Limits of an Infinite Self

From Bernhard Guenther, based on his article of the same name.

Turns out my laptop was only temporarily dead. (shock.gif, dismay.jpg) Well, it was only a matter of time before my new-found peace in the home was disturbed once more by the renewed presence of this piece of technology and the world that it brings with it. The real challenge begins now: how to coexist with this most perfectly adapted waster of time and energy, this portal into cyberspace. Being without it for only a couple of days has been a wonderful experience. It was a chance to see life very differently: as it is all around me, full of potential for so much more than sitting in front of a glowing screen trying to live without living, without really being present, connections only virtual. I've been freed from all that to do the things I really want and need to do. To live consciously moment to moment, responding to the immediacy of life with integrity.

In these days, I have repeatedly heard the phrase “Know what you're doing.” Being conscious of what one is doing, how it's done, and why, is so important.

Listen.......
to nature.
Listen.......
to yourself.
Listen.

A time to sow, and a time to reap.
A time to wake, and a time to sleep.

Looking in the mirror...
Now is a time to step up and BE who you are. No more compromises and half-truths, no more going along with anything that's not in line with soul purpose. Your life is yours to live. If it's worth living, then it's worth living well. Hold yourself to your standards, and let go the failures of the past. BE HONEST.

Spring and a new beginning. A new beginning every day, as often as it's needed.

Mother Nature, Gaia-Sophia, calls her child to renew his remembrance of her in all that he does. To call upon her in every need, to give thanks for all that she so abundantly provides. She is now in full possession of her faculties, and offers to her child the opportunity to grow with her in this end-time of great upheaval, completion and transformation. There is still time to sow, there is no better time to invest one's labour in the things that truly matter. The harvest will come, and it will reap the fruits of all that has been sown, for joy and for suffering, for destruction and for new beginnings.

..love and peace..

Technical issues: my laptop just DIED. Won't boot, at all. So, unless and until I get it fixed, if I'm going to continue with my writings, I'll be doing it the low-tech way.



Good news: focus and clarity come so much easier without the constant stream of digitally mediated reality. I am able to cultivate a much more spiritually connected way of being, free from my greatest source of distraction. Healing, meditation, and prayer move in naturally to fill a simplified existence with the strength and gnosis that come with presence and awareness.

once upon a time there was a magnetic love
approaching the heart of the loved
but it was moving too fast
it hit an obstacle
and broke into pieces from the shock
and those pieces scattered all around
still attracted, but in chaotic motion
they orbit the hearts of lover and loved
meeting other pieces, other obstacles
at first not knowing which is which
only over time, over aeons of time
through many setbacks and wrong paths
does that love learn to recognize
and reunite its parts
converting chaos and complexity
into the original divine simplicity
the true, unlimited and pure
the essence and the power.

it is the beginning
it is the end
it is the process
and the motivation
it will not be perfect
until it is whole
but imperfectly they try
to seek it
within, without
and in between
in who they are
and what it is not
in what they are not.

there is not love
without awareness
nor wisdom
without compassion.

soul search penetrates
to bone and marrow.
it is in the process
that we find our redemption.

How much say do we have
in defining who we are?

Is it our choices that define us?
Or our God-given nature?

Our nature is infinite in essence,
but particular in expression.

I long for the ecstatic joy and freedom of Source.
Alas, I will never know it as long as "I" exist.

But I don't.
I'm an imaginary character, playing a part.
That's all.
And when my part is through,
I will smile and remember
or scream and fight to the last
and die
in glory or oblivion
in accordance with how my part was played.

Did I find redemption?
Did I save my heart from the
darkness within it?
In the moment of truth,
did I fall or did I rise?

Prepare me, O Lord Shiva.
Cleanse my blackened self.
Blow the carbon out of my jets.
Burn me, burn me through
and let no impurity remain.

Lord Shiva does not answer.
He cannot do for me
what I must do for myself.
I know not how much work is left,
be it a lifetime, or an age,
or eternity.

And so I continue
the alternating heat and cold,
light and dark
process of the Great Work:
to know myself.

If it is so, as my dream has told,
that, in another time and place,
I was a hired killer,
then it comes as no surprise
that in this lifetime, I should be
a wounded healer,
channeling life and love and light
through hands that once devoured them.

My past is with me - I cannot change it -
reminding me of the depths of evil
of which I am capable.
What led me to murder fellow beings
who'd done me no harm?
It was fear, only fear
and unknowing.
So the antidote, you see,
must be love,
love
and awareness.

The bodhisattva exhorts us
to continually seek the One,
to make it the focus of all our endeavours,
to diminish our vain and limiting thoughts about ourselves
and let the light of the real shine through.

There are few, so few, who take these words to heart
and employ this sincere counsel of the wise.
Myself, I know not how,
for my desire is yet divided
and my will a sputtering pipe.
My hope lies in the mysterious
and inescapable workings
of the Architect
who owns all ways and means
with which to challenge hearts and minds
and, given only time,
win over all Creation
and make it bloom ever so much more wondrously
each time it's seemed to die.

... Don't make him come out there. Jesus, you've been making a mess of things. It's like you don't even realize what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity you've been handed. It's a wonder we're still in one piece. You gonna get your act together, or are we just gonna spiral down again and wreck everything we've been given?

Why do we always forget the truth (of who we are)? Grab the wheel and knowingly steer off into detour and distraction? Squander our precious resources on needless things and unreal concerns? Don't we know what's at stake? The hell we don't! We are fucking up the whole show with the same old tricks. Again. It's sabotage. It's deliberate. Don't pretend it isn't.

My anger isn't real. It's a self-justifying illusion. Just like all the other unreal motives, just a twisted reflection of the same thing.

We are soul fragments, split off from the original by a repeating series of self-denying, self-inflicted wounds.

Deep down, we know what we need. We're haunted by that unfulfilled desire for the one thing that could make us whole again. We long for it, for the peace that it would bring - but being denied it, we remain divided, continually embroiled in this fruitless struggle for survival. For some meaning beyond this unreal prison. For the truth that, once totally known, fearlessly embraced, would set us free.

We fight because we refuse to surrender. We are too attached to our notions of false identity and imagined offenses. Our deeply, tragically, accepted sense of being so much less and more than what we simply are.

My children, my brothers: do not despair. There is light - all we need do is face it, let it wipe away the shadows from our sight.

We are one. Grandfather is here and always has been, patiently waiting. He sends his undying love to us all, every moment. We can make steps toward unity, through integrity. Every conscious act of love and courage brings us closer.

Let us lay aside our petty grievances, our weights and burdens. Let us take up this gift, our birthright and our living strength. Let it shine from within and light our way.

We must not give up. There is so much yet to do, to attain and rejoice.

Take heart. Stand together. Forgive yourselves and forget all else in devotion to the path of healing self and other. There is no self and no other. Only love.

The solstice lunar eclipse of the 21st of December was a most thoroughly anguished morning for me. I could think of nothing else but my longing for the presence of God, the pain of not having that connection open. No earthly concern could compare with the magnitude of that pain. In this state of mind, I was unable to undertake even the most rudimentary task. So I turned to the best available remedy, a fly agaric brew.

Fly agaric is heavy shit. Effects vary, but from what I hear, poorly-informed people trying for the psychedelic side of it typically only succeed in inducing the sleepiness, nausea, chills, and other physical symptoms, followed by mild euphoria. In fact, this had been my own experience the previous two times I'd tried it. This third attempt was no different, but luckily by then I was inured against disappointment and carried no greater hopes. I got exactly what I expected and what I'd counted on getting. All it was, was a way to wrench myself out of that paralyzing state of misery by going through the symptoms, particularly the sleeping and the purging effect, culminating in a state of mind no less depressed, but with serenity and balance enough to function and get through the day.

(I think it's quite possible that the solstice lunar eclipse, an extremely rare alignment, allowed for something nasty to break through into our dimension of reality. Or it may have been just the ultra-intense astrological energies doing their thing.)

I should mention that my maternal grandfather passed away on the morning of Sunday the 12th of December. This was a very significant event. Huge emotional impact on many levels. Perhaps the beginning of the end of my emotional childhood. I say "emotional childhood" because I do feel like my development somehow hit a snag around the age of two, and I've basically been operating from that primitive level ever since. All the seeming maturity and sophistication I show on the outside is a facade for this wounded inner child who never really went away, only into hiding. Healing that primal hurt, whatever it is, may be the key to my growing up. Which is pretty much my goal for this year and the next.

One consequence of my grandfather's death and the timing of the funeral was that I was able to spend Christmas with not only the family I have here in Finland, but also with my mother and her sister who flew over from Canada. This was also significant, since I so rarely get to see them. All in all, my Christmas was very much a collective experience of joy and peace as well as mourning, re-connecting with family, and adjusting to a new reality without Grandfather on this earthly plane.

The funeral, a poignant event in itself, came and went. Soon it was time to say goodbye to Mom and Auntie, and go home for New Year's Eve.

I've spent the past two thirty-firsts of December by myself, at home, no fireworks, no partying, just quietly thinking and doing whatever I happen to feel like doing. This time, likewise, I felt no compelling need for any company or boisterous activity. What I did feel like doing was taking another shot at the fly agaric. I'd been intending to do so around this time of year all along, ever since I harvested the mushrooms in the fall. Lo and behold, it worked. (Research pays off. So does patience.) An interesting little trip: dream-like time distortion, geometry, woo-woo weirdness, humorous typos, and... yeah. That was my New Year's. A much-needed break from conventional reality! (For me, that is, specifically, at that time. Anyone who takes this blog entry as a general endorsement of hallucinogenic experimentation is mistaken. Don't try these things unless you know what you're doing, and don't blame me if you do and you don't and you mess yourself up.)

Now we come upon the last few days leading up to this New Moon. Oh God.

I am so broken.

Issues rise to the surface that I would never have wanted to stir up. Ever. But the fact is that I must face them and deal with them head-on if I am to make any progress toward where I want to be as a person. I am not good at dealing with difficult things head-on. Or even speaking directly of them by name.

My deepest fears and insecurities are calling my name now.

I'm supposed to start school in a week. All of a sudden it seems such a daunting task. I haven't even started and I already feel overwhelmed and inadequate. I hear my brain telling me it might be better to put off school for another year, wait until I've built the necessary strength and finesse physically and spiritually, learned more theory and practice. It almost sounds like a sensible option. But I'm not one to give up so easily on something I've decided upon. I will give it a go. Even in spite of the news I just got, that there are too many massage therapists out of work for my education to qualify for support from unemployment benefits. Fuck that. That is not my fucking concern. Did I create this fake, anti-life economy that disingenuously steals people's livelihoods away from them? No. This is my calling. I will pursue it, one way or another. Damn the naysayers and seriously damn the goddamn banksters.

Well, that's one angle covered. The rest is very personal, but I can say that it applies to relationships with people in general and some relationships in particular. And this Gordian knot of self-judgment and self-loathing that comes with seeing so clearly in this darkened moonlight the darkened half of my emotional body and all my personal faults and failures not only revealed but magnified out of proportion. It is as if somebody went and exhumed from the vaults of my soul a block of lead the size of a coffin and now I have to carry it. Impossible.

These are my thoughts of the moment. Tomorrow will bring something else again. Heavy, heavy, heavy.

I haven't self-identified as a Christian for some time now, a couple of years. I've explored a variety of spiritual perspectives in that time. Now it seems I have less need to do any seeking of an outward nature. I try to focus on simply listening to what I'm being told personally by the circumstances and daily events of my life, by synchronicities and dreams. I observe silence and beauty. I dig into my thoughts, feelings and motivations, try to discern the true from the false with the sword of awareness, to understand where I've gone wrong, and attempt to forgive all my many deviations from the way of Life. Forgiveness is often the most difficult phase, but it is crucial. Without forgiveness, there is only a hell of guilt, a legion of incriminating voices crying "not good enough!"

To withhold forgiveness, from oneself or from others, is to deny the Love with which we are created, to obstruct the flow of Life that streams unending from the infinite source of all things. And when we are thus negatively disposed to that all-encompassing flow, we find that it becomes a rain of arrows, bringing anguish and pain. Instead of letting go and transforming our pain into Love, we too often simply opt to build thicker and thicker walls around our hearts. The result being that we are increasingly cut off from the Source. We descend deeper and deeper into separation, into a realm where illusion, deception, manipulation, distortion, and corruption appear to rule. Struggle replaces ease, fear and anxiety and anger replace love and trust and harmony.

Christianity holds that forgiveness is only possible because of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, a "perfect sacrificial lamb" who took the sins of the world upon his shoulders, descended into hell, and defeated Satan's power so that whoever believes and accepts his redemption work can be saved and go to heaven. This is the storybook version. I know a lot of people believe it literally, and they're welcome to it. For me, it doesn't hold water as such. As far as I do accept it, I take it as an archetypal myth that both conceals and reveals the actual spiritual truth behind it, depending upon whether we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Jesus was a spiritual master, prepared from even before his birth for the role he was to play on this earthly stage. He went through some process of initiation into the ancient esoteric mysteries, probably in both Egypt and India. He came to a full awakening of the Christ consciousness, which is a balanced and perfect consciousness, the Ain Soph Aur, the white light of the Trinity. In this sense he most definitely was an Avatar of God.

The Bible is a tough book to read if you're looking for truth but don't know what to look for. After all, it was written and edited by all sorts of people with all sorts of motivations. And canonized, mind you, by a particular group of people with particular motivations. I mean, of course, the Council of Nicea. That's when they made the sausage. When the modern, processed, pre-packaged, adulterated, sterile version of Christianity was born. To serve the needs of the very powers-that-be from under whose oppression the real teachings of Jesus would have delivered all people, had they been taken to heart.

If you question nothing, you get only what you're given. True faith in God will withstand any revelation and any trial, because it is flexible and open to new information, and rests upon the true source of all strength and hope and insight. Of course, our faith is weak. We stumble and stray. But this is the work of God in us. Every error and failing brings us closer to learning how not to fail. We learn what makes us suffer, and what the antidote to our suffering is. The answer is to seek to perceive God in all things, even to perceive as God. Through the eyes of Love and ever higher awareness....

The Matrix has you...

Indeed it does. It has us under its spell... this God-forsaking realm of animal urge under Demiurge. The human experiment reaches its morbid climax once again as another cycle of time approaches its inexorable end. A time of reckoning, a crossroads of fate. A more golden age, or a deeper, wider, longer hell than we could ever imagine. Lifetimes of iniquity and failure behind, and one more chance to make it right, to break the mould and exit this bloody stage of mundane mortality and the oppression of hateful laws. Might makes right. Dog eat dog. Ignorance prevails. The cancer is terminal. We lurch from day to lifeless day, unaware that the hungry maw of Death awaits to consume our wasted zombie flesh. We are already dead; it is only our continual state of distraction-denial and restless, outward activity that convinces us otherwise.

Believe and it is so. Conscious, waking-mind belief affects the appearance of reality; the deeper the level of belief, the more fundamentally it shapes our experience.

Today I have chosen the material nature as my frame of reference. I've given my lesser qualities a turn at steering the vessel. It is a choice. Yesterday was different; tomorrow will be different again. But today I embrace my fallen self. Mechanical. Bound. Yet I know... I know that that is not who I am. The essence of me is eternal and free. This will never change, no matter how I might deny it.

The ascending path is hard. It is narrow and steep. Through adamantine strength of will I could attack it head on and stay the course. But that is not my way. There are few with such strength. So I lapse into detour, the side-road that looks so much easier and leads nowhere but back to the true way. Lost time and rueful wisdom. Just for today. Tomorrow is a new day.

When shall we seek God? When the harvest is in and our bellies are full? When we've persevered with our own strength and won the glory and praise of this world? Not likely. It's when we've exhausted all other ways, when we're pushed to the brink, when all the faith we had in anything else is brought to ruin; that's when we turn to the true source of Knowing, Loving, Doing and Being. Our Divinity.

Theories, teachers, traditions, techniques. These can help us. But they will also hinder us.

You seek an experience of God? Fool. God is the one experiencing all things. You yourself are part of that wholeness. It is only your conviction that you are a separate being that keeps you from knowing this.

Your seeming separateness may seem a curse, but I say it is the greatest gift of all. Seek the One if you feel so inclined. Seek with every fibre of your being and you will find it. Seek by half measures and you will wobble, tugged by turns toward truth and death. In any case, you can only be what you are until you choose to make yourself something else. Make the change or have it made for you.

This day I have drunk of the wine of this beautiful prison earth. It is sweet poison for the blood, intoxicating the mind with a heavy softness that fades into guilt. How much more potent is the wine of heaven, which purifies, clarifies, and exalts the spirit!

This blog is not a conscious service to humanity. Any good that comes of it, comes in spite of the misguided efforts and petty motives of the writer. It is in the modus operandi of God to use all things, all vessels, for the universal good. In the case of a corrupt vessel, the good that is wrought comes in spite of the vessel's own intentions.

The writer would characterize this blog as a running display of his own ignorance and shortcomings. Look not for revelation hence, lest you be deceived.

So says the lost soul, confounded by too much trying, all in vain.

Less writing, more living. Or rather, less vanity, more service.

I overindulge, yes. But that is my choice at the moment. To expose my ugly side with honesty. Not even in the words, of course, so much as behind and between the words. Unconsciously. But with the potential for consciousness, upon reflection... and soon I leave this pit behind for another view again. Thank god for that.

To honour and love God and one's fellow creatures - mineral, plant, animal, or human - is the totality of the law. If we do not know ourselves, how can we know others? How can we know God?

To see ourselves in others, not as projections of ego, but as individual expressions of the same essence of God. All that endures is God, all else is but the ever-changing dream in the imagination of God.

To know is to perceive directly. We do not perceive; we are too caught up in chasing our thoughts, from past to future to past again. Fantasy, delusion, worry, regret, interpretation through the filter of the unknowing, conditioned mind. Or we are embroiled in sensation, craving pleasure and avoiding pain. Identifying as the content of our mental, emotional and physical experience, instead of as what we truly are. Thus we enslave and imprison ourselves and are tossed about by outer circumstances and our unconscious drives. Truth as it can be perceived exists only in the present.

To make the unconscious, conscious. This is the beginning of the alchemical work. The proper study of man is man himself. What lies hidden within him. Observing, without bias or judgment, one's actions, feelings, thoughts, and motives. Passionless understanding. Accepting, and accepting responsibility.

This writer is a fool, as are all common men. The only thing keeping him from being a perfect ignoramus and an imbecile is his flickering recognition of the fact that he does not know, does not perceive, only thinks, feels, senses outwardly, and foolishly parrots the thoughts of others without real understanding. Even were this not the case, you would be a fool to assume otherwise. Anything he says must be tried and proven first. And if you know directly, you have no need of his words at all.

What we might call "knowledge" is not given. It is earned. Through suffering and striving. Through patience and labour. And even then it is only one's own subjective experience. True knowledge surpasses all this, all the efforts of man. It is timeless. It is priceless. It is to perceive what is. How shall we who are blind and deaf, perceive?

We are blind and deaf because of the thick miasma and dirt of illusion and sin that covers us. So many are comfortable with this condition, they seek to preserve it and deepen it. You who desire the sincere and loving, all-illuminating truth, must not be so complacent as these. You have your work cut out for you.

Purification. Cutting through the illusion, casting off the sin. This requires brutal honesty and total commitment. Yet it is not merely the work of the separate little you, capricious and weak. It is the work of God within you. The divine will, the divine intellect, the divine love.

With God all things are possible.

God is within you, and you are within God. Rejoice and give thanks, for it is God who created you, God who sustains you, and God who will transform you in ways you never imagined. Life and death, night and day. One eternal Being.