The Secret You Don't Want to Hear

I’m going to tell you something that nobody has ever told you. Something that nobody ever will tell you. Something you probably don’t even want to hear it. Nevertheless, I'm going to tell it to you.

You’re not real.

That’s right. You - which is to say, all the dear little qualities, opinions, talents, abilities, gifts and graces, plans and schemes, hopes and fears, successes and failures, likes and dislikes – all the things that make you that incomparable, delectable, indefinable “you” – the ideals you cherish, the memories you treasure, the feelings you hold onto – none of them are real. They are like bubbles. They are flights of fancy, castles in the air, dreams within a dream. And the dream, my friend, is you. The myth of your separate existence and the time and the space it inhabits, it is all a dream. And the dreamer is God. The only real and lasting Being, the only Source, the only Power, the only Substance, the Beginning and End, Alpha and Omega, it is God. And the only point of view from which creation can be reconciled or justified, the only perspective from which it makes the slightest bit of sense, is God’s.

Consciousness is God. Awareness is God. The dimensionless dimension in which this colossal show goes on, is God. And the same eternal Awareness that permeates all space and time, also permeates the dream that is you. Locked in the cage of your body and mind, playing the role of your existence, that Awareness has come to believe it is you. And it will go on thinking it is you, seeking conditions that appear congenial, avoiding conditions that appear hostile, exploring the potentialities of your dream-existence, life after life, until it finally exhausts them all. And it will exhaust them. First, because it has eternity to do it in, and second because nothing individuality can offer will ever satisfy the aching need for Eternal Omniscience that is in God.

Thirty-five years ago (or 35 lifetimes, or 35 millennia, whatever) when I first understood by inference the truth of what I have just written, frankly, it scared the hell out of me, I can tell you. Because it seemed to mean that the only goal of individual existence was that one reached the end of it. Given the suffering that comes with any degree of self-examination, that seemed cruel to me. I couldn’t see why God would so delude himself as to create such as me. What’s more, I couldn’t imagine what the end of me might mean in terms I could understand or appreciate. Locked in the labyrinth of my life and my mind, I had no way to experience that pure Awareness that lay behind it, and which is God.

Things are different now. I will not say I have found God, because I have not. But in meditation, there have been glimpses. Finding God is not like finding a penny - or a dollar, or a diamond. It is not an event; it is not an act. It does not have a beginning or an end, because God does not have a beginning or an end. God is Eternal Awareness, and the only way to find God is to remain in unbroken awareness of that Awareness. In that Awareness, individuality is dissolved. Eternal Awareness of Eternal Awareness. That is what it means to find God.

What Child is This?

If the world is metaphor, as I have written, the primal metaphor is family. Our relationship with the father – provider of the vital essence that becomes our life – is our relationship with the Heavenly Father, the divine Intelligence that dreams our existence. Our relationship with the mother – who nurtures us in the womb, and provides for our needs in infancy – is our relationship with the Divine Mother, the infinite Compassion that sustains us throughout eternity. If we have a loving relationship with our earthly Father and Mother, it is because, in the past, we have developed that relationship with God. And if there is something lacking in our relationship with our parents, there is something lacking in our relationship with God.

Yet whether the relationship with our parents is good or bad, perfected, or a work in process, sooner or later, they die; and sooner or later, we are left alone. There is a profound finality in this, whether it comes when we are 7 or 70; and there is an indelible poignancy in it – whether acknowledged or not. For in the end, we are each one of us orphans. We are each one of us alone. Each one of us will leave this world as we came into it – in utter isolation, in the presence of God alone. And if we feel inadequate, if we feel bereft, it is because our relationship with God is not yet deep enough.

My own Mom passed away June 29th in Boston. It wasn’t a surprise; she was 93, and for the last few months, her health wasn’t good. But she soldiered on to the end, singing “Blue Skies” to my wife on the phone a day before she died, making it a point to tell me what a great son I was, and how beautiful her life had been – as I told her she’d been a great Mom. “I’m not going to say goodbye,” she said. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

If life is a school, as they say, then death is the final exam. You can’t fake it, you can’t cheat, you can’t cram. Your whole life is a preparation for it. She passed the test, my Mom. What can I say? I miss her terribly.

Which is to say, I still have work to do. I am not close enough to God.

Justice in Gehenna

The good die young.
The rich get richer.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Behind every great fortune is a great crime.

Is the world ruled by law? Justice dispensed according to a law of cause and effect?

Seriously, what do you think, yes or no?

Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, you does less time for a fraud that costs ten thousand investors their life savings than you do for selling an undercover agent an ounce of crack cocaine. And you won’t do hard time, either.

If you buy a company in Ohio, fire the workers and move their jobs to China, you make more money than if you don't.

If you drop a bomb on an Iraqi grandmother, throw the wrong guy into a cell in Guantanamo, or distort the available intelligence to start a senseless war, chances are, you’ll retire on a pension.

These things are true. Indisputable phenomena. The question is, why?

Most of us believe in a God of righteousness. We believe this God has laws. We believe the laws are just. We believe there exists a law of cause and effect that applies to human actions – what they call in the East, a law of karma. This is a universal belief. The whole world believes in a justice of one form or another.

Why on earth would we believe that? I’m not denying that justice seems to prevail sometimes. But other times it surely doesn’t. If it’s a law, why isn’t it reliable? If the world is just, why don’t we SEE more justice in operation?

Let’s say you’re dumped on an island with a bunch of people you never met before. You have no idea how you got there. You just wake up one morning and there you are. Not being the nosey type (or particularly sociable) you decide the best thing is to just go about your business, keep you head down, and fend for yourself.

You build a little hut and enter survival mode – hunting, fishing, eating coconuts. Everything is alright for awhile, but then unpleasant things starts to happen. You go spear fishing one day and when you get back, the coconuts you gathered that morning are gone. A couple days later, the extra spear you made is missing. And a couple days after that, there’s a guy there WITH the spear – telling you he’s taken over your hut, and you’d better get the hell out now unless you want to fight him to the death for it – which he seems eager to do. So after a minute, you swallow your pride, turn tail and head off to start work on a new hut – and a new spear. But no sooner do you get yourself settled, than the pattern repeats itself. Except that this time, instead of one guy with a spear, its two guys, and the time after that, it’s five guys. And pretty soon, it becomes clear to you that this particular island is populated by a bunch of lunatics and criminals – and they are starting to band together. It seems your basic choices are to fight for your rights (individually or in some form of group), find a better way to hide, or give up building huts and become a nomad. Unless, of course, you could find a way off the island.

This is not a baseless story. A year ago, I spent a couple weeks on Molokai, the least developed of the Hawaiian islands. Molokai is known (among other things) for having the highest sea-cliffs in the world, with waterfalls cascading two thousand feet in a sheer drop to the sea. While I was there, we took a boat around to the windward side, where the cliffs are. It’s a beautiful, but forbidding place, of high winds, a heaving sea and crashing surf. As we headed around the point into the full force of the wind, I saw what looked like ruins, perched on a spit of isolated flatland that lay at the foot of impassable cliffs, the only access being by sea. It looked like some kind of settlement, and I asked the boatman if that’s what it was. He nodded, and I asked him why anyone would live in such a God forsaken place.

He smiled. “To get away from the wars,” he said. And I thought about that.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, (Gehenna posted here April 24, 2008), the world is our island, and the message of Jesus Christ, Bhagavan Krishna and the rest of the saints and sages throughout the ages is, “If you want to find happiness, get off the island.”

"My Kingdom is not of this world," Jesus said (John 18:36). “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth …. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” (Matthew 6:9-20).

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells his disciple, “O devotee: Get away from My ocean of suffering, death and misery!” (Ch XII, Yogananda’s translation)

Now the truly peculiar thing about the island we live on is, we can leave any time we want to. There’s no forbidding ocean around it, no mighty wind, no crashing surf. True, people will try to talk us into staying – our family, coworkers, friends. They’ll tell us we’re crazy. And they’ll mean what they say. They’ll have our best interests at heart. There will be no reinforcement. Our culture will engage us, dissuade us, entice us. But the bottom line is this: the only thing that can keep us on the island of this earth is our desire for the things we think we can get here and our fear of giving them up.

Now, suppose you were a just and loving God, and for that very reason, you had created this island with its mélange of troublesome inhabitants. (You could call it hell, or Gehenna, for example.) And suppose further that a principal characteristic of the inhabitants you had created was that you had given them something called “free will” – the apparent ability to decide what they would do and not do, based on their own perceived self-interest. Of course, having created this island and these inhabitants, you would know that the only hope any of them would have for achieving lasting peace would be to get the hell off the island and move on to a place where the inhabitants had learned to identify their self-interest with the interest of a larger group. But having given the inhabitants free will, there wouldn’t be any way you could force them into doing it.

Now taking all that as given, the question is, what would “justice” look like on the island?

The answer is, it would look pretty much the way it does on earth. Virtue would apparently be punished and vice rewarded, because the real punishment would be getting what you wanted (this would motivate you to stick around and suffer some more) whereas the real reward would be getting disillusioned (which would motivate you to get out of the place for good).

This is why the great masters agree, the best thing is not to get involved with the world. Renounce it. Give it up. It is fundamentally irredeemable.
I admit, it’s a hard truth, but then, when was truth ever easy.

Evolution

Each soul is an individuated particle of consciousness, which has temporarily fallen in love with its individuality. So charmed has it become with this individuality, in fact, that it has temporarily lost sight of its universal nature and come to believe it IS the individuality.

The soul in this state of identification is called the ego.

As the ego explores, exhausts and eventually become disillusioned with its separate existence, the soul never changes in essence. It is pure consciousness, or awareness, untainted by its individuated content. It is this power of awareness that gives the ego the ability to learn and grow.

The limited is constrained by its limitation. Only by contact with the unlimited can it integrate what it thinks it is not.

There comes a time for each individual when the potentials of its particular uniqueness have been exhausted. This is a necessary part of the process because it is only when an individuated particle of consciousness has fallen OUT of love with its individuality that it becomes motivated to rediscover what it truly IS.

This, in a nutshell, is the drama of creation - or at least one version of it.

Evolution is a slow process – so slow that those progressing through it often fail to recognize or understand what is going on. In the final act, as evolution proceeds toward an understanding of what the soul truly IS, the process becomes uplifting. But in the long slog when the soul is experiencing the inherent limitations of individual existence – hunger, thirst, pain, injury, failure, death, thwarted desire, unrequited love – the process can be excruciating. In fact, it’s so painful at times that the ego simply can’t face it. This results in denial, or repression, a process that divides egoity into “conscious” and “subconscious” portions. But the consequences of action are never lost, so while this division provides temporary respite from the awareness of pain, the pain itself never leaves. It is only displaced, and continues to manifest in one way or other, until consciousness manages to penetrate the experience, and through acceptance and understanding, dissolve and break it down.

If evolution is sometimes painful, it is also sometimes exhausting. That’s why, regardless of how good or bad the day, no matter how exciting, insightful and exhilarating our experience has been, each night we eagerly abandon it and fall asleep. That is to say we forget our egoity and its physical metaphor, the body, and in deep sleep, enter at least for a time, the realm of our universal identity. And at the end of life, we enter the big sleep. Only this time we abandon awareness of the body for long enough that it decays, and we have to incarnate in a new one before we can resume the process of evolution again.

The pain and exhaustion of our former lives would be overwhelming if we could remember the details, which is why we cannot. But the effects of past causes can never be lost. So while the specific memories oremain hidden from us, when we are confronted with similar situations again – usually repeated because we failed to resolve them to our satisfaction the first time – the associated feelings return along with them. These mysterious feelings, that seem to come from nowhere, we call “moods”.

As each soul is different, so the course of its evolution is different, with many ins and outs, ups and downs along the way. In some incarnations, desires are gratified; in others, not. Sometimes we are rich, sometimes we are poor. In some lives the body is sick and weak; in others it is well and strong. In some lives we may be famous; in others, we are unknown.

Some waves are big and some are small. Big waves provide the drama of the creation; they heave and soar, born of violent upheavals, racing through life whipped by storms of desire, finally crashing with a frothy roar. Little waves arise too, making their gentle way through the world with barely a trace, falling peacefully and unnoticed on the shore.

This post is dedicated to you all.

Consciousness

Western science limits itself to the physical world: matter and motion within space and time. Scientific "proof" relies on the testimony of the five senses and various instruments designed to magnify the capacity of the senses to perceive various physical phenomena.

Western science does not deal with mental phenomena (ideas) or emotional phenomena (feelings). In the West, these are considered the realm of philosophy and psychology, rather than that of "pure science". This view is resolutely held in the face of the irrefutable fact that all creation -- human and otherwise -- clearly begins in the mind.

And, of course, science does not deal with consciousness, which can be defined as “pure awareness, independent of its content.” Scientists rely on -- indeed they could not exist without -- this attribute. But they don't study it. At times, philosophers have turned their attention to the subject of consciousness, but their discussion is muddled. They confuse consciousness with mind or the contents of mind: ideas and sensory phenomena. Of late, it has even become fashionable to seek an explanation for consciousness in organic chemistry or biology. These efforts are based on an ingrained and unexamined materialism, which results in what I call “cause-effect reversal”. These philosophers are like drunken men, wandering in a park, who wave their arms and think they have caused the wind.

“I think, therefore I am,” is exactly wrong. "I am, therefore I think", is closer to the truth (although I can also exist without thinking).

Awareness, or consciousness, is the primary and fundamental Fact of the Universe. Awareness is a mirror, that reflects whatever is held before it. Awareness without specific content can also be called Being. Awareness focused on itself is Self-Aware Being, which can also be called Self, as Self is nothing other than awareness of one’s own awareness or being.

The mistake Western philosophers make is in assuming consciousness is the effect of something else, when in reality it is the cause.

The great mystery of the universe is how the universe was (is) created. As I have suggested elsewhere, the universe is created first in intention. By that I mean, the intention within Consciousness to separate subject from object. In pure Self-Awareness, there is no separation. There is only Being. But, in the thought “creation”, the ideas, “creator” and “created” arise. Inherent in “created” is the idea of individuation. That which is “created” is separate both from the "creator" and everything else the creator has defined. Space and time are the “dimensions” of the created universe; individuation is the principle it comprises.

Within this scheme of subject and object, creator and created, another principle arises. To illustrate what it is, suppose you’re dreaming. In your dream, you’re in a bar talking baseball with a colleague from work. Your colleague (who happens to be a New Yorker) starts making disparaging remarks about your favorite team (which happens to be the Boston Red Sox). A heated argument ensues, and you wind up punching your colleague in the nose.

What does your colleague think about that?

He doesn’t think anything about it, does he? After all, he’s a dream colleague. He isn't real. He exists only in your consciousness. As the dreamer, you know all this this is true. But suppose you were to give your dream colleague the power of consciousness, do you suppose he would agree with you?

I have said that the first quality of consciousness is REFLECTIVITY; in other words, consciousness is like a mirror that reflects whatever it is focused upon.

As we have seen, the second quality of consciousness is PLASTICITY: its ability to assume any and every form.

A third attribute of consciousness, of which we, as individual parts of the creation, are both beneficiaries and -- for the most part -- unwitting victims, is its UBIQUITY. Consciousness permeates and comprises everything; it is all-in-all in the creation.

As God (or in other words, Eternal Self-Aware Consciousness) projects thoughts within the eternal mirror of Itself, each of those thoughts is also comprised of Itself, and is therefore conscious. But since each thought is apparently limited by it's nature (i.e., the character of its individuality) when that thought views its reflection in the mirror of Consciousness, it naturally assumes its “self” is the individual “self” of that thought and not the Universal Self of that which created it. Since each thought is limited in space and time, the "self" of that thought comes to believe it is similarly limited.

This mistaken notion creates the sense of egoity – “I” and “not-I”. A desire arises for the continuation of "I", which, in turn creates loves and hates, fears and desires. What is favorable to the continued existence of "self" is called "good"; what is unfavorable is called "bad", and so on.

The refinement and redefinition of egoity is behind the process of evolution; it is the essential magnetism, the fundamental polarity from which all the forces of the world are derived.

When I was a boy, I used to wonder, “If God made the Universe, what did he make it out of?”

The answer is, he made it out of Consciousness. Or more accurately, he became it.

The Source of the World

What I am going to describe cannot be demonstrated, nor can it be deduced from the known world. It logically precedes the senses, and cannot be cognized by them. Therefore, it is not subject to what is called scientific proof. Nevertheless, what I will describe is true and can be experienced in a way I will describe in a minute.

That which is beyond creation I will call Spirit. Spirit is pure consciousness, independent of any specific content other than the awareness of its own infinite and eternal being. Though in our conscious mind, we cannot really grasp what that awareness is like, we can think about what it does NOT include. It does not include any sense of lack or want, because there is nothing extant that is not already included within it. There is no sense of desire for the same reason. There is no body, so there is no hunger or thirst, no pain or discomfort. Also, there is no fear of illness or injury because there is no body to be injured or harmed and nothing external that could possibly threaten or harm it. The existence of Spirit is eternal, and it is aware only of its eternal existence.

Think about that for a minute.

No hunger or thirst nor any fear of them, no aches or pains, no fear of illness or injury, no sense of lack or want, no fear of death, no need for anything. What would that feel like?

If you go deep into this thought, you will first experience a profound peace – a sense of completeness, wholeness and security. You will let go, and relax. If you go deeper still, into the certainty that this state of being is real, and that it actually applies to YOU, you will begin to experience a certain joy.

That joy is the third and final attribute of Spirit.

As Spirit is consciousness itself, it is instantly and eternally aware, not only of its own eternal conscious being, but also of the joy that flows from the comprehension of it. The awareness of possessing that joy (in addition to the awareness of knowledge, security and completeness) creates even more joy, of which Spirit, then, immediately becomes aware.

This awareness, in turn, creates more joy, and more awareness. And more joy. And more awareness. Awareness and joy, awareness and joy, awareness and joy -- these ever alternate (or vibrate) in Sprit.

Subject and object, subject and object, subject and object.

This is the initial division.

This is the source of the created world.

(To be continued.)

God of Creation

The most universal conception of God is that He (or She or It) is what created the universe.

Unfortunately, if there is a God, He (or She or It) cannot be perceived. Since the five senses are all parts of the created world, God would have created them, along with all the qualities they perceive. The Creator would contain and lie beyond EVERY quality; therefore, NO quality could be said to define or describe Him (or Her or It).

That includes the qualities measured by scientific instruments.

Therefore, the existence of God cannot be scientifically proved. Or disproved.

God is not just impossible to describe, He (or She or It) is difficult to discuss. Not just our senses, but our very language, and the concepts it seeks to express, are parts of creation. Words cannot describe That which created and logically transcends them. Nouns cannot refer to It. Adjectives cannot describe It. Even pronouns are a problem. Take the first sentence of this paragraph. Is God a He, a She or an It? Each denotes a sex. But the Creator of sex necessarily transcends sex, so even simple pronouns are misleading.

Indeed, the only logical way to approach the subject of God through the intellect is by pointing out what God is not. This is the path of discrimination followed by the ancients.

So let us see what we can throw out.

To save time, let's start with the basics. According to modern physics, the fundamental components of the known universe are matter, energy, space and time (or, if you like, matter-energy and space-time), but as we'll see in a minute, these are nothing but ideas – and murky ones, at that, with circular definitions that dissolve on close inspection.

Take matter, for example. Matter is generally defined as “the substance of which physical objects are composed.” The term substance is defined as “the essence of an object without which it would not exist.” In philosophical terms, we would call this, its “Being”.. The existence of substance cannot be proved. It rests on the theory that an object is distinct from the properties it manifests. This notion appeals to common sense, but in reality, it is an article of faith. There is no way the reality of substance or Being can be proved.

In physics, the two key properties of an object are its mass – conceived as the “quantity of matter in an object” and its energy – conceived as the actual or potential velocity of an object (sometimes expressed as the amount of “work” it can do). Velocity is defined as a change in the position of an object in space over a period of time.

Mass is measured in terms of an object’s resistance to acceleration. Velocity may be viewed as the result of an object’s capitulation to acceleration. According to the special theory of relativity, there is an equivalence of mass and energy. As the velocity of an object approaches the velocity of light, its mass also increases. If an object could reach the velocity of light, its mass would become infinite and time would stop.

That this is true is obvious. If an object had infinite mass, by definition it would contain all the matter (substance, being) in the universe, and if this were true, space would disappear and the very concept of velocity, or motion in space through time, would become meaningless. In other words, we would have arrived at a point beyond creation.

Space and time constitute the fabric of creation. Whether they are understood as realities, or as conceptual dimensions, the created universe could not exist without them.

In its essence, space represents the idea of division. If there were only one thing in the universe, space would have no meaning and could not be measured.

Time represents the idea of change. If there were no change in the universe, time would have no meaning, and could not be measured.

Space has no meaning and cannot be measured without individuation. Time has no meaning and cannot be measured without change. Space and time represent dimensions of the created universe. Without them, there could be no created world and nothing to describe. With them we enter the world of forces and motions, particles and waves.

What logically precedes space is indivisible Substance or Being. What logically precedes time is changelessness of Being. And one other thing.

For there is another element of creation that science largely ignores. That element is Awareness. Awareness (we can also call it Consciousness) is the quality of observation, the mirror in which the created universe is reflected. Without Consciousness, there would be no subject, no observer to measure, describe, or define physical phenomena. Within creation, this power of awareness or observation is divided, as Substance or Being is divided by individuation in space and time. Preceding Creation, there can be no such division -- only undifferentiated, indivisible Consciousness.

So these items, taken together – indivisible Conscious Being – describe a God preceding creation.

While nothing more can be deduced logically from an examination of the system.

That does not mean, however, that there is nothing else that can be experienced or said.

HWS