Spirituality Guide

by Seeker

If formal or orthodox religion isn’t really religion, what is?

Looking back to early times, religion seems to be a contact with a type of reality which is not a part of that perceived by our five senses. It may be a world hidden from us by virtue of a different fundamental frequency or perhaps one vibrating to a different melody than that within which we live.

Many of the mystics seem to have needed to renounce this world, to back away from the trappings of reality – ‘trappings’ is a peculiarly significant word for this context – to find their way to a new view of things. Science has found our minds ‘ring’ to a variety of frequencies, brainwaves that have different characteristics depending on what frequency they range in.

It’s possible some drugs, such as DMT or Ayahusca can alter our basic frequency and make available new vistas for the mind to experience. It’s also possible the same states can be achieved by dance, drumming, singing praying or chanting. Meditation can also apparently achieve such states.

If so many different things can bring about a basic change of state in so many people across time, it implies something basic in humans that is either a capability or skill, not normally available to our physical lives, to our awareness, when circumscribed to the merely mundane, to the universe of atoms and forces that makes up what we experience with our basic senses.

So perhaps Religion, in its truest form, is the daily seeking of the numinous, the regular practice of the things that take our awareness outside the physical universe and into the presence of Beingness beyond ours. It could be the development of personal awareness of the connectedness of ALL, of how everything comes from, exists because of, and contributes to the ALL-ness that IS.

Religion is not the seeking for God, or the upholding of laws imposed and enforced under threat of punishment, nor even pretending to love everyone because a book tells us to. Religion is instead, the finding of God-in-us, the upholding of personal integrity in an infinite framework and the allowance of Love to grow within as we come to be aware that we are All and All is us.

By Seeker

In the West, and in most formal religions today, we have a congregation being ministered to by some form of oversight. Usually, there are levels of ‘spirituality’ where the average person isn’t really ‘qualified’ or ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘holy’ enough to commune with the Deity. An intercessor is needed; someone with the spirit, the training, or the holiness to be able to intercede for the congregation and bring wisdom or light or interpretation to the masses who can’t achieve this for themselves.

Yet, without exception that I know of, ALL the religions got their beginnings with someone who had a vision, an experience or an enlightenment that brought them to a new state of being. They have then tried to bring the message to all that salvation, growth, enlightenment or whatever are available to all and are a personal experience between an individual and his/her Creator (or the Divine)

Think of Christ. Over and over the Bible tells us he stressed the personal level of experience in being saved, of achieving ‘Salvation.’ He repeated the message so strongly it has been unable to be eradicated from the scriptures, yet right from the start, the Pauline Church placed an intermediary between the people and their God.

The message was corrupted almost as soon as it was issued; thence followed the centuries of persecution and killing to ensure the people never found out they held their own salvation and didn’t need an ‘authority’ to guide or tell them what to do.

Over and again, the mystics, sages, prophets and messiahs have told us that our immortality is our own responsibility and that we need to lead our lives in a way to develop the immortal beingness that is the true ‘us.’

And let’s face it – listening to the pastors, bishops, priests, ayatollahs and popes doesn’t seem to have led us very far up the path of enlightenment.

By Seeker

So, what is religion? This can be broken down further – what is religion NOW and what did it begin as? In Supernatural, Graham Hancock looks into the hallucinatory drugs, how they work (from the inside rather than a chemical treatise on body effects) and why we find similar visions across the world using drugs like DMT or LSD to those painted on cave walls dating back to, as far as we can tell, the dawning of Consciousness.

There appears to be information and answers available in trance state. The ‘Sleeping Prophet,’ Edgar Cayce, would go into trance to find answers for petitioners to resolve problems ranging from illness to a life direction to follow. Shamans down the ages use trance to delve into a person and help their soul on its path through life or lives.

It goes further – Edison and other inventors deliberately pushed what is called the Hypnagogic state to find new ideas and come up with inventions. Societies around the world use various methods from drugs through dance and drums to chanting to find a path into trance. They are all firmly convinced that in trance they can find new information, new paths and ways to follow for the betterment of others.

Hancock is not saying drugs equal religion or god, he is suggesting they offered one path very early in our development to open up a facet of ourselves that we have been exploring ever since. The Indian experience, both recent and from the Vedic times, tells us that people can be happy, or at least content, with very little in the way of material things if they are actively pursuing a spiritual path in life.

Reading across the internet it is fairly easy to find references to the fall of Atlantis 12,000 years back – the tale is one of spiritual beings becoming enamoured of the flesh, finding overmuch attraction in the things of this world and seeking power for its own sake. The bible and other religious texts also talk of the Fall of Man. It can, on one level, be talking about the destruction of the ‘golden age’ of Man by consecutive cataclysms that wiped out civilization not just once, but possible 3 times within eight or nine thousand years, but it could also be talking about a more spiritual fall.

If Man was once focused on the life beyond this, on the pursuit of the development of an immortal Consciousness, and somehow we lost that focus and started to think the merely physical was all that mattered, maybe having such a view triggered by the disasters around us followed by the herculean efforts needed to regain survivability for the race, this could be a Fall from the heights.

By Seeker

Were the people of olden times any happier than we are today? (if, that is, you can describe the modern condition as happy) We have no direct evidence of those times, and from the Vedic tales from India, the Pyramid texts from Djoser’s tomb in Egypt, and the later fragments and myths from Sumer, Egypt and other locations, we find that those civilizations fell from three main causes.

1. Disaster. Flood and Deluge mostly. Empires at their height, brought down by ‘the Gods’ for hubris and arrogance.
2. External nations. People dying out or moving away (taken into captivity) because of strife with warlike neighbours
3. God-strife. The ‘Gods’ misbehaving like the worst of spoiled brats, causing internal strife and bringing down their own empires.

Over and again in the historical evidence we find civilizations that came from nowhere, full-blown in skills, lived pretty much as is with little later innovation except for growing in size, then suddenly vanishing from the record with no trace.

Whatever the reasons for the demise, (and it seems often associated with climate change as the Earth warmed and changed after the end of the Ice Age) what we don’t see in the record, with extremely rare exceptions, is the population revolting against their governments.

It is a truism that people get the Government they deserve, but when things get bad enough, recent history has told us the people get up in arms and revolt. What they get may not be much improvement, but they will storm the cannons barehanded if needed to replace what they see as unfair.

The White and Red Russian parties started a bitch-fight to see who would rule Russia and their depredations were so intolerable, the people brought in Communism – yet at the start of the violence, there were maybe 80,000 communists in Russia. It cost 20 million lives but the people got, in spite of what the West saw it as, a better regime than what the Tsar gave them.

So it seems, the people not only didn’t suffer enough to revolt, but they gave wholeheartedly to projects that must have required massive commitment and resources from everyone in the nation or empire. How many of us would give up our TV’s to fund a giant statue, accept a reduced ‘standard of living’ to help George Bush find immortality or even stop buying imports so our country could build a monument to stand down the ages so people knew we had been here?

Hello readers, and good day or night to you depending on where in the world you are. We have had a guest posting, who prefers going by the name of Seeker, here for quite a while now. The guest posts will continue for a while – Seeker is passionate about spiritual, historical, scientific, etc subjects – so I thought it would be a good idea to check in here.

Due to circumstances both in and out of my control, I haven’t been able to dedicate the time and effort to this site that I have in the past. I would certainly like to do more here, but the 24 hours in the day simply doesn’t permit it for me. Seeker is someone I trust completely to take over writing for this site while I am sorting out all these things in my personal life.

I hope you are enjoying the posts so far. Seeker didn’t intend to write so much on the subject, but you know how it goes when you are passionate about a certain subject, and Seeker is quite passionate about many things.

I wanted to let you know that I’m still here and enjoying reading Seeker’s guest posts. I will be checking in every now and then. I will be back writing for this site as soon as I get everything organized and my life permits it.

Thank you all very much for your time and understanding. If you have any questions or comments for Seeker, don’t be afraid to say so. You can leave a comment or I am happy to pass on any messages.

Have a wonderful and peaceful day.

by Seeker

We have evidence of a civilization that could build megalithic monuments and buildings that defy even modern abilities to duplicate. But in orthodox history, there is no trace of such people.

We have anomalous ruins across the world, built using skills we thought were modern inventions, constructed for unknown purposes. (eg. The major pyramids in Egypt provide literally no evidence they were ever used as tombs; no bodies, no funerary arrangements, and with the exception of some red paint daubs above the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid, currently disputed as forgeries, not one scrap of writing has been found in them)

There are scores, or hundreds, of myths and creation stories that tell of a world disaster, commonly a flood and deluge, that destroyed the previous world and reduced man to savagery. A savagery that ended when strangers came from the sea, with (usually) knowledge, powers and seeds, to rebuild a civilized world using the local tribe as a nucleus.

Now that we can go beneath the waves, we are finding more and more ruins, megaliths and structures, once again without any ‘normal’ historic explanation, that have to have been there for ten thousand years or more.

And all the stories, the myths and mystics, as well as what we can decipher of the lives led by those back at the purported dawn of civilization, point to the importance of a spiritual existence, of following a life that leads, not to increased possessions and money, but towards growth into immortality.

From the earliest times, painted in primal colours on cold rock walls, a spiritual theme has shown up. Among the very first messages to come from the dawn of sapience are those dealing with a world beyond, a world that extends and makes sense of the one we see around us.

The buildings, the temples, the reverence for the patterns of nature and the awe at the existence of Consciousness have all been pointed to the Immortality of Beingness and highlighted the shallowness of the purely material.

We look around us at a world that glorifies the materialistic, the ‘owning’ of things and the consuming of resources. To view our world, one would think we should be the happiest of peoples – after all, we are the pinnacle of all time, the apex of humanity in all our pride and glory.

Yet, in this age, in these circumstances, it is almost impossible to find people who don’t have an escape from life. Be it alcohols, drugs, rage, TV or handing it all to God in abnegation of self-responsibility, we all find ways to turn away from living our lives to the full. As a race, as a civilization, as individuals, we are quite apparently not happy in our lives.

by Seeker

Some of the new knowledge we have come to from science tells us that the Earth is in flux. The surface of the planet is still recovering from the Ice Age, both in climate and in physical effects. The mass of ice, particularly in the Northern hemisphere, was enormous; when that much water is concentrated in one area, the excess weight can change landscapes, alter the albedo of the planet so that more sunlight is reflected away from the surface, and even press the continental plates down into the magma underneath.

The Antarctic is made up of two islands, something not many people realize, with a channel between them. One island is pressed down below what would be sea level by the ice on it. Were the ice on that island to slip and slide into the ocean, not only would the mass of water alter the sea level rather rapidly, there would be a surge back from the island as the magma below ‘popped’ the dimple back out to the normal surface.

As well as the weight stress on the continental plates, there is the effect of huge masses of ice entering the sea in a very short space of time. For example, recent findings show an increase in liquid water under the ice on the Antarctic islands – it isn’t hard to see this water as a lubricant, allowing the sudden slip of a large mass into the ocean.

Not only would this raise the sea level, a sudden mass slippage would cause a tsunami, the size of which would depend on how much ice moved. There would also be climate change as the fresh water altered currents in the ocean and even changed precipitation rates and distribution.

There’s another effect as well; huge amounts of water can be trapped behind ice masses and when the ice lets go, the water releases all at once. Canada was once almost covered by a large lake held back by an ice dam. When it released, possibly due to an atmospheric air burst of a comet, (of which they are finding traces in excavations across North America) it scoured across the US, entering the Gulf of Mexico in such an amount it altered the salinity enough that the life forms changed from marine to freshwater for a time.

Ice dames are dangerous even today – in India there are often unexpected floods as valleys in the Himalayas, flooded for centuries, suddenly empty as the ice holding them back is swept away.

So, it is certainly feasible that the end of the Ice Age brought about massive cataclysms that altered the world. Even today, most of our civilization lives in the lowlands, close to the sea. Were the sea to rise within a day or so, by (say) twenty metres, how much of our world would change forever?

by Seeker

There is other knowledge that is out of place in Time. We are taught about Pythagoras, and how he came up with Pi, the relationship between the circumference and diameter of a circle, yet we have evidence, set in stone, (literally) that shows others knew of Pi.

We have the incredible accuracy of placement of the Great Pyramid and the other monuments on the Giza Plateau – aligned more accurately to the meridians than we could achieve today. Yes, we have accurate ways to measure such things, but to build such a large structure in multi-tonne blocks of stone and have it align so accurately is a task to quail the finest engineers.

Building at all from blocks weighing into the hundreds of tones is not something we do, nor would it be easily achieved, yet the Osieron and other temples in Egypt are built from such massive blocks. And worse yet for the poor engineers of today – imagine if we told them to go build with blocks weighing more than a hundred tones, coming from up to fifty miles away, using no wheels nor machinery, and they had to do it at a height where just breathing is an effort for most people. Tiahuanaco seems to have had super-human engineers.

Back to maps – Admiral Piri Reis set off exploring with a map which is in a Spanish museum now. It has his note on it proclaiming he copied it from older sources, and it shows the East coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast of Africa and what has to be the coast of Antarctica.

The problems are – it’s quite accurate in latitude and longitude, in a time two hundred years before an accurate chronometer was devised, (essential to get accurate longitude) it shows coasts not yet visited and it shows Antarctica – yet to be discovered. It’s not alone by any stretch – there are a number of such maps which show, accurately, things they couldn’t, by orthodox history, have known.

There’s even maps which show the coast of Antarctica… without the ice! That’s something we only learned in the 1950’s and 1960’s when we did seismic testing to determine where lay the land under the ice.

So how can all this information come together? Is there a way to make sense of multiple mysteries and contradictions?

by Seeker

A brief overview of things so far…

Mankind seems to have a capacity for accepting that there is more to this universe than just the mundane. That the physical world has a counterpart, or perhaps alternate, reality alongside or at the base of what we can see, feel, hear, smell and taste.

We have literally no evidence that there is a ‘solid’ reality out there as everything we know, we know via little electric impulses that activate our brains and inform our minds.

Science teaches us there isn’t such a thing as a ‘solid’ world – at the smallest scales we are hard put to find anything at all, let alone anything solid.

Awareness or Consciousness seems to be integral to Reality.

The spiritual awareness of Man goes back to the very first records we have, the cave paintings and has been present all through our history, yet the start of it is lost in the mists of time.

There are puzzles about our history which are difficult to reconcile with the idea that Man’s progression has been an ongoing steady improvement from caveman to nightclub man. These include the suddenness with which ‘civilisation’ appeared on the scene after Man settled down from the hunter-gatherer life, the common ‘disaster’ themes from around the world, the megalithic buildings and monuments left scattered on both land and sea and the anachronistic knowledge we find from the past.

I can hear you asking… what anachronistic knowledge? It turns out there’s quite a lot, but let’s start with one that everybody knows. According to what we were taught in school, Christopher Columbus proved the world to be a ball by sailing to America. Of course, he supposedly wasn’t aiming for America, nor did he actually find it. He thought he was going to the Orient to find a new spice route, and what he found were the islands off the mainland.

But Chris didn’t just sail off into the briny West; he was using maps. And interestingly, when you delve into the maps that were in use by the sailors of that time, a number of them were maps of a globe mapped flat… our Atlases use a Mercator projection to do this, but there are other ways.

by Seeker

As one looks into the past, over and over we find ‘religious’ views. The Ancients were like you and I, pragmatic people, quite capable of reasoning, (even if a lot of us don’t now indulge in the practice) and oriented towards survival. Why would they hold things spiritual so close to their lives? Was it really just a need for a security blanket or a wish to believe in fairy tales?

In the bible we have some rather mysterious stories – the Old Testament contains things that don’t sit easily within the Christian churches. We have people living for hundreds of years – Noah was supposed to be six hundred years old when he started to build the ark. There are giants, and strange beings who come down to Earth and find human women attractive and breed with them. And there’s the flood.

There’s a problem about the Flood – several actually. One is that there’s no evidence that, around the time Noah was supposed to be extant, there was anything like a flood that could be considered big enough to wipe out the known world – and let’s leave out the idea it was the whole physical world.

There is however, evidence of at least one flood and deluge event, and fairly good evidence of more, but the timing is wrong. These floods predate even the Sumerians – we’re talking about events that occurred because of the ending of the last Ice Age.

Another problem is that, across the world, many cultures talk about a flood and deluge event. For all of them it seems to have been a pivotal time. They tell in myth and history of how their civilization got its start after the Flood. Over and again there is a tale of strangers coming from the sea, teaching them the rudiments (and sometimes more) of how to live in a civilized way, and then leaving – usually back to the sea.

If the Noah story is so unique to the bible, (after all, God wiped out all mankind because of the evil in Men) then why do we find essentially the same story across the world? And in tribes and nations which have had literally no connection with the Middle East as far as we can show? And in tribes and nations which clearly predate that of the Hebrews?

by Seeker

According to orthodox history, Man moved from hunter-gatherer to farmer some time around the period 4000BC; there’s evidence found of farming in the ‘Fertile Crescent’ in Mesopotamia. Sheep are supposed to have been domesticated around the same time and area, although why a sheep would develop in such a warm area I find a little puzzling.

Equally puzzling is that, after tens of thousands of years going from sharp rocky things, about a thousand years later we have the beginnings of the Egyptian Empire and four hundred years after that, they were able to build the Great Pyramids that characterize the 4th Dynasty. And the Sumerian civilization that left us the Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Egyptian one by at least a thousand years so we are left with the uncomfortable conclusion that, almost the instant Man stopped being a hunter-gatherer and settled down, we invented civilization, cities, agriculture, sewage, mathematics, writing, astronomy… the list goes on.

Obviously that was one hell of a good time to be alive!

So something smells with the scenario. The dating seems unassailable, the artefacts are there, the pyramids, Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations did exist at those times… so what is wrong with the view?

And this only covers one small area of Earth. Man was living all across the face of the planet by 4000BC. We have other records to look at, in places like India and China, in South America and North America.

There is another point of view that could fill these conditions, but it requires we drop the view that history has been an almost unbroken steady progression from the cave to the skyscraper. It is only belief that things have steadily progressed ever-upwards to our current pinnacle of sophistication.

by Seeker

It may seem I am straying far from the path of Spirituality, but be patient with me, it does come together. There is more evidence of things lost in the mists of time. You may have heard of the ‘road’ they found off Bimini near Miami in the US. There’s more of this type of discovery.

Off the west coast of India they’ve found a number of submerged structures that are very hard to dismiss as anything natural. At least one site shows as a town several kilometres long. Down around Sri Lankha they’ve found more underwater structures that appear to confirm Tamil myths of cities that once existed on the land bridge to India. It would also confirm Marco Polo’s assertion about the modern island being much larger in the past.

Off Cuba, an engineer named Paulina Zelitski found structures at 800 metres depth that show pyramids, walls and buildings that, by orthodox history, cannot exist.

Near Taiwan, at the Japanese islands of Yonaguni, a number of underwater structures have been found and are being investigated. And there are others…

The problem with all of these is that we know, with as much certainty as science can give us, that the waters covering these structures have been there for thousands of years. This means the structures were covered by the sea before conventional history says anyone was around to build them.

Tiahuanaco has wharves carved in stone to take advantage of the opportunities trade and development offered by Lake Titicaca. The problem here is, the lake moved away something around 10,000 years ago.

There aren’t meant to have been any civilized humans at that time.

by Seeker

SO just what is it that started us on the spiritual path as a race? Graham Hancock started as an investigative journalist and has a string of books behind him that have a common thread – that we have, as a race, a history that has been forgotten.

He has travelled the world looking for clues to what we have lost, and he seems to have found them all over. Geologist Dr. Robert Schock has cast a skeptical eye over the Sphinx and provides convincing expert testimony that the erosion on both it and the cutting in which it stands (or crouches) has been caused by long term heavy rainfall. This erosion also interestingly calls into question the face and head of the sphinx – it shows much less weathering than the rest of the monument.

This immediately moves the sculpting of the sphinx back prior to the last time Egypt had such weather – prior to about 6,000BC – and given the heavy weathering along with the evidence it has been restored a couple of times, probably a long time before 6,000BC. You can see the erosion and some of the old restoration work in the photo above.

Hancock, Ralph Ellis and Robert Bauval, among others like Charles Hapgood and Christopher Dunn have caused controversy and name-calling among the orthodox historians and Egyptologists by pointing out, with what must be agrannoying insistence, the inconsistencies in the ‘normal’ historical view of the history of Man.

There are mysteries about the Giza plateau pyramids, about Stonehenge and the knowledge they encode, with Tiahuanaco on the shores of Lake Titicaca and the pyramids at Teotihuacan in Mexico; some of these are known about by most people, even if not in detail. But there are many other places and mysteries that seem to point as well to a forgotten history, as well as reasons why we may have forgotten. And consistently we find these mysteries and histories tied up with a interwoven thread of spirituality and the quest for immortality.

by Seeker

Now all of the above doesn’t really have much to do with the title of these posts. Religious thought gestated in the darkness of the hidden past of mankind; we know little about the time before Man started to record his life and thoughts, but when s/he did get around to it, spirituality was there.

How do we know? Well the first records we have of Man aren’t books or words at all. Cave paintings have been found across the planet, showing all manner of diagrams, animals and strange part human/part animal images that seem to have little basis in reality.

The orthodox view of the paintings is they started very simple a long time back and got more sophisticated as the artists became more ‘modern’ and sophisticated. This fits nicely with the extant view around the world that we live in the highest (read smartest) civilization that ever was, that with all our problems, we have come far beyond anything our ancestors could achieve.

Unfortunately for that view, science says it’s wrong. Some of the most artistically sophisticated images are from right at the dawn of time as far as Humanity is concerned – more than 40,000 years ago, men and women, just like you and I, sat in the dampness and coolth of the caves and painted down their thoughts or memories.

Graham Hancock has a book worth reading about this subject – Supernatural is a book about his journey to find out just what our spiritual sense, our wonderment of things beyond our mundane lives, is about and from whence it came. He has some very interesting things for anyone interested in spirituality to think about.

by Seeker

When we reach down into the tiniest things of the universe, into realms that even the math says are the tiniest things possible, it is natural to be uncertain as to the reality of what we imagine. Strings are so tiny, there is not only no experiment to verify them, we haven’t yet thought of a possible experiment that could work.

One of the finest ‘microscopes’ we have is the electron microscope; it streams electrons at things and we ‘read’ the results on a screen. Streaming electrons at a string is like trying to identify a piece of wool by throwing Jupiter size planets at it. Only worse.

But the theory says if strings are there, they vibrate. In their vibration they create the particles of which we have evidence. The ancients and mystics have talked for millennia of the Song of the Universe and it appears they may have known more than we give credit for. The orchestra is all of the cosmos, the players every piece of mass and energy, the score is mathematics and the music is the combination and interaction across time and space that produces Consciousness.

It may be that our task, as Conscious beings, is to simply appreciate the symphony of creation, to be the audience to an orchestra beyond the wildest imaginations of Beethoven and Bach. Or it may also be that we are here to bring harmony into the Sounds of Chaos, to so order our lives and our paths that we impose scale and beauty on what might otherwise be chaotic dissonance.

Another facet that the Theory of Strings http://www.superstringtheory.com/ brings up is it still doesn’t have a built-in description of awareness. In fact, in Quantum theory, awareness seems to be a required part of the schema; a necessary part of collapsing the probability matrix that is the quantum potential into a settled ‘state’ that then makes up our universe.