Contributor
Question: What is your relationship to Life? How do you feel about
being here? Do you trust it, or are you suspicious, bitter, and
withdrawn?
In my casual ego mind, I am emotionally withdrawn, absent, shut down,
bewildered, disengaged, and confused. I endlessly complain about my
plight in this world and am ungrateful. The ugly truth is that I
routinely default on myself and others and on Life itself. Life doesn’t
betray me, I betray it. When I entertain thoughts of betrayal and
abandonment, I rape Life, then blame the bitch. Life gets raped and
blamed for it.
By now, I’m choking to death, but by my own hand.
This is important to recognize because, if it’s my hand, then I can
remove it myself, don’t need anything or anyone to do it for me.
This is the first Office of Authentic Spiritual Practice: Recognition
of and responsibility for the emotional withdrawal from Life and Love.
The Second Office is when I sit down and shut the Fuck up in the Face
of the Cosmic Enormity of Life, and recognize Its Innocent, Fierce,
Infinite, egoless Nature, my truest self. I stop disassociating
emotionally into my fantasies of separateness from this Profound Wonder
and vomit out all the repression, the avoidance, the trauma of real and
imagined disease and get into Bed with this Great Lover.
The Brilliant, Unbroken, seamless Presence of Life circulating
through all creation, the Current that oscillates between the cycles of
birth and death, through infinite stretches of fathomless space, that
one, that Very One, is the Only Existing Reality and I am completely,
always, already inherently one with It, just like a whirlpool in a
River. It has always been this way.
There is only One Life living all things and It became me and you.
When we meet on that level, big things happen, because ego, the
dramatization of betrayal and abandonment has been made obsolete by
Noticing and Being Intimate with the One who shows up as Two. This
produces emotional and spiritual intimacy between us because we are
standing on what is Real.
When the whirlpool sees the River and its place in it, it swoons and
falls intoxicated into bed like a lover, ready, willing, able, open,
fully engaged, deeply pleasurized, intensely passionate.
Now, you are aware of the Elephant on your foot. It hurts. God
becomes man, even poor little you and me, a painful and bloody affair.
The infinite Life consents to be you and me and everything else, fully
surrendered to us all, and I miss it. The Word becomes flesh, the
infinity of Life fractalizes into mortal human beings who are all going
to die, and I hide my face even though I am obligated to somehow love
and trust in the face of this great contradiction. We were born with
the impulse to love, and everyone we love is going to disappear. Does
this make sense? Does it produce trust or doubt in you?
Authentic spiritual practice, true religion, begins with this:
Recognizing my emotional recoil from the Incandescent Event of Existence
and overcoming it by being responsible for it.
I thereby stand before it, not as it.
Spiritual practice has exactly nothing to do with beliefs, it has
everything to do with the moral obligation to face the truth, to face
Reality, to tell the truth about my lies, to own my own refusal to be
that which I so obviously am: the full bodied, red blooded incarnation
of Infinite Life, in spite of my mortality and all my many faults and
shortcomings.
This is an Ordeal, coming to terms with the simultaneity of my
infinite and mortal nature. It’s an impossible, contradictory
situation, but here I am anyway. When I make friends with it and stop
making it into a problem, my eyesight clears up, the Obvious is now
Noticed, this is simply the Way God Is. Coming to terms with this
involves staring into the Paradox long enough for the light and heat to
burn through the rational and metaphysical assumptions I constantly
plaster onto Life, ideas like “consciousness comes from neurons firing
in the brain” (scientific materialism) and “Original Sin separates Man
from God” (religious psychosis)
These completely unfounded and theoretical assumptions reduce Life to the level of a concentration camp.
We are not isolated individuals, we share a dynamic unity with
literally everything. Scientism, the religion of science, as well as
religious fundamentalism are maps masquerading as this Territory of the
Heart. It doesn’t matter if the whole world believes it, belief has
never changed the truth, not once.
Ego ideas about life are just not equivalents to Life Itself. No map
ever could be equal to the territory it describes. The Radiant Core of
Conscious Light, Existence Itself, the Infinitely Intense Current of
the Heart, is the fundamental Nature of Reality.
When human culture is based on the Recognition and Appreciation and
Exploration of this Wonder, this Impossible Treasure buried in the
Field, when we as individuals and nations overcome our recoil, our lack
of confidence in Life, in Actual God, we will return to the disposition
of the Radiant Core and humanity will become the birthplace of Real
Life, not materialistic, industrialized consumerism and disaster
capitalism, not fundamentalism and fascism. Tyrants will be laughed off
the planet, having no exploitable hosts to dominate. Priests will go
broke for lack of work. The searing Obviousness of Utter Unity with all
Life will overwhelm the petty differences within the human family and
profound gratitude for and empathy with all others will be the dominant
social meme planet wide.
This will come about when Reality is met on it’s own terms and is no
longer held hostage in the dungeons of ego mind. That will be
accomplished when we have had quite enough of self strangulation,
capitulation to lies, collusion with saboteurs, empowerment of tyrants,
belief in false gods and completely wake up to the liberating Facts of
Life: Freedom and Light and Happiness is our very nature, now. We
share the nature of That which originated us, which is Free, Self
Existing, and Radiant, Intelligent Light. We are not orphans born in
sin. We are inherently blissful incarnations of love and truth
(Reality) radiant fractals of eternal Light, now as always. This is the
demonstrable Truth, is not a belief, an idea. It’s Real. See for
yourself.
This is cause for great celebration and will one day be the basis of
human culture. The Recognition of the Free, Ecstatic nature of Life and
our inherent unity with It will unleash the most powerful forces ever
seen on planet Earth. When we identify What is fundamentally True and
live in alignment with It, everything else falls into place.
Responsibility for Love, for Life, for What is True is the only
realistic way to live. Conventional religious and scientific beliefs
are like junk food, it looks good, but has no real nutritional value.
Only Truth and Love can provide Light and Life. Truth is Real, is not
an opinion. If Truth is an ocean, belief is a ripple on its surface.
Belief systems are virtual facsimiles of this Reality, canned versions of fresh food.
Why settle for a virtual reality when you can have the Real Thing?
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