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Who Really Has All the Answers?

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I still don’t know how or why the sun is so bright and how or why anything happens.  You can give scientific explanations, but that doesn’t cover the why.  You can give pseudo-spiritual answers in vague terms, but that just doesn’t do it for me.  You can make your reality whatever it is you want it to be, but there will still be so many unanswered questions.  Even if you think you have all the answers, you are wrong.  How can you truly know anything for sure?  You can believe you are certain about something, but how certain are you that you are actually certain?  You can say something like, “I am certain that if I do this, this will happen.”  And you could be right.  You also could be wrong.  But right and wrong are human terms.  They were invented, like everything else.  Even these words I type here were invented for my use.  If I were to give this blog entry to a dog, he would probably eat it.  There would be no thought to what it means or the ideas presented.

We want to know, though, don’t we?  We want to know what is out there.  We want to know how this reality works.  But the simple fact is that we don’t know the majority of how and why this world and this universe works the way it does.  And we’ll never know everything.  It is impossible to know everything.  Well, not impossible, but it will take billions and billions of years and a time machine to truly know everything.  But everything is everything that ever happened, is happening now, is happening elsewhere, at every time and every place in the known universe.  That could take awhile to gain knowledge of and even then, we would have more and more information to add to the pile every nanosecond that goes by.  Wouldn’t that be an exhausting task?  And wouldn’t it be a complete time sink?

What we are truly searching for is the core of our existence.  Why are we here?  What is the purpose of all of this?  But how are we to discover that purpose?  Even if we think we have discovered it, we could be dead wrong.  It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We find the answers we want to find and disregard the rest.  We become whatever it is we truly are.  Where we seek, we find.  And it’s not a complete picture, but it is certainly more settling than complete and utter uncertainty.  It is better to believe in something than it is to just spend your life believing nothing.  It is a bit of a shortcut to easing our pain of unraveling the existence conundrum.  We choose to believe in whatever we most feel is close to our experiences.  We try to have our beliefs be congruent with what it is that we see, hear, smell, etc.

I don’t truly think there is an omniscient god out there.  There is just way too much information to take in and it would be impossible to know everything.  Although, on different levels, other than our own, I’m sure that the spiritual world has a better grasp on reality than we do as a small planet in the corner of the universe.  I can’t say for sure what happens in that other world, but they seem to have much more wisdom due to extraordinarily more experience than us lowly humans.  They have seen whole galaxies crash and burn, entire solar systems wiped out.  It is a more holistic perspective.  Even if they do not have all the answers, they certainly have more than we do.  Much, much more.  We are just here for a short time and we go away, either to the spirit world or we rot in the ground, or both.

But believing we do nothing more than rot in the ground is a dead end, literally.  There is nothing more to experience after death.  It is a pointless perspective, and a very fear-creating one.  To think that this is the only life we have, ever, would place importance on survival and staying away from anything potentially dangerous.  But to believe that we will “return” to the spirit world after we die is a bit more comforting and exciting than rotting in the ground.  Sure, our bodies will rot regardless, but a part of us, our spirit or soul, will go to a place where we are around other spirits, or to a place where we are all one.  Although we won’t know the exact nature of this place until we are actually dead, we tend to have some idea of what it will be like.  And we will remember why we were here on Earth and gain some insight into what the hell is going on here and what it all means.

Will we have all the answers then?  Who knows?  It could even be a complete fallacy.  We could just rot in the ground.  But that would make our lives pretty much meaningless up against the test of time.  What would be the point of living and then dying for no purpose whatsoever after the world or solar system or galaxy is burnt out and destroyed?  It is hardly inspiring material.  And it doesn’t cover the why of anything either.  There would be no reason for all of this here, it is simply dead particles floating around.  As Descartes put it, “The scream of an animal being tortured is no different than the ringing of a bell.”  Nothing would truly matter in the long, long run.

So, I believe it helps to think that we are here for a reason, even if we do not have all the answers we seek.  And it is entirely possible we will never get all the answers or even a fraction of them.  But the main thing is that we are still growing.  We are opening our minds and our souls to new and interesting ideas that may or may not prove to be true.  Perhaps one day the veil will come off and the truth will be revealed to us.  It definitely helps to lean in that direction than to just proclaim, “There is no God, no afterlife, no anything other than what is here right now.”  It is extremely rigid and disempowering to just say that things like life after death in a spiritual form is impossible and not going to happen.  How much would that trivialize your own existence?

But as I said before, seek and you shall find.  If you are looking for evidence for no life after death, you will find it.  If you are looking for evidence of a spirit world, you will find it as well.  A self-fulfilling prophecy.  What you should truly see is what makes the most sense to you deep down in your soul, consciousness, or whatever you want to call it.  Being is another word for it.  Do you truly feel that you are something more than just a human being, or do you have low self-esteem and think that all you’ll ever be is a body and a mind?  The choice is up to you.  The answers are yours to find.  Whether through this life or in the spirit life, there are answers waiting for you.

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Who Cares Who We Are?

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

This is a question I’m asking honestly.  We can go on and on about who we are, what we are, but who among us cares to delve into these subjects?  I know I certainly do.  But who among us really wants to know?  Who wants the truth?  From an objective lens, we are the rapists of the Earth, destroying our planet ever more rapidly, just to extend our power and control over the environment in which we live.  From a subjective lens, we are whatever we think we are, or believe we are.  The subjective lens is a more empowering view of humans, but is that really what we need as a species?  Because it seems like, from an objective lens, that all we’ve done with this expanded power is cause more death, destruction, and control.  Sure, life is great for a select few in this world, but it is at the expense of others, humans and nonhumans.  From what I have seen, most of the world lives in poverty, which is not right, but that’s how it is.  We are not living with the great spirit within us as a whole.  But that can’t stop you from doing so.

We can tap into another reality at any time we want to.  We just have to know how.  We have to have the consciousness for it.  But what is the true nature of reality?  What is the real truth?  Which lens is most accurate?  The question is unanswerable, because for one there are too many lenses to look through.  Another problem is that different lens are more accurate for different people.  It’s hard to really know which lens is the most accurate, but we can explore different lenses to see which one works better than the one we are using.  Or we can use the multi-lens approach, tailoring each situation to the best lens for the job.  But I’m sure this takes years of practice to calibrate which lens is best for each individual situation.  I believe that subjective reality is one of the primary steps to getting your reality in better order, simply because it allows for what you believe to be true.

It is a creative belief system, with potentially unlimited possibilities, but the major limit being our own minds.  We can explore our inner space indefinitely, and this is a way to truly flourish, independent of the objective universe, although the objective universe is contained within the subjective framework.  But the objective universe is only there because we believe in it to be so.  But our belief is truly rooted there as of now because that is where our consciousness is wrapped up.  Sure, it has led to unbelievable understanding and advances in technology, so it is useful in the framework in which it works, so it cannot be completely dumped.  But relying solely on the objective lens creates fear and uncertainty.  It creates a feeling of lack of control.  But when the subjective lens is placed before the objective one, it can make the objective world a creation of consciousness, and therefore more flexible and less pronounced.  The subjective lens accounts for much more than just the objective world.  It brings that all experiences are possible and that if we wish to create them, we can by intending it to be created.

It reminds me of the mantra, “If you believe it, it is so.”  Very true.  But not always.  You’ve seen cult suicides, and other indoctrinated people who believed what they believed only because their consciousness was controlled.  You can believe whatever you want to believe, but it has to actually work for you.  It has to encourage growth, not stagnation.  It has to empower you, not disempower you.  It has to open your mind, not close it.  A closed mind is one of rigidity and clinginess.  People cling to their beliefs, even in the most contradictory experiences.  When you see something that contradicts your beliefs, you need to open your mind and find something that will explain it,  otherwise you are perceiving reality inaccurately.  And that would be a damn shame because it would hinder your ability to function in the real world.  The more removed from reality your beliefs are, the worse off you are.

A few years ago, I tried out the subjective lens, and intended money to come into my life.  I had absolute strangers giving me $5 where I worked.  At the time, I was a bagger at a grocery store and when I went outside to retrieve the shopping carts, I was finding money everywhere.  I was getting large tips from people I helped out, and this one incident threw me over the edge.  A man called for my attention when i was in the parking lot and said, “Come over here for a moment.”  So I did.  ”I just wanted to thank you for what you did yesterday.  You helped my mother bring her groceries to her car and I just wanted you to have this.”  He gave me a $10 bill.  I had never even imagined something like this would happen unless it had to do with my intention for it to happen.  I thought to myself, “Wow!  This is really true!  It made my life better in every way possible!”  Of course, we forget and go back to old habits, so I did, and lost parts of that belief system.

I’m going from personal experience when I say that intention-manifestation does work, but it only works to the extent you believe in it.  If you have doubts, those doubts will appear in your manifestations.  If you don’t actually believe you can manifest $50,000 dollars just by intending it, you won’t.  If you think these things are impossible, stop reading now.  Your beliefs will stop you from experiencing anything beyond your realm of possibility.  In a subjective framework, anything is possible.  Your only limitation is if you don’t truly believe this.  I’m not quite there yet, but using reference experiences and other people’s supposed experiences, I figure that it can only enhance reality, not degrade it, so it is empowering by its very nature, to say that you (consciousness) are the very creator of this reality and are everything you experience, not just your physical body.  It is the dream scenario in my previous post.  You are all that exists, all that you are aware of, all your thoughts and the thoughts that you perceive to the in the global consciousness.  It’s all you.  Other people are you.  The planet is you.  The universe is you.  Everyone and everything is connected.  There is no you and I.  It is all I.  Or we.  We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.  Life is nothing but a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.  Einstein proved that, so why haven’t we taken it seriously yet?  Because we (I) am not ready yet.  But I’m getting there.

And when we believe that we are all one, all part of the same whole, in this together, we start to have compassion.  Compassion for all that is.  We realize that to hurt another is to hurt oneself.  To hate someone is truly to hate a part of yourself.  Non-duality.  A belief in this can create quite an interesting life I bet.  It is a very empowering way to view reality and no matter what happens, you know you are safe, even beyond the death of your physical avatar.  If you die in a dream, you don’t die for real.  Your physical body is but a manifestation of consciousness and is just another one of your creations.

I’ll expand on this later when I have more time.  I just manifested a lunch with my grandparents.  But I hope I have convinced you that you should care about who we are and that we should get to the roots of reality to perceive it accurately.  Remember, an accurate belief enhances your life and the lives of those around you, while an inaccurate belief causes problems, especially if it closes your mind to other schools of thought.  This is why subjective reality is the most empowering belief I’ve found so far.  It encompasses everything and anything, as long as you are open to it.  A jack of all trades.  It is how we all live our lives, but with many belief systems tacked onto it, some that even negate the subjective paradigm.  A God making himself powerless.  Anyway, happy existence to you!

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Who am I?, Part 4

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

I figured, what the hell, I’ll post another blog entry.  Since I’m not working tonight, it makes sense since I’ll have no time constraints other than my will to go to sleep.  This reality is certainly interesting.  We can only take so much of it, then we have to sleep.  We finally get to take a break, but sometimes we even have to work during our sleep, like when we are dreaming.  Mitch Hedberg had a great line when he was still alive about dreams and sleep, “I go to sleep so I can rest, but then suddenly I have to build a go-cart with my ex-landlord.”  Or take the quote from Steven Wright, “I have to be in bed by 1 AM, because my dreams start then whether I’m asleep or not.”  Of course, these are paraphrased, but they relate to what I am going to talk about today (or tonight for those of you keeping score).  I want to talk about how dreams and reality have  a close relationship and how it could be entirely possible that we are living in a dream world of our own imagination.

Since this idea cannot be proven wrong objectively or subjectively, you have to assume it could be true.  How would you know otherwise?  If you knew your entire reality is nothing but a dream that “something” is having, with you being the first-person view, what would that mean for you?  Would you live this “dream” any differently than you life your current life?  Would certain pressing issues cease to matter at this point?  Would fear even be a problem?  Would you change your outlook on life to one of wonder and curiosity?  Or would it be the same old thing?

It’s interesting that when we are dreaming, it is very real to us.  We feel emotions that correspond with the dream events.  No matter how ludicrous the situation, it is plausible in the dream, as long as we don’t realize that we are dreaming.  Once we realize we are dreaming, one of two things happen.  We either wake up or become lucid within the dream.  I have had a couple of lucid dreams, maybe 5 total in my lifetime.  I could fly, and do crazy unimaginable things just because I knew it was a dream.  The excitement of that caused me to wake up.  Back to reality.  Or was it?  I have had a dream within a dream before and woken up out of the second dream and was still sleeping, but awake in the first dream.  Waking up within the dream felt really real to me, so for me it is entirely possible that this reality is nothing more than a really, really long dream.  Whether or not I know this to be true is not confirmed, but it is certainly in the realm of possibility.  And it is certainly something worth trying, at least for awhile, to see if it empowers or disempowers me.

The very truth is that we do not know for sure what the nature of our existence is, so we get to fill in the gaps with different beliefs and thoughts.  Keeping an open mind and adopting a belief like this is yet another experiment that could yield much better results than you are getting now.  It’s not like I’m going to go buy 50 puppies and just let them live in my house, or even build a go-cart with my ex-landlord, but being in this dream mental state, it makes reality that much more interesting and creates more and more curiosity.  I believe it was the Buddha who came up with the idea that life could be a dream and that it was a powerful way to transcend fear.  If everything is a dream anyway, what’s the harm in trying something new and failing at it?  There is truly nothing to fear, not even fear itself, once you’ve transcended it.  So if that is the only thing holding you back, it may be wise to try this way of living for awhile.  Just out of curiosity, if nothing else.  It will certainly make your normal days that much more interesting.  Imagine trying to interpret your life as you would a dream.  Talk about mind-bending…

I’m just trying to get to the core of who we all are and whether or not we can decode this reality to its very nature.  There are so many stories you can tell about reality and why we are here, but it makes more sense, at least to me, to come up with an answer that fits me and my understanding, while at the same time remaining open to any thoughts and ideas that may enhance what I already believe to be true.  Lao Tzu once said, “I had a dream I was a butterfly and now I do not know if I am a human who dreamed I was a butterfly or if I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a human.”  Food for thought.  Because we don’t really know for sure what is real.  Sure, things feel real and look real, but even that can be manipulated by stimulating the brain in certain ways.  We are the imagination of ourselves.  That’s what Einstein proved.  ”Matter is reduced to nothing but a slow moving vibration.  There is no such thing as death.  We are the imagination of ourselves.”  Bill Hicks does a great joke on that.

I’m just trying to open doors and not close any windows.  For example, recently the numbers 9:11 have appeared in my reality almost every day.  Some call 11 a wink from the universe.  Others call it a nod.  Some people deny what they are seeing and pass it off as coincidence.  But when these things keep showing up, what are you to do?  Cling to your objective framework and deny that there may be something more?  Or ask questions why these things are happening?  Perhaps there is a deeper meaning to all of this.  Perhaps this is a dream, but that doesn’t make it meaningless.  Perhaps this reality is manufactured.  We don’t know.  But that doesn’t change what we experience.  To us, it’s real.  We cannot deny what is right in front of us.  Our experiences are what make us who we are.  Also, how we perceive our experiences, which is what I am working on now.  I encourage you all to do the same.  Whether you want to experiment with a dream-based belief or some other belief about reality, try it out, see how it fits.  It may just be your size.

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Who Am I?, Part 3

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

You are not your religion. You are not your thoughts or your beliefs. That is not who you are. You are consciousness. That is all. Pure, unfiltered consciousness. That is all everything truly is. It is the same as awareness. Any belief on top of that is simply a tool. A tool that can be used to enhance or degrade our experiences. There are many beliefs, philosophies, and religions out there that can be useful at times to make sense of what we are experiencing. We have the option to use all of them at any time to create a more accurate picture of reality. The problem is that most people choose just one and call it “the only truth.” But there is no real truth, except what is. And what is is the only phenomenon that can be filtered through religions, belief systems, or philosophies. There are billions of ways to view one situation. Many of them are similar, but some of them are vastly different. They are all valid in the eye of the beholder. If you upload a certain belief system, it will be valid for you, simply because you believe it to be so. That doesn’t make it true, but for you, it is.

All of these thought patterns have good points and bad points, disempowering and empowering beliefs. There are strengths and weaknesses in all of them. So why not just buy the whole lot and keep the good, while dismissing the bad? You can take the parts of each belief system or thought pattern that works for you and dump the parts that don’t. You can have them in your arsenal for use when needed. You don’t have to identify with them, but you do understand them. They are tools useful in certain situations. You can approach situations from multiple perspectives and make a more conscious decision based on the more rich spiritual and philisophical input. It seems a bit more intelligent to me than limiting your experience of reality to just one filter. It is much more encompassing than just Christianity or just atheism. You use the advantages of many belief systems to make more sound decisions and allow yourself a much wider range of experiences due to your wider range of beliefs.

I’m thinking of this as a much more empowering way to live and a much more sound way as well. It may not answer all your questions, but it will attempt to answer them. And you still have yourself. Your consciousness makes the final decision about anything. Sure, you may view a situation from multiple perspectives, but it is you that makes the final decision. And it is also you who must bear the results of that decision. But allowing multiple perspectives into your consciousness creates the opportunity for a more precise decision in any situation. Sure, you may not think you will not fit in with your Christian friends or Buddhist friends, but you’ll find you will understand them better and from every perspective that is them and is not them. You’ll be able to see flaws from within a belief system and from the outside looking in. It is a rare advantage to have. And it seems to be very empowering.

I am not simply speculating here. And there is nothing to lose in being open to different schools of thought. I have done this before and it has made me feel more empowered and able to do more. It gives me a better feeling of certainty. It allows me to broaden my horizons in new and exciting ways. It makes me feel better after making a decision. I have not, however, experimented with this way of living quite long enough to see its long-term effects. But just starting out it seems like it has already rendered wonderful results. For example, it has motivated me to write three blog posts in two days (spread out to three for more page views). That is pretty amazing if you ask me. This blog had become a breeding ground for negative rants on nature and this new way of living has allowed me to see beyond that position and move forward to new ways to think about the whole nature or reality.

I guess it has given me more of a sense of purpose, more of a feeling of wanting to share with the world. And I have evolved in some ways to get to this point. I’ve asked questions and wondered what the answers might be. I’ve become inspired about new ways of looking at the world and beyond. So I’ve become a more inegrated whole in just a short time of trying out this new “religion.” It is really a religionless religion, but at the same time encompasses every religion and belief system that I know of and can harness.

This is not an original idea. Steve Pavlina came up with this idea years ago in an article called Spiritual Depth Perception. It was an opening for me back then and I’ve just recently gotten back into experiencing what I experienced back then. I can’t really describe the feelings you get from having all these perspectives, but it is close to the feeling of joy if not joy itself. It is a more empowering and deep way to live and I can already see the benefits once again. It is one thing to write about this sort of thing, and it is quite another to actually live it. I’m going to keep writing and keep posting about this new way of life for awhile and see where it takes me. I welcome you to come along for the ride. You can even try this yourself and compare the results to your past self. This is just the beginning of something big for me and hopefully for all the readers out there, if you’ve got the guts to try it.

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Who am I?, Part 2

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Last night I asked a lot of questions in this post, and I did not really provide any answers.  It’s because I wasn’t there.  And neither were you.  But how can we use this uncertainty to live a better life?  Is it possible to believe in anything when we simply do not know what the real truth is about our origins?  Well, I would say yes, but only in a way that allows us to flourish as human beings, not one which provides true understanding.  Sure, living a good life is fine and dandy, but what is the deeper meaning of it?  Sure, you have rich experiences and have tons of joy in your life, but what does that all mean in the greater context of all that is?  I guess it will be easier to live out your “sentence” on this planet and will make living that much more fun.  And a life well-lived is something that can have a very deep meaning to you, to me.  Even if it doesn’t answer all of those nagging questions.

People who live lives based in spirituality or other belief systems could have it all wrong.  But many of them do not suffer for it.  Especially if it is a consciously-chosen belief system, not a socially-conditioned one.  A socially-conditioned belief system is nothing more than dumb luck, the family you were born into, the culture you live in indoctrinate that belief system into you.  You mostly associate with those who believe the same as you and rarely ever go beyond the box of your little belief-created world.  Many people never even change one belief about their spiritual practices in an entire lifetime.  Even if they do have questions, social pressure holds them back from getting answers.  They just go with the flow of their little world.  Outsiders are different, so they are deemed dangerous, much like the condemning of the Muslim faith in American media.  When’s the last time you saw a lead story about a peaceful Muslim movement?

Of course, those that choose their spiritual lives consciously have most likely tried at least a few belief systems and found one that worked best for them.  There are even those who have multiple religions or perspectives when it comes to spirituality (see Steve Pavlina).  These are conscious choices and are more certain beliefs in my book, because there was at least a period of spiritual exploration that took place.  There were questions asked.  Answers given.  And there was growth beyond the socially-conditioned path of spirituality.  It makes more sense to try out different beliefs about reality and see which resonate with you than to just pick one and stick with it, no matter how close-minded it may be.  Even atheism doesn’t explicitly claim, “There is no God,” just that there is no proof of God.  At least they are man enough to say, “I don’t know.”  Or maybe I’m thinking of agnostic.  Even Buddhism does not say whether or not there is a God and does not say what happens after death.  Why?  Because these people are not dead.  At least they are not making false promises, or creating delusions that most people would regard as insanity from the outside looking in.

Experience is the only tool we have to create our belief systems.  Everything else is what I would call “a leap of faith.”  Unless we have directly experienced it, then we do not know whether or not it is true.  For example, suppose you read in the paper that some building got bombed in another country, killing hundreds of people.  Then the next day, an article comes out saying the first article was false, a mistake, a hoax even.  But it was real yesterday, you say.  But the only thing that was truly real to you about that whole experience is you reading the article claiming that a bomb went off, killing hundreds.  You weren’t there to witness it or the after-effects.  So you don’t know whether or not it is real.  I’m sure it would be out of your way to go all the way over there and verify, but you don’t have to do that.  Because it didn’t even happen, as you will soon find out.  But how do you know the retraction is true?

This is why I find it hard to put my trust in ideas or philosophies I haven’t tried for myself and enjoyed the results.  Sure, taking a leap of faith can help sometimes, like if it makes your life that much better, go ahead and do it.  But I feel like taking too far a leap into the wrong faith can corrupt.  The only thing you can ever be sure of is the present moment and what is around you.  Everything else is a leap of faith.  Your reality is what it is at every moment, and nothing else.  That is the only thing you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Your experiences are only real because you were there.  Otherwise, they are pure fantasy.  So wouldn’t a belief system focused on the present moment make a lot of sense?  Or at least a belief system based on the culmination of all your present moments up today (i.e. your experiences)?  To do anything more would be taking a bit of a risk, but you can always come back to first principle.  You can keep an open mind about all belief systems, but know in your heart that all you know for certain is that you are here right now, existing, doing whatever it is you are doing.  And it is then that you have no need for answers because all the answers you seek are right in front of you.

So, I am advocating a belief system based on experiences and the present moment.  It is logical, but at the same time spiritual.  You can have spiritual experiences and they are valid because you yourself experienced them. You can keep an open mind and experiment with any beliefs you want, but they are not your identity.  You don’t need to rely on someone or something telling you how it is because you know how it is based on your experience.  It does not claim there is a God, or that there is no God.  It does not claim anything, other than what you actually, tangibly experience.  It is certainly grounded in reality.  It is certainly fool-proof.  It cannot be wished away or simply changed.  It is what it is and that is all.  Simple, yet very profound.  It needs no labels or converts.  It simply just is, for now at least.

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