People want God to forgive our sins.

God is either love or God is a sin-hater.

Which God? 

If a body really thought God will forgive me

that one’s soul would never know sin. Lack of love is the source of sin.

What is the relationship of God to self?

Self is an image put together by thoughts.

Love is not such.

What is sin from the point of view of love? That is the relationship.

 Separation of RELIGION

A Christian is to believe Jesus Christ, Son of God, died for his or her sins and His Father thereby forgives all sins of the Christian who so believes and such a believer will not perish but have life everlasting. 

The Bible presents Jesus to a reader as a holy man who is pure love…for all. The story is of a shepherd who loves each lamb so much he will leave all his flock behind to search for the lost lamb. As a child I was taught the story and even taught the story to other children. It is not surprising that a person becomes a lost lamb. First, right after birth, came a set of patterns I am to follow in life. These patterns soon become the facts of our situation. Trying to follow them brings conflict and confusion and, finally, desperation. When it happens to one of us we are ready to hear the story. A lost lamb in a human body wants more than anything to be found by someone who loves him or her. That feeling is like no other. 

This writer need go no further into the matter. It is enough to understand the attraction to any of the religions organized by man. I feel lost. A group with a name and symbols and a headquarters offers to help me. Enlisting in an organized religion, in some manner I am led to give my life over to an image I make in my thoughts of what it is like to be a complete human. One more loveless pattern. 

This writer writes only to question whatever led to the “organization”in the first place of what is so universal. It has unquestionably separated humans rather than uniting us. Created conflict where none is called for. In fact, to make a separate religion amounts to an attempt to make a separate “life”. That is so arrogant! 

The term religion comes from the same word as relationship. Life is relationship and how we respond to it. I am the living. You are the living. They are the living. All the same. Period. Actually, Jesus became famous for saying “love your enemies”. Now, perhaps, is the time to embrace such wisdom.

The method described in paragraph one above means when any child of God dies to its selfish life as it is being lived in separation that one act of pure love opens the human to an unknown selfless way of life where that one and any who follow suit will not perish but have life everlasting at the instant of such a psychic “death”, which means life never dies since death is always followed by a new beginning. What else is it than “life everlasting”? At the very famous Last Supper of the Christian religion Jesus told his disciples he was leaving the “master-disciple ” role, so goodbye. He asked to be remembered and then promised he would come again, right away, and did and continues to be born all around this Globe every day. Salvation complete. All organized methods fulfilled in the ending of conflict. This important understanding is real, based in fact not belief, unorganized, and unites all humanity.

                                                                                 LIFE & 

THE TERRIBLE WORLD

The world of persons as far as I can see is a terrible place to try and live. So much violence. So many people hateful and angry. So much cruelty.  Enormous greed and disrespect for what is beautiful and tender. Comparison and measurement in all corners. People buying and selling others. Corruption rules on Earth. Beginning with the family of separation.

I cannot change the world. Have not the power to do that. I want to but cannot. I also cannot even keep my family and close friends knowing they are safe. I was early taught I was to do that much if I am to have any dignity as a man. I found it very hard to admit that it is not possible for me to keep such a promise to them because I am not Superman or anything close to it. I tried many ways to escape that fact. But it eventually got to me. I lost my mind. 

Then something happened to me. I admitted my weakness and sense of shame and asked for help with my suffering. Some people told me they recognized me as one of them and agreed to show me a way out of the sickness. Said it was unlearning mostly.  What I have to say now is that there is a way. I found out my trouble was not really “mine”-really, it is that I am not who I thought I was before. Like in the story of Alice, a caterpillar asked me-

“Who are you?”

I attempted to answer and each answer was shown to be absolutely false. I arrived at a place where I just admitted, “I don’t know who I am.”

When a person is clear he has no identity his mind has to open up to the complete unknown. It loses its entire load of bullshit that was attached to the wrong ideas he had about the most fundamental truth- existence! Believe it or not it is a wonderful place to fall into. Empty mind, that is. Suddenly everything is possible!  It became my quest to question it all! Ha!

As I continued on the “questioning everything” journey to meet up with identity more and more gifts came to me I had not even asked to have as if they fell from trees or something. One thing for sure, empty mind has great energy. I tell the following and stop. 

Eventually, it came to me as a fact that my problem is the other man’s problem and the problem of all human consciousness and therein lies the source of suffering. We were driving each other mad in a House of Mirrors. Amness is life’s energy in a human body. That energy cannot be destroyed by anything. Nothing can reach it. It is in another dimension entirely. It transcends problems. 

My body is mortal and will die and can be hurt but not so for the truth of my identity. And it turned out to be what was left when I had established by serious questioning who I am not! With this knowledge was it realized in gratitude there is safety in a dangerous world. It is in me and cannot be messed with by anything.

This that is revealed here is not the property of any person or any group of persons. “Persons” are the great problem. To walk the safe road is not a choice and will not be found by shoppers. Lovers have it. A lover goes to any length for the beloved because that is what a lover does.

 The Way Of True Marriage

What’s It All About?

A Jazz master was approached by a younger man who wanted to play in the master's band. Without more, the master handed the younger man a sheet of music notations saying "Here are the chords I wrote for a number I composed. Call it The Territory. I will begin to play it and you listen until you hear me suddenly make a change and begin something entirely new. Completely fresh. Into God knows where. Call this the The Adventure. Or, call it living. 

And while you listen to what I am doing you respond in the adventure with ideas of your own and I will hear your response and respond to it as your response to my response has sparked in me to play and we continue this way back and forth as long as we please in another dimension to go places where nobody has ever gone before and where nobody will ever go again creating a time for the music we play that responds moment to moment to what is being played by each of us…that way we absorb truth.

Something I have for a long time found strange concerns the way humans relate to one another in practice. We seem to agree for the most part we are a part of the “living” world as opposed to the nonliving things of the world. But when we talk about ourselves intellectually we speak and think as we do of nonliving objects. So, our scientists, the intellectuals, responsible we think, for leading us from our present condition, about which we loudly complain, to a more appealing one readily work on us and our parts as nonliving “things”. For example, they think: having a light bulb makes a better world for us. Does it? Or did it make a larger bank account for Mister Edison and a more secure future for all inventors to follow him? To really answer that question we must address what in us makes us “living” beings. Is it mainly that we are aware of our existence? We do not think non-human animals or plants are so aware yet they are considered “living”. So, what is “life”? We do not know, if honest. We toss the word around, like we do the word “love”, in complete ignorance of that of which we speak. How about that?

How important is “life” to you? How important “love”? Why then do you not act like they are and spend at least as much time studying the meaning of those terms as you do planning your budget or your career or obtaining property or a mate or your children’s education? How aware are you as you go about your activities day-to-day that you are not a non-living object for you have “life”?

If these words upset you all the more reason to give them attention. Be honest. What is life? What is love? What are peace and contentment and freedom? What are the characteristics of that which lives? Can life be measured? Compared? Of course not. That is why science is powerless to study them and should admit that. 

Best science can do is to say a living human can eat and drink and breathe and respond to stimuli and a nonliving one cannot. What is religion? Really, what is it? To be truly religious, what does it mean? Is it at all important to the scientist? The lawyer? The corporate executive? The politician? What is meant by a call of the heart? Do lawyers, scientists, and executives feel often they even have one and it calls?

Can we label life? We label objects. Here is how you speak of yourself and your fellow man and woman-she is a Catholic, he is a Jew, they are Spanish, I am American, he is a criminal, she is crazy, those are unemployed, those are elderly, etc. he is my client, she is my wife, he is my boyfriend this is my son, he has special needs and on and on and on. Abstract labels for objects. Since I was a child I have wondered why people deal with me as an object and pretend to know me. I am sorry, but something terribly important to me goes missing and it hurts like Hell!

So, let us consider seriously enough to find the answer to a simple question: what is the nature of my relationship to every other human being I meet outside of the labeling game? If I call you my wife. What do I really mean? Do I mean: poof! you are an object I can own you? If I mention love, what do I mean? What’s it all about?

Love means to be unattached. You have been taught to mistrust and fear unattachment and to search madly to attach, attach, attach. You know the first cure for the pain of divorce suggested by all the remaining husbands and wives is another wedding. But to be unattached means to be indivisible and that is where you will find love.

Attachment to another is a mental concept only, not real, and cannot be made real. Thought and time have no such power. I am what I am. Funny, but maybe, in the final step, one learns it takes two or more to make a fella or gal feel lonely and then find that to be alone is to be all one. A body can have no more companions than that! 

Another side of that common experience of being lonely in a crowd is to understand it is a lack of love that leads the unloved to marriage, not love. One of the major religions that marries many people has taught for centuries love is not possessive. Marriage is based in possession and is a vain attempt to make the living into but a nonliving set of abstractions. How can such a practice be associated with love? Some never learn. The central question to be asked and answered in life is: Can it be possible to find out what love is by spending one’s life possessing others?

Getting real, ask, who is it that claims to have and be had by another? Who do I think I am when I say “I do”? 

A moment came in my own life when I wanted more to know whether I would behave badly if I ceased to claim to have a wife or a child or a friend of my own than I feared the answer. Up to that moment all my training had been that unless an authority orders me to behave in an admirable fashion I will shun all responsibility to others. That is pure bullshit. Truth is the opposite. 

Certainly the evidence is abundant that we are very unreliable in any possessive relationship. We let each other down too often to count. Wisdom suggests you are born as the person you want to grow up to be. 

The conditioned mind of a human caught as a prisoner in time knows nothing of love or life or death or God or kindness or generosity or compassion or passion or religion or discipline or loyalty or insight or creativity or anything else that transcends time. Minds make plans using memories from the past to craft an imagined future in the attempt to control human destiny and the results are pathetic. It only amounts to repetition of yesterday’s failures unto a dusty death of fools. (to follow a line by Mr. Shakespeare) 

Thinking can be useful as a tool for tying one’s shoes or inventing a light bulb and the like. But it is to be assigned to the mechanical applications and to be kept under constant surveillance from the eye of a watchman who slumbers not. Once set loose, the conditioned mind never ceases plotting and too soon it gets around to the sinister ways to take prisoners and breed abstractions so as to rule in a corrupt world of tyranny. By the time it has taken power it has become convinced that the reality of its very existence is a mentally invented image, an abstraction, attached by a label to a mortal body who obviously intends on taking Heaven by force.

A Man For Every Woman

 I want to question something almost universally held to be true. Possibly it has been written down or memorized in every language there is on Earth. 

Does a man have a woman? Does a woman have a man? What is the evidence of  it? A mere abundance of sentiment? Is it possible to live well without such? There are so many songs and rhymes that seem to want it to be so they cannot be counted. This questioning is a heavy one with far reaching consequences. If one is convinced “I cannot have someone else as my possession” what happens to that one? 

Obviously, if the statement is correct it immediately makes a large excess of energy available for other things. Imagine, if you will, what that amount of energy released can accomplish.

It could be so that the only reason for clinging to a possibility so doubtful is to have someone to blame, besides myself, for the mess I have to endure. “My wife does not behave”; “my husband does not behave”; my children do not behave”, etc. For this reason it is suggested we look into who is it benefits from a widely held tradition that for every man there is a woman. Often such inquiry is revelatory of the tradition’s invalidity as a fundamental method for experiencing a sense of well-being in life. There is a belief behind the idea of marriage as a binding contract that it will help to ensure the control of people. Who desires to control people? Whose job description is that? How is it so closely related to whose job is it to manage and control children?  What underlies the belief that if we can control a child up to the age of seven or so we have that child for life? Think like a free animal. 

We are getting somewhere. Ask: if I make the decision to be in the company of another human moment to moment am I more or less likely to have a sound and solid relationship as opposed to some traditional assignment of me to him or her for a lifetime? Am I ill-equipped to live here naturally? Are you? Think like a free animal.

Somebody sold us a bag of rotten fruit in the form of bad tradition with a motive when we crossed a line into a world organized by other people for us before we were even born. Not so good for children. Well, do not feel so all alone. Every child must get stoned. Resurrect your living bones! 

 ENLIGHTENMENT

A close friend and I were talking recently about gurus we have known. One stands out to both of us. However we both acknowledged that after his death it was written that not one single person could be found anywhere on Earth who was enlightened by that man’s life long teaching. Too bad he was such a failure. My friend and I laughed.

The next day it came to me like a bolt out of the sky-nobody has ever been enlightened from the beginning of time for the obvious reason that for enlightenment to appear one must first see clearly 

“ I do not exist as a separate self and never have I existed so” 

Nobody will ever speak out “ I am enlightened” except to prove to others, “I am not”. Not surprising then was the writing that not one single person can be found who tells “that guru (the one my friend and I had discussed) enlightened me” and that means he did his job ever so well. And that is what I know of enlightenment.

ref: The Nobody Book by Nobody at all 

A copy is available free with cost of shipping only upon request

 I am reading a small book by Larry McMurtry entitled  Crazy Horse. Only about 150 pages it seems to me the author accomplished what I would have thought impossible by presenting a reader with a biographical work which makes the characters not to be read as worthy or unworthy performers in an historical account but to be met up with as the real people each must have been. It leads me to say that we, all people, are like droplets in a body of water flowing and no drop is more or less important in the description of how the river flows. It flows as it does. McMurtry’s book shows the human race of people go as the composition of its droplets, taken together, move it along. People treat each other very badly. Attempting to explain who are the important players (droplets) is as ridiculous an undertaking as the ranking of droplets in a body of water. It’s a whole body of humans. Those few droplets of human consciousness who are the stuff of myths are inevitably the very ones about whom almost nothing is known, the mysterious ones, who honor something unspoken which reminds me that anonymity is a powerful reality. 

I was tickled to learn that when complete, if ever it is, the statue of Crazy Horse in the Black Hills of South Dakota will be the largest sculpture ever made on Earth thus far. McMurtry writes that for all such as Crazy Horse “fact withers in the heat of myth”.  And that short sentence is the vitality of “myth” itself. A history book of “fact” is always untrue. Crazy Horse, unlike Sitting Bull, did not escape into Canada when it looked inevitable that whatever they have to do the White Men will do to take all of their homeland: and with it the right to exist. Jesus did not escape his arrest and execution. Billy the Kid did not run from New Mexico to save his life. Perhaps they just did not want to leave home. Therein is a taste of what is meant by 

“there lies something before us and in us unseen that transcends thought” 

Could it be the reality of one, indivisible human consciousness? Until that is grasped we humans remain but a conflicted, confused, lost and selfish lot separate and unnaturally lonely in the river of life, killing our own. How can one learn what the water is like? Only by jumping in!