> From this.
Contrary to popular opinion, the statement “I think therefore I am” can, in fact, be refuted. You can deny your own existence. It doesn’t even have to be illogical to do so, either. We have something that “looks out”, and that is what most people consider their own personal “I am”. It is similar to what Leibniz called a monad. This epiphenomenon is what Descartes is talking about in his famous statement: when “we are,” the very fact of us relaying it makes the statement that it cannot be denied. If we denied it, then what is doing the denying? So you see, whatever that is, that must be the “I am”. Without it, we could not do anything at all, because we would not be anything at all to do it.
Could it possibly be another illusion, however? What if that which looked out were actually an extension of a greater thing that looked out, which you were not aware of, that lends you the sensation of authentic consciousness? That other knows what it is to look out for real, you just think you do. That would mean your “I am” is not, not really. It’s just borrowed, it is only a leaf on a tree, and is not the being that is actual, that is the tree, like it thinks it is. And this way of looking at things is not as wild as it seems, if you ever read some works in eastern religion. This is actually some mystics’ view of consciousness, that there is one cosmic consciousness (the tree) and that we are merely the One forgetting it is one and having become many (the leaves).
And however far out that view of things is, it’s within logical possibility. Now, if one were not to take logic for granted, we could go to town on Descartes’ irrefutable. Then nothing is sure, the very essence of what it means to be sure would have been yanked away, and you know what? Once again, like the fish who doesn’t know what water is, we do take logic for granted. For there is nothing really that guarantees logic has to be the process of the way things work; we just have a history that things do, indeed work through logic. It’s induction, which has been known to have problems, philosophically speaking. Something we will be visiting upon in a bit.
> From this.
All is vanity, and chasing after wind. All these words have been written before, I tell you nothing new under the sun, for what is written shall ever be written again, in as many cycles as there are years upon years, as we live under the turning of the great Wheel. What hope have we, to mean something before we are scattered into the winds, like the dust we are, and never gathered together again? Chasing after wind. Vanity. Dust in the wind. Airs. What meaning have those whose works are remembered, for do they not also go to the grave? Mostly we are shivering in a Brownian daydream, and then we are gone, and after those who remember us are also gone, so we are blown away as inconsequential infinitesimals.
Or shall we believe that there is more? Can we conceivably have the notion that the God of small things listens to the cricket’s chirp, to know every fluctuation of temperature in every crevice, and what transpires in the smallest capillaries of our bloodstream? To Him there is no vanity. To Him, who knows from where the wind comes, and to where it goes, life is not a poor player. We must follow where He goes, and we will perhaps arrange these written words anew, find meaning even in the dregs of our language. Surely in the attempt, to deny the entropy another minute of the heart’s erosion.
We must to understand where the meaning is to be gathered, out there in the vasty show of streetlamps and buses and pigeons. True love, free: ask and it shall be given to thee. Free love, true: ask and it shall be given to you. True love, after all, is to be found: I am found! I found it! Newly discovered, having been there from time immemorial. And just everywhere: past, travelers through the corridors of memory; present, for those who have eyes to see; and future, in the most solemn hope; even in the very imagining, in the dreaming — so to join in the tune our spirits, to the time of the grand and awesome song of creation.
> From this.
It really is amazing just how much we take for granted. I harp on this point a lot. One would imagine that an extreme case of it would be the tweets after Christmas of spoiled children not having gotten the exact color iPhone, and subsequently posting, and I quote, “FML”. Seriously? Do you even have the barest awareness that there are other people in the universe at all? I suppose you can say, however, that we are all guilty of this, if you think about it a bit, perhaps it being only a matter of degree what we truly do not give a second thought to. How much we are totally unaware of, because like fish who have no idea what water is, we rely upon these necessities just as matters of fact, and think no further on them.
But let us imagine, let us go, to the other extreme: in the other direction, which might be to recognize that all good things we have we are given, and even that good which we do have not source in us at all — that only the mistakes we make are truly ours. Our intelligence, our ability, our will (if true), our capability to exert effort — all these are gifts, even all the elements of developing skill in anything at all. All of whatever is good ultimately comes from God. Really, all we actually are composed of are the small sparks our brain makes when deciding something. Be therefore thankful, in the worst of your moments. There is still hope, even in these, and that hope, too, is a gift.
> From this.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is an animal called the Babelfish. Placed in the ear, the effect is to translate any language heard into the one you speak. Such an animal is deemed to be so useful it is the proof of the non-existence of God (it removes faith from the equation, and without faith God is nothing, the joke goes). In my thinking, music is like the Babelfish. (There are other things, but this is number one on our survey.) How is it that we can enjoy music? How does blind evolutionary process bring about attuning to certain sequences of tone? Its only purpose seems to be the conveyance of emotion, if it has anything like a practical application at all. We don’t need it to survive. Diplomatic treaties and instruction manuals are not written in musical notes. (Maybe they should be, to convey the spirit of the document all the better.)
It is a stunning coincidence. Can we look at this, and all that which is fortunate in our existence — how long until it becomes irrational not to believe in a higher pattern? Because music makes one question what “coincidence” actually may be.
We of science have believed that we are a run of the mill planet revolving a rather ordinary star, in an average position in our galaxy, which is itself nothing to write home about. This makes me think of the researcher who averaged the faces of serial killers and when he did so, came up with a more attractive face than all his inputs. If you “average”, he found, one comes up with beauty. How long will the white coats ignore that what they call “average” is what they mistake beauty for? And coincidence? Do not such phenomena deserve a different word? Those who believe God is luck, and not that God is love. Maybe that’s the paradigm shift they should be working on — from selling God short. Eggheads, before you try to absolve other people’s ignorance, start with the man in the mirror.
> From this.
I was given the exact signal once, or what was supposed to be it, with all that I knew or thought I knew, “One of you shall betray me.” It was a positive signal, not a damning one (as far as I could tell), to go along with the rest of all my “Judas volunteered” intel. But I know not the source of that signal; it may, in fact, have been somewhat confused. Like the existing gospels, the one that gave me the signal I believe had his own agenda in mind when he proffered it. For I know not how exactly how it must have felt for Judas to have received his cue, on that ultimate evening, that critical night.
To make sense of the innocence of Judas, whether we have a complete picture or not, at the point where he got that signal, Judas went and got his 30 pieces of silver and arranged for the Lord’s capture; or more likely, if Judas had gone to the Pharisees before that, he and the Lord must have discussed it previous to his going. I saw in my visions, after all, the symbolic interpretation of him going into that meeting. Maybe I’ll get more intel on the matter, some telling revelation that awaits the proper prompt, the proper state of mind or grace. “Judas volunteered” is a hard teaching, indeed. Like the bitter medicine this world needs to cure it of its long ignored insanity.
> From this.
Love is what unfolds from the desire of the heart. The rose that blooms even when the world is shrouded in snow — the kiss of immortality. It is the eagle feather which is held in solemn trust, for to call upon the Creator… Behold what presses you on in the darkest of the ways, through to the other side. It is the end of the journey, when home is found again, sometimes at a new place — for home can be known in many ways. Love is to know what is right. Do you wonder what love might be, and what love might be to you? Why do you seek after something that you can find in simplest terms, within your very grasp?
Love is everything you think it is. It can hurt you and blind you, it can make you despair, and it can frustrate your every thought and movement. But if it is love, you will find that all of whatever you have been put through is worth it. Well worth it. And what is more: you will have an idea why all of this, all you touch and all you see, is the way it is. Maybe to scry where you are drawn in the great blueprint the Builder meticulously inscribed, checked and double-checked, and to know you are not no one: you have a place, and you have a purpose. For this is love: where heaven touches down to earth, through the heart, through our intentions, and through our very hands: no one else’s, for our footsteps are the only paths that love may follow. No one else’s.
> From this.
To believe that Judas volunteered is to acknowledge that the evangelists who wrote the Gospels changed the actual story substantively, at least partly from not knowing the actual story, and we cannot gloss over these changes. But if you think about it, this must have happened. Anyone who thinks that the Bible is absolutely coherent and consistent is working a special sort of schizophrenia. Really? It is the Jews’ fault that our Lord got crucified by the Romans? They cry, “his blood be on us and our children”? Really? And we know that the Barabbas story is almost definitely untrue, that no one was ever set free because the Jews wanted it on their holy day. The scriptures are peppered with such errors, whether they are blatant fabrications or just honest or copying mistakes.
The gospels, you realize, don’t agree how certain things happened, or in what order, so if we try to reconcile all their inconsistencies, we then create a new gospel, which certainly didn’t happen in any way that we make out. For my part, the information about Judas being innocent of history’s charges came from On High. Any attack on that idea, within the HALOSPACE, has only come from the forces of evil. Only from the darkness do I get fuel for my doubts; all light that shines upon the matter only reconfirms Judas’ lack of culpability. I still wait for a revision of it, when I’ll be told that the mainstream view is actually correct; hasn’t happened yet, and it looks like it never will. I only seem to get further confirmation of this minority report. When is it irrational not to believe the incredible? What would they say, “Two billion Christians can’t be wrong”? Except when all they’ve ever known are stories, that they mistake for history.
