3 Presents For You

      Another stormy day. Perhaps stormier weather politically. It can be hard to keep your cool when the world seems to be falling apart. When society seems to be deteriorating and so much stupidity is rampant. For me my mind's go to when I get scared by the socio-political climate is to say, "Oh shit, what am I going to do about this, I have to do something about this, I am not doing enough." It's difficult to recognize that, for myself, I am reacting fearfully and losing my center. Losing myself in this fearful reaction to my environment. I think it is difficult for many of us to recognize the difference between fearful compulsive reacting and heartfelt response. I think for many of us, we shut down entirely, remain passive, or get engaged compulsively. I think our hearts are overwhelmed and we lack the processing power and emotional strength and wisdom to engage in a positive way. I think in general we are overstimulated and overtaxed personally which makes being wise nearly impossible. We are to some moderate extent in reactive compulsive survival mode, unbalanced. We sense there is a better way to act, but it seems frequently out of reach. In establishing an overall strategy for treating the multi-dimensional issues of our times, we are at a loss. We don't even know where to begin. We lose the opportunity to act on our feelings of a need to act when we are sucked back into our stressful life cycles. I think often, the way forward is not to do more, but to do less. By doing less, we end up doing more.
     If we are overstimulated and overworked, doing more from a stressful place will increase the burden, not diminish it. We have to take care of our feelings and our bodies so our minds can be balanced enough to see clearly. So we can act on our best impulses and have the capacity to think things through. I think much of what we do is superfluous. Much of our habit is depleting rather than enriching, largely because we come from a society that is often disconnected from the heart of being. We are bombarded with advertisement that seeks to manipulate our senses so we consume not which is necessary or good, but is profitable for a few. This has become generally accepted as our way of life. And I am in complete opposition to it. It promotes selfishness and dangerous competitiveness at a time when we need to come together to deal with the upheavals of the world. It is hypnotizing, putting us to sleep in fanciful lollipop dreams that only cover up the nightmare of our world if we continue to pursue them down there maddening rabbit hole. For myself it has seemed like the choice I have had is between poverty and madness. I have had to make compromises with both as I am sure you all have as well. 
     The solution is quite simple actually. Do good. Learn how to do good and recognize the difference right and wrong, being present and being ignorant, acting wisely and acting from delusion, conditioning and dreamy disconnect. If you cannot see the way, perhaps too much is obscuring your vision. Perhaps you don't have enough support, or the right environment. Perhaps you need to let go of something that is inauthentic and debilitating. Perhaps you need to engage in something that will wake you up. Perhaps you just need to breathe, relax, and let things come into a fuller picture. What are your feelings telling you? What is your conscience telling you? It's surprisingly vital to listen to your conscience, your feelings, intuitions if you want to be awake, be yourself, and do good in this world. Be free, be alive. And so much of what we do is unnecessary while so much else is necessary to take care of ourselves and the world. I think we can live much simpler and much less stressful lives if we can learn to be in harmony with ourselves and with life in general. If we do good, we do good, if we create suffering, then we create suffering. It's that simple. 
     If we are really doing good then we are making the world a better place, it doesn't matter what we are doing, we are adding positivity to the world. If we are negative, it doesn't matter what we are doing, we are adding negativity to the world. It's obviously not this black and white, but through practice we can learn to see very clearly what is true and what is false within ourselves and what we do in life. Feelings can take us to strange and distant places from the comforts of what we may have considered our normal and ordinary lives. They challenge our perspectives, asking us to look again at our preconceived notions of the world. We may find that we are extraordinarily naive. Our intuition will tell us when what we do is enough, right, and true. Then we can let go of much of our worries and allow much more of our attention to dwell in the present. 
     When we have passed through considerable interior garbage we may find ourselves in a place when we can begin expanding our hearts and minds to the world. We can open up to new possibilities and old dreams that we set aside while we delved into ourselves to find the truth and who we really are. We may begin thinking again about how to engage with the world consciously and effectively. We may take on more responsibility maturing in character. Our strength may grow, talents and activities expand. We may find ourselves standing in the sunlight while our destinies pull us across the day lit Earth into various occupations and circumstances. It is here that we see what we can give to the world and we can see what we want from the world. It is here that we find our place in the world. When our spirit is awakened and our heart is true, our bodies and our minds will be rejuvenated. We will be sound enough to engage the world with an awakened spirit. We will cut through vast resources of delusion clearing the way for others. We will stand apart even as we are thoroughly engaged in all levels of human activity.
     We are human, we are imperfect, we love, and we suffer. We may never stop making mistakes, unless mistakes stop being mistakes. We may always be foolish. We can forgive ourselves for being human. We can forgive ourselves for being imperfect. We can recognize how much we don't see and how little we know. And we can relish our impossible blindness as we realize how little we can do to change our situation. We simply are the way we are right now. I don't know if there is anything we absolutely need to do to, or some way that we absolutely need to be. I find that just recognizing how I am right now has a profoundly positive effect on the way I engage with myself and the world. Not doing anything about how I am, just seeing life and myself clearly. It's really letting go of the heaviness of judgment and overcoming the heaviness of fear. Both of which I seem to have as much control over as I don't have any control over. I just am the way I am. Seeing this deeply enough is profoundly liberating. It is also so wonderful to have the heart to be ok with this. To be ok with all of what I see as negative and terrible qualities. To love myself enough to be ok with it. I wish you all can love yourselves enough to feel this freedom. If not, then I love you enough for you. You are beautiful and free. Here and now. It is quite astonishing how much love there is at the bottom of everything. How much love exists between us. How much we love eachother when we can see clearly. How desperately we wish to serve eachother and accommodate for eachother. At this level it is so clear to me how I wish to treat people and what kind of world I want to build. Here, you are all my brothers and sisters and we are all family. I will do anything and everything to make sure you are ok. Everything within my power. And I know, here, that you will do the same for me. Here, love is so powerful. Who we are is so spiritual and inhabiting an environment of such loving kindness and infinite grace. To me, this is home, this is where I always will strive to be when I can see clearly enough, and where I will wish to take you if it feels right. It seems to be just as much your home as mine. From here, I unconditionally love the world and I unconditionally want to make it better for everyone. This place just seems like our home that we have forgotten about. And it's right here, and right now. This Is It. This. 

This   

Presents #2

👼       Let us eat lettuce. And be cannibals. Last night when I wrote Presents I think I actually became aware of the ground of being. And it's kind of stuck with me since, off and on. I think this is sort of how it is. We are like sinuous waves of energy that power on and off through time.  Alternating between being and non-being in the moment that becomes the non-moment. The moment which is just this right here and now. The italics aren't to make it special or mystical, just to bring your attention to whatever your currently experiencing. And it isn't anything in particular, it's whatever is in particular. What it is, what matters, is what is being particulated right now. The way that it is is wayless not that it doesn't have a way, that it doesn't have a permanent root. And the way that it is may be that it isn't at all. 
     Somehow the sun shines. Somehow at times it seems, or I think, that we are. Perhaps sometimes we are not. How much of knowing is not knowing, not being someone to see at all, but being someone that is by not being who they think they are, but who they really are. Who we really are is someone, something, which we cannot understand, but someone that we know and someone who is very very good and very very...perhaps real. Why does real have to be real? What if real is something that isn't real? What if real is not real at all, but just an idea. An idea that's only reality is that it is an idea. What's real is found at the boundary between what we think is real and what we think is non-real. Because what we think is real is not wholly real and what we think isn't real is not wholly non-real. Our mind splits the universe into these inherently flawed dichotomies that we can only escape by unifying what can't be unifed. Black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, etc. They are defined by what they can and can't be. Two things that assume the universe is separate. If the universe isn't separate, these dichotomies wreak hell on our being, our souls. The separate universe is an imaginary universe. An imaginary overlay on what may actually be going on right now. Dichotomies are defined by the assumption that they cannot be what they are opposed to. That they are not the same. We believe in these assumptions and we suffer because we try to fit our being into a space that it cannot fit. For example, we assume that being is not non-being and because of this we are afraid of death. We attempt to perpetuate notions of what being is and we attempt to annihilate what we think non-being is. We don't realize that being and non-being, life and death are just ideas. They aren't real unless the way we relate to them is in how they point to what is right now. We don't need to have cognition of the ideas of life and death to be or to experience this. We think we can think our way to perceiving life as it is because we think our thoughts define reality. If we want to look at God we need to find a way to step outside of our normal thinking patterns in which we are completely lost in binary assumptions. We have to actually look and actually see rather than trying to force perception to come from compulsive and imaginary cognition. 
     The reason why we have so much trouble in looking and seeing is that we are so caught up in disconnected mentation. Our thinking is often much more like dreaming that active being. We have to learn to look with our life. And to be able to discern between what's imaginary and what's actually going on. For whatever reason(s) it seems like most humans are pretty asleep during the day and that we have been like this for millennia. Caught up in the dream of the separate universe, pretty much wholly unaware of this as it is right now. Actually being awake. It's more like we are partially asleep and partially awake to varying degrees. It's pretty crazy. We keep on going round and round in the dream, struggling to surface, struggling to be, caught up in the matrix of dualistic cognition. It doesn't seem like this struggle is a problem or an avoidable detour. It seems to me that fully conscious being is actually born out of maya. Light is born from darkness. It seems like maya is actually the fuel of self-awareness in an incredibly beautiful way. Waking up is such an incredibly beautiful experience. Waking up to a boundless infinite universe and self. Your being extends and includes everything. Wtf...How can this be real? And yet Here I am. Here we are. Pure ecstasy. Constantly being reborn in a constantly deepening constantly expanding constantly novel unpredictable sea of being. Having no idea where you are going. Flying though time and space open and vulnerable, fragile as a taut piece of paper. No top, no bottom, no inside, no outside. One with the universe, one with everyone, everything. Jesus Christ. 
     This..is me..all of this..wtf. I can do anything. I am everything. I have complete control of anything I desire. I just have to figure out how to use the controls. Lol. Everybody else is worrying about typical human stuff, (I am too), but then I am like, wait..I am God?..And I feel so much whimsical spontaneous flippant confidence and carefulness. My mind and feeling is spinning sparkles overlayed and filling the forms in the window of my Earthly sensory perception. There are other forces at work here besides finances and being a square. (no offense) Like overwhelming intuitive feeling being poured on you by angels. The cry of the Earth and the will of Heaven. Justice, adventure, love, free-spiritedness. Soul baby..soul...Soul is what the world really needs. Badass, courageous, heart-wrenching soul. Precedent crushing soul. The truth is that this kind of soul is already here and already in all of us. But I want to light that fire on fire. I want to set ablaze to the dead wood that is materialism and greed and superficiality. I want to to burn away greed and selfishness in the holy fire of Divine Perception and human liberation. I want to set humans free from millennia of imprisonment and corruption. I want the old world to fall away. It already feels so weak and splintered. It will fall away from us, those that awaken. We will leave it behind, perhaps with other human beings still confined and attached to it. We will build crystal cities. We will travel the stars. We will cleanse the Earth. We will liberate this planet. I know it. It is our destiny. Many of us were born to be enlightened spiritual leaders. More now than ever in the last however many thousand years. Will will not just stand alone on the mount, but travel in groups and communities. We will heal the sick and wounded and raise the dead. We will rejoice as we find our brothers and sisters. The stones will speak. We will go further than we ever expected or imagined. We are tasked with great feats and we are given great tools. 
    

Let go of your precepts, let go of everything...

Feel who you are and relinquish to your true nature

Let go of life, let go of what you think you need to do

Who are you right now? What matters right now?

This is it. This is fucking it.

Presence

      What is presence? Is it important? To me it is kind of a confusing thing. It has been and still is hard to pinpoint exactly what it is. I think it's the same thing as being, another difficult idea to really get at least for me. Because if we aren't our ego, then who or what are we? How does this change us, to not be solely this center of tension and conditioned identity? Are we still someone? If we are not just our body are we still somebody? Kind of scary maybe. What do we aim for when we feel the pull to awaken to something greater than what feels like our little confined sense of self? Is there and ultimate self? A ground of being? What are we awakening to? I think we sense where we are going, but don't really know what it is we are looking for. This is inherent to having an ego, being deluded and ignorant of things as they are. What I have learned is that we don't need to completely get rid of our ego. We can discover truth within or among samsara. Obviously this is the case because some days it's partly cloudy and partly sunny...
     What we can discover, what we can become despite our handicap of being a limited human being, is the sunshine behind and between the clouds. I think presence is a good word for this. We discover this as we sip a cup of coffee, as we talk on the phone, as we look out into a room empty of other people. The reason we can be angry shites and know the Buddha is because everything has Buddha nature. God isn't about tomorrow, God's about today. Right now in fact. All of this, right here in from of you right now. God doesn't give a shit about who you are or what you do. At least in the sense that presence isn't denied anywhere because of someone's attitudes or state of mind, or level of enlightenment. What does this mean for us? 
     It means that realizing who we are isn't about achievement, it's about perception. It's the way we look at the world. It's not about becoming something else, it's about seeing what we are, what is right now. Enlightenment isn't quality or worth, it's presence. It's this. How does what is personal and what is impersonal fit into this? First off, are they truly different? Are they separate? How are they different? Can you find somewhere where they split off from each other? What I know is that I have personal feelings and I think impersonal ones. The wiser I have become, the more they seem to be mysteriously blended and apart of something singular which I don't know that I can define. This is where presence and perhaps being arise from. The quietest arising in my consciousness and I begin to feel that something may be here. I have vague feelings, memories, of being and presence from my childhood, but I feel like I have been largely asleep since then. 
     I feel like and perhaps know, that what I truly and deeply wish is to be, right here and now.  I feel that objectively I am here right now, but personally and subjectively I am not, not in a clear and obvious way. Isn't this what life is all about? To be? Isn't this what all of us desire? Clear and present fulfilling being? And it's so elusive. So foggy. To such a degree that I greatly doubt that there is such a thing. I think, and think I sense there is clear and obvious being here now. I think it's hard to find because it is so simple, obvious and we look for it the wrong way. We try and see it through judgment and discernment, which is impossible because it isn't limited in anyway. It's not a thing or a type. Our mind tries to find it through a lens, which is how it finds everything else, and it can be hard to stop ourselves from doing this because it's so habitual. We literally, and I would say subjectively, have to become presence to see it. We have to somehow relax our cognition so it doesn't dominate our perception to a point where our identity as a separate self has dissolved. This is where presence is. When we have peeled away or penetrated all the layers of thought and discernment and there is a place in our awareness where there is no mental alteration of what is perceived by the senses. I think this is where it lies. Our mind deceives us with it's judgments, convincing us that we are what we are not, yet I believe that always we are present. Logically, I do not see how it can be any other way. 
     This matters to us, perhaps for a while, because being present is how we become free. Escaping the confinements of our cognition which suffocate our sense of self. We aren't just our thoughts, or just our feelings, just our identities. We are something more. It's this more that stirs us into expanding our perspectives and experience. It calls us to grow and change, to do things we, in the past, never would have. It is trying to unleash itself completely. It can only do this through deepening and expanding the sense of self. Unfettered presence is a complete transcendence of this sense of self. Our individual identity as such and such. It matters because it shows us this. That we are something which does not depend on any quality that we have, any thing that we have, or anything that we can see. It shows us that there is nothing that we can hold onto permanently and that we aren't who we think we are. Life isn't how we think it is. That obtaining things and striving can't provide fulfillment, because they fulfill desires of a self that isn't the entirety of who we are.
     I think presence is something we can't define. We can't define it because it is what is real. It's not some combination of personal and impersonal because these are just ideas. They are the minds attempt to cut out portions of reality that cannot be fully understood when separated from every other aspect of reality. If you boil any word down to it's essence, you get words like presence, or god, or reality. Reality cannot be completely understood in the dissecting mind, it can only be experienced. Reality isn't an idea. I think ideas are always incomplete and assumptive to a degree. Reality cannot be defined. To know it, you must become it fully. And this is the trick, because we already are it. As far as I know, this is presence. Everywhere is this and everywhere is presence. Wow, it's so simple. This is it. No italics. This is it. wow. It's not how you are now. It's you.

Journal #16

      Expanding consciousness and gaining power over being. More like gaining the ability to maintain power in balancing components. Balancing components meaning optimizing homeostasis and total energetic expression. I have been pretty tired the last few days. Kind of afraid of laying around/sleeping too much because I don't want my schedule to shoot too late into the day. It's hard because I feel like I really do need rest, but I am afraid it will get in the way of what I want and need to do. I've been dealing with this same issue for a looonnng time. It kind of feels like I haven't gotten anywhere in years. My perception has certainly changed, but I haven't really made anything of myself in the world and I still feel really insecure. I feel like I am stuck at the bottom and that I won't ever get out of here. Like I am too afraid to move on. It kind of sucks. It seems like a lot of it is just my foggy mind unable to sense what I need to do and being able to do it. My mind and being seems scattered all over the place and it seems its strongest function is to sprawl out all over the place. That doesn't really work in this world. At least I'm afraid that it doesn't and I can't let it do what it needs to do to reset. It's like catch-22. I don't have the will to let go enough, or the will to pull it all together, so I'm stuck in between not going anywhere. Not a good feeling. I kind of feel like shit. Every time I get going, it doesn't last long enough to become anything that will pull me out of the muck. I guess I am just exhausted of being in the swamp. Makes me want to be a hater and say fuck the world. Fuck everything. This whole thing is just so stupid. I am probably just in a bad mood right now. Yup. Like a light switch. All good or all bad. 
     Sort of get lost in these drag holes where I forget myself and how I want to be. Lights go down low and the body gets tense. Maybe I try to run away from my feelings and hide in the dark, or take a blinding step in the right direction and forget myself again. Lol. Scared of the news, scared of the dark, annoyed by people. Lol no one can do anything right. All I really can do in these moments is do my best to set myself straight again and give it another go. Experimenting in the confines of my own mind, trying to sustain the light of my consciousness and the health of my body, a pioneer in a country of 1. I blame people for my problems. I blame the world for not being good enough to support who I am. The reality is that the world does affect us strongly and I think for a lot of people we don't have enough support. Genuine affection and intelligent support. It sucks. It sucks feeling and being alone with your struggles. Feeling like no one understands you and that you can't communicate to people. It sucks feeling like you can't take care of yourself, your life, or the people around you. It sucks hurting so much. I want a stronger community around me of open-minded caring individuals. I want people around me who are like me. Incredibly open and free spirited. Super intelligent and capable. I want to work with these people and create a paradise on Earth. I want to do it now. I am tired of squirming in the mud like a worm when I know I am so much better. I know I am gifted and more than anything I long to let these gifts flourish in the world. I know we can create a better world for humans to live in. I know we can treat our planet better. I know we can treat each other better. I know I am surrounded by gifted individuals. I know there is a better way. And I am going to do my darnest to see it happen in my lifetime. I want to build a crystal city full of crystal people in the hills and valleys of the Pacific Northwest. I want to see great feats of engineering and technology and science and human organization. I want to see incredible synthesis of the sciences and of various aspects of human imagination and approach. A renaissance of technique in the synthesis of work and play, effort and leisure, black and white. An incredible distillation of knowledge into the liquor of awakened being and awakened society. 
     Many people just need to be given a chance, given another way. This world just doesn't work for them. It can't because of who they are. We need something different. And not through war and tribalism, but through love, imagination, and unleashed intelligence. Cooperation and self awareness, heroic leadership and heroic participation. It's time for the kids to come out and play. It's time for the rocks and the trees and the hills to speak to us again. It's time to let the wilds flourish and trees to line the horizon. To build megaliths to the spirit. To open our minds, our hearts, our souls, and unleash our potential. All I want to do is live in the Spirit. Live this kind of life in the Spirit with all of my friends and family. I want to see it spring from the rocks like fresh greens in Spring. We can build this community. It's built into us. Into our minds, our dreams, it's singing to us. It is the song of life. I look forward to meeting you and failing to discern you from the rocks and grass and rain and sky on a hill. You are my brothers and my sisters and we are the people of the wood. 

Journal #15

     Feel like I've fallen asleep again. What a strange feeling to sink under the waves of your own internal energies and lose varying degrees of presence/consciousness. It's nice to be close to the surface again I think. To see through a lot of the darkness of my mind. To more easily relinquish compulsiveness and to more easily have faith. 

     To me, my inner world is as real or more real than the "outer world". The two are blended to a great degree. My experience is that the physical world is as transparent and fleeting as my feelings and thoughts, composed of the same fundamental energies, but perhaps with a slower rate of change. The outer world is simply another compilation of forms in an infinite sea of mind, which feels like an innerverse. There really is no in or out, they are the same. My life is like a lamp made up of countless bulbs that vary in brightness with time and altogether create the kaleidoscope which is the sum total of my ever-expanding and deepening feelings. Life itself seems to be an extension of myself, all of it, all of me expanding spontaneously in all ways at once. My consciousness of this phenomena is like the rolling of the waves and is determined by the functioning of my body and perhaps my soul. Like an inconsistent current of energy passing through a complicated machines with components subject to failure and stress. 

     I have come what subjectively feels like great distances to expand my life into unbounded, direct oceanic experience where the individual will becomes more of a sea of pointed change rather than an isolated point. The individual has to a large extent merged with the volition of the world, not through change in fundamental structure, but through an awakening of perception. We have always been the sea. It's what we really are. It is what being is. 

     Although I have gained this oceanic perspective in subtle and complicated ways, I maintain my sense of being an individual. I actually feel more like myself. I have scrubbed off much of the haze and grime covering the headlights of my 2003 Honda Civic and my true feelings, my true sense of self, of being a human being has shone through perhaps partially. I think it's really a wonderful experience to be becoming "an awakened individual". Kind of like being a kid, except kids have the feeling of being the whole, but not the cognition of the actual whole. This human body is an instrument I inhabit to enjoy and experience the universe in a very full-flavored way. It seems as though human beings are uniquely gifted (compared to other life on Earth) to enjoy and experience a staggering array of universal forms. We are multidimensional from matter all the way to the divine and gifted with self-consciousness. To me, we seem to be perfect beings based on the mechanics of our overall being. I don't see anything that we cannot do on any level of reality. 

     I often seek perfection of myself and I wonder if this is a complete waste of time. Not that I can completely stop if I wanted to. Unless I can...? Part of my life is living through and working with ongoing streams of artifice, fears, and doubts that seem pretty unfounded to me. It seems like this being lacks the light to eradicate them completely, but then again, why do I need to? If the joke is out, it's that we have absolutely nothing that we need to do to become fulfilled, however you want to put it. Life is inseparably whole all of the time. We don't need to stop seeking or be a better person, we can't be a better person really. Maybe in the future, but when does that happen? If we are negative, we are negative. If we are positive, we are positive. Life doesn't judge us, we judge ourselves and we judge eachother. Nothing is outside the scope of what we may call fulfilledness. We are simply ignorant. And it doesn't matter at all that we are, at least in an absolute sense. The thing that stands out the most to me is that we simply are as we are, and the world is as it is. To such a profound degree that it seems silly to worry about what will or won't happen. Life is born and it dies, people have a wide variety of feelings and inclinations and do a wide variety of things. We strive in varying degrees for good and for harm and nothing changes us from being human except perhaps death. We will do bad and we will do good. We will be honest and we will lie and manipulate. We may change for the better or worse. All in all, we are just human beings being human beings. Nothing we can do will take us outside of ourselves, removing us from our natures so I don't see the point in worrying about things if I can help it. There is nothing wrong with our misery. It is natural to be miserable and to experience what is terrible. It is also natural to want to eliminate misery. All of this is to be human. We don't have to do anything to be a human being. The point is, that there's nothing wrong with us, perhaps nothing right as well. We just are the way that we are. And I guess, seeing this feels liberating to me and creates ease in my life. Maybe it will in yours. I guess too, we can relax in stressful times and let the world do what it's going to do. 

Peace trucking bros

No way, the way we are..and..the coming tide

      We search for a solution to our problems or our lives, but I don't think there is one. I don't there is a solution because I don't think there is anything to solve. Not that we don't have problems or troubles, but that we don't need to solve them. They don't need to be solved. The search for a grand solution I think is just an idea that doesn't really have any ground in reality. I think much of our suffering is due to the fact that we are searching for something else than what we have, when as far as I can tell, there is nothing else. Even "God" can never be separate from us, even when we are Donald Trump. The Whole is the whole bowl. I don't think we can pinpoint what this is. I think we can find absolute freedom here, but when I've found it I haven't reached somewhere new I've just come to my senses and been able to see more or less things as they are. I come to the conclusion that this place of boundless freedom is where I always am, I just don't seem to be aware of it much of the time. And it's not something you can cling too, it's open ended.  
     I think in an absolute sense we are free right now as we are. This freedom includes the painful and the mundane. I want to say that the way to find much peace is to embrace life as it is wholeheartedly, but I think this still may be missing the point. I think this still is a way of thinking in which one is turning away from how things are because the present is deemed insufficient. A turning away from a very real suffering, even if in such a small degree. It's also saying that we are not embracing life wholeheartedly as we are now, and that we are selves are somehow inept, lacking a certain quality that would make our lives right. I think this is ridiculous because it is impossible to be separate from life in any way, shape, or form. We may turn away from specific unpleasant forms in our minds and hearts, but everything about who we are is genuine because everything that we are is real. We cannot be less than wholehearted because we exist. Lol. We are always one with the universe. Our hearts are always boundless and full. Sometimes they are just full of hate. Lol. The idea that we can be less than whole is a disconnected furtherance of our meditations on our feelings of lack. We feel weak, lonely, unfulfilled and we assume we must be lacking something quintessential. We don't understand the universe and we assume a great deal about it. It's these assumptions that lead to great amounts of repeated mental head smashings on all kinds of wonderful hard surfaces. But this is how it is!? No I'm afraid not. Nearly everything you believe is bullshit. Lol. What a funny thing.  
     I think we can be and that we can do in these moments whatever we want. Or at least whatever we find ourselves capable of doing. I think the difference between the wise and the ignorant is that the wise person is awareness. The fundamental nature of the two is the same. Both are whole, both are God. Whatever. It seems like the feelings of lack are just that, feelings. Not realities. Not that we should totally discount our feelings by any means. Just that it helps to be aware that their depths have limits and that there veracity is often clouded by judgments, assumptions, and beliefs. 
     So much of how we feel about ourselves is untrue and not real. We are lost in a quagmire of artificial cake toppings that we can't help ourselves from overindulging in. The result is that we are sick to our stomachs. Perverted in our mentation and derelict in the proper maintenance of our lives. To such a degree that it seems almost hopeless that humankind will avert from the devastation of what looks like an impending apocalypse. And also to a degree to which it seems pointless to try and completely overcome the artifice of our daily lives. It seems more appropriate to settle with much of it in contrast to trying to completely rock the boat. At least in the meantime. However great it may be, this artifice can't hold out forever because it is a castle built on sand. 
    Even if we may save the world today or in our lifetimes, we can go to great lengths saving ourselves and probably some of the people we influence. In many ways the great wall of ignorance is cracking and even split wide open. More so today than in the last several thousand years. Let's call this the real furtherance of thought  made by what I'll call in a broad sweep New Age religion (an evolution and synthesis of tried and true wisdom traditions), general progress over the last x-thousand years in science, technology, justice, human rights, depth of consciousness. In many places all over the world, there is strength enough for individuals and communities to experiment with radical ideas that challenge the status quo which is often narrow and unforgiving. I have witnessed this social-consciousness expansion accelerate over the last 10 years growing in great strength and in rootedness. I see the establishing of a culture and a people that has more potential than any other on Earth. A culture based upon trans-dogmatic science and religion. Where the bounds of the intellect are matched by the bounds of the heart and the spirit. This community has my affections because I am one of it's children and one of it's exponents. This culture is not the formation of a new dogmatic faith, it is an answer to the problems and limitations of dogma around the world. It is not one that separates itself from others, but is one with existing communities. It is a exposing to greater clarity of our raw humanity and of the kindredness of all human beings and all life. It is a synthesis of cultures, sciences, and religions. I believe it is the sprout of the next step in human civilization. It is no longer the seed within the minds of a few individuals in temples and monasteries around the world. It has taken rooted and sprouted onto the surface of the world. And I don't think there is anything we can do to stop it. It may me a very small minority, but it's power and voracity is unparalleled. It is a novelty that will infect the entire system in due time because it is the deliverance that we have struggled for and prayed for for millennia. The countless prayers, wishes, hopes, and dreams of yearning human hearts over the millennia has created a maelstrom of karma that is beginning to tear across the face of the Earth. 

     Much of what we know may be destroyed in the process. But, I believe it is the uprooting of the old for the coming of the new. This may take centuries, or even longer. But, a new way is coming and it is clearing the face of the Earth. There is no more room for the old. There is nothing we can do to stop it. It is not simply a human movement, it is a total omni-dimensional world shift. As in heaven as it is on Earth. It has been being born since Christ and before. As it has probably been here before and come to it's time to pass away before. It's breath is in the air if you have the sense to feel it. It may be speaking to you in subtle and overt ways. It is the message of the times. For myself, it is the divine wind that I could not ignore and has apparently completely overtaken my direction in life. In a way I have been born again in it. It is my calling to carry it's light like a knight in the storm to the people on Earth and to see that it becomes the breath of the people that walk among the stones and the trees. It is in a way bringing the people to the Earth and to the sky. As King Arthur was one with the land so shall this come to pass for many others.