1. A beginning.
2. A reevaluation.
3. Fear
4. Redemption
5.
My mother's passing
6. Spring
7. as if
***This is not to be a journal. This is to be conversations with myself. And that conversation will be with the universe as far as light can reach, through space and time.
What will you say?
Only that which comes to me.
Of course.
Then a beginning is made. You are just filling time if you intend a thing. Intentions blur the truth. The flow of being, the resting vibration of the soul, is moving, cannot be stopped nor stilled. Your work is merely to merge with it, let it take you where it will, where you cannot judge the outcome. It will require only that you dare, dare to see nothing, understand nothing, sense nothing. Only then can you become aware. Each day is a movement, not a moving but a blending in, finding at last that you are where you have always been and that is ample for the mind, the stilled mind, the mind aware of itself. Nothing else is powerful. Nothing else has significance, but that significance will mean that you must truly comprehend that there is no real significance at all, that what you dream is often only what you desire, and as long as you desire, you are lost forever searching for nothing, for what cannot be found because simply it does not exist. You need only to reach out to reach in. The source of the beginning does not matter, only that you begin.
So let's start with something simple and see where it leads: I smoke and drink. Even now.
Then if you need to stop, you will. There is nothing you cannot do. If you do not wish it, then it will take care of itself.
That sounds too easy, to pat, too much of what I want.
Then it is true. When you want something else, then you will accomplish it merely by acceptance. The work is all accomplished, all as the flowers and the grass and the blue of the sky, the pattern on the water, the flow of wind ruffling the fur of the dog. It becomes itself, it becomes what it will be, only because it cannot help itself. Nothing is decided, nothing is established. All things grow as nothing dictates but the season.
Can this be true? If that is true, then purpose vanishes. There is no meaning then.
So be it. Why does that frighten you?
Only because I am afraid that what I wish to be taints the truth. I am talking to myself, out of myself.
You are as much outside yourself as anything. When you talk to yourself you are talking to someone else. You are talking to the stars as easily. That should be understood. This conversation is with yourself, but you are no more yourself than the blade of grass that bends to the touch of scythe or wind.
Can revelation come of this?
As much revelation as you are capable of, both of revealing and of understanding. The mystery is that they are one and the same. And it is a mystery only because you decide to be confused. You need not try to understand. You understand already, but you decide not to accept it.
I feel I am then merely fooling myself.
You are fooling yourself anyway. What difference does it make that you fool yourself on the side of the marvelous? You can become the living being of the end of time. You can become the rest of it if you decide. The complexity is your own doing. The rest is open to the stars. Believe this: You can experience heaven as you are, right now, this moment because heaven is within you as you sit there. There is no danger. There is no cause for perplexity. There is nothing that will be held back from your gaze except if you dare not look.
Evil exists. There is evil in me.
If you say so. Call evil by another name, it takes on another aspect.
Hitler...
Was a part of creation and was as evil as creation was. If he was evil, so also must have been what made him. There is no separation between the two. What acts he spawned caused suffering, but suffering itself is a part of creation; an act must have an actor. Something grew because the development was opened by another development. A movement begun moves on; it is influenced by countless acts; a whisper in the garden was the a seed that caused a stir that moved a nation to an act that changed the flow so that another evolvement could but begin anew with a face you recognize as being a face, though unique. A crystal grows both by its own initial structure and by the imbalances it meets. The general pattern is predictable, but not the final shape. Life continues, not because a hand guides it; it flows to become itself, is therefore unique and yet is the same as all else that is alive.
Then there is no God in all this?
God is who God is. We have changed only our perception of Her; we have changed it as often as we have changed the most influential society of whatever age that has emerged. God does not need our small vision of Him to make Him real. She is real as She is, but slowly our re-creation of Her in our own image is approaching the truth. Each generation has come closer to the truth.
I would be disappointed if Jesus did not envelope something of this truth. It would be fearful to me to think that He was not the Son of God, who suffered for our salvation, that we might all come to God.
Jesus was the Son of Man. He was the Son of God. He understood most deeply that we are all like Him. He sought to wake us to this truth, to bring us liberation from superstition. He suffered, He died, He arose and came to God. What made Him different from us is that He dared to live the truth so much so that He sacrificed all He had; He lived the assurance available to all of us if we could but find the courage he possessed. His faith became assurance. He was the first to understand that love is the only force more powerful than evil.
Because it was given to Him to understand by God.
As it is freely given to all of us.
You are saying that there is nothing special about Jesus.
I am not saying that. He was the first to understand that He was the offspring of God, not in some vague, nebulous sense. but in truth, in absolute fact, in thunderous, absolute and joyous conviction. He prepared the way for the rest of us. He allowed all of us to see that we are a part of creation, just as we are. We have no need to hide, no need to feel inadequate, no need to fear. Only love waits for us.
But His suffering and death and resurrection was then unnecessary?
Absolutely necessary. He led the way to God.
But He was not the Son of God from the beginning of time?
Of course he was. We all are.
He does not sit at the right hand of God?
He does indeed. We are in Him as He is in us.
But is He greater then us? Is He more than us? Is He the only begotten Son of God?
Yes, but only because none of us has yet accepted the truth that we are all of God. We will. And then we will see Him as he has always wanted to be seen, as a brother, a friend. We are almost ready for that revelation. Too few of us dare be without the sense of safety that a father figure, authoritarian figure, offers us. We want the safety we had as children, but we are no longer children. It is time to make the leap of faith. It is time to step beyond feeling the sand with our toes as we walk deeper into the surf. It is time to leap outward, to swim until we cannot swim any longer, and to know that we have nothing to fear, because in the letting go, we will find life. Jesus suffered the drowning already. We need only experience the gentle birth into the opening abyss that is but our souls returning home. The abyss is but the release into the arms of God. We see it as an abyss only because we have not the strength to accept the truth. We are already saved from drowning. No one needs to drown again. It is accomplished.
***Why am I afraid to accept your image of Jesus, afraid not to view Jesus as Someone absolutely different from the rest of us, as Someone much more than the rest of us, as God incarnate?
He is different. He is all powerful. But so are we. Humankind clings to its superstitions in order to keep a childish sense of mystery.
A childish sense of mystery? That's too cute. I don't think you understand me. I am saying that Jesus' objective here was to bridge the chasm between God and Humankind, a chasm formed by the expression of the free will of man to revolt against God. That separation was the beginning of death. Jesus suffered as a sacrifice to atone for that revolt, to bring us the possibility of reconciliation with God, to bring us Life again. He could not have accomplished this if he was not One with God, had always been One with God, imbued with the Holy Spirit that joined Them from the beginning. You seem to be saying that anyone of us could have taken the place of Jesus if we but had the vision and the courage. It frightens me to accept that. It would mean that all the teachings of my parents are suspect. I would be betraying their faith. It would be too much to accept. It would be saying that Jesus was just a man who came to a revelation and took it to the farthest possible conclusion. Anyone could have taken on the task he undertook?
Not anyone. God was with Him.
But God could have been as easily with any other man? Isn't that what you are saying? Was he chosen like any other prophet, or was he God?
Your fear weakens you. Why are you afraid to be God?
For a very simple reason: I am not worthy. As you say, I am weak. Jesus could not have been like me, because then God is like me and then the universe is built on the rubble of lost dreams without a center that grounds me to any certainty at all.
What if there is no certainty? What if all your faith is grounded in wishful thinking? Is it better to continue in a happy fantasy, or reach out for the truth even though what you find staring back at you is the horror of your own face. You find your own face horrible?
Yes, if I am looking for God.
There is no need to fear.
That does not help me from being afraid. I need to be able to depend on something larger than myself. If all I have is myself, in the end, I have nothing. There must exist an ultimate to stand up against evil for us.
You have all you need. But maybe you misunderstand me. I am not saying that anyone could have been Jesus. I am saying that we all have the potential to be.
That seems only playing with words.
We need a rest.
You are losing patience with me.
No. I am searching too.
***Maybe you are not afraid to view Jesus in a new light. Maybe the light you view Him in is the right light. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe your fear is only your sense that your view is the truth.
It would be unwise to lead someone to a false path.
Except if that path led to understanding. Anyway, you are leading no one but yourself. You cannot lead anyone anywhere unless she wants to be led.
Maybe we should try another tack. Lately, I have thought often of death, often as an adventure to be had joyfully, sometimes as a fearful prospect, like a nightmare. Which is it?
Death is the final adventure, the completion of the trip we began in the warmth and wet of our mother's womb. There is joy and fear, certainly. But the fear is all in the uncertainty, and that exists only because we lack a faith in what we see about us. All is cyclical. All waxes and wanes and returns. Take the seasons for your teacher. There cannot be anything to fear. All that you see about you has the shape of a circle. God gives us clues that are obvious, but we fear them, because we think it too easy. The truth is that the truth is always easy.
I am homesick for heaven. I want to go home. I am tired of the trivial, the grinding down day to day. Life is wondrous, I'm not denying that, but the lack I feel seems a dulling whirl toward sameness setting in.
How do you intend to accomplish this returning home?
Not suicide, if that is what you're thinking. No, I am satisfied to go through the changes that are a part of life. I'm only saying that impatience sometimes sets in. I want so much to be with my father and brother and mother, to sense all of creation as Jesus sensed. This life seems so preposterously shallow, so like the tongue upon the wind, as my father used to say. Wouldn't death be the awakening that brings the green shoot thrusting home?
You ask the question.
And?
And answered it.
I don't even know what the question means.
Then why did you ask it?
It just came to me.
Then it must be from a source you can trust. It must be the truth.
It is a remembrance of a line from a poem. It is not even my thought.
If it came to you, it is your thought. How you used the image is your thought. Are you afraid that it is too cute, as you put it earlier?
What does it mean?
What does it mean to you? Don't be stubborn.
The green shoot is life, the life force, all entangled in sexual connotations, the thrusting, all involved in an emerging awareness that is death. Death is an awakening into a more complete life.
Simpler than you thought, isn't it.
Because more complicated.
Exactly. All truth is obvious.
As long as we are ready for it.
And we are always ready for it, always have been. We just haven't accepted it, haven't allowed ourselves to imagine that the truth isn't a struggle, that the truth is sitting on our shoulder, that to become complete, all we have to do is turn around. We fear the truth because we fear freedom. We think someone else must reveal the truth to us. The someone else is ourselves, and that is fearful, because we will not fathom that we have always known the truth. It seems too easy. We are afraid that we are somehow fooling ourselves, that it is wishful thinking. But once we start to glimpse the truth, the implications then seem too profound to accept, our wishful thinking now seems just the opposite; we reel away from it, from the conviction that there is no authority that is not completely wrapped up in our own perception, that no authority exists apart from ourselves. We fear that then there is no center to hold to, since then we only have ourselves as the anchor. There is nothing else that holds the universe together, allows it to make sense, except our own strength in accepting the truth that we are, at once, both completely alone and completely one with all existence. There then echoes forth the horror and the bliss that there is no difference between in and out, between the universe and smallest particle in it. We can no longer hope that someone or something else can make sense of it all for us. There is no one to trust in the comprehension of truth but ourselves. And so we feel both the horror of absolute aloneness, isolation, and the bliss of absolute connection with everything. They are one and the same.
But to the mundane. How does this truth alter our every day existence? Our everyday existence doesn't matter, then.
Doesn't matter, because that is everything.
And nothing.
Exactly.
And so we are truly free.
Truly free.
And there is nothing to fear.
Which makes us fearful.
Then is there no escape?
Why would you want to escape?
Don't we all have a need to expect something else, something more.
What more could you want?
Uncertainty.
Exactly.
And round and round.
But what a joyous ride.
When the rain comes like willow wood tossed upon the breeze, I see my father's face, the strength of conviction for weakness shared; the understanding comes, the truth that we do what needs to be done in order that the children have a place to grow. (And that was my mother's influence too.) God is in that, not in the acts or words that pretend an outcome God is supposed to favor. God is not a lawyer, never has been. As soon as incantations, words spawn out by those in some authority, form upon the lips, we know that we are back to our barbarian past, the past that found itself afraid of the dark, afraid of the sounds that came unbidden, afraid of the truth, afraid of knowing that the truth is only what is left over from the conquest of fear: Superstition. How presumptuous of humankind, how absurd, to think that a human's incantations could influence the love of God, a love that is absolute to begin with. That even the church of Christ has become envious of its own power is beyond reason and hope. What would Jesus think? As soon as a person intones words that are supposed to have some special meaning or power in a spiritual or religious sense, they are false, both the person and the words. Do not listen to them, neither the words nor the person. Jesus suffered, died and rose to save us from such.
You are denigrating all organized, Christian religions?
Just the part that seeks power and control.
Listen to You Are Missed, Mor.
An orphan at fifty blessed
I held my mother's hands
Until she passed from mine to His
And, gazing at my face,
Saw suddenly before her
The aspects of my father
And my brother--arms outstretched to her.
Her song of Jesus, now silenced to our ears,
Echoes through the stars;
Her wisdom that was the purest love,
that strengthened us
embraced us,
Is now embraced
And fills the universe.
Three full breaths at last
And she was free;
Three breaths of benediction
I was blessed.
But I so miss you, Mor, I miss you
More than life and truth,
So that I do begrudge heaven
Its masterwork returned in glory--
I begrudge it sorely
Though I know as certainly as morning
That I shall sit beside you once again
It does so little help just now
So little even though.
There is that time to wait
And it is heavy
But I am on my way,
Oh, Mor, I am on my way.
