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Enlightenment

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

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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Posted in Dreams, Inspiration, Nature, Religion, Theories | 4 Comments »

Opening Your Eyes

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Every week now I’m trying to write a blog entry, on either Thursday or Friday, because I work pretty much the rest of the week.  I work nights, so it’s not really practical for me to blog more frequently.  Besides, this is just something I do to express some ideas I have, or expansion on the ideas of others.  I am not someone who is going to post multiple times a day or even more than twice a week, because I feel not only that I would have less memorable posts, but also that it would become a giant time sink.  I would be spending hours, maybe more, every week just to maintain this thing.  And if I’m not making money from it, what is the payoff?  It’s not like I even want to make money from this blog.  I don’t feel like I’m saying anything special, other than the fact that I have a unique writer’s voice.  The ideas are as old as the hills, it’s just I’m expressing them in my own, unique way.  How many people have thought the same things I have and expressed them in their own way?  Millions.  Over the course of human existence, that is.

But I am not my ideas, because those ideas are not mine to begin with.  Nobody can own ideas.  Ideas are fluid.  It is the unique expression of those ideas that can be owned.  That is our gift to the world.  Our own perspective on things, on ideas.  That is what we bring to the table.  That is our uniqueness coming out.  And this is why every human has something to contribute.  (This is another bull shit, everyone is special post, when most people are not special, they are ordinary, but that is only because they have been conditioned not to think for themselves and to let the media and the government do all their thinking for them.)

Now I’m going to lash out at the world at large because that self-help shit really isn’t me.  No offense to those who got value out of  my posts about goal setting and following your passion.  My passion is exposing the world for what it is and how it takes from the wider world without giving back, and allows crimes of epic  proportions and we just sit there and accept it, or remain blissfully ignorant of it.  We accept what we are told by the media because nobody wants to put in the time and effort it would take to prove things wrong.  And when someone does prove that the “official story” or something is wrong, like Bush winning the election, people still believe it.  Or when 9/11 was debunked by quite a few people, they were viewed as heretics and unpatriotic, abominable to think our own government would attack itself.  If you know all the evidence, you’ll know that the WTC was an albatross, inefficient, and would need asbestos removal that would cost more than the original buildings.  Not to mention some guy just bought the building and put an insurance policy on it specifically for terrorist attacks less than a year before the “terrorist attack.”  And let’s not forget that Dick Cheney become head of NORAD, which had never happened before in the history of NORAD.  No elected official was ever put in charge of shooting down planes and for some reason, that was the time and Cheney was all, “Do NOT shoot that plane down!”  They removed all bomb sniffing dogs from the WTC 2 weeks before the collapse.  The buildings fell at near freefall speed, which is impossible for a steel-framed building unless it is being demolished with small charges at ever floor to lessen resistance to zero as the building collapses.

What happened to most of those who said something to the contrary about 9/11?  I’ll tell you what.  The people in high-ranking positions in journalism and politics were made a mockery of, many of them lost their jobs, and were told never to speak of it again.  Others were threatened and changed their official “scientific” findings.  9/11 is not about Muslim terrorists, it is about America wanting a fascist state of control and a reason to attack the middle east to get oil.  The people who are invested in the “official story” have everything to gain, while those who question it have everything to lose.  So it is a risky position, even to say that we trained Al-Quaeda is a risky position.  To say that Osama Bin Laden used to be a member of one of our government agencies is ludicrous.  But all of it is true.  They are hidden truths.  I have this theory that if even 1% of what we don’t know were let out, we would have a revolution.  But most people don’t want to know.  Better avert your eyes.  Why is it so few people truly want to know?

I’ll tell you why.  Because if they lied about that, what else did they lie about?  What other load of crap are they feeding us?  The government lies on a daily basis.  The government is not your friend.  Unless it is a friend who kills people and lies about it.  Big Brother is watching us almost everywhere we go now.  The PATRIOT Act was a total dissolvement of our freedoms in so many ways and we just stood there and took it.  People don’t have critical thinking skills, not even our leaders.  Not anymore.  The public education system, for the most part, creates a population that is a worker  bee, that will go along with the status quo or whatever the government is doing, because in school it is the same way.  Most people get their spirit broken in school.  Imagine 6 year old children forced to sit at a desk for the better part of 6 hours listening to a teacher drone on about mathematical equations when all they want to do is go outside and play and explore their world.  Even things that would be considered fun, such as kickball or singing a song is done under threat of punishment.  We are trained to do what those “above” us say and believe what they say as well.  We are conditioned since birth if our parents were really lousy and placed us in front of the television.  If they actually paid attention to us, we were conditioned since the start of school, the stupidity-manufacturing institution.  No wonder most people don’t really know what is going on in the world.  They don’t know that they don’t know that they are being conditioned and are being brainwashed on a daily basis by all forms of media.  They are told how to think, they believe what the media tells them to be true, even when it could be completely false.

Very few people take the time to question what they read or see on the television.  And that’s the problem.  If we actually did examine and pull the wool off of our eyes, we would see more than we could ever imagine seeing in this socially-conditioned state we are in now.  How the media placates us and gets us hung up on issues like whether or not a mosque should be built at Ground Zero, rather than focusing on the erosion of our freedoms of religion and speech.  The very things that are not reported in the media are the things that bear the most importance.  We never hear about secret societies that control the world on the news.  When was the last time they had the Bilderberg Group on the TV?  Or the Freemasons?  All this secrecy in the name of controlling people, and gaining more and more power, substituted in the form of money and land.  It is a power addiction that has led us to be left in the dark while those in power take everything and maybe throw us a little crumb every now and then.  They commit crimes of epic proportions, right out in the open and blame it on someone else.  As Napoleon said, “To be believed, make the truth unbelievable.”  And he’s right.  Most people can’t believe we attacked ourselves on 9/11 because it would shatter their reality.  It’s easier to believe that someone far, far away that hates us did that horrific act.  Not Uncle Sam.  Not our government, not people who live in this country and have for their whole lives.  It is just easier to believe that some brown people did it who believe in a foreign God that most people in this country don’t believe in or even understand.

It’s just so sad, because human beings have such a capacity for good, but also one for evil.  And when I use the words good and evil, I don’t mean in any religious sense.  I guess you could call them constructive and destructive.  Sane and pathological.  The choice of words is meaningless.  It’s just good and evil are better understood.  Fear and love are also easily understood, and so is love of power.  We have the capacity to create heaven on Earth, but most of us can’t because we would have to quit our jobs and possibly be homeless just to see our visions through.  The system has got us by the balls and we know it.  It is only through transcending the dominant system in small ways to start that we can begin to live autonomously, with the need for less and less from the system.  The system that lies to us and kills people.  Then we can finally begin to do good in ways that are good from every perspective.  For example, buying a piece of land and letting it run wild, like it should be.  That creates diversity and you could also live on it.  But in order to buy that land, you have to spend time in th dominant system earning money to get the land.  But once you have it, it is yours.

Dropping out completely is stupid, but the further you go, the more free you get.  If you no longer depend on your government for subsistence, then you are no longer complicit in what it does.  That is a nice bonus.  It’s not just the government, but those who control most of the world’s wealth.  When you no longer need much money, they can no longer control you either.  They can’t dangle money in front of you to silence you.  You have more integrity than that, now that you are outside the system, although you still take advantage of it in some ways.  I dislike the word dropout, because it still places the primary focus on the dominant, parasitic system, but what’s a better word?  Naturalist?  Minimalist?  Anarchist?  Anarcho-primitivist, although I don’t know if I want to go back that far.  I still want decent  shelter and some form of comfort.  I don’t want to have to try to sleep with bugs all over me.  Yuck.  What I’m looking for is a way forward where we lessen our dependence on government, technology, and hierarchical systems and start focusing on community and truly good values.  Values that come from love, not fear.  Get rid of fear completely and have a world just filled with love.  Will it take time?  Yes.  Are we ready for it now?  No way.  But is it possible?  Definitely.  We just have to make it happen.

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Posted in Anarcho-primitivism, Anti-establishment, Inspiration, Nature, Rants, Simplicity, Theories | No Comments »

The Human Cycle

Friday, September 10th, 2010

All human beings are mortal.  All human beings will eventually die.  We see it every day.  People die.  New people are born.  Thus the cycle of life.  Over one billion years of organisms being born and organisms dying.  Some species have lasted a long time, while others have perished rather quickly.  It is all impermanent, every species will ultimately meet its demise, including  us humans.  When the human species goes extinct, what will that mean for the rest of the world?  There will be nobody to record what is happening, no eyes of the world.  It will be something none of us will ever see, and yet I’m sure some of the most interesting things will happen, but with nobody to record it.  Sure, animals will recognize what is going on to some extent, but they will not be able to keep a record of the post-human future.  There will be no reason to keep a record because there will be no record keepers. It will be a world mostly lived in the present, with new and exciting things happening that are just accepted as is with no pre-judgment or negativity.

The freeways will start to crack open, and the skyscrapers will become home to thousands of animals.  Eventually, there will be no visible trace of any human structure.  It will be an animal’s world.  There will be no wars, no weapons, no fear, just existence.  The consciousness of the world at that point will be almost entirely present moment and there will be no regrets or worries.  Life after people will be very diverse and resilient.  It will also be abundant, due to the lack of a primary exterminator, us.  Everything will pretty much coexist in balance with everything else, and create a harmonious world that nature itself intended.

Whether us humans go extinct in 1000 years or 1,000,000 years, the fact remains that life will go on.  New species will flourish and ones that depended on us for the sustenance will suffer.  We will be gone and the rest of the species on this planet will simply be allowed to live.  They will be free in the most absolute sense.  Kind of like we used to be.  There will be no guidelines, no rules.  Just nature.  Just a diverse array of lifeforms competing for resources and territory, with safeguards to keep them from getting out of balance.  Without humans destroying natural habitats, many environments will come back that had previously been destroyed.  All it takes is a little time and nature always recovers.  So, maybe it’s not such a big deal that we are destroying the planet.  We will probably destroy ourselves before we ever get to destroying the entire planet.

I don’t think humans can get back into balance with nature.  I don’t think they can coexist with other creatures as equals.  We are just too smart at this point.  We know too much.  We know how to create these fantastic civilizations where we wield all the power over all other living things.  We can’t go back to what we once were.  It’s not that we can’t, it’s that we simply don’t want to.  Human life is good for a good portion of the people, although things are getting worse.  But the thought of living in a grass hut or a cave, catching our own food, and bathing in a lake just seem silly to us.  We’re smarter than that.  We can do things that other creatures cannot.  We have opposable thumbs, damn it!  We’re comfortable in our lives.  Our air is conditioned and we are shielded from extreme temperatures of any kind.  We are the kings of the world right now.  And we are really reluctant to give up our throne.

Our time will come and go, however.  Something will make humans extinct.  Be it a plague or a natural disaster, we will go extinct eventually.  Our throne will finally be vacant and will most likely stay that way for millions of years, or forever.  Human beings are nothing special, other than their intelligence.  If we didn’t have that, we would be goners in the wild.  How in the world would we hunt for food if we didn’t know how to make tools?  There are tons of theories on how we developed our superior intellect, but nobody truly knows for sure.  All we know is that it has allowed us to be at the top of the totem pole for tens of thousands of years and only now are we starting to pay for the exploitation and destruction of our home planet.  It’s just a pattern we’ve been running since grain agriculture and it just kind of got out of hand.  Now we have nearly 7 billion humans, who consume at the highest rate in history with most of them having no knowledge of the consequences of their actions.  But our cycle is reaching a tipping point if it already hasn’t.  Things are starting to get worse and there is nothing we can do about it.  Since we are consuming more than we can produce from the Earth, production will go down, as will consumption, which will lead to all sorts of economic  problems, which will lead to people being hungry, which may or may not cause a drop in population.

All I know for sure is that a world without humans will be a world where everything else is just allowed to be.  Sure, there will be competition, but there will not be extermination.  No animals are going to clear-cut forests.  They are not going to have nuclear power plants.  There will be no processed food or pharmaceuticals.  It will be a clean world, a natural world,  one where every organism has a chance to thrive, instead of just one species and the species who are considered useful to that one species.  No exploitation, no destruction.  Just pure life, the way nature intended it to be.

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Posted in Anarcho-primitivism, Anti-establishment, Nature, Theories | 2 Comments »

The Perfect .400 Hitter

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

I’d like to divert from my usual topics to discuss one of my hobbies today.  Baseball.  The national pastime.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, baseball is a game played with a ball, a stick, and a baseball diamond.  I’m not going to get into all the rules here, as I’m sure someone else has already done this.  I’ve studied baseball history for about 15 years now and in that time, no one has come close to hitting .400 (that is, having a base hit in 40% of at bats).  Tony Gwynn in 1994 hit .394 in a strike-shortened season, but who knows which way he would have went if the season went all 162 games?  My guess is he would have ended up somewhere in the .370s or .380s.  No offense, Tony.  It’s just that the media pressure would have driven you crazy, much like what happened to Roger Maris in 1961 when he broke the single season home run record by one in a longer season than the previous record holder.  But if anyone could have done it, it would have been Gwynn.  He was a pure hitter, with little power and a knack for hitting line drives and a good eye.  His career batting average nears .340, which is the highest in the last 60 years.  And there’s the rub.

For the most part, people don’t hit for obscenely high batting averages anymore.  Why?  There are plenty of reasons, and I’ll start with what is the most prominent one.  Strikeouts.  Batters strike out quite a bit more than they did 70 years ago, when Ted Williams became the last baseball player to hit .400.  Statistics show that somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of balls put in play are base hits.  That would add around 20 or 30 points to someone’s batting average if they never struck out.  Pitchers are far more skilled than they were in the first half of the 20th century.  I’m not saying that there were no skilled pitchers back then,  just that there were fewer in proportion to the amount we have today.  They throw harder, have more movement on their pitches, and with the use of multiple relievers in a single game, there are fresh arms pitching the majority of the game as opposed to the 1900-1960s era where most starting pitchers pitched at least 20 complete games in a season.  There are specialist relief pitchers today who come in just to face one batter.  There are more pitches today than ever before.  The hitter is constantly guessing at which pitch out of dozens is going to be thrown.  Thus, there are many, many more strikeouts.

Every .400 hitter struck out less than 8% of the time in that respective season.  How many players today strike out less than 8% of the time?  It would be cumbersome for me to look that up, so I’ll estimate that it is probably between 1 and 5 percent of all Major Leaguers.  Also, it helps to walk quite a bit in a quest for .400.  The less at bats you accumulate, the better chance you have to hit .400.  Why?  Because that means you don’t have to get as many hits.  If you walk 100 times in a season, that is 100 plate appearances that don’t factor into your batting average.  It definitely pays to have a patient presence at the plate if you truly want to hit .400.  If you look at what Ichiro Suzuki did just a few years ago, breaking the single season hits record, you’ll understand what I mean.  He hit .372 that year, which is excellent, but he had over 700 at bats.  Not plate appearances, but at bats.  Granted, he is a leadoff hitter and would not have been able to break the record had he walked 100 times or hit much deeper in the lineup.  But he would have had a much better chance of hitting .400.  But he is not exactly a power hitter.  Pitchers don’t mind giving up a few singles, so I highly doubt Ichiro was intentionally walked much.  He has a threat of hitting the long ball, but for the most part, he is a contact hitter.  His speed and contact ability allow him to collect many infield hits, therefore padding his batting average to higher than your average player.  Speed is a definite advantage when it comes to hitting .400.  So, patience and speed are two other factors that would contribute to the creation of the perfect .400 hitter.  If you can steal some cheap hits with your speed and be patient enough to take a bunch of walks so that your at bats total goes down significantly, you are upping your chances for .400.

I would also argue that in this day and age, a player with respectable power would be more likely to hit .400.  Not your typical slugger, but someone who hits maybe 20-25 home runs a year.  Someone who will occasionally be pitched around to get to a weaker batter.  Obviously, a consistent hitter would also be at the top of the list.  Someone who has similar stats each year would be more likely to be able to reach the .400 mark due to their well-disciplined personality.  Somebody an awful lot like Ted Williams.  The year he hit .400, he also led the league in home runs.  He was known as both a power hitter and an average hitter, and struck out very infrequently.  He walked quite a bit, as his #1 ranking of all-time in on-base percentage shows.  Quite frankly, someone with his caliber would have a hard time hitting .400 today, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.  Lady luck must be on your side if you ever hope to get into this exclusive club.  Certain flares that you hit must fall in.  You must accumulate at least 10-20 infield hits.  For some reason, you must be a left-handed batter.  Why?  Because left-handed batters have an advantage against right-handed pitching, which is still a majority to this day.  Both Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn were left-handed batters and they both had the highest career batting averages of the last few decades.

It would also help to miss a small chunk of time if you are going to hit .400 for a season.  As long as you amass 502 plate appearances, you still qualify for the batting title and your record will be official.  I know it could be called cheating to some, as I was extremely mad in the 1990s when Mo Vaughn narrowly missed a batting title to go along with his 40 home runs due to rival New York Yankee Bernie Williams, who had much fewer plate appearances than Mo.  Not only that, Bernie Williams, on the final game of the season, went 2-for-2 and was taken out of the game.  Mo, who had over 600 at-bats, had a batting average that was within 0.2% of Mr. Williams, and came up short.  But for the .400 hitter, there will likely be no one even close in terms of BA.  So, no harm, no foul.  I would say between 550 and 600 plate appearances would be a good number, with maybe a 15 day disabled list stint placed somewhere during the season.  Look at Chipper Jones.  He won the batting title in 2008 with a mere 534 plate appearances due to I believe 2 stints on the 15 day DL.  .364 BA is nothing to sneer at.  He only had 439 at-bats, due to his patience at the plate.  90 walks certainly helps your batting title goal.

So, here are the criteria for the perfect .400 hitter:  A player who strikes out very little, walks rather frequently, has speed to beat out infield hits, has formidable power to attract intentional walks, has fewer than 600 plate appearances (although this is not a necessary requirement), and has to be a pretty consistent hitter, and most likely left-handed.  Or a switch hitter.  This would have to be someone who can avoid cold streaks and be able to rattle off some hot streaks.  It would also have to be someone with very thick skin, as the media can create a ton of pressure.  A player who can recognize pitches very easily, someone with the great eyesight of Ted Williams.  Not to mention a knack for being lucky when others are not.  So the question is:  Is there anyone playing in the MLB right now who I think could hit .400?

Right now, I just don’t see it.  I don’t see a single player who possesses all of these qualities to the extent necessary to truly put together a .400 season.  I could be wrong and someone might get lucky.  There are just so many factors that contribute to a season like this that it would take some sort of miracle for any current player to hit .400 for an entire season and qualify for the batting title.  It’s a long season, and you never quite know what’s going to happen.  Perhaps in the next 20-50 years, we’ll find someone who can accomplish this feat.  But I don’t want him to be handed this .400 crown, like a team out of contention giving him fastballs down the middle because they want him to succeed so badly.  I guess .400 is baseball’s version of the 4 minute mile.  Although, it kind of goes backwards instead of forwards.  The mile record is well below 4 minutes now, but it’s been almost 70 years since someone hit .400, and even before that, very few did.  It’s only been done 35 times, all before 1942.

I think we have a .400 hitter on the horizon, but I can’t say for sure.  If things fall right into place for a player having an already amazing season, then it can happen.  As for hitting .500, forget it.  We’ve got to hit .400 before we can even talk about .500.  Most of the .400 hitters did it before 1900.  That was when baseball was in its infancy.  Whoever eventually does this will have to be a superman.  And be extremely lucky.  But I have faith and so should you.

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Posted in Inspiration, Sports, Theories | No Comments »

Beliefs and Context

Friday, August 20th, 2010

I’m really looking to ramp this blog up.  By that, I mean seriously working much harder on it.  By that, I mean putting in conscious effort to create meaningful and lasting content that truly makes an impact.  I like where I’ve taken this blog in the last couple of months, and I wish to continue that trend, only with more focus and intensity.  I feel that blogging is a real contribution I can make to this world by expanding people’s minds and hearts to new ideas that may or may not be outside their comfort zones.  I really want to make a difference in people’s lives.  That is my main motivation.  I want to challenge people to think outside their box and to move beyond close-mindedness into a new way of thinking that allows for multiple perspectives.  This will, in turn, create a field of perspectives from which to make decisions more accurately, rather than relying on one context alone.  Challenging?  Yes.  Impossible?  Certainly not.

There are so many perspectives you can take when looking at reality.  There has to be millions if not billions.  Your perspective, or context, is what defines how you approach certain situations.  For example, if you are a Christian, you may believe that everything that happens in this life is a result of God’s will or other divine being.  So you surrender your life to a higher power and live knowing that whatever happens, some greater intelligence meant for it to happen.  How would that affect your life?  I would say that it would absolve you of some personal responsibility and make you feel good inside, but at the same time it would make you feel that you are not in control of your own life, that some super-intelligent being is.  A super-intelligent being you’ve never seen or heard from (unless of course you have).  Another part of Christianity is the concept of Hell.  That if you do certain things, after you die, you will be placed into a place with torture, pain, suffering, and the likes until the end of time.  How loving of our compassionate God, huh?  Using fear to control the masses.  Sounds more like human planning, not divine.  But if it works for you, adopt it.

On the other end of the spectrum, you could adopt a perspective that says that there is no God, no afterlife, and that this life is all we have.  Another fear-based context, but a valid one nonetheless.  If you never know when you are going to die and this is the only life you have, it would make sense to try to prolong it as long as possible as long as you are enjoying yourself.  Otherwise, it would be best just to put an end to this awful nightmare.  Because there will be no suffering beyond life, ending it is a guaranteed way to end suffering.  At least from this perspective.  Another thing is that there will be no consequences after death for your actions on Earth.  It may feel liberating, but deep down most of us still have a moral code and would not harm others just because we feel that after we’re dead, nobody can hurt us.

There are beliefs that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.  That there is no such thing as death.  That life is nothing but a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.  That it is simply just a  ride that is fun, for awhile.  That one day, when we supposedly “die,” we will finally see the true nature of our existence.  We will still exist, in some spiritual form and still be able to develop our consciousness even after our “avatar,” or physical body, dies.  This perspective seems to be very popular in the spirituality movements and creates the notion that we are all one and that we should cooperate instead of fight, that life should be enjoyable for all, because we are all the same, all together in this experience.  And what a wonderful experience it is.  It gives us a feeling of unconditional security, meaning that no matter what happens, we are safe.  It is a very empowering belief system that definitely benefits humanity, rather than detract from  it.

There are tons of belief systems, and tons of times when each one will work better than another.  Practice makes perfect in these areas.  What’s better for a certain situation will be up to you to decide.  But calibrating your decisions over a long period of time will eventually lead to becoming an expert on which context to use in which situation to the best effectiveness that you can perceive.  It is really an  experiential procedure that takes a lot of trial and error.  Of course, you may find one belief system works for most of the situations in your life and that only on rare occasions do you have to step outside that box and into another.  And that’s great.  It’s all about living to be the people we want to be.  But being aware of all the other belief systems is important because you never know when they will come in handy.

I’d like to say you should do this process gradually.  Don’t try out 10 belief systems in one month.  Take your time to really absorb each one and take the good and leave the bad.  That is, take what resonates with you, and drop what doesn’t.  There are no rules that dictate what you must believe.  But it is better to believe things that you actually feel are true than to try and convince yourself of something you feel to be untrue.  And you have to immerse yourself in new  beliefs.  You have to truly feel that  you believe them, otherwise, you will just know of them, but not truly understand them.  I have to say that no belief system is entirely wrong, but no one belief system is entirely right either.  Reality is perceived through filters (i.e. our senses, our beliefs).  It all depends which filters you are using that determines what kind of reality you will experience.  Of course, we all live in the same reality, but our differing beliefs create for an interesting variety that makes the world different in every being’s eyes.  And that can make for some pretty interesting conversations.  And wars, but hopefully one day we’ll get past all that.  I believe it.

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Posted in Inspiration, Intentions, Nature, Theories | 2 Comments »

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