lives of millions more. There are numerous quotes in these articles
from scholarly religious thinkers, and multiple viewpoints on the subject. Everyone
seems to have their own opinion about why a supposedly loving God would allow or
even cause such things to happen to "innocent people".
Some say that God is punishing "sinners". Some say that God has nothing to do
with this sort of thing. Some say that there isn't any God, and that disasters are proof
that creation is random and chaotic, etc., etc.
I didn't see much evidence in either article that the author or any of his sources of
information knew what they were talking about, in spite of their status as scholars. The
prevailing conclusion to most of their reasoning was that there was no way we could
hope to understand God's mysterious ways, so we might as well not even try. We
should just help each other muddle through and hope for the best.
In a way, that's not a bad course of action, because helping each other is what
we're always supposed to be doing, and taking one day's troubles at a time is the only
way to grow. But I have never been satisfied with a plan for an entire life, or even a
small project, that was based on ignorance or guesswork. I am convinced that the
assumption that we cannot know why we are here, or why evil exists, or why this, or
why that, is a serious fundamental error.
We have already seen that our minds, and consequently our beliefs, are what
create our lives, so assuming that we cannot know something or do something pretty
much guarantees that that we never will. It is our determination not to know that
keeps us ignorant. Most of the references in the above-mentioned newspaper articles
were from people connected with one of the world's organized religious groups.
Organized religion, especially Christianity, encourages the idea that we cannot know
God's plan. It keeps us dependent on the organization or a "Savior" to get us through.
It is a false premise. The idea that we cannot know "God's plan" for the world is
simply not true. The whole purpose of our life is to figure that out, and we certainly can.
What we cannot, and do not yet need to understand, is the complete truth behind all
creation, for the simple reason that it is both infinite and ever-changing, and our
conscious minds are not equipped to handle that much data.
However, just because we don't completely understand nuclear physics doesn't
mean that we can't figure out what's going on in kindergarten, and compared to all
creation, this world is just a kindergarten. It is our job to figure it out. Telling each
other we can't is a cop-out, and prevents a lot of people from even trying.
When I was a child, my mother used to do embroidery work, using metal
"embroidery hoops" to hold the fabric taut while she sewed pictures on it with colored
thread. It was quite fascinating to watch the picture develop as she progressed, but I
noticed that if I looked at the bottom side of the fabric instead of the top, it was im-
possible to tell what the picture was. The reverse of the pattern just looked random
and disorganized. Only when I looked at the work from my mother's viewpoint did the
project make sense.
That's man's problem in a nutshell. Our perspective is wrong. We insist on looking
at this world from the bottom-side viewpoint of our limited conscious minds instead of
the top-side plan of the Creator, and it appears random. It is not. The entire uni-verse
(literally "one song") is completely orderly and purposeful. The only reason that it seems
un-regulated is because we ourselves are part of the creative process, and we have been
given the freedom to make use of it at will.
We don't always make good choices, so the mathematical structure of the system
tends to pull us up short once in a while so we can find the right pattern again. This
brings up the other critical misconception that causes mass confusion among "scholars".
It's called "dualism", and it permeates all the philosophical ramblings of Christianity.
We have two big stumbling blocks in our thinking that we must overcome. The
first is, as we have been discussing, the assumption that we cannot know what the plan
is, and the second is the notion that we are separate from the Creator. The idea that \
"God" is out there somewhere either ignoring us completely or making decisions about
our fate based on our behavior is utterly ridiculous. It is based on the primitive picture
that we are children, and we need a father to keep us company when we're good and
punish us when we're not.
Let's get that straight right now. God (which is merely an older spelling of the
word good) is not "out there" somewhere watching us. He/she is us. The Creator is the
creation. There is nothing that is not God (or good). "He" is not outside of natural laws,
He is natural law. He is all of nature. The laws of nature are merely the arrangement
that the symphony orchestra of creation is playing. We cannot be separated from the
Creator because that's who we are. If we do not see this and think that we are separate,
it is just because we are looking in the wrong direction.
The newspaper articles we referred to at the beginning of this chapter were both
printed on the same page under the heading, "Where Was God"?, and the writers
attempted to propose different answers to the question. The answer is: The same place
God always is - everywhere. Where does the sun go at night-time? Nowhere. We can't
always see it because the earth turns away and it's temporarily dark, but the sun is
right where it always is. So is the creative force, whatever you want to call it.
The sun is perhaps the best symbol of the Creator we have, because it is our source
of physical life. If we turn our backs to it, what do we see? We see shadows, which of
course are caused by the sun. On an overcast day we see clouds, which are also a
product of the sun's rays combined with the energy form we call water. To make it
simple, from now on in this book we are going to call God by his right name to help clear
up the confusion. God's name is "ALL THAT IS", and we can even abbreviate it for
convenience to A.T.I.
A.T.I. is just what it says it is. There isn't anything else. That means that when
A.T.I. says it is "I AM", it is telling the truth. I AM is just another aspect of A.T.I.
The fact that you and I have what we call a "personality" is merely an expression of the
I AM in infinite forms. All we really need to do to realize that we are a part of A.T.I.
is to start acting like it. The realization will follow.
We have said that A.T.I. is good, and the subject of this chapter is "good and evil"<
so let's get to the subject. The natural disaster we talked about is generally referred to
as "evil" because it resulted in the destruction of lives and property. We are going to
make it as clear as we can that there is no such thing as evil. EVIL spelled backward is
LIVE. If A.T.I. is good, then what appears to be evil is just another characteristic of good.
That's what there is. There is the appearance of evil, in the same way that there
is an appearance of a shadow when we look away from the sun, or the appearance of
chaos when we look at the bottom of an embroidered picture. We are not seeing evil,
we are seeing the darkness which is the opposite of light, or the cold which is the
opposite of warmth, or the fear which is the opposite of love.
The movement of all this manifested (kinetic) energy is based on polarity.
Everyone knows that we cannot get an electric current to flow unless we have a
positive terminal and a negative one. Is the negative pose less important or desirable
than the positive one? Certainly not. Both are essential for the energy of creation to
exist, and both, then, are good.
We cannot have light without darkness, and we cannot have heat without cold.
We cannot have a top without a bottom, and so on and so on. It is the eternal inter-
action of opposites that is our so-called physical universe. But are they really opposites?
Actually, no. Darkness is merely the absence of light, and cold is the absence of heat,
so darkness and cold do not have any reality of their own. Fear is nothing more than
the absence of love on the emotional level instead of the physical, so our fears are
imaginary, too.
The logical conclusion to this is that what we are calling evil is only the absence of
good that allows good to be expressed and recognized. It does not exist by itself either.
It is a vacuum, and we all know how nature feels about a vacuum. It is unsustainable.
All right then, what are we to think about natural disasters? What do we do about
suffering and death, whether naturally caused or man-made? What about the "apparent"
evil in the world, and the personification of evil that the Christians call Satan? These
things are there. They are part of our world, and we have to deal with them, don't we?
The first thing we have to do, and it is the most important, because if we don't do
it we will never be satisfied, is to change our perspective. We have to get our from
under the embroidery that A.T.I. is creating and see it from the top - the viewpoint of
the creator. If we don't do this, it will never make any sense. It is very easy for us to
be caught up so completely in our immediate problems that we lose our perspective and
begin to see only the half-empty part of our lives. We all do it.
When it comes to large scale disasters like earthquakes, floods, famines, wars,
etc., we almost panic because the suffering is so physically and emotionally devastating.
What is A.T.I. doing here? Well, let's go back to an earlier chapter and remind ourselves
that we're dealing with infinity. If 150,000 people lose their physical lives all at once,
how does that number compare with the available number of souls, which is infinite?
One of the newspaper articles we have been discussing includes this fact: "If the final
death toll of the recent Asian tsunami reaches 120,000, it would rank no higher than
39th on the list of the most deadly natural disasters (counting epidemics and famines)
of the 20th century.
How does that change our perspective? The incident in question is only one of an
ongoing sequence of events that is the story of mankind. What's more, it is only
devastating to those individuals immediately involved who are depending mainly on
physical survival for their sense of self. Let's talk about death from our higher
perspective for a moment. Who really died here? If you are having a conversation with
someone and that person suddenly gets up and goes into the next room so that you
cannot talk to them, are they dead?
That's really all that happens in the process we call death. The physical form,
made from the earth's material, is no longer being occupied by the timeless entity that
was using it. The entity takes the positive lessons learned, along with memories of the
earth experience, and goes into the next room. The only thing lost is the line of
communication, and that loss is temporary. It is a tragedy only for those who do not,
can not, or will not see the big picture. We will all learn to see it, or we will continue to
beat our heads against the wall and suffer.
No-one is at fault here, and no evil is being perpetrated. The orderly process of
creation is being carried out as planned. In the world of computers, there is an acronym
called W.A.D. It stands for "Working as Designed", which is the case when a computer
user is having trouble with a program that is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
Getting angry with A.T.I. about our frustration is just about as effective as punching a
computer that is W.A.D. The problem is not in the software - it is a user error.
Yes but, you say, there are evil people in this world. There are those who are under
the influence of the "Prince of Darkness" and spread misery and pain in their wake.
Right, but just like there is no darkness, there is no Prince of Darkness, either, unless we
want to create one with our minds. There is a famous quote that says, "the Devil is the
cornerstone of the Catholic church". That's not fair. We should not blame the catholics
for a problem that is almost universal, but the point is well taken. It is far easier to blame
some nebulous "devil" for our problems than to admit that it is really us who are at fault.
There are several things wrong with the assumption that some or all humans are
inherently evil, or "sinful", as some like to call it. If we state on the one hand that we are
"made in the image of God", and at the same time insist that man is basically evil, then
we must logically conclude that God must be evil, too. Since the word "God" is now
spelled "good", then that conclusion is impossible. Man is not evil. We are often mis-
guided, to be sure, and some of our errors are tragic, but they are not of evil intent.
The most reprehensible acts are invariably committed by someone who thinks at the
time that they are doing exactly what they have to do. It's all about learning, and some
lessons are much harder that others.
Secondly, this is a fact. A so-called "evil" person cannot hurt you in any way unless
you allow it with your own negative expectations. The boundless paranoia created by
the victim mentality of human minds that are out of control is not just part of the problem,
it is the problem. Your life, my life, and everyone else's life is largely a series of realized
expectations. If no-one ever considered the possibility that something bad would happen
to them, nothing bad would ever happen, and the vacuum that we call evil would just
disappear by being filled with good.
Is that going to happen soon? Probably not. We still have a long way to go on our
path. Many soul-entities come here specifically to work on unproductive habits of long
standing and they, as well as we, will all learn patience as the process plays itself out.
A better understanding of how things work will definitely help, though, and that's what
this book is all about.
So what is the bottom line? How do we make the day-to-day decisions that help
us deal with the world as it is? if there really is no such thing as an evil force that is out
to get us, there certainly is the appearance of evil and the distress that goes with it.
There is a real sense of loss when someone who is dear to us goes on into another world
where we cannot directly converse with them. What's the best way to deal with that?
Even if we are healthy and well-fed, and many of us are not, we still experience the
stress of daily living. We still have mental and emotional (or spiritual) pain even if we
are not hurting physically. Earth is a tough school. How will we ever graduate?
In the next two chapters, we are going to get down to the nitty-gritty of our
responsibilities and try to answer some of these questions on a very practical level. We
need to do that, but here is one more general thought that we should probably keep in
mind while we are thinking of schools. We were all taught early on in our science
classes that one of the most important laws of physics is: "for every action, there is an
equal and opposite reaction". It's a fact of life, and can be proven by experimentation.
Since we know that our lives exist on at least three levels (physical, mental, and
spiritual), is it not logical to assume that the same law applies on all three levels? Why
wouldn't it? If the scientific world would put their minds to it, I'll bet we could "prove"
that every time one of us has a negative thought, there is an equal an opposite reaction
to it in the mental world we are creating. Of course, this would also be true of positive,
helpful thoughts. More on this later.
On the spiritual level, imagining and picturing an endlessly patient and loving
Creator instead of a vengeful one or an evil "Satan" would certainly lower our stress
level, and the opposite reaction could begin to heal the bitterness and heartache we
have been creating. Let's face it - the dual nature of this world guarantees that along
with the troubles we see, there is an incredible amount of joy and beauty to be found
everywhere if we get in the habit of looking for it. It's our responsibility and our
privilege to do so.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT
"Legislatures are like animals in a zoo.
You can't do anything about 'em. All you can do is just stand and watch 'em."
... Will Rogers
Responsible government? Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?
Looking around at the various governments in the world today, it appears
to be almost impossible to find one that is acting responsibly. From the
management of the smallest village to the halls of the United Nations, we
see greed, corruption, and selfishness creeping into every governmental
decision. There seems to be evidence everywhere that power does indeed
corrupt even the most idealist "governor" eventually.
Why is this so? What is there about us that makes us unable to
manage our affairs so that everyone is fairly treated? What is the best form
of government, and why do we need one at all? These questions are at the
heart of all human history, whether recorded or forgotten. It apparently is
the nature of humanity that we must have a hierarchy of some sort to
survive. Even a family functions more efficiently when there is one person
who sets the tone and usually makes the final decisions for everyone. Some
kind of social structure is a pretty basic fact of human nature. Does it have
to be this way?
If the world was perfect, and if each of us came here knowing our place
in it, and were prepared to do, think, and say all the right things, then anarchy
would probably work. Everyone would always treat everyone else with fair- ness and consideration, and every social situation could be arranged to our
satisfaction with a little one-on-one discussion. How often have we seen this?
Occasionally? Never?
All we have to do to get a glimpse of the problem is to visit a classroom
full of kindergarten children or pre-schoolers when the teacher is not totally
in charge. Apparently, even a group of souls freshly arrived from another
level has trouble adjusting to their new situation as "humans". One of the
first things a new-born baby does when it arrives here is to cry. It's almost
as if the new entry is saying "where am I, and what is happening to me"?
Then after a few years of learning to walk, talk, and get adjusted to a severely
limiting environment, the child is tossed into a situation where it has to
cooperate with a bunch of other partially-developed individuals in a classroom.
Some react well. Some don't. There are inevitable conflicts as young
"people" go from a world which was mostly about them and where their needs
were taken care of, to a place where they really have to learn to share. In
this sort of environment, which we call a school, there must be some sort of
supervision, or at the very least, leadership. There are some schools whose
philosophy is based on letting each individual learn at his/her own pace, and
they seem to work out well, but even then only when there is a trained
instructor to direct the activity.
That's government, whether we call it that or not. When one person
decides what another person is going to do, by definition, that is govern-ment.
If there is payment involved, it's called employ-ment. If there is force, it's
slavery or incarceration. Why do we need it? Because, dear friends, we are
not always individually responsible. That's what we are talking about here.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain un-alienable
rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
... Thomas Jefferson
These words are well known to most Americans. They begin the
second paragraph of our "Declaration of Independence" from the govern-
ment of England, or Great Britain, if you prefer. Apparently, Mr. Jefferson,
and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, who worked on the declaration
committee with him, really believed them, because they put their lives on
the line by writing them.
These bold men, along with many others, formed a new country with
specific principles that had not been spelled out before in the formation of
any other known nation. The principle of equality, and that of certain
guaranteed rights, have assured the rapid growth of the United States of
America, which in the past 200 years has become the wealthiest and most
powerful of all the nations of the world. In the sense that adherence to
certain basic beliefs can build wealth and power, they must have been
right. The evidence points to it.
This book tends to question whether building wealth and power are
the main objectives of humanity, but there is not very much wrong with
guaranteeing each individual the right to pursue his or her own happiness,
as long as it isn't at the expense of someone else's. We believe, as did the
earliest Americans, that everyone has a right to the freedom of choice
regarding their own life, and that this right is basic. It comes with us, a
gift from A.T.I., when we are born, and our government was designed to
see to it that we keep that right.
Here's the catch. There's always a catch, isn't there? The same law
of nature (or A.T.I.) that makes it impossible to make a coin with only one
side, also will not allow us to have any guaranteed "right" without the
automatic responsibility that goes with it. It's a dual creation, remember.
We can't have one side without the other, just like we can't have light
without darkness.
After the United States publicly declared their independence from
England, the leaders set about the formidable task of writing a "constitution"
that would spell out the guidelines along which the new country would be
run. The project took many months and a great deal of sometimes heated
discussion, but it got done, whereupon we almost immediately began
writing "amendments" to it because it wasn't perfect. It sill isn't, so we're
still arguing.
As most of us also know, the first ten amendments to our constitution
are generally referred to as the "bill of rights", because they attempt to
spell out the specific terms of some of the constitution's guarantees to every
individual citizen. What if the authors had also taken the trouble to include
the corresponding "bill of responsibilities" that went along with it? What
would that look like? We should probably get that in writing too, since the
responsibilities are there whether in writing or not. It might be a good idea
if we were clear about them.
BILL OF RESPONSIBILITIES
AMENDMENT I
RIGHTS: Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the
press, right of peaceable assembly, right to petition the government.
RESPONSIBILITIES: Amendment I covers a lot of ground, so it must place a lot of responsibility on us. Let's break it down a little.
Religion: We don't have to have any interest in religion at all if we don't
want to, but if we do, we must never attempt to force anyone else to see
things our way. We can only offer our point of view, we cannot insist on it.
Speech, and the Press: Words have great power. Every word is an
expression of thought, and we know that on the mental level, thoughts
are things. We must choose our words carefully so they have a positive
effect. This is important even in our everyday conversation, but it is
especially critical in the world of the media, which have a great deal of
influence on the public mind. Negative ideas produce negative consequences,
no matter how they are worded.
Peaceable Assembly: The responsibility is apparent from the definition.
Peaceable means peaceable. No angry shouts, shoving, or rock-throwing
allowed. There is a world of difference between a cheering crowd and a mob.
Petition: See "speech and press". Since we seem to need to be governed
by someone, let us keep our communication with them as positive as we can
to set an example for how we want them to act. Governors are supposed to
reflect the will of the people. An endless succession of whining, self-serving
petition is not going to produce good government.
AMENDMENT II
RIGHTS: We are allowed our own weapons for the purpose of organizing a state militia.
RESPONSIBILITIES: It goes without saying that we cannot go around attacking each other, with or without weapons. Specifically,
owning or using a firearm is a huge responsibility because of the potential
damage (probably, the person who invented the first one should have been
shot immediately). The irresponsible use of any kind of weapon by an
individual or a nation produces more negative effect than anything else we do.
AMENDMENT III
RIGHTS: Privacy. The government (meaning the military) cannot
just take over our houses without our permission.
RESPONSIBILITIES: This is a large issue. If someone who has all
the weapons wants your house, there's not much you can do to stop them
from taking it. Waging a mini-war is not the answer. This situation really
needs to be prevented before it ever gets that far, but when things like this
happen, it's amazing what a little kindness can do to defuse the tension.
There was a true story that came out of World War II about a lady and
her two children alone in a remote house in Europe in the middle of a
December snow-storm. The house was found by a few lost American soldiers,
and also by some German (the enemy) soldiers. The lady insisted that all
weapons be left outside, and invited all the young men in, where they shared
dinner with the family. They went their separate ways as friends, despite the
language and political differences, and the writer of the story (one of the
American soldiers) said it was one of the best memories of his life.
AMENDMENT IV
RIGHTS: Protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
RESPONSIBILITIES: There are really two responsibilities here. Since
we have decided that we need a government, we must as individuals demand that our representatives take their responsibilities seriously and perform their
duties like the public servants they are. Whatever legal means are available
should be used to prevent governments from becoming masters instead of
servants. It's a challenging task. The second thing we all must do is to
conduct our own lives properly so that we have nothing to hide, which will
reduce the chance that anyone would want to search our property.
AMENDMENT V
RIGHTS: We cannot be put on trial twice for the same offense. We
cannot be compelled to witness against ourselves, and our property cannot
be used publicly without compensation.
RESPONSIBILITIES: Of course, the reason that these rights were
enumerated in our constitution in the first place is that they were not
available under the previous government. The whole point of declaring our
independence was to get out from under a government that was out of
control. It is the nature of any form of government to do this, and our
founders knew it, so they tried to put in place as many controls as possible
to prevent it.
That is our responsibility. To be endlessly watchful of anyone to whom
authority is given. It is very easy to let others make decisions for us, but it
is a dangerous game. Since we are involved in a human society which has
adopted a competitive mind-set, we are obligated to make sure that our own
input is always positive, and to make our own choices according to the
highest principles we know. The cumulative effect of large numbers of people
living correctly will be a government that acts accordingly, because it is made
of the same kind of people.
AMENDMENTS VI, VII, AND VIII
RIGHTS: All these have to do with the activities of the legal system.
They involve our rights in regard to criminal prosecution, trial by jury, and
protection from cruel and unusual punishments.
RESPONSIBILITIES: The first obligation we have is obviously to avoid
doing anything knowingly that would generate the need for legal action
against us. This seems simple enough, but an amazing number of people
ignore it. In the event that we find ourselves in the position of a defendant
even though we tried to do what we thought was right, our need to conduct
ourselves correctly becomes even greater.
Rather than become cynical because there are others who mistreat us
or attempt to create problems where there should be none, we must become
more ethical and fair-minded ourselves. Even if they do not always act like
it, others will observe our actions and respond to them. Our approach should
not be defensive. It should be actively positive to bring about a positive
result. The only reason that the system appears not to work is that as a
group we do not answer unfair treatment with kindness nearly often enough.
If all of us insisted on implementing the "golden" rule, there would be far
less need for legal remedies of any kind.
AMENDMENT IX
RIGHTS: Simply states that the rights listed in the constitution are not
the only ones we have.
RESPONSIBILITIES: Since we know that every right has a corresponding
responsibility, the more rights we have, the more responsible we must be.
Let us keep in mind that while the rights we are talking about are supposed
to be "guaranteed" by our government, they did not originate there. They
come from A.T.I., and they are an automatic component of our humanity.
The government cannot really give them to us, it can only take them away
by mismanagement.
In the same way, the responsibilities that come with being a temporary
inhabitant of earth are always there whether or not they are spelled out in
writing. If we are allowed to ignore our responsibilities by our so-called
governors and do so, then we are like spoiled children who go around causing
problems because their parents are not acting responsibly. Sooner or later,
someone will be accountable. The laws of nature will not be suspended just
because we aren't paying attention to them.
AMENDMENT X
RIGHTS: Any authority not specifically given to the national government
is reserved by the states or (more importantly) by the people.
RESPONSIBILITIES: This is an attempt to hold back the tendency for
large government bodies to always get larger. The states, being smaller
entities, must not fall into the trap of depending on the larger organization to
fill all their needs. Concurrently, the people must not fall into the same trap
by depending on the state, or the city, or any other organization to fill theirs.
It is fine to have these organizations, but it is not ever a good idea to
surrender our A.T.I.-given freedom of choice by depending on them. It is
the dependence that gets us in trouble. Governments in general do not seize
control of their people. It is handed to them voluntarily by anyone who asks
to have his or her life managed by someone else. We do this every time we
allow our government to do things for us that we could easily do for our self.
In the last analysis, we cannot ever expect to have responsible government
unless we have responsible citizens, and that means all of us.
***
This is not exactly new information. Hundreds and hundreds of years
ago, China produced a collection of writing that was attributed to someone
called Lao Tzu, and offered a beautiful description of the proper attitude for
a responsible king, and also a responsible populace. The poetry of the
Tao Te Ching is as profound and appropriate today as it ever was.
I have a 1955 translation by Raymond B. Blackney, who was president
of Olivet College, a former missionary and teacher in China, and an author of
many volumes on oriental religions. This is a sample of Mr. Blackney's
translation of the wonderful advice of the Tao (literally "The Way").
"Set firm in the Way: none shall uproot you;
Cherish it well, and none shall estrange you;
Your children's children faithful shall serve
Your forbears at the altar of your house.
Cultivate the Way yourself,
And your virtue will be genuine.
Cultivate it in the home,
And its virtue will overflow.
Cultivate it in the village,
And the village will endure.
Cultivate it in the world,
And virtue will be universal.
How do I know the world is like this?
I know this by intuition."
So do you. So do all of us. We are A.T.I. We all intuitively know
the right thing to do in every situation and our job, our responsibility, is
to listen to our own inner self and do it. If we do, our governments will
automatically be responsible ones.
CHAPTER NINE
RE-DECORATING THE JAIL CELL
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by
us 'universe'. A part limited in time and space, he
experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling, as
something apart from the rest - a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a
kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal
decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest
to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening our circle of compassion to
embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature
in its beauty."
... Albert Einstein
The previous chapter was about the rights and responsibilities of those of us who live in a "free" country. What is this freedom we have, and for which
so many have fought and died? America became free when it was no longer
under the dominance of England, did it not? We feel as though we are free
because most of us still have the right to do and say what we want without
excessive control by someone else. That is not possible in some other areas
of the world, so we treasure it.
But there is another kind of freedom which most of us do not possess.
It is a very personal thing, and it is of utmost importance if we really want to
be free. Do we? Of course we want to. Everyone does. The following quote
is from a book called "Think on These Things" by J. Krishnamurti, which was
published in England in 1964. It is about this kind of freedom.
"... but freedom is really a state of mind in which there is no
fear or compulsion, no urge to be secure.
Don't most of us want to be safe? Don't we want to be told
what marvelous people we are, how lovely we look, or what extra-
ordinary intelligence we have? Otherwise, we would not put letters
after our names. All that kind of thing gives us self-assurance, a
sense of importance. We all want to be famous people, and the
moment we want to be something, we are no longer free."
The book just quoted is a remarkable discussion of the human
condition by an outstanding thinker of a few generations past.
Mr. Krishnamurti saw himself and the rest of us with wonderful clarity, and
had the ability to put into words what we all know to be true, but either
cannot express, or simply do not want to think about at all. There are
several books of his writing, and they are all to be recommended to anyone
who want to know who we really are, and why we do what we do.
One of his choice expressions that I have never forgotten was
"re-decorating the jail cell", and I have chosen it as the title for this chapter
because it puts in a few words one of the biggest and most common mistakes
of mankind, and that means you and me. To most of us, the idea of a jail cell
is abhorrent. There is no greater loss of freedom than to be locked in a small
room with no way out, and I'm sure that anyone who has suffered this fate
will never forget it.
Yet a "jail cell" was the way J.K. described the state in which many of us
live, because of our lack of personal freedom. If we are dependent on
possessions, power, beauty, respect, money, romance, or even organized
religion for our sense of self and happiness, then we are technically in a prison
of our own making. We will all ultimately that if and when we attain any of
these objects of our desire, the satisfaction derived will be only temporary, and
the nagging sense that there is something missing will soon return. We will
want more.
The world calls this attitude "ambition", and praises it. Anyone who rises
above his/her peers in the areas of accomplishment we've mentioned receives
compliments, awards, or adulation. It's hard to resist that temptation. We all
want to be respected and appreciated for who we are or what we've done.
But where is the benefit of all that effort if the world is not a better, happier,
or more comfortable place for everyone after we have finished? A physician
who had attended many dying patients was once heard to remark, "I never
heard anyone on their death bed say, 'I wish I had worked more'."
On the same subject, there is a Native American proverb that goes
something like this: "The fist thing a man thinks when he realizes that he has
just died is, 'Why was I so serious?'.
So what are we saying - that none of us should try to improve ourselves
or our position in the world? That all effort is futile, and our accomplishments
are vain? Is there nothing we can do to be free? Believe it or not, there are
some people who really believe that is true. There are some "scientists"
(literally, those who know) who subscribe to the "chaos theory" that says that
the whole universe is a big accident, and has no particular purpose at all. There
are also those who have tried to find meaning in their life, but have been so
frustrated by circumstances that they have given up and stopped trying.
There are even certain individuals who consider themselves to be religious
because they partially understand the ideas of reincarnation and "karma", and
have used them as an excuse for inactivity. These people are convinced that
we are all placed in a particular situation at birth and that it is improper to try
to improve that position, or even to help someone else to improve theirs. That
strikes me as a beautiful example of a self-created jail cell.
It is our conviction, after nearly fifty years of study and wrestling with
these questions, that life is definitely purposeful. Our problems arise from the
fact that we don't make enough effort to discover that purpose. We are like
children playing a game who have become so fascinated with playing it that we
have lost sight of the object of the game.
It is a game, after all. We must always be on guard against taking ourselves
too seriously. The reason we are all so fascinated, starting in childhood, with
games of all kinds, is that they are metaphors for our life. A game has rules or
boundaries, an ultimate objective, a certain level of competition, and if it is
played by more than one person, even seems to have a winner and a loser.
That's life, isn't it?
So what's wrong with competition? Nothing. It's fun, but only if we don't
get carried away and assume that we must win at all costs. A game that is out
of control is called a war, and that game results in mass murder. Obviously, we
are not supposed to elevate our competition with each other to that level. That's
why games have rules, and so does our life.
Let us digress for a moment and consider what some of these rules might
be. If we are clear about the important rules of this game called life, then
perhaps we might become better players. That is sort of what this book is all
about, and of course we started way back in Chapter Two by giving some basic
"rules" for living successfully. Remember?
1. ALWAYS TREAT EVERYONE ELSE THE WAY YOU WANT TO BE TREATED.
2. BE HERE NOW.
3. REMEMBER, EVERYTHING IS ENERGY.
Why did we pick these rules, and what would happen if everyone played by them?
The three basic rules offered here have two things in common. (1) They are
all very simple to understand so that anyone can play the game. (2) They are
also unbelievably complex and difficult to master in actual practice, so that no
matter what level of skill we attain, we can still enjoy the challenge. Life is not
just any old game. It is the perfect game, and the most perfect part of it is this:
ULTIMATELY, EVERY PLAYER WINS.
Because of the endless complications of our existence however, life, just
like all the other interesting games we invent, does not have just three rules.
There are many more guidelines we can use to help us understand how things
work, and stay on the right track to winning the game. A few thoughts on some
of these other "rules and regs" might be appropriate here.
Probably the next most important thing for all of us to remember is that
once creation is set in motion and becomes kinetic energy, it stays in motion.
There may ultimately be a rest period or a time out for all of creation too, but
for our purposes, that would be so far off that it doesn't apply to us who are
focused in the here and now. We need to keep moving just to keep up. Change
is the status quo. Every time we take a break and stop trying to learn, we lose
ground. The universe will not pause and wait for us. We will either keep moving,
or we will be pushed.
This rule tells us something important about fixing the problems of this
world. Since everything is always changing, we really can't make any permanent
repairs to the mechanism of life. There is no once-and-for-all fix that we can put
into place. It's not about a final destination, it's about direction of movement.
We can't fix all the problems, but we can, and we must, make sure that our
efforts are helping the world move in the right direction. Things in general, as
well as the details of our own little world are always getting better or worse, and
it is our job to see that we are helping, not hindering.
Another thing that it would be helpful for us to keep in mind is that there is
unity in this creation. That's why we call it "one song" or "uni-verse". What
works in one area will probably work in another. What is effective on one level
of vibration is often just a reflection of what is generating progress on another.
We have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. In the late 1600's
in England, there was a gentleman named Isaac Newton who saw the world a
little more clearly than his fellows, and changed scientific thinking dramatically
with his observations - for example:
"To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the
mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and
directed to contrary parts."
or:
"Every body contains in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a
right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces
impressed against it."
Those of us who took science courses in school were taught the above
principles and were told that they were universal laws of physics that gave us
an understanding of how the world of matter wags, and what wags it. I don't
recall being told, however, that the same laws would apply to the world of
thought, or of the spirit. Maybe I was told this, but I wasn't the most attentive
student, so I missed it.
If that idea had been stressed, I might have been made aware in my youth
that it is impossible because of natural law to direct a negative thought to any-
one or anything else without producing an "equal and opposite" negative reaction.
Or I might have seen that the apparent tragedy that befell someone who was on
a spiritually destructive path was merely the "forces impressed" on that individual
by A.T.I. to compel him or her to change direction.
Natural laws do not turn on and off on a whim to suit individual needs or
extenuating circumstances. The reason they are called laws is that they are
always there, and we can depend on them. Gravity works every time unless we
apply some other kind of force to offset it. We will either learn how to work with
these rules, or we will continue to believe that we are being victimized by them.
So what is the purpose of all these rules, laws, regulations, and limits that
we live with or struggle against? Are they just there to teach us how to build
better houses or bigger cities? Is the objective of A.T.I. to force us to create
powerful nations, or larger and better organized societies? Are we to understand
natural law only so we can make better laws and fairer governments of our own?
Perhaps. These do not seem to be undesirable goals for human-kind. If
we accomplished all these things, the world would certainly be improving steadily.
But how can we hope to sustain any progress at all if we, the individuals who are
the stuff of which society is made, are not growing in wisdom one by one? How
can we build a better house if the bricks are defective?
It seems fairly clear to me that the real objective of the force (or personality)
that we are calling A.T.I. is the refinement by experience of each living soul-
entity, one at a time. We are the players of the instruments in the grand eternal
symphony, and we must all learn to play our own part perfectly or the music will
always be discordant. Every single one of us is essential to the performance, and
those who cannot or will not play their part correctly must, and will be pushed,
shoved, encouraged, helped, praised, criticized, or even beaten over the head if
necessary until they get it. That's a natural law. It's not a vengeful God, but our
own stubborn ignorance that's causing us to work so hard. How do we work at it?
Lots of ways, but some are more effective than others. It does absolutely no good
to keep altering the style of our government to solve problems caused by
irresponsible individuals. That is re-decorating the jail cell.
It is useless to build more and larger houses and arrange them in more
efficient cities and towns if the inhabitants don't care about each other. That is
re-decorating the jail cell.
It is meaningless to erect beautiful school buildings and universities if the
students are not taught the real purpose of education along with how to make
a living. That is re-decorating the jail cell.
What is the point of having churches, monasteries, or cathedrals if all they
are used for is dogmatic ritual that creates dependent and guilt-ridden souls?
That is re-decorating the jail cell.
It is particularly misleading to become obsessed with our physical health
and well-being to the point of creating medical systems that extend the duration
of earth life without improving it mentally and spiritually as well. That is, you
guessed it, re-decorating the jail cell.
And on and on. For too many of us, the focus is always on tending to the
leaves and branches of our trees and ignoring the roots. Is it any wonder that
the forest is not always enchanted? Most of us have heard the expression:
"Everyone wants to change the world, but no-one wants to change himself".
But we still keep trying to do it that way.
I'm not making this up. Today's big city newspaper that I have just
received (It's Sunday) has on the front page with a big headline, an article
entitled, "Moral Issues Spark Push To Alter Society". Isn't that what we are
talking about? A section of the article lists a half-dozen "issues" that face
voting-age people these days, and offers a quote from one person on each
subject. The issues listed are: "Ten Commandments Displays, "Abortion Ban",
'Traditional Marriage", Decline of Moral Values", "Ending Judicial Activism",
and Politics and Religion".
The people who are quoted are each getting an opportunity to sound off
on one of these subjects, and all have a valid point of view. It seems to be a
good idea that a prominent newspaper will give several pages of space to a
discussion of these matters, but the conclusions offered by the writers and
those who contributed their opinions do not reveal a great deal of deep
thinking. The lady who was asked about moral values even said, "Sure, I'm
concerned about moral values, but I really don't think it's that big a deal".
Maybe she's right. Maybe it isn't that big a deal. But I'm more inclined
to agree with the elderly gentleman who apparently lives in a part of the city
that has a higher crime rate. His comment about the ten commandments
included, "Those are laws that pertain to everyday life. If people taught it to
their kids, they wouldn't be out there shooting and killing and disrespecting."
That's pretty much the whole idea in a nut-shell. What happens in the outside
world is merely a reflection of what's going on inside us.
I offer the following thoughts of my own as a short summary of what I've
been trying to say.
* Government cannot make the world better, nor can big business.
Only individuals can. One cannot build a quality house from poor
materials.
* Lighten up. Don't take yourself so seriously. This is an eternal
game - we're not going anywhere. Love yourself and everything
else. The only punishment you[ll ever get is what you give
yourself with the unnecessary baggage of guilt.
* What A.T.I. wants is for each of us to evolve back into co-creators
and bring with us all the experience we have accumulated. The
way we do this is to become more like A.T.I. every day.
* We are all micro-copies of a three-part creative force - ALL THAT IS.
PART ONE - PHYSICAL The GENERATOR. or electrical creation -
electrical energy that manifests in infinite ways, only one of which
is the one we call "matter".
PART TWO - MENTAL The AMPERAGE, or electrical flow - an
endless field of information accessible to each of us.
PART THREE - SPIRITUAL The VOLTAGE, or electrical pressure -
the emotional force we are calling love, which is the motive behind
the creation.
*
All we have to do to be more like A.T.I. is to: (1) be more alive by being
aware of the electrical force that is everywhere, (2) seek to learn, learn, learn -
there are no limits, and (3) be more patient, kind, tolerant, and forgiving - in
short, be unconditionally loving. The prison walls will soon vanish.
CHAPTER TEN
CHRISTIANITY
"Why do you call me "Lord, Lord', and not do
what I tell you?
... Luke 7:46
Of those few who might read this book, some of you perhaps were
offended by my opinionated comments and arbitrary attitude about my
subject. If you were so bothered by my style that you stopped reading
long ago, then the rest of what i have to say, which is even more blunt,
will not matter to you. If you have gotten this far, then it's possible that
you at least partially agree with my point of view, and I'm hoping that
these final comments will also be of some interest to you.
At this writing, i have passed my 70th year on earth, I am still fairly
healthy, working more-or-less full time, and enjoying my life. Why
shouldn't I? I have been married twice, raised (or helped to) six children,
and have eleven grand-children and a large extended family. I've had
several careers after leaving college after two years, and have been self-
employed for the last thirty. That's a lot of experiences - some good -
some not so good, but a full life, nonetheless.
I began my own research for understanding of this world about
fifty years ago, and much of what I have found is in the pages of this
book and the two others I have written. Whether any of it is useful to
someone else, only time will tell. I'm writing because I feel like I have to,
and if it does nothing else, it helps me to clear up my own thinking. It's
difficult to put your thoughts on paper without going over and over them
with some care.
While writing these pages, I couldn't help feeling that there was a
little more that I wanted to say about some specific subjects that were not
covered very fully in the nine chapters just completed. I've edited these
selected subject down to just three, and the following comments represent
how I really feel about them after all these years. You're certainly entitled
to disagree, but that's fine. You'll have to admit that there is nothing new
about the lively discussion of these topics. They are:
1. Christianity
2. Reincarnation
3. Health care
This chapter will offer some pertinent comments about Christianity.
I had really begun to discuss the matter of reincarnation first, but
it immediately dawned on me that it was organized Christianity that made
the discussion necessary. Most of the other well-known world religions
have no problem with the idea of many "lifetimes" for an individual soul.
It seems that only Christianity has stuck its official head in the sand and
decided that God couldn't possibly arrange to have the same soul sent
here more than once.
How arbitrary is that? It is typical of the dogmatic thinking that
characterized the early years of the Christian church. When Constantine
decided to make Christianity the "official" religion of the Roman Empire,
he started it on the long slippery slope that turned a perfectly good
religion into a political machine whose agenda had more to do with
building the organization than actually helping people.
The fact that Christianity still has the power to help is a tribute to
the fact that Jesus was somebody special, and in spite of the strange
distortion of his message that survived the church's editing, he still is.
Actually, we need to clear that up right here at the beginning. I saw a
billboard the other day that said "Jesus lives". Well. in the sense that
time does not really exist and that past, present, and future are simul-
taneous, then I suppose that's true, but I'd be more inclined to say that
Jesus is dead, but Christ lives. That's not the same thing.
There is a difference, and it's the same difference (an oxymoron)
that we have been talking about in the rest of this book. Jesus was a
man. He was a temporary role played by an eternal soul just like all of
us are. The word "Christ" refers to the timeless soul that was specifically
chosen (or volunteered) to play that role because it was uniquely qualified
to do so. Not everyone can be Hamlet. Darn few of us could have done
what Jesus did.
What did he do? Let's try to get the story straight, and then we'll
see if we can determine what the organization that calls itself Christianity
has done with it. I am sorry to say that this discussion is going to be the
short version of the story. I am considering writing a whole book on the
subject of Jesus' life and work (to go along with all the others that have
already been written), since my own fifty years of research has yielded
far more information than can be included here. Any reader who is dis-
satisfied with this brief account is hereby invited to begin his or her own
lifetime search for the truth. It's a fascinating project.
We cannot hope to understand the man we call Jesus unless we
first acquaint ourselves with a group called the "Essenes", who lived in
Palestine 2,000 years ago. The Essenes were a highly spiritual sect of
the Jewish religion, and were themselves out of the mainstream of
thought at that time. They had their own communities, their own schools,
and a much more profound understanding of the world's situation than
most others of their time.
They included healers, mystics, and others who were in touch with
multiple levels of our "reality" on a regular basis. These things were also
taught to advanced students in their schools. These skills were used to
"arrange" the birth of one particular individual who would be an earthly
vehicle for the "Logos", an exact, perfected model of the Creator. This is
no small task. It took several generations, beginning probably with the
parents of the one we call Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Much is made of the claim that Mary was still a "virgin" at the time
of Jesus' birth, and some still think that is impossible. Whether it is an
historic fact or not is irrelevant, but it's amazing to me that someone
could imagine a Creator capable of setting up universes who could not
manage a simple thing like a a "virgin" birth. Every birth is a miracle.
The creative force of the universe doesn't need out help to make new
new humans. That is just the way it is normally done to make us feel
responsible. There is evidence to show that Mary's mother was also a
virgin. These were very special people who were on a mission.
At any rate, Jesus was born according to the plan, and he was
brought up by the community with the extra care needed for their star
pupil. His training was both intensive and extensive. The eighteen or so
years of his life that were deliberately edited out of our "Bible" were
excluded because the official organization had decided to sever any ties
with the Essenes. The new "Christianity" also did not want any connection
with any of the other Eastern religions that existed at that time, so they
literally destroyed records, omitted facts, and created a whole new history
of Jesus' life to suit their own purpose. They did a wonderful job. It is
very difficult to find the truth, unless we really look for it.
The truth is that the man we call Jesus (in Hebrew, Yeshua) spent
the first 30 or so years of his life in total preparation for his mission. He
studied (and preached) in Egypt, India, Tibet, and all points in between
before returning to Palestine for the final years of his public life. Even
the Bible stops short of saying that he spent his life in a carpenter shop.
I don't know where that piece of fiction originated.
There is a short passage in the Bible that covers the "baptism" of
Jesus. but it is rather vague about the event. That is too bad, because it
was significant. After a lifetime of preparation, what happened to the
man at that point is probably beyond our understanding. It involved a
complete transformation - a "graduation" of sorts, into the Logos in human
form. From that moment on, Jesus was not like the rest of us. He became
a perfect and complete model of what we all can become, but have not
attained. Some of what he was able to do after that has been fairly well
recorded.
What I have to say now is going to offend a lot of people. It cuts
right through the heart of what passed for Christianity these days, but it
is what this book is all about, so I will write it anyway and see what
happens. It concern's the "death" of Jesus.
The current story about this event is that he was put on trial because
he was creating a disturbance by his preaching, which was becoming too
popular for both the Roman officials and the Jewish church. He was
exposing the defects and hypocrisy of these organizations and they
couldn't take the pressure. Contrary to popular opinion, however, it was
not the Jews who sought to have him killed. They were content to argue
with him. It was the Roman emperor who just said, "get rid of him".
Rome was building an empire, and they couldn't be bothered with this
annoying disturbance in Palestine - they were interested in bigger goals.
Crucifixion was their method for solving small problems like this.
Pilate, the governor, had no choice. He did what he was told to do.
It was only later, when Rome became the center of the Christian religion,
that the "facts" were edited to make it appear that the death sentence
handed down was the Jews' idea.
Now the story really gets complicated. They held their mock trial
and carried out the sentence. I have discovered two possible scenarios
for what took place. (1) The "dead" body of Jesus was given back to
his friends and family (the Essenes), who were perfectly capable of
restoring it back to "life", because they understood the process of dying
much better than we do. Or (2) The man who was actually crucified
was not Jesus at all, but another of the self-proclaimed "messiahs" of
the time who volunteered to take his place. In either case, the present
popular story is inaccurate. At this point, the Logos that had animated
the man withdrew and Jesus spent the rest of his earth years in the
seclusion of the Essenes' private community, his mission completed.
There is a great deal more that could be told about this story
about the birth of one of the world's great religions, including some
rather startling facts about both the characters known as "John the Baptist"
and the disciple known as "Paul", who is credited with founding the
organized Christian church with his missionary zeal. The information is
beyond the scope of this book, so it is not included, but we again urge
our readers to carry out their own search. The truth, whatever it is, will
create a religion that is more alive and satisfying than the present super-
stitions, and will truly "set you free" as promised by the Master.
We all know what the organized church has since done with this
story. They took a little of the idea of "karma" from the eastern religions
and combined it with a lot superstition from their own and came up with
the idea that Christ "died" for all the "sins" of everyone else. This was
all about control. The church officials then went about telling the un-
educated masses that only the Christian church could save them from
eternal damnation, and it scared the "hell" out of them.
They carefully selected and edited the "scriptures", and even told
everyone that they, the priests, were the sole interpreters of the holy
books. They did a fabulous selling job. The organized "Catholic" (which
means 'universal', or 'all-inclusive' - how arrogant is that?) church
became a world political power. They now even have their own country.
In the process, they have convinced half of the world that we are all
dependent on a "savior" for our eternal life (which we all have anyway)
so we have no more individual responsibility than to believe what we are
told. There was even a period in the ensuing years that you could be
tortured and/or burned alive if you disagreed.
This story is so full of holes that it is hard to know where to begin
to straighten it out. We will just make a couple of more observations
here, and encourage you again to search your own mind and heart for
the truth.
Observation #1 The Christ (literally, the chosen one) is an eternal
soul like us, but one that has been perfected by eons of experience and
returned to one-ness with the creative force that the Bible calls "the
Father", and I am calling "A.T.I. The Christ has come here to earth many
times and in many forms to help the rest of us extricate ourselves from
our self-created problems. This is what is really meant by "Christ died
for our sins". Coming here is "dying", by comparison to some other
levels of consciousness. Jesus was on of the most recent and notable
of these "incarnations", and his mission was to set an example for all of
us by showing us what we are capable of becoming. He did not perform
"miracles". He was only demonstrating some of the possibilities.
Observation #2 The notion that we are supposed to "worship"
the Creator is man-made. It is a guilt trip encouraged by the organization
for its own benefit. There is no place in any of the scriptural writings in
the world where "God" is directly quoted as saying, "I want you to worship
me". It is a good idea if we acknowledge the creative force, because "His"
reality is our own, and ignoring this fact gets us in a lot of trouble, but
"worship" is not necessary, it's misleading. On this subject, we are
reminded that very often in our present-day Christian liturgy, Jesus is
referred to as "Lord" or "King" or some other model of authority. As far
as I can tell, he repeatedly said that he did not want to be a King, or a
boss of any other kind. That is precisely the kind of hierarchical foolish-
ness that he was opposing. He was our older brother, our foster parent,
and the only thing he asked from us was love, both for him and for each
other. We are the ones who have turned that message into guilt and
subservience.
If we really want to become "Christians", we only have to try to
find the "Christ" in ourselves. This Christ is the Creator, All That Is, and
can be Muslim, Buddhist, Shinto, or any other symbolic religion as long
as the love is there. That's the only criterion.
It may seem to some readers that this way of looking at Christianity
and its founders takes away the magic and wonder of the traditional story.
We do not want to give up our childhood fantasies - they are very com-
forting in a way, and they do get us off the hook of personal responsibility.
But it's a mistake to think that we have to lose our sense of wonder to be
responsible. The miracles of creation are everywhere if we just open our
eyes, and Jesus' life was one of them.
Accepting responsibility for our own "salvation" may seem like too
much to handle, especially if we try to get it done all in one short earth
experience, which is part of the dogmatic myth we have adopted, but it
is no less believable that the fanciful tale we have been told. it really
makes no difference whether Jesus allowed himself to be crucified to
pay our karmic debts, or to show us the supreme example of unselfishness.
We ought to appreciate it either way.
The famous American "seer" Edgar Cayce was quoted more than
once as saying, "We don't go to heaven, we grow to heaven". He also
spent his whole life teaching Sunday School in a Christian church because
he saw no conflict whatsoever in using the Christ as an example instead
of a crutch. The Christ, however, is a universal symbol in the same way
that "All That Is" is a universal Creator.
A.T.I. is the Christian "God". It is also the Muslim "Allah", the
Hindu "Brahma", and all the other gods and goddesses that man has
used as representatives of some of the Creator's qualities. "Christ" is
all of the prophets of all of the man-made gods who have tried through
all the ages to help us see the truth that we are also part of A.T.I., and
just need to start acting like it.
The eternal Christ is only interested in the quality of our lives, and
couldn't care less what name we give our "religion". I imagine he shakes
his head in amazement at some of the things we do in the name of
Christianity. Jesus reportedly got a little upset with the opportunists who
were selling things in Jerusalem's temple to help gullible people to get
into heaven. These days, we are a little more subtle. We just open
"Christian" bookstores and peddle Bibles, pictures, and crosses. That
might be progress, but not much.
There is nothing wrong with using symbols of one kind or another
to help us remember what is important, but too many of us fall in love
with our symbols. In truth, the whole world is nothing but a symbol of
the inner realities we also inhabit, and our mistake is that we lost in this
symbol, too. There is a well-known Zen saying that goes: "The finger
that points at the moon is not the moon". The world is like a reform
school for wayward souls, and the various religions we invent are just
paths that are supposed to help us learn our lessons and find our way.
We have to be careful that we don't focus too hard on the school, the
religion, or the pointing finger, and miss the moon.
"Every book is a quotation".
.. Ralph Waldo Emerson
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