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 1 May 2008 @ 23:43
The plot of these dreams was that there was two elements that could not be one. It was inside the reality of these dreams that impossibility, a seemingly wholly intellectual notion, became a feeling... More >
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 27 Mar 2008 @ 05:18
Not really. I wasn’t born in what we Ohioans call “the county.” In fact, I lived only on the edge of it from the ages of seven to twenty-four. Yet, it is in my blood…and I forgot. More >
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 28 Aug 2007 @ 16:21
“Yes, sire.” One may be familiar with this form of address, which usually took place when a servant interacted with English royalty. Implicit within the address is an acknowledgment of the supposed divine nature of the royal personage, as the word “sire” means heavenly body or star. It’s in this way that the word “desire” means, at least etymologically, ‘away from heaven.’ If one posited that heaven was some vague refuge of pleasure, then this etymological ‘discovery’ offers little insight. However, posit that heaven is this case signifies Wholeness and the word “desire” becomes a key that unlocks truths about life and the pursuit of happiness.
Games are created through desire. One has to want the goal; one has to want to win for there to be a game. If one did not care in the least, no game would ever be created or played. And one cares because there is a lack. One has to be in some sort of a state of unwholesomeness to conjure the concern or desire that a game demands. Geoffrey Filbert once told me that with anything there is the positive and the negative…and then there is how much one really cares. In other words, there is the goal, the anti-goal and desire.
Is one innately deficient? To put it another way, does one have no choice but to care? One idea that may prove otherwise is the notion that a restricted state can only originate from a state of greater freedom. Ibn ‘Arabi, a Spanish Sufi, spoke much about the fact that determined things can only originate from non-determination. With this in mind, it could be said that one is actually innately Whole and that one creates deficits for oneself in some effort to participate in game play. From a certain perspective then, any belief that one is in any way deficient, and that one is need of anything, would amount to a LIE. This may explain the recent findings that Max Sandor published on his blog at sandorian.us. Max writes: “In short, ANY ATTACHMENT to a desired object will result in that object to go AWAY, and NOT to be attracted.” Perhaps this is because one’s Higher Self will not tolerate such a lie, the lie that one needs anything. Max goes on to mention a “winning strategy.” He writes: “Relinquish attachment to the positive pole and resistance to the negative and ACT as if the result wouldn't matter!” One ‘acts’ as if the result wouldn’t matter because the result really doesn’t matter! At least, it doesn’t matter as far as one’s eternal happiness is concerned.
It’s been my experience that whenever I find myself attached to something, there appears a Voice that demands my flight from it. It’s as if this Voice will not tolerate such a substandard condition as being in need; it seems it cannot stand my harboring such a false belief in the face of Reality, the reality that I am Whole. Hate may begin to come into play as hate becomes a propellant. One may begin to hate that to which one is attached, as a means to better achieve a “freedom from” and thus ultimately a “freedom to.”
It seems everyone is engaged in the pursuit of Wholeness but it’s this wrong belief, the belief that it’s what’s “out there” that will bring one wholeness, that prevents them from truly achieving what they ultimately already have and ultimately already are. Deciding that heroin, sex, procreation, wealth, etc., will bring them everlasting happiness, they pursue these things of the world with uncontrollable fervor. Yet the most they can hope to achieve is temporary wholeness, a brief pleasurable union as they fall back and as the chase begins once again. In the Pali Canon, someone once asked Siddhartha Gotama why anyone would want to achieve Nirvana. He said essentially it’s because people shun woe and embrace weal. So once a person comes to fully understand that it’s no object of the world that will bring them true weal, and that there is a path that bears the potential to do so, they can shed their false ideas and look to that which may actually bring them eternal wholeness. But there is no reason why they couldn’t enjoy the temporary pleasures of the earth in the meantime!
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 9 Aug 2007 @ 14:44
Many people seem to be quite miserable on this planet, some more than others. Yet an interesting and for some a surprising feature of this misery is that when thoroughly examined, it seems it’s there because people want it to be there. People want to feel bad. This is quite obviously insane but as with any insanity, there is order to it, there is a noble spiritual goal in its midst. Gurdjieff commented on this seemingly strange state affairs when he said that man will give up his pleasure long before he’ll give up his pain. His contention was that perhaps this results from man’s desire to be noble. His explanation may be a specific instantiation of a more general truth: people want to be miserable because it’s beautiful. Aesthetics may answer the question of why people are seemingly drawn to pain, confusion, helplessness and failure.
I can remember being in class in college and announcing to the students around me that I had discovered the answer to the age-old paradox, the one that asks how God can create a rock He cannot lift. (For those of you unfamiliar with the paradox, if God can create a rock that He cannot lift, well, then He cannot lift it and He is thus not omnipotent. If God cannot create the rock, then He is obviously not omnipotent. This paradox presupposes that for God to be God, He must be omnipotent). My answer was that He could do it through a lie. He could create the rock, knowing full well that He is able to lift it. Then, He could “forget” or make Himself unconscious. He could somehow, through some mechanism, repress this knowledge. Outraged, the other students around me claimed that I had not solved the paradox because the ultimate result is that God is unable to lift the rock and is thus no longer omnipotent. False. He can lift the rock, He is still omnipotent but He can’t because He has chosen to forget or repress his ability. If God is omnipotent, He must also be completely free, free to choose whether or not to lift the rock.
This paradox is really a question of how a God may become a creation or how a God may become human. In “The Phoenix Lectures,” Hubbard describes just how this change may occur. He says it comes about through altering one’s creation. Yet simply practicing what he refers to as alter-isness does not necessarily cause one to lose control of one’s creation. It’s in altering a creation to the point that one’s role in the creative process goes out view that can make a God into a man. Hubbard discussed at length what he called The Legend of the Creator: persistence is created when a being alters a creation by postulating that it was in fact created by someone else. Such an action, making someone other than oneself responsible for one’s creations, brings about persistence as well as a plethora of experience that must be inherently foreign to a being with endless potential creative power. Weakness, desperation, helplessness, anguish, really a whole host of experiences and sensations become available to a being when it loses control over creation. It’s quite possible that this may explain why beings are ‘down here’ in the first place.
In his essay, “The Subtle Choking-Chains of Aesthetics,” Max Sandor suggests it is through the use of aesthetics, as an alter-isness of creation, that can make a god into a man. He writes: “How can an almighty Being with limitless potential degrade to a completely other-determined entity? The only way, it seems, was the voluntary attribution of an aesthetic to a 'lower' state of sensation.” Sandor is answering the paradox in the same way that I did above, except his answer is more specific. I said it could happen through a lie. He said that lie is aesthetics. He goes on to explain that when a being introduces or injects aesthetics into an event, terminal, phenomenon etc., this introduces high-frequency energy. Ultimately, this introduction obscures the so-called truth of the phenomenon and if one cannot see the truth of it, one certainly will not be able to control it. One ends up with a beautiful mystery, which may describe what life looks like to most inhabitants on this planet.
Spirits seem to have an innate attraction to beauty. They love it. When a being makes things like pain, loss, failure and misery beautiful, it has set quite the trap for oneself. When it introduces this high-frequency energy (aesthetics) into an event or terminal, it can no longer see how it may have created this event or terminal in the first place. The result is persistence of that particular condition. In the end, this means that an important step in restoring one’s power is developing the willingness to see life as less than beautiful.
As an example, I had a friend who according to my perception, had clearly become a weak, selfish and emotionally manipulative person due to decisions he had made in his childhood. Yet I can remember as I described the less-than-ideal conditions of my own childhood, he said to me, “I never had that experience. My parents were great. I had no problems.” In other words, he is telling me that he had a beautiful childhood. In my own life, I’ve noticed that in a recent break-up with my girlfriend, I was experiencing feelings of loss and longing. They were quite powerful, even paralyzing at times. Concurrently, these feelings were quite beautiful to me, stuff of which a million love songs have been written. When I ‘spotted’ the aesthetics in these feelings, the fact that I was creating them and desiring them would naturally come into view. Most of the time, I would choose to divorce these feelings from the aesthetics and the magnitude of the feelings would drop to almost nothing. Sometimes though I left the aesthetics there and simply enjoyed the beautiful sadness.
Standing behind the pursuit of truth and beauty (or lack thereof) is an inappropriate identification of certain goals with others. The average person seems to fear the truth as they fear it will destroy their beautiful life. They see the only way to create a beautiful life is through beautiful lies. They do not want to analyze the reality of their relationship with their spouse or the genuine intentions of their governments or their placement here in the physical universe because as they have charged these things with aesthetics, they naturally don’t want to see their work of art desecrated. The truth is that truth is destructive, but to build something with true foundation, one has to clear out any substandard structures first. So it seems that the ability to create beautiful truth is a sign of real spiritual maturity.
* Go to [link] for a great drill to get one in touch with one's use of aesthetics More >
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18 Apr 2007 @ 19:52
In the current political discourse, one aspect that I see neglected by even the most astute commentators is the role of fiat currency (paper money) in the conflict with Iraq and with the seemingly imminent conflict with Iran. The US campaign in Iraq has been called a “blood for oil” campaign with the understanding that the Bush administration, representing corporate interests, is simply commandeering the oil in Iraq. In light of an incisive article by Krassimir Petrov called “The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse,” the supposed rationale for the so-called “blood for oil” campaign looks like somewhat of a half-truth. More >
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