Monthly Archives: December 2010

There’s Something Wrong With Us

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Obviously, there is something wrong with humans as a race.  The fact that we take, take, take from the wider world without giving back is the prime example.  We will destroy anything, even ourselves, to get what it is that we want.  We will systematically exterminate subsets of our own species just so we all look alike.  Humans believe they are the crown of creation, the final evolution, God’s chosen species.  But we are not.  That is just something we tell ourselves to justify the evil things that we do to other species and our own species.  Before we save the planet, we first need to save ourselves.  We need to become emotionally healthy and self-sufficient.  If we can’t do that, how are we supposed to get anything else accomplished?

If humans would stop for just one second and look at the desolation and destruction they have caused over the past 10,000 years or so, they would be appalled.  But most humans would rather not look.  Why not?  Because it will reflect in ourselves what we, too, are capable of.  We are all capable of such cruel and unusual behavior, it’s just some people are more prone to commit these kinds of horrendous acts.  It is either nature or nurture in these cases.  It is mostly nurture, I believe, due to this insane world we live in.  But it can also be nature in some cases.  Some people are simply bad seeds.  It is not their fault, nor their parents’ fault.  They are born that way.  But that is the exception, not the rule.

Most people have to be conditioned thoroughly to commit the horrendous acts that are perpetrated daily on a mass and small scale every day.  Some of us aren’t even aware of what we are contributing to.  Others knowingly commit crimes of epic proportions to get ahead in life.  It is not their fault, though.  The system was set up thousands of years ago and it is only recently that it is becoming evident that something is seriously wrong with it.  This civilization is pathological and will never stop, even at the expense of itself.  We will exploit everything and everyone that can be exploited.  I truly cannot see it stopping anytime soon, even when many of our natural resources get scarce.  It will become more frantic then, more cutthroat, more devious.  But why?

I would argue that the human race was traumatized somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago by multiple traumas.  One of them was the magnetic reversal of the poles, and another was the Ice Age.  It is entirely possible we were visited by aliens and they did something to us that traumatized us so badly that we had to invent the ego, which allowed us to get through these tough times.  The truth is that we don’t completely know why we got so fucked up, but the important thing is trying to get better.  Like I said, we need to fix ourselves before we can fix the world.  That is definitely a prerequisite.

There has been this practice called yoga going on for over 5000 years.  Yoga takes many forms, and it is a form of cleansing overall.  The real question here is:  What did we need to be cleansed of in the first place?  There had to be something.  Something terrible.  And something we can only speculate on today, because we truly have no idea.  I’m sure somewhere deep down in our DNA we know, but the attempts at explaining this shift in our behavior for the last 10,000 or 30,000 years sometimes gets crazy, like fourth-dimensional lizards messing with our DNA and breeding with some humans to create shape-shifting lizard people who rule the world.  Is this scenario possible?  Maybe.  Is it likely?  Highly doubtful.  All I know is that this isn’t the life us humans planned for ourselves.  There shouldn’t be so much darkness in us, in the world.

Like I said before, it’s anyone’s best guess what happened to us so many thousands of years ago.  We truly don’t know because we weren’t there.  Our ancestors were there, and they are long dead, and there was no written word when this happened, so how are we to find out?  It would really help a lot to know what went on, but I don’t know how that’s going to happen.  It’s kind of like a repressed memory that we’ll have to dig out of our subconscious at some point down the road in order to begin the healing process.  We used to be one with the Earth, now we are one against the Earth.  Something profound has to happen for an event like that to take place.  There are a ton of theories about what happened, but how can we know for sure what truly took place?  How can we find the origin of the separation from the self and the movement into the ego, which is the cause of all our problems and also what saved us in the beginning?

I’m posing these questions to you.  I don’t have any answers, other than the fact that we’re totally bonkers as a species.  And that whatever spawned civilization had to be pretty dark, as civilization spawned dark emotions in many, many people throughout history, behaving in such a manner that they have no soul, no empathy, and an addiction to power and control.  Why is it that 13 or so bloodlines have most of the power?  Or why do they pass laws that makes it illegal to sell or give away food you grow yourself unless the government has its look at it?   Why do we need government in the first place when no other species needs it?  What the hell made us so selfish in regards to the wider world?  These are all questions that are not easy to answer, and may have no definitive answer that we can discern.  But it is thinking about it, wondering, that gets us moving in the right direction.  And it could possibly lead us to an answer, that would jump-start the healing process to allow for us to finally get over whatever it was that made us this way.  Let us pray.

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You Don’t Need It

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In this holiday season, people may go out on spending sprees, going into debt, and spending the rest of the year paying it off.  We are the consumer culture, buying things we can’t afford made by people in third world countries we’ll never meet.  It’s just the newest chapter of exploitation and greed.  Imagine a world where we didn’t do all of this.  Imagine a world where we were happy with what we had, and didn’t constantly need a new product to make our lives feel whole.  Imagine a world where we saved money, instead of frivolously spending it on things we would later regret buying.  We buy and buy and buy for others during this holiday season, when what we could give them is much more meaningful than a gift.  You could cook them a meal, make them some cards, or just tell these people how you feel about them.  You could have a nice family meeting where everyone goes around saying good things about each other.  There is plenty you can do in lieu of gifts.

For the past few years, when people have asked me what I want for Christmas, I’ve often said, “I don’t know.”  The only thing I would possibly want would be maybe an Amazon gift card to add a few more books to my Kindle, or something that I will get continuous value from, like a mug warmer or a new desk for my computer.  But I don’t really need those things, I just want them.  The desk I have is okay, it works, and I would have to get rid of this one in order to get a new one.  What I could really use is a small filing cabinet that could fit where the tower part of a computer would go if I had a desktop computer.  That way I could be a bit more organized.  Ever since the drawer bottom came out of my one drawer in this desk, I’ve been using a box on the floor.  But it hasn’t caused any suffering yet.  It’s just a minor inconvenience.  And I could easily head down to the Salvation Army and find a file cabinet that fits my needs and I could easily afford it.

What is it we actually need?  Food, water, some kind of shelter, people who support us, and fuel for those terribly cold months some areas of the world experience.  That’s pretty much it.  It is not required to have an iPhone or a Sony Entertainment System.  Those are things that can easily be done without.  Most of us would say we need a computer or a television, but that is simply not true.  Even though today’s world is full of them, and many people’s jobs rely on these new technologies, are they really necessary?  No, but they are still worth having sometimes because we all like to use them every once in awhile.  Self-deprivation is no fun, and we should have things we use, but things we do not use or will never use should be donated, or simply thrown away.  Or even recycled.

Many people today are minimalists and they don’t even know it.  There are people who are minimalists by necessity, because they have very little or no money.  Then there are those who are very wealthy who own very little, because they’ve seen beyond the socially-conditioned way of life and choose to only own what is useful to them.  It’s all about the mindset.  Not to mention that it is wise to save money and buy less now before the complete collapse of the economy.  It won’t take long for this to happen, just a few decades at the most.  We have no idea of the times that we are headed for.  Things certainly haven’t gotten any better, and if that’s any indication of how our future will be, then we need to stop spending fast.  I just hope our government stops printing money so that we don’t experience hyperinflation, which will make all the money we saved up essentially worthless.

I’m trying to justify minimalism in these hard times, because it will be best for us when it all comes crashing down.  And that all this spending, all this debt, is exactly the problem.  Stimulating the economy through credit cards and loans is not going to solve the problem, but just make it worse.  Do you hear that, Washington?  Stop all the spending and maybe someday we’ll get out of this recession.  Stop spending all our hard-earned money on things that don’t benefit us, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Those wars haven’t helped the American people one bit.  In fact, it has crippled them.  So has all this outsourcing to China and other countries that will willingly exploit their people to send up cheaply-made merchandise.  Is this the world we were meant to live in?  I think not.

Why aren’t people willing to do the things that are necessary to creating the world we were meant to have?  It’s going to start on a conscious level, moving down to the physical.  We need to have a global rise in consciousness before we can get anything done.  We need leaders to get those who are not quite there yet up to our level.  We need to educate people about what is really going on in the world, so that they can make informed choices on what to buy and what not to buy.  Not only that, but what to do, and what not to do.  If we stopped buying things from the corporations who exploit other nations and other people, then they would have no power whatsoever.  If we all stopped going to Walmart and Target and Best Buy, then perhaps we would see a change for the better.  If people would actually think of why something is so cheap and think of the people who actually have to produce these things, there would be the start of a consciousness revolution.

It sure is a mad world out there.  And most people would rather be left in the dark about it, because if they don’t know, they don’t feel they are contributing to it.  But that is sheer willful ignorance.  We are all contributing to this world in one way or another, and we can decide in which way we want to contribute.  We can move towards fear or we can move towards love.  We can keep going on this suicidal trainwreck, or we can stop the train and figure out which steps need to be taken to restore the world to what it once was.  For the benefit of all creatures, not just our narrow, unenlightened self-interest.  Why is it that everyone who ever told us to live together in harmony either got shot or killed in some other way?  When are we finally going to be ready to hear this, much less do it?

A Tribute to Bill Hicks

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Bill Hicks, one of the lesser known “famous” comedians, has been an inspiration to me and just a truly brilliant man.  He’s dead now, like all the great ones, although he didn’t die from a drug overdose or from suicide.  Sure, he did drugs, and he had a great time doing them, but he was more than clean and sober when he died.  He was called The Dark Poet, and some of his observations and imaginative works about different people on the news and in the media were dark and funny as hell.  He was considered an outlaw comic, and even had his entire set censored out of Letterman’s Late Night show.  It had been approved and pre-approved before, but Letterman didn’t know if  his audience could take what Bill was saying.  He was saying things that people weren’t ready to hear, and he offended tons of people, but he did it in such a way that he became the voice of reason in an increasingly insane world.  He reminds me a lot of myself, but I’m nowhere near as angry or bitter, but I have some of the same thoughts he does about the government and entertainment media.  People say he died way too young, but I think he got his message out in time.

If you don’t know who this man is, I would suggest looking him up on Youtube.  I don’t want to embed any videos on here because I want to keep- my website simple.  He had such a great bit about negative drug stories in the news.  He may have been a bit scathing at times, but he had to be.  To steal a quote from the movie Se7en, “When you have something important to tell someone, you can’t just tap them on the shoulder anymore.  You have to smash their face in with a sledgehammer, and then you’ll see you have their full attention.”  I think that’s why Bill was so offensive, because if he didn’t talk in that way, he wouldn’t be able to get the ideas he was trying to spread into people’s thick skulls.  I love the joke he does in the above link, “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.  There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves…here’s Tom with the weather.”  It’s not just a joke, but it opens your mind to a different experience of looking at the world.

Also in that clip, thankfully, there is his most life-affirming piece of material called, “It’s just a ride.”  Wonderful, enlightening piece of material that totally blows your mind.  That is what all these enlightened teachers have been trying to teach, that life is a dream, or a ride, or something similar, and that to take it seriously, or as if it were real is only going to lead to suffering.  The choice between fear and love.  This guy got it, and he was also funny about it, which sure helps convey the message better.  He made you laugh, and he made you think, and ponder.  One audience member once yelled out, “I don’t go to comedy clubs to think.”  Bill responded by saying, “Where do you go to think?  I’ll meet you there.”  He reminds me a lot of George Carlin, although I feel like Bill went further.  Bill wasn’t afraid to bomb, he wasn’t afraid to express his unpopular opinions.  The guy was Relentless, which coincidentally enough, was the title of one of his DVDs.

The sad part was, however, that he never gained a mainstream audience in America, because he was not allowed to express his ideas on television the way he wanted to and, frankly, most people were not ready to hear what he had to say.  So he went to the UK to perform and his comedy was uncensored on Channel 4, and the people there loved him.  He was allowed to be himself, not some censored, edited version of himself.  He gained a huge following there, and he now has a sizable following in America, but not nearly as big as the Carlin fans or the other really popular comedians.  His ideas were radical and controversial, and they made sense.  He was no sellout, and would call out those who were.  He was one of a kind, and had integrity and was honest.  He told people how he saw the world and he was dead on.  But like all the other people who say, “We should all just get along, stop fighting, become one with the world,” he died young, but not too young, because he at least got his messages out.

He would mock religion, mock these popular, mediocre pop artists, like the New Kids On the Block and Rick Astley.  This was in the late 80s and early 90s, as Bill; tragically died in 1994.  It’s amazing how many people have never heard of him.  I hadn’t heard of him until late 2005.  And it took me awhile to really warm up to him, just like it did with Carlin.  But he has been a part of my life ever since, because listening to him is like getting an upgrade in integrity and consciousness.  He sure had a lot to say.  He used to joke that he was “Noam Chomsky with dick jokes.”  He used to say something like, “I know what you guys are waiting for, and don’t worry, dick jokes are coming.  I editorialize for about one hour, then we go down dick joke highway, because I know that’s why y’all are here.  Don’t worry, they’re coming.”  I’m sure he rubbed a lot of audience members the wrong way and some people probably think he is an asshole, but he was just trying to wake people up.  That’s all.  He truly wanted humanity to evolve to a higher state of consciousness, and isn’t that what we all want?  I’d say so.

In closing, this guy is one of my heroes.  He had morals, he had rebellion, he had such conviction in what he was saying that it just made him either more or less likable, depending on how much you agreed with him.  I have more respect for him than any other comedian, because he was real, he was uncensored, and he would take risks that other comedians wouldn’t even dream of.  I’m pretty sure he was a reclusive type of person, somebody who didn’t quite fit in, but he sure used that to his advantage to call out those who were completely full of shit.  I just wish his work hadn’t fallen on mostly deaf ears during his lifetime.  But today, I think the word is getting out more, and although not as sizable as others, his comedy can still entertain and enlighten us for decades more.  Bill, you are a fucking hero and I hope more people get the word out about you like I’m doing right now.

Here’s some links that may be offensive, but I’m going to add them anyway:

This is by no means an exhaustive list.  There are so many more clips on Youtube of this man and his thoughts, so feel free to browse because I have a feeling you might learn something.  The Rush Limbaugh one is a bit offensive, just to warn you.

Enlightenment

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What is enlightenment?  It is when you recognize the world for what it is: an illusion.  Everything in this so called universe is an illusion, a dream.  It truly does not exist.  All that exists is God, or consciousness, or whatever it is you wish to call it.  What you are is a divine being, a part of God or consciousness, having a dream of separation, when there is no such thing as separation.  Your ego is a part of this dream.  It is a very persistent dream and there is little room for spectacle.  We think that it is real, just as if we are dreaming while sleeping and feel that the dream is real, but when we wake up, we realize just how absurd the dream was and how it is in no way real, but a projection of the mind or consciousness.  The key to enlightenment is that you become lucid in this dream that we call reality and realize that true reality is Source or God and nothing else.  It is often referred to as Heaven.

For those people who have become enlightened, such as the Buddha and Jesus Christ, they lived in such a way that inspired others to write about them.  Once you become enlightened, there is no more need for additional reincarnations.  It may take many lifetimes to get where it is you need to be to reach enlightenment, but realizing that this reality is indeed a dream, an illusion, is the first step to getting there.  We all are one in reality, but in the dream, we have the illusion of separation, due to the ego’s influence on our consciousness.  The ego is very defensive, and will do almost anything to ensure its survival.  If you ever try to transcend your ego, you will notice that it will fight you to the bitter end.  It will try and trick you.  But what most people don’t realize is that the ego, along with what we think of as the real world, is an illusion and the only true reality is of Source.  The universe was created by the ego, but only in a dream form.  But we don’t realize that until after we die as a physical being or become enlightened in our last incarnation on this planet.

If we were to all “wake up” instantaneously, it would be very traumatic emotionally.  This is why most people don’t truly wake up until they have achieved enlightenment.  It is a noble goal, and could take many lifetimes to achieve.  But you can accelerate the process by becoming a student of A Course in Miracles, or other texts that are designed to get you to the point where you can forgive unconditionally.  Forgiveness is the key to salvation.  And since what you are forgiving isn’t even truly real, but a dream, it’s not so hard to do.  That is, once you get the big picture about the true nature of reality.  I find this to be a fascinating belief system, which comes partially from Jesus Christ’s real teachings, not the stuff you’ll find in the Bible, but the stuff that Jesus and other enlightened beings actually said or did.  Not what people wrote about him centuries later in an attempt to control the masses through guilt and shame.  Christ never advocated such nonsense.  He loved everyone equally, and never judged anyone.  A true humanitarian.

I have to say, reading The Disappearance of the Universe has truly opened my eyes to what many of those enlightened beings were trying to convey.  All of it makes perfect sense from a subjective viewpoint, because they realized that the world is indeed subjective, not objective, and that objectivity was simply an illusion that people regarded as true, simply because that is how they had been conditioned.  The religions we have today have barely any resemblance to what these prophets actually taught, and it has become more about money and converting people to your way of thinking than anything else.  But when you look at what these people actually said, you realize that it has no denomination, as it is the simple truth and nothing else.  The universe is an illusion and the true reality is God consciousness.  Total and complete oneness.

I figure this stuff may be way out there for some people, but it makes sense intuitively to me and many others who have heard of such ideas as subjective reality and God consciousness.  To become enlightened is to truly know who you really are, not your ego, and not your mind, but pure God consciousness.  You are the same as God, as he created you in his image.  Not your physical body, but your spirit or soul.  And when your physical body dies off, you will return home to whence you came, and then come back to the illusion until you reach the peak of enlightenment.  At that point, you will no longer have any need to go back into the illusion, other than to help other illusory bodies pass over to the enlightenment side.  It’s a journey to say the least, and getting there will not be easy.  Most people need help from some spiritual source, but it will happen for everyone eventually, as there is no time limit, as the time in this illusory reality is also illusory.  So, no need to worry if you’re not there yet.  You will be, your path is already pre-determined, but you can always choose to accelerate or delay the process of returning Home.  The choice is up to you.  I definitely recommend reading The Disappearance of the Universe, and then A Course in Miracles.  I haven’t read the latter yet, but the former has tons of references from that book, so it has a similar structure.

Good luck on your path towards ultimate bliss and enlightenment.  It may take lifetimes, but it will be well worth it in the end.

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