Limits of an Infinite Self

I am an idealist. I generally believe in the ideal, for better or for worse, as an actual thing, somewhere out there, existing, even attainable, given enough time. Faith and endurance, if anything, are what will bring the ideal into actuality. But, if absolute perfection is the ideal, then we can approach it forever and never actually get there. To what degree, then, must a thing be perfect, if it is to be ideal?  (And if we can't get there, is it still worth trying? I'd say, regardless of whether you're a realist or an idealist, the answer ought to be yes.)

I suppose the problem with idealism stems from the fact that each of us has a different idea(l) in mind when we speak of ideals. Ergo, conflict arises between those with contradictory ideals. But this is only a problem if we take the relativist view, the subjective view of individual humans. Two problems: the realist either denies the existence of the ideal (due to lack of evidence for it in perceived reality), or, allowing its existence in hypothesis, claims that we cannot conceive of it ourselves, because it is beyond our (believed, and thus perceived) nature.



The one who perceives only the appearances of the conditions of this world will insist that the ideal is not a realistic goal, given how far it is from reality. But for one who believes in it, it can be the only goal. Where the two may reach balance is if the idealist takes each realistic goal as a temporary, short-term goal, as a step, on the way to the final goal.




Human fallibility – of course! is what gums it all up in practice. As you can imagine. Look at the world. See? But wait, now, if you look closer, if you give it time, if you listen, if you're open – you will see signs that the better nature in the human spirit lives on. The desire for harmony, peace, mutual prosperity (our ideals?). For learning and growth as well. (The process!) The realist and the idealist can come together and help make progress, if they choose. And the more so according to the degree to which their realism or their idealism is pure – that is to say, true.




Good so far. But what about life in the moment? What about life as an evolving, individual soul? What is the ideal for ourselves? And how can we deal with the pitfalls of idealism in the personal arena, in how we relate to self and others?

Idealism and realism, both like pits full of shit until the light of awakening consciousness does its work on them. Each has its “pitfalls.”

Somnambulant (spiritually asleep) realists may believe that what they see and sense, and that alone, is real. They often overestimate their own objectivity. They disdain imagination (the greatest tool we have) and the sense of wonder (our bringer of miracles), and so bring upon themselves a restricted field of possibilities, and much drudgery. The solutions to these are implicit in their presentation.

The undeveloped idealist is the worst sort of daydreamer. Never achieves anything, never satisfied with anything – and if they're satisfied, it's only because they're so indifferent, because they're either living in their own world of ideals and daydreams, or they've given up hope of ever achieving it. The lack of hope, of the desire to improve, of the will to serve, are equally stifling as they would be in the realist. These are signs of a faithless idealist, one who has not the courage of their convictions or the spine enough to act on them.

Here's an imagined dialogue between two somewhat more evolved individuals.

Realist: What are you doing?
Idealist: I'm meditating on my vision of perfection.
R: While doing... what... for real?
I: Well, uh... I could tell you about this vision, for real.
R: Oh. OK. And, when you're done, I can tell you about some suggestions I have, based on my own observations, about how to improve things around here in the present moment.

So the true, positive, conscious realist does have an ideal toward which they strive – it's just... a direction, more than any particular idea. An increment of perfection. Reaching in time for whatever betterness is within reach. There is no thought of a final perfection, or an absolute. The existence of either is debatable, and hardly relevant anyway. It's a very practical way to see and live. And, at its best, open-ended. Trust in the process leads to good destinations.

The mature idealist is realistic enough to know just how far they are from being able to imagine a perfect ideal. Realistic enough to set their practical ideals within practical reach. But yet faithful enough to believe, still, that perfection exists in the Heart of All, and, subjectively at least, in the Realm of Pure Ideas. The Heart of All, of course, is no-where and no-when. It is beyond manifestation, it is the source of the manifest. All manifest beings and manifest realities reflect degrees and variations of the Heart, n-dimensional bytes and slices of an infinite-dimensional matrix of possibility, all rooted in the zero point of perfection where all is equally possible, if not equally distant.

It is that discouraging distance from perfection, the wide gap and heavy contrast between the observed and the imagined, that trouble this young idealist so often. I speak of myself. I am troubled when I look upon the content of my character as observed by the consciously observing, neutral part of me, outside the box of ego.



And I compare it to what I imagine I could be and should be. What I want to be. The differences would fill volumes.

But... my instrument of observation is not neutral; it produces distortions. It contains judgments and is subject to strict limitations. So what I think I observe is not even necessarily close to objective reality..!

 Accuracy, precision, frequency bandwidth, field of view, focus, lens: the variables in forming a picture of what is, or what appears to be.

Accuracy suffers from judgment; judgment is relative to perspective; only the whole perspective gives whole accuracy. So when I judge myself, and I do so harshly, I see myself in a distorted light.

Precision comes with a more refined degree of complexity (higher resolution) of the consciousness doing the observing. Frequency bandwidth, I won't discuss, because the dynamics are too involved beyond the scope of this article... but “scope” is indeed the next variable, aka. field of view. Which is what gives us a context to understand and comprehend the relative nature, the function, the necessity, the genius, the beauty, and the purpose of a part within the greater whole.

Focus: the area into which consciousness concentrates its energies. How well you can focus determines the intensity of your picture. What you focus on, grows. First inside you, then around you appear the results.

Lens: your state of being. Dirty and dark, or clear and bright? Fearful... or loving? Chaotic, conflicted, confined... or harmonious, unified, expansive? Divided by judgment, or reconciled by understanding and acceptance? Connected or cut off? Strong or weak? You can choose your state of being, if you remember the part of you that chooses it – become the part of you that is it.


Let your most beautiful ideal inspire you to act within the real. Let your innermost knowing of who you are guide you. Create your experience of yourself by choosing what to be. Imagine yourself as God, and know that the form you take here is just a little piece of that. It doesn't matter how imperfect we seem to be; we are part of a grander perfection in a grander scheme than we can dream of. You, the far-from-ideal, pathetic little human with all your faults and weaknesses, can no more sully the perfection that is God than you can erase your own eternal existence as God.

We lament when our dreams fall by the wayside, or shatter painfully, or torture us, or turn out to be hollow, or morph into nightmares. But where would we be without the Dream? We are the Dream: these characters we play and the stories we make. We each express our own Ideal,


on its long journey to self-discovery and self-realization. That is what this is about. We're works in progress. Maybe there is no destination, no beginning and no ending. Maybe this is just an ever-changing Dream of Who We Are, Who We Think We Are, Who We Are Becoming, and Who We Wish To Be.

In this life, certain things can be laughed at and other things are deadly serious. Those other things can kill you, and worse.

If you believe that, then welcome to Penitentiary Planet Earth, third rock from the Sun and home of seven billion (and soon to be a lot fewer) pitiful little creatures who once enjoyed the pleasure of being free human souls. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Of course, if you knew the truth, you would be laughing at me instead of the other way round. Because that's how it is.

There are laws and then there are laws. Lower creatures are subject to lower laws, and higher creatures are bound by a higher set of laws. You know there are people who get away with murder, right? I mean, take a look. It's almost like the more deaths you're responsible for, the more untouchable you are – provided, of course, that you're also rolling in the cashola. The material god of this world is on the side of those with the greatest amount of dough, baby. So how surprising is it that the wealthy few are now Extremely F---ing Wealthy, to the tune of billions in digital currencies and billions more in real assets, while some 95% of the world lives in perpetual debt slavery? Pretty good deal for the moneybags. When you practically own the planet, the world's your oyster. Excuse me while I puke from the sheer awesomeness of the situation. Didn't taste like oyster, though, I'll admit.

Where was I? Yes, these self-proclaimed elite world leaders. The ones who you see (or don't see, thanks to our ever-so-vigilant public eyes in the media) attending such fancy clubs as the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. But not so much them, of course, as the ones holding their (purse) strings. In any event, for the sake of convenience, let's treat them all as one big happy psychopathic family. Where a smile means anything but and loyalty comes from a deep pocket and a big, big gun. Mutually assured pathology is such a beautiful thing.

The real beauty of this arrangement is that nothing is as it appears to be. To the unawakened masses (who are a conspicuously dwindling lot these days), these lizard-tongued phonies and their little crooked cronies are indistinguishable from the fictitious roles they play for the benefit of the brainwashed-from-birth bozos who believe whatever the babbling boob box tells them. Fortunately for you and me, my friend, things are not as they might appear to us either. If you've followed any of the alternative news sites on the web, you know (or at least, I'm telling you now) what a sorry sack of pungent manure they carry. The truth, they call it. Well, I call it fertilizer for the brain. What these conveyors of information (and varying amounts of disinformation, don't forget) fail to perceive is up to you and me, the discerning readers, to fill in. Not everyone is a compulsive fact-checker or info-miner, and you don't need to be those things to break through to the essential truth. Which is... what? Well, hang on.

Let's go back to the notion of law. As you may perhaps suspect by now, the lying murderers and child-molesters at the top of the worldly pyramid are not operating under the same set of laws as you and me. On the surface of it, they make the laws and break them as they please, while we are subject to an increasingly arbitrary and bewildering system built on books full of arcane legal language and intimidation both physical and psychological. The list of dos and don'ts in our modern society is truly a wonder of intergenerational programming. They do it to us and we finish the job for them. The scientific dictatorship, as imagined by Orwell and predicted by many others, with its veneer of rational ideology, institutionalized mass murder and theft, and false promises of security and prosperity, now constitutes our everyday reality. Or so it would appear.

What it comes down to, is this: who's got the power? If you think it's them, well, I guess you're right. Better stock up on ammo and food, then, and hope everything goes your way when the shit hits the fan. But that's a choice you make. In my reality, these clowns have no power whatsoever, beyond the ephemeral power of the illusions they create in your mind. You see, they are absolutely dependent upon you not realizing that there are in fact much higher laws than the ones they use to control you, and that by raising your level of awareness, you in fact begin to operate above and beyond those cleverly imposed restrictions.

The law of those who seek to control humanity is a cruel one. The human parasites are themselves fed upon by parasites of a higher order, and anyone who takes the path of deceit and betrayal will inevitably be deceived and betrayed in turn. A system of control is an unstable thing in the natural world. It can survive only by consuming, threatening, and lying, and these activities have finite limits, which, when attained, result in the collapse of the system. By contrast, the dictum of live and let live, certainly preferable to the aforementioned law, is unlimited in practice. Love, freedom, and creativity act to expand the realm of possibility, and indeed, in so doing, will tend to expand themselves.

But let me speak of something else here that will hopefully clarify the issue on a deeper level. Not everyone will agree with my take on this, but it works very well for me.

What are we? If we are mere physical beings, then we are certainly doomed. Death follows birth, and this simple fact is one that the material mind most fears to accept. Is it fair to say that fear of death is the prime motivator of the egoic mind? We can say that this mind has evolved for the sole purpose of prolonging life and bettering the prospects of passing on one's genes for the continuation of the species. What other purpose could it have? And so the higher faculties and sensibilities of man are thus seen as adaptations for survival in an increasingly complex environment. This is the basic position of what we commonly call Science.

Religion counters this and offers release from the primal fear of death by which mankind is afflicted. It posits something invisible to the natural senses, some higher aspect to this being, and calls it the soul. The soul, it is said, cannot die. Unfortunately for us, however, little agreement is ever reached as to the specific nature of this soul, nor the way by which that soul might reach a more agreeable state than this thorny vale of tears, forever caught between heaven and hell. The best that religion can provide for this life is a moral code and a sense of meaning and direction, though its assurances be often unprovable.

Is there a way out of this conundrum? I speak for those who are less than fully satisfied with the dogmas of both Science and Religion as they are commonly presented. What are they missing? I would suggest that the answer has to do with a kind of truth that is beyond the reach of either of these modes as long as they cling to their preconceived limits. It is a truth that must be discovered personally by each one who seeks it. The true, hidden nature of ourselves – whatever that is – is the key.

Now. If that true, hidden nature is that we are the both the dreamer and the dreamed – and it's clear to me that we are – then the whole situation with these madmen who seemingly run the show here for their own pleasure and profit becomes a laugh. They are the fools! We are in charge! And I mean “we” as in the divine aspect of ourselves, naturally – the One. Hey, all we need to do is get in touch with that. Gosh, what a game-changer. Whoops! I guess all that fear and anxiety was for nothing. And that's handy, because it turns out that, besides being the main instrument of our oppression, fear was also the main sustenance of a host of unpleasant beings that populated the unseen portion of our planetary prison. By starving them, we now force them to move out. Perhaps they will feed on each other? Nom nom nom. Goodbye!

If I'm right, then what we're going to see in the run-up to the Big Crunch that's coming (and by that I mean the point at which all roads meet) is a lot of heavy drama and a lot of wild revelations coming out that these hopelessly deluded ruling-class sock puppets would have preferred to keep under wraps if they could have. Unfortunately for them, all that they do will only end up turning against them and they will make fools of themselves for all the world to see. This is because they really are actual sock puppets that think they can write the script when they don't even realize who owns the stage. The show itself is a cosmic morality play that reads like tragedy and comedy all at the same time.

Do you see the funny side? I hope you can, because I've seen it, and, well, it's nothing but a grand old hoot. It's one hell of a good time. Had me laughing so hard, it was a piece of heaven. You know what laughter is. It's the sound of a soul set free to fly.

Wishing you many laughs (and warm hugs too),
~william

You know, I always thought "the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question, of Life, the Universe, and Everything," being equal to "42" was a bit of a copout on Douglas Adams' part. Like, don't you think a smart guy like him would be able to come up with something a little more profound? Oh, I knew it was a joke, but I just didn't really get it. I guess he was pretty well on the right track, if you're able to read between the lines. See, we start with an advanced civilization questioning the very root meaning of existence, looking for an answer that would satisfy the age-old enquiry, "Why are we here?" And they were smart enough to build a computer that could calculate that answer for them. For all the good it did, they might as well have spent those resources calculating pi = 3.14... to the gajillionth decimal place, when any idiot knows that that's nothing but a circle. Maybe life is a circle, maybe it's a spiral, maybe it's a whole bunch of things, but the point is this: when you're done explaining it to yourself, you can move past the question and just live it like you would have, had the question never occurred to you in the first place. I know that's unfair and not really what I mean, but seriously, maybe the Question actually is the Answer in a different form, like "What is it? It is what it is." So life is its own Question and its own Answer, and maybe the point is to just explore everything it has to offer and to one day maybe stop pretending we don't know what this is all about. Where we came from and where we're going... it's the same thing. And if that's so, then everything really is OK and there's nothing in this universe to be afraid of. All those things we think are really scary and bad, what are they but stuff we dreamed up to tell ourselves that it's not what it really was all along, the perfect expression of an eternally loving God?

These past couple of days have seemed to follow some kind of weird script. I've spent them with a friend of mine who's been going through some internal malaise that could be described as depression, but that I might also term an existential crisis. I've been through quite a doozy of the same myself in the not-too-distant past, so on some level I can understand what it's like.

My own deep existential crisis occurred in September of 2008. I was visiting the town where I was born, seeking my next foothold out of a dead-ended life situation. I was looking for answers with a mixture of nervous hope and bright-eyed desperation. But instead of the answers I was looking for, I found something I never expected.


Chaos.

The Void.

The complete and utter antithesis of God and Creation and all that might give a shred of meaning to this cruel joke of an existence that we call “life.”

In deep metaphysical contemplation, I saw God and looked past his shoulder; right through him, in fact. What I saw behind him was absolutely terrifying. The Abyss swallowed every last bit of my capacity for joy and pleasure and satisfaction. Next to that mind-boggling nothingness, the Divine seemed an insubstantial dream of the utmost audacity.

In that moment, I hated God. Almost every fiber of my being was turned against him. I raged at him for being such an idiot, to think any of it justifiable. I cursed him out for a good six hours straight, no exaggeration. For six hours, I ran a loop in my head saying “fuck you” to the universe in general and its maker in particular.

Not surprisingly, that didn't make me feel any better. I could almost physically feel my frequency resonance vibration dying down, down, down, weaker and darker, to what felt like the bare minimum to function as a human being. I was a weary, grey husk. As therapy, catharsis was a failure. As a tool to mess myself up, though, as some twisted revenge, it was perfect.

That night, I was drawn into imaginings of my own death, by my own doing. The most convenient location would be the local ski jump, if I could get up to the top and throw myself off. I never fully intended to do it, but I was engaging in a reckless game of brinksmanship with the Creator. I wanted to see how far this cruelly compassionately dispassionately orchestrated universe would let me go before it either stopped me... or didn't.

I snuck out of the place I was staying at and went for a hike up to the mountaintop where the ski jumps were. The new one was inaccessible, being a walled concrete tower, but the older, wooden one was open. I went up and found myself in the company of a romantic couple, a few years younger than me. “All right,” I thought. “So much for this game.”

By then, though, my suicidal motivation had cooled down by several degrees due to the walking it had taken to get there. Walking is always good therapy. It helps one mull things over and see them in a new light. I was still pissed off, but only a little. I could see the humour in the situation. I knew I was ruining the kids' romantic interlude, but I didn't give a damn about that. I chatted them up a bit, friendly-like. Commented on the view (amazing) and the stars (awe-inspiring). Asked them if they believed UFOs were real, a usual question for me. They were polite, but soon realized I wasn't going away, so they left. I had the tower to myself, and I lingered there with my thoughts, admiring the view, until the cold got to me and I hiked back to the apartment and snuck back in with no one the wiser.

It actually took me about three weeks to recover from this crisis, to feel like myself again. It was not easy to come back around, but I did. I had the support of a few especially dear friends with whom I was able to share what I'd been going through.

It was as much a crisis of belief in general as it was a crisis of my relationship with the One. I think that may have been the point where I finally gave up on the idea of being able to grasp anything objectively. I realized that my personal reality is the one that has meaning for me (if any), and that it can only ever be subjective. Therefore, belief is purely a matter of choice and it is probably best to indulge in it (if at all) with a generous helping of “I really don't know.” At the same time, I recognized that eternal agnosticism on everything until proven or disproven is a hell of a useless and boring way to go. One needs to have faith in something. On some level, faith is a risk. As such, I find it's also very exhilarating, and, more often than not, pretty rewarding.

Since that time, I haven't really had any issues with belief. My approach to truth-seeking has been psychologically pretty well-balanced, in my opinion. I'd say it was well worth passing through the darkness of that existential nightmare. Once I faced it and won, I could move on and not look back.

Returning to the present case of my young, deeply intelligent and aware, but troubled friend, I had a dream about him before we spent this weekend together. I dreamed that his car had blown up while parked on the side of the street, with him in it. Gasoline fumes, most likely. Blew the roof off and charred everything. He was dead. I saw his body in the remains of the car, somehow perfectly intact in death. His face looked peaceful. I mourned the loss of him and my soul wept. But then I felt this knowing, like he was still around close by, floating above our heads somewhere. I felt his relief at being released from his pain and bondage, and his joy at discovering that it was all right after all, there was nothing to feel bad about, and that, truly, there is a divine agency that sustains and embraces all existence with its eternal and all-surpassing love.

It wasn't long before I saw him again in the dream, wearing a brown leather jacket and a smile that reflected the awesome gnosis he had received in death. After considering things from that new perspective, he had chosen to come back, and he was READY TO ROCK THIS WORLD.

As for what transpired in the waking world, I won't bore you with too many details. It began and ended with highly significant and impossibly mirror-image-like events, and the middle involved mild inebriation and dancing at a local watering hole, spiced with a mysterious triple synchronicity from Bill Shakespeare. What's to tell, right? Yeah, that's what I thought. You think I'd tell you about that cute girl who was totally digging me? Forget it. (grin)

It goes almost without saying that I've been going through a very transformative time lately. What else is new, right? (grin) This time I feel I'm really making progress in some fundamental areas. My whole sense of reality has begun to shift on an ever-deeper level, beyond mere intellectual awareness and into the level of basic belief and manifest experience.

The last time I wrote, my breakthrough was the laying of a particular foundational rock, the ability to stand firm in the knowledge that I AM, therefore I AM. The implications of this knowledge are far-reaching. If I Am as the Infinite Is, then truly I am the Infinite. (As are you and as is everything in existence.) My conscious, egoic mind now has a way to become a tool and a partner in life, such that it might eventually know its place and be able to be called up and used or set aside at will.

After this epiphany, it was natural for me to attract to myself the next piece of the puzzle. It's a piece that I've always had with me; again, this was simply a matter of having it clarified and brought home in a more personally meaningful and relevant way.

The re-Minder (re-Hearter) in this case was David Icke's Tales from the Time Loop, specifically the latter portion. David, in his inimitably down-to-earth style, makes very clear his understanding that “Infinite Love is the only truth; everything else is illusion.” He reduces our seeming reality into the vibrations of energy that it fundamentally is. We are infinite consciousness choosing to have an experience of being human. Our five senses function to receive vibrational signals and construct an immersive virtual reality experience that we then like to think is perfectly real and solid and existing, in an absolute sense, independently of ourselves. Wrong!

Where did all that vibrating energy come from? It came from consciousness to begin with! So what we are observing as this seeming world “out there” is in fact a direct reflection of the thoughts that consciousness is having. Thoughts become things through the alchemy of creation. By thinking something, consciousness also creates it. Because it's all just a virtual reality, right? So, then... what's the power behind it all???

It's Love, silly! That's the whole reason for creating anything in the first place. Love is what makes up and sustains everything that is. And the Love of Prime Creator is a perfect, all-encompassing Love that is the only thing that really exists in an absolute and eternal sense. When we speak of Oneness, we are speaking of Infinite Love. They are the same thing.

Oneness does not vibrate, because there are no two different states for it to oscillate between. It is totally still. It simply IS. David Icke puts it so well when he describes how to get in touch with Infinite Love. All it takes is stillness. He doesn't feel the need to “meditate,” but he often does simply “sit quietly,” allowing all illusory thoughts to recede from his mind, allowing stillness to enter in. In that place of peace and stillness is the awareness of Infinite Love.


In my very limited experience, I have found that David's method can work to at least some degree. I have personally, however, had more success (i.e. a more “spectacular” experience) by placing my hands over my heart chakra and visualizing it opening like a flower with layer upon layer of petals, becoming ever more exposed and vulnerable. At the same time, I let go of ego as best I can and focus my being on just surrendering to the awesome truth of what is, to the experience of divine Love. With this method, I've been able to feel half-second bursts of the most incredible feeling I could imagine. And yet, I know that all I've allowed myself to feel has been the merest shadow, the faintest holographic imprint, of what Infinite Love really is. If I felt much more than that, I think I'd blow every fuse in my body. (grin)



I've been exposed to the idea of “You create your own reality” in an explicit way only since I read an e-book on “manifesting” using the so-called “Law of Attraction” a couple of years ago. However, that book didn't really seem to convey a full grasp of it all, in a practicable way, now that I compare it to Montalk's excellent summary on reality creation (Part 1, Part 2). You'll want to read that one for sure.

Reality creation is nothing more than the use of certain metaphysical principles to influence a given reality into being. Key factors are conscious intent (confidently deciding something, declaring it as your intent), attraction (holding thoughts that resonate with the desired reality), appropriate action (meeting reality halfway, creating possibilities for manifestation), and non-anticipation (anticipating something energetically blocks it from occurring in the way anticipated). Anxiety and doubt are obstacles to manifestation, whereas a nonchalant attitude of confidence and simple trust is key.

I have had at least one quite persuasive, though small-scale, success with reality creation. I once had a veritable clan of indestructible warts on my feet that persisted for many years, far longer than warts are supposed to last, despite my every attempt to scour them away with whatever wart cures the pharmacy had to offer. Finally, I decided, “Heck with it, I might as well try some of this voodoo, woo-woo stuff.” I put myself into as deep a trance state as I could achieve and thought wart-free thoughts as fervently as I could muster. For the next two weeks, I took “appropriate action” by eating a strict raw-foods, vegan diet. I hardly thought about my warts. I was emotionally detached from the results of the whole endeavour. Lo and behold, one morning I took a look at my feet: not a single wart nor any sign that I'd ever had one. As far as I'm concerned, that was reality creation at work, by the book. For a long time, I kind of half-dismissed the whole thing as an unrepeatable fluke, but I'm now hoping to use it to manifest progressively more spectacular results.



“Flow” is a related concept, also relevant to my current situation. I've been more or less pretty well in it lately, except for a few rough patches. Flow happens when you're following the path of least resistance. Conventional wisdom might call this laziness, but I call it not being a stupid goat-head, bashing yourself against the fence when you could just walk around it. One of David Icke's aphorisms is “Flow equals Go; Stuck equals Chuck (or change).” Being in the Flow is simply a sign that you're on the right track in life, doing what you're meant to be doing. Life isn't meant to be a miserable cycle of soul-sucking drudgery and failure; if that's your experience, then UR DOIN IT RONG. Either that or you actually signed up for such an experience before coming here; in that case, don't complain. (grin)

It's absolutely essential, if you want to get into the Flow and stay there, to follow your intuition. It'll never steer you wrong if you just cultivate the ability to hear what it's actually saying. Your intuition comes from the part of you, the non-egoic part, that's connected with all things and knows all things. It may come as the merest whisper or nudge, but you ignore it at your peril. The logical, reasoning mind can only see to the next bend, but the intuitive mind sees the whole route at once. It's there to guide you, so make use of it.

Remember the Little Engine that Could? He believed he could, and so that was his reality. If he'd believed the opposite, then he'd have gotten the opposite reality, “can't” instead of “can.” Believing makes it so. Be careful what you believe, what you tell yourself, and what you let others tell you. Your core beliefs are more than just the lens through which you view reality; they ultimately create that reality.

That's all I've got this time. Thanks for tuning in!

Human experience follows a limited set of archetypes. One of the best-known models of this set is laid out in the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot. Card XVI, The Tower, represents the archetype of the Dark Night of the Soul.

I just passed through a Dark Night of the Soul experience, and am still very much in the process of learning from it, seeking and assimilating the wisdom to be gained. I am grateful to several individuals in particular for helping me pull through. One of them is a public figure, rapper KRS-ONE. His lecture Hip Hop Beyond Entertainment was instrumental in bringing about the personal epiphany that brought this most recent Dark Night experience of mine to a definitive close.

KRS-ONE re-minded me (re-HEARTed is more like it) of the primal significance of the realization that I AM. That's where our true power comes from, the power to truly end slavery – to end the entire idea, the very consciousness behind slavery. To paraphrase the hip hop philosopher, as long as you're looking outside yourself for validation, you are FREED – not FREE. Freedom – self-actualization – is what gives someone the ability to take a worthless rag, tie it around their head, walk around in public like that rag is worth ten thousand bucks, and end up having other people actually pay ten thousand bucks to have one just like it.

And that's pretty much what hip hop did. It came out of seemingly hopeless circumstances: war overseas, fatherless families, an epidemic of heroin, substandard education, and a cycle of poverty. That generation, in order to survive in a world where it was effectively excluded from the mainstream of society, had to self-create its own identity outside the mainstream. If they'd waited for permission to have a culture, or to join the wider, established culture, they'd still be waiting. Except they'd probably be dead. It was Do or die, so the ones who refused to die... Did. Lacking instruments, they made their own music with what they did have. Lacking approved venues for their visual art, they used the surfaces that were there, whether they had permission or not; hence, graffiti. Their solution to the impossibility of their situation was to reject the reality of their parents' generation and replace it with their own reality, one that they could understand and that reflected their own values. Hip hop didn't need approval, it approved itself... and flourished. By the same token, FREE human beings don't need to earn the right to exist, they have that right intrinsically, because they exist. I AM, therefore I AM.

What value do you place on yourself? Are you worth more if you own more real estate or have a bigger bank account? Are you more human because you have a family and other people who care about you? If you don't value your soul, does it have worth? Are you less than completely you if you lack the university degree or the job you want? Does your self-worth depend on someone else's say-so? And who is responsible for you? Do you want somebody to protect you from your own choices, or are you willing to face the consequences without blinking? If you say you're going to do something, and then don't hold yourself to it, what was the point? Your existence either means something, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then you might as well not exist. And would you choose that, really? Because it is a choice. You may not have to earn your right to exist, but you sure as hell ought to claim it. Because if you don't own your life, someone else will.

Me, I'm still working on getting this through to myself. It's been four and a half years since the first time I consciously came to this realization. That time I ended up losing my nerve, sliding back. I reckon it's a case of “not being ready 'till you're ready.” But I think the point's been driven just a liiiittle closer to home this time. If it takes another Dark Night before I'm really ready, then so be it. But I'm not throwing away this chance.

Thank you, God, and thank me, God.

Espavo, Namasté, and peace out.