Adventure - dreams

I am sleeping in my brother’s home with my sister in law and nephew, along with three dogs.

I feel that our souls compress among others and expand the fewer humans there are.  I felt most expansive in the Yukon, most compressed in cities like New York, London, Istanbul, Kuala Lampur. The experience of being a thousand miles from others solo sailing in the Pacific was palpably so. The density of human consciousness changes one, bears down on them, creates a heaviness.  

I love the Czek book, ‘the incredible lightness of being’.   I  have a psychologist ballet dancer friend in New York whose joie de vivre seemed to lift her from the heaviness of humanity despite her living and working in the centre of the city.  Personally I feel the press of humanity and have all my life felt solace in the escape to the country.  

In recovery the social component is becoming a part of the human race again. Alcohol and drugs isolate and disconnect the individual from the group.  Our traumas do the same.  The intrusive thoughts and the feelings of infestation and alienesss don’t shake easily.  When you sleep with the devil or play with sulphur that scent lingers.  After being raped and betrayed and rejected and lied to I felt paranoid, closed, unsafe.  I have gone to the wilderness to heal. But in recovery the aim is to regain the comfort in community.  The monks of old knew this.  Today I go to meetings of others in recovery.  I believe the church was and in some places remains a place where you can ‘lay your burdens down’.  Yet too many there have a hierarchy of sins.  The gluttonous and avaricious look down on the lustful and angry.  

I dream often of a heavenly place which reminds me thoroughly of the Greek island Santorini.  The buildings and rooms are white. The climate is idyllic. The people and me are all like those in my college and university years. The singleness of purpose is higher learning. There’s a quality of Godliness, that essence of Magister Ludi.  It’s welcoming and we are mingling with adults and history and yet our common purpose of celebration brings us together as war and necessity are described as doing. There seems no past but only the moment. There are many mansions and many rooms and we can come and go to classes and feasts and activities, sports, dance, games.  I always think of this as heaven.  There is passion and love but I’m mostly arriving alone and joining the community which is fully welcoming.  Some times I see my mother, ex lovers, father and uncles and grandparents. They are just more familiar.

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead the teachings is we reincarnate again and again but not alone rather as a member of a caste of a thousand or so. Each person plays a role till all the roles are taken.  The whole collection of family and society binaries are played out like master and slave, parent and child, murderer and murdered all to be played out against in the next collective unconscious dance of consciousness.  Now reincarnation was a teaching of Judaism and Christianity till the Nicene Creed and intellectually it didn’t matter in the time of the ‘cloud of unknowing’.  We simply played our part the best we could and there were no end of rehearsals.  Everything was one day at a time and no rush.  Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Gandhi, Marx , the whole group of them were waiting till the last of us came home.  Maya was seen as veils and creations were infinite as stars.  The one became many and the many became one.

I also dream of another place that’s here in the west where we are all gathering in large groups in the woods and day lakes in the rural region. I remember the gatherings , the Strawberry Mountains Peace and Love Festival, or San Francisco dancing in the streets, love painted on my forehead in luscious red lipstick and flowers in my hair. The Rainbow festivals continue.  Then there’s the camp outs and sweat lodges and RV Parks and church camps and YMCA and motorcycle rallies. These gatherings are in  another dream and they are like the market place in Instabul or the labyrinth of shops in Bombay or Tokyo. This place seems to have money and ‘stuff’ and ‘experiences’.  It’s a bit like a circus and I’m again in that pivotal age of passage from adolescence to adult hood.  There’s a bit more disorderl and chaos.  I imagine this is closer to hell or purgatory but it’s exciting.

Last night I dreamed I was in this place and I’d had the content of my wallet stolen. I didn’t feel afraid just that I then had to find those contents. This week we’d gone for dinner and I’d left my iPhone and credit cards, license etc in the car.  Graeme found them for me and brought them back to the restaurant. I wasn’t afraid just annoyed at the time I foresaw I’d need to take to restore my ‘state’.  Like the time I lost my iPhone in the Seattle Airport on the way to New York.  Thanks to Apple I was able to get a new phone in Manhattan and have the information reloaded from the Cloud. A few hours detour from my schedule restored the ‘state’.  I felt the same in the dream but it felt like. I was at this reception without a tie or something similar.

In the heavenly Santorini like place I felt that no one would notice if I was naked and there were those who might be walking about as such. We mostly wore white togas like Romans did and there was never any need for currency as all appeared free like an all expenses included vacation where as the ‘other place’ was more like ‘the world’. It was darker to and people wore all manner of clothing western and cultural. There seemed to be no commonness of purpose and individually there was a self seeking which all manner of individual pleasure being offered almost like a booths.  I imagine the medieval art and literature depictions of Dante. 

Buddha said Desire is the root of all suffering. The idea of attachment is the source of pain. C. S. Lewis said stop looking for God in the wall.  The cult classic Lazy Man’s Guide to Englightenment by Thaddeus Golas focused on acceptance, love and enlightenment.  Positive psychology today describes ‘joy’.  Jesus taught ‘do not be afraid’ and the idea of Milton’s devil was the angel that preferred to watch his shadow than turn to face the light of God.  This disconnections or what 12 step programs call the ‘ego’ is the problem.  

In both dreams which are recurring there is no army war or police presence.  In both the meeting and greeting and sharing is like the idealized ‘savage’ tribes of middle european consciousness.  The glorified Islanders of Hawaii before they ate Cook.  The simplistic projection of the adolescent idealistic mind that doesn’t know the superstition and self absorption or self centered ness of the primitive mind. Courage is doing the right thing in spite of fear while there is the idealized notion of ‘fearlessness’ popular with those who have a similar thought of ‘pain free bodies’ but they haven’t treated the third degree burns of a person lacking nerve endings so they have no warning system.

In lucid dreaming one can intervene in their own dream and last night wandering about obsessed with my wallet and identity and credit cards I stepped out of that was in my truck and camper doing 360 degree turns down a road nearly missing cars and cranes and coming to a stop without hitting anything now with my whole house wheels and wallet and crowds but an amazing lesson is Christ carding for the falling bird. There I’d been like so many times on the verge of an horrendous crash and been snatched out harms’ way by ‘luck’.  I don’t believe in ‘luck’ but rather called that ‘God acting anonymously’.  

Constantine removed reincarnation from the Creed. I wonder what it is about reincarnation that makes the most prideful to want to have their vision of the afterlife and the means to achieve it and the ‘rules’ of this game of life as their. Of course there’ ‘control’.  I watched King Charles and the pomp and celebration of the Throne Speech and was amused to think that this was the surviving descendent of the Medieval Knights tradition.  I saw that the organization of society was the same in Azerbaijan with Romance and Chivalry the same as the Shield Wall days of Rome.  I loved Ender’s Game by Orion Scott Card.  

There is only now and only God and today with the lifelike computer game and animation and holographic realities and AI people are imagining with a whole other robustness.  I’m continuing in my gypsy mode, healer, shaman, author, philosopher, scientist, poet, dancer. I don’t know where I’m going other than ‘in’ and yet I feel I’m ‘okay’. I’ve a friend in ‘Jesus’.  His teaching was summed as ‘Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself.”  The present day emphasis is on being ‘kind’.  Kind and kindred suggest that the ‘other’ is ‘you’.  I am he, I am he, blessed spirit I am he is the Swami song of enlightenment. 

I love that Adam’s in Dick Slaterly’s Holistic Detective Agency needs Thor and the old English Gods and finds them in nursing homes talking about the clean sheets and lovely buxom efficient ladies cleaning the rooms and the regular good food . He doesn’t want to go out to the wild with cold weather and harsh days.  I supposed we forfeit freedom and individuality for conformity. The offer of the WEF and AGENDA 21 15 minute city is the well cared for comfortable cage.  Soylent Green and all the futuristic series of the ‘benign dictator’ who morphs into Nero or Caligula.  We have our new leaders , the Traditionalist Pope declaring all sex but marriage baby making sex unblessed.  L’chaim.  The war of weaponized jihadi children of Islam being fought out with Christian and Secular societies paying for those ‘fucking for Allah’ as aetheists don’t reproduce.  The age of the Trudeau selfie and the claim that mass migration is necessary for GDP is just disruption and control.  Scab labor . Scab voters.  Divide and conquer.  Favoritism for the in and exclusion for the out while all sing kumbaya and offer peace in the legendary deceit of politics and war.

In both my dreams there is peace.  I’ve not lived in war.  I felt the presecnece of God at Meteoria and Cappadocia and imagined those with the hoards like urban gangs surrounding and passing by.  The laws and police didn’t allow me to protect my self or my home and I feel safer in motion.  My brother lived here and trusted his society and felt safe from maurauders.  I miss that peace. Even as a child I feared invaders in the Cold War and felt my Dad would protect us.  Now I’m the old one and my back aches and I’m weakened with age . At the target range the tremor in my arm has made a pistol inaccurate for me. I must depend on a shot gun and laughed to see Stratham in his latest shoot em up movie using just that. 

Thank you God for dreams and mysteries and all the entertainment and hide and seek with Jesus. Help me to focus on the light and walk upright and forward. Protect me and my family from evil and harm.  Thank you for Grace.  Thank you Jesus. 

Bardo - between lives

In the Tibetan book of the dead, the Bardot is the state or place between lives. I’ve argued with Christian friends about reincarnation but that’s one of the doctrines that Constantine removed because reincarnation has always been bad for the State. There’ s ample evidence in the Bible that the people of Jesus’s day believed in reincarnation.  Revelations by contrast is the most controversial book.

The doctrine of reincarnation doesn’t disagree with ‘end days’.  It simply says that before ‘end days’ they will be multiple deaths and rebirths.  I may well be a different person many times over from the one I was a child.  I have a sense of ‘nodal’ points in my life where there was a cross roads where I took the ‘road less travelled’ and became in kind a different person. 

Also the west is ‘linear’. We believe in progression forward.  This whole ‘ordered’ time scenario is questioned at it’s core by Science. There is definitely ‘Now”. Now, the present in ‘God’s time’.  There is only a vague yesterday and tomorrow in what Jung called the Collective Unconscious.  

The idea then is that everyone today, now, this vague ‘day of God’ which may be a day in our life or a hundred years or maybe even a thousand, is indeed a reincarnation of each other.  We’re all related by DNA to an African lady. The differences between us are minuscule.  

Anxiety is said to be a measure of our distance from God but equally a measure of our humanity. Jesus taught “Do not be afraid.”

The State is forever fear mongering.  If there is ‘reincarnation’ then we know that we will die and evolve but that State bureaurcrats and leaders who do evil will return as perhaps a mosquito, a worm or a frog.  

The consensus is that we reincarnate within the same level. So a bad man gets to come back to do it again as a human. But we all began collectively as insects.

When natives say ‘all my relations’ they are speaking to this spiritual truth that we’re all connected not only spiritually but by DNA. We’re all sentient too. The dolphin, wolf and tree are alive and ‘thinking’.  When I eat wheat I’m killing just as I’m killing when I eat a cow.  Each division that human’s make is a kind of traditional arbitrary decision.

In the Bardot, what is fascinating for the Tibetans, is that they felt a group of people reincarnated over and over again as a team or ‘cast of characters’.

Karma or divine retribution says that the murderer will be murdered. Dr. CarlJung described the ‘archetypes’, pretty much the collection of characters depicted in a standard Tarot deck. These are the main players in the ‘tribe’ and later the medieval society.  These exist today but are less easily identified. The corporations are now the knightly societies that parallel the legal structures of the king. Corporations have their own private armies they call ‘security’ forces.  The medieval arrangement was not so dissimilar.  Trained to see the patterns and think of time as today it’s not that difficult to recognize patterns.  

“Process thinking’ is another asset the priest of science, the psychiatrist, is taught which makes this all even more apparent.

The notion of ‘attachment’ is the idea that people have become confused by the ‘magic’ or the ‘evil’ of this world.  They actually have identified with their body.  Rather than realizing they are spiritual souls and adventurers on a journey they believe they are this world, this impermanence.  

The story of Jesus is clearly the local government supporting the international government and killing the son of God.  God is permanent. God’s kingdom is not of this earth God’s kingdom is eternal. There is no eternity here.  

This is not ‘real’ in the sense that God and heaven and spirituality is.

The question we ask ourselves is ‘are we spiritual beings living a physical adventure’ or physical beings living a spiritual adventure’.  Even E=MC2 tells the story of Energy and Matter.  Even string theory talks of the Word of God.

If you have ears you can hear.

But the Bardot says we don’t just do this alone but rather it’s like a play with this whole cast of characters. The job is to see ourselves with the forgiveness that Jesus shared. To evolve we must ‘love’.  

The whole idea of ‘peace’ on any terms is silly. You have peace between wars. The Utopian claims of aetheists and other religions are simply ‘when I’m in charge’ I’ll make it good for everyone.

Jesus said the ‘Kingdom of Heaven” is here.

God is within.

The great spiritual teachers have said the same.

In the Bhagadvagita Arjuna looks at the war and says that those fighting are all my relatives and Krishna answers yes, the only question is whether you will participate.

Attachment is playing the game as if the ‘game’ is real when Plato said that it was shadows and the Glass Bead Game tale is of a different kind of reality.

So I die. Is that the end?

Am I alone or are all these people I’m writing about in my life just family and relatives.

In Zen your enemy is your best friend. The one who kills you in this life teaches you your weakness so that in the next life you will be better equipped. 

Love your enemy.

In Christianity the ‘devil’ or ‘satan’ is the greatest and most powerful and most nasty in Catholicism.  That’s the remnants of the State Religion of Constantine.  

C.S. Lewis paints a very different picture of the Devil in Screwtape Letters.  He’s more a bureaurcrats in a B movie.

The drug dealer sells lies. 

Doing drugs is like fucking a blow up doll and believing it’s love, is what one person described it as.  

On a grand scheme the propaganda of the State and other aetheist or dictator based religions is really just illusion.

Reality is God. Reality is Love.  We are One.  

I learn as a Christian to see other Christians in this church, to reclaim the familial relationship that I had before this life with the friends in my cast and those with whom I return.

I think of the Bardot as the Green Room. Between acts and between plays when I was an actor we actors and casts and assistants and all those involved in production would laugh and celebrate ‘off stage’.  We would leave our ‘imaginary’ roles and become authentic and ‘be our selves.’

The role of the policeman is just a ‘role’ . The role of the bureaucrat or judge or thief or executioner or rapist is just a role. The role of victim is equally a role.  

My job is love.  The more I see the similarity and the more I understand the other as an aspect of myself but mostly as a teacher, a loving teacher, and not an alien, but family, then the closer I am to God.  

I’m writing my own memory of my past with people as good or bad but that’s not the way I truly perceive them. The past is past.  I saw the man who stabbed me through the eyes of fear and alienation but I’m alive today. What didn’t kill me has indeed made me stronger and more enlightened .  I loved the book Spirituality of Imperfection because it spoke to our humanity.  

We collectively are evolving and the plays are like the Lord of the Rings.  i believe I’m a kind of Hobbit. I do believe in Gandalf. I love that the Bible show ‘we win in the end’.  Not some dictator or tyrant or committee of gangster but ‘us’ .  ‘We win’. “I am not alone.”

My image of heaven is best described by C. S. Lewis though I am especially fond of Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.  I love for my homestead acreage. I miss the chickens. I want to be in the Garden of Eden with God laughing about the snake and Eve.  I want to be more loving and more forgiving and to give my ‘utmost for his highest’.  At the point of excellence I see God as clearly as I do on the peak of every mountain I’ve climbed and in the middle of the ocean I’ve crossed. In the Center of the Hurricane I’ve known the unsettled calm. I would know heaven on earth. I would know God more clearly. I would live more spirituality, more courageously, less fearfully.

Thank you Jesus.  

Evolution, Reincarnation and the Bible

Evolution names the development of more complex entities from simpler ones.  The gene essentially becomes the genome becomes the evolutionary basis of life on earth.  Evolution is a ‘method’, not a religion.  Science is a ‘method’ , not a religion.  A lot of confusion is created by unscientific or pseudoscientific declarations about matters of religion.
A meme is the genetic like precursor of an idea, the bit of an argument that begins a train of thought. It is an ideological equivalence to the material gene.
“Evolution of God,” by Robert Wright is a seminal theological text exploring the history of God in the three Abrahamic religions.  It’s not that God, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent ‘evolved’ but rather that our ‘understanding’ of God evolved. Further Dr. Wright argues rather convincingly that the Holy Bible was altered to accommodate the development of ideas.
Montheism, that there is only One GOD, developed from Polytheism, the idea of many Gods.  “Thou shalt have no other Gods but me.” is a statement in the Bible that holds within it the idea of ‘other gods’ or ‘polytheism’.  The Evolution of God says that our understanding of God is dynamic and that our Holy Bible, once a developing work like ‘science’ texts became ‘fixed’.  Today rather than adding ‘books’ to the Bible, which was the ‘norm’ until Constantine made the Bible the State Legal Book approximately 300 ad, ‘commentaries’ are added to the main  book.  The Gospels are the 4 main books are  the main ’teachings’ of Jesus.  Jews similarly have the original text of their creation story, covenant and tribal beginnings as the Talmud.  The Apostles and Paul are ‘commentaries by this early understanding so that even today the ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ of what is ‘holy’ from what is ‘human commentary’ is a matter of much human debate in the three Monotheistic religions.
Similarly the Bible contains the previous ‘idea’ of reincarnation. At the simplest, Christians believe they will be ‘reincarnated’ on death, given a ‘new body’ in the afterlife as do Muslims.  The Hindu idea of ‘evolution’ from insect to man is not part of biblical tradition. Indeed the Hindus have the idea of forward and backward evolution based on deeds and this is not anywhere in Christianity. No interspecies reincarnation and no becoming a dung beatle if you mess up in this life.  Clearly ‘reincarnation’ is not ‘orthodox’ Christianity today.  However it was accepted in the world of Jesus and in the early Christian church.
Philo Judaeus, the Jewish philosopher,  described souls coming and going in human bodies while Flavius Josephus held that ‘good’ souls had the capacity for reincarnation. Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai taught the ‘transmigration’’ of souls.  Rabbi Manaseh ben Israel taught that the belief in the ‘transmigration of souls’ is the belief of the church.
In the Holy Bible the disciples indeed asked if Jesus was Messiah; how come according to the prophecy Elijah had not come before him ,”Why then say the scribes, that Elias (Elijah) must come first.”  Jesus responded that ‘Elias is come already and they knew him not.”  This reference is to John the Baptist. The was the insight of writer/philosopher Robert Graves.  The people themselves, suggesting the common reincarnation belief of Jesus’ judaism, said ‘some say thou art John the Baptist, some say Elias, and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.'
Scientists have reviewed the Bible noting that ‘words’ used in ancient times did not ‘translate’ into the meaning we give them today. For instance if there was a Hebrew word ‘gay’ used in the Bible it would not refer to homosexuality as the word ‘Gay’ does today  So many words which come out of the ‘time’ of Jesus no longer hold the same meaning. It has been argued by scientists that the word ‘infinity’ comes truly out of the mathematical sense made clear by Descartes. Agricultural societies don’t have this notion of ‘forever’ but rather the better translation of these terms is ‘for a long time’.  So much is lost and sometimes gained in the translation of words and further ideas.
Today ‘linear’ time is superseded by the ideas of quantum existence and the multiverse.  Every possibility exists for God but the human conception is limited by the limitation inherent in the human state.  The idea of ‘reincarnation’ doesn’t ‘change’ the central thesis of Jesus is Lord and Jesus taught first Love God and Love your Neighbour as yourself. Indeed Christ is. The Gospel means the ‘God News’ and supersedes all ideas at they relate before it.
We say among Christians that when we accept Christ as Lord and Saviour, we are ‘reborn’.  Spiritual rebirth and even the very idea that we leave behind the notion of a material being and take up the idea of being a spiritual being, a son of God, living in this spiritual/material world following the teachings of Jesus is what is always most important.  Evolution of ideas, such as the evolution of the idea of God as Trinity, three persons in one, and the ‘personhood’ of God is a new meme, a new beginning for inward study of external scripture.
From genetics we learn that the fruitfly has 70% of the human genome.  The concept of fractals suggest a mathematical god idea inherent in the shapes of reality.  Scientists see science as showing ever more evidence of the genius of creation and the interconnected harmony and celebration of God in creation.  That a monkey with all the time that the idea of the Big Bang Theory gives it could not make up Bach teaches us that God is active and working in creation as String Theory itself allows for such 'miracles'.  Indeed Celtic Christians believe that the physical world shouts God’s love and celebrates Jesus as much as scripture does.  The discord lies with man.
There are many methods to know God just as there are many roads to acceptance of Jesus as saviour.  However it’s sad but we also say that the road to hell is broad and the road to heaven is narrow.  So we depend greatly on the spiritual directors and advisors and elders who have lived longer and walked more deeply in the wisdom of the lord for their guidance.
Hallelujah! Christ is Risen.