Tuesday, January 31, 2012

How to be passersby


The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
- Susan Sontag

Apropos sound alienation, thanks to TCG and Biblegateway for these interesting bible verses: 

John 15:18-21 

18 "If the people of this world [a] hate you, just remember that they hated me first."

19 "If you belonged to the world, its people would love you. But you don't belong to the world. I have chosen you to leave the world behind, and that is why its people hate you." 


I suspect that alienation is a necessary step towards Awakening. 

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Steps (and rest)


What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.
           -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.
           -- Ovid

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

What god can do


Even God cannot change the past.
           -- Agathon

I'm a little astonished at the postulates people are willing to put forth about what God can or can't, or will or won't, do. How can we possibly know? It's like amoebe claiming to know what humans can do.

As a simple example: let's say God changed the past so that ants became the intelligent race and ruled the earth, and humans numbered a few thousand, cowering in trees. Well, the present might change as well, and how would the inhabitants of this world know that it had ever been any different? Heck for all we know, ants were our masters until last week, when God got bored and changed it all. 

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Be a doubter


If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. 
- Rene Descartes

Monday, January 9, 2012

the "Zebra Personality"

Have you come across people, particularly various kinds of spiritual teachers, but also other kinds of leaders, who obviously have a lot of light and wisdom in them, but can also be nasty, vicious people? For example they will be very loyal to a friend, but if they decide that the friend have "betrayed" them, they will see him like the devil and treat him like caca.

I call them "zebra personalities". I see that in this lifetime they have made a jailbreak attempt from this world and the ego, and they made a very strong one and got very far, which is why they can be so inspired and inspiring.
But they only made it half the way. And because they are very strong people, their Ego is very strong too, and this sudden collision with The Light of Source made the ego freak out and go into super-high gear.

This mixes with the blessed part of their personality, and you get a person with almost no grey tones, only stripes of black and white. Thus the "zebra".

You would think that such light and such darkness could not co-exist in one person, and normally they can't, but we are talking about very rare, exceptionally strong and bright people, and they can hold together a functioning personality even though the conflicts between such strong light and darkness would tear a normal person apart.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Doing the Work Of Good is hard work


I’m reading “Living with Miracles”, new book by D. Patrick Miller. 

He quotes from the Course about how Harmless and Helpful goes together. I was reminded: 
LR Hubbard said that a man is as happy and productive as he perceives himself to be dangerous to his environment. 
He said he’d realized this after he'd been walking home one night, and he was threatened by three drunk sailors. He “handled” them in the violent fashion of one of his own fictional heroes, including a broken bottle into the face of one of them. And after that he said, he was super-productive and on top of the world for days! 

You’ll notice that for this to be true, a person must be basically on permanent and essential war footing with the whole of the rest of creation. 

BTW he may have just made it up (the fight), but doubtlessly it was in line with his beliefs. He saw himself as the greatest spiritual king of ages, battling alongside a ragged bunch of incompetent but lovable rascals against incredible odds, to literally save not only the Earth, but the whole universe and all universes beyond it from the otherwise inevitable slide into something which would make Dante’s Inferno seem like a day at McDonalds. 
Literally, no irony, no metaphors, no exaggeration. Saving the *whole* of creation, by himself with a little help. 
And his enemies were similarly great, of course, with “Xenu” being the yang to his Yin, the evil being of evil beings, who apparently also almost single-handedly engineered the “downward spiral” of the universes since time began. 
And so it goes without saying that if you have to main and kill at little at times in order to achieve such ends as Saving Civilization, that’s trivial. Nay, admirable, because you did what you had to without hesitation or fear of reprisal. 

Funny enough that last philosophy is echoed by many hard-science-fiction authors, like Robert Heinlein, Algis Budrys, van Vogt, Orson Scott Card, Jerry Pournelle… 

Of course it’s just a slightly bigger vision of the whole “Dirty Harry” syndrome of the Ego’s, that if there’s evil out there, you kill it. And if you happen to find pleasure in such killing and maybe shoot a few times more than strictly necessary (notice how Dirty Harry movies (and "Unforgiven") always end in an orgy of shooting), then that’s of course only because you’re the Good Guy and you enjoy doing the Work Of Good. 

And you know that you are the Good Guy because you are doing the Work Of Good. And, er, vice versa! Perfect logic! 

And you know who the bad guys are, because they shoot first! Except of course at times when you, the Good Guy, has to shoot first to stop the Bad Guy from doing it. It’s all obvious and can be seen by everybody except those who are either Enemies or Traitors. (And the number of traitors which can stack up by a really great Good Guy is fabulous.)