Spirituality Guide

By Seeker

So what is Truth?

From the outset, all we know of the Ancients tells us that they venerated the quest for immortality, the search for the fundamentals of Life. Those fundamentals were apparently things beyond the merely physical.

The cave painters drew on the walls the symbols and visions they experienced while in altered states. Shamans reach into the otherness to find solutions for troubled lives. Mystics give up any shred of comfort or luxury in their quest to find the Real. The Egyptians apparently devoted their lives to ensuring their leader found his/her way into a realm called the Duat, (a very defined location in the sky) to dwell with Gods forever.

Along the way, most of these sought very specific knowledge. Knowing the details of the Precession of the Equinox, the steady progression of Ages through time was important. Knowledge of the Ages and when they end, and how they end, was apparently crucial.

It seems a strange mix of knowledge. What we have of the Ancients talks about knowing details that they, according to modern views on how primitive they were, couldn’t have known about the real world, right alongside images and instructions about how to act, where to go and what to know, after one died.

Religion seems to have been formalized as a way to pass down this sort of information. But it is carefully encoded; none but the Initiate can find the full meaning of the stories, the parables and allegory contained in the various ‘scriptures’ that have been passed down.

Over and over, similar stories are told across the races, the nations and religions. Look at the Noah story. For one from a Judaic religion, Noah is Truth, but the story is told over and over across realms never dreamed of by the Hebrews. And when we look, we find the evidence tells us, while the tale may be truth, it could not be so for the Hebrews – it is a story brought forward from older times and altered to fit in the new story of the Judaics.

The God of the Old Testament doesn’t make much impression in the realm of sanity unless one takes into account the possibility the He is an amalgam of a number of God stories from the Ancients. The times before the first Flood must have been marvelous, but after three or more such events, the remnants of knowledge were hard to retain. Myth and legend were brought in to play. Tell someone a dramatic story with the needed details encoded and they will pass it on almost unchanged, to their progeny.

By Seeker

Science has failed us as a tool. Logic was useful for some time and brought a revolution to the way we live, but it has become a tool that kicks back against the user.

Dogma has replaced the ability to think o7utside the box. If you try to open new ways of thinking, you will meet resistance. Science says you should be asked questions, be required to show how what you say provides answers. Instead, new thought is required to fit into how things are currently being seen.

If Einstein had been required to show how his ideas fit within Newton’s world, he would have remained in the Patent Office. Instead, he moved beyond what Newton saw. In this time, even those who try to use scientific method to show new knowledge are castigated and have their reputations attacked by the orthodox.

Rupert Sheldrake has some new ideas about PSI effects – he conducts large scale experiments to try to show ephemeral effects at a scientifically acceptable level – he gets ridiculed for trying.

What are they scared of?

Egypt alone has questions unable to be answered by orthodox thinking. Even if the Egyptologists are correct in their ‘history’ there are questions to be answered. To combat those questions, they remove the questioners from Egypt, they gather in numbers to ridicule the theories, and they ignore the inconvenient questions.

How did people who had only copper and then bronze, carve out granite? How did they make small radius curves in stone seats, or ‘drill’ into granite to make small bowls and vases? How did they align multi-million tone structures so exactly to the meridians? And if you can answer that, WHY did they do it?

Science should be addressing these issues as puzzles; instead, those who raise the questions find themselves cast beyond the boundaries, labeled and ridiculed as cranks or, the ultimate epithet, Conspiracy Theorists.

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

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?

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

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

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.

And now for the third part in Seeker’s series on The Birth of Religion.

The Birth of Religion - Part 3
by Seeker

What is it to be human? A part of it is our ability to think and reason, but another part of it is our wonder and sense of awe at the scale and content of the world around us.

Reason tells us that it is at least a possibility that the universe exist only in our minds. Those considered wise among civilizations throughout history tell us over and again that consciousness, spirit, beingness, or whatever name you give to the essence that is us, is all there is. That we create the cosmos around us and that without awareness there is nothing.

Whether or not this is so, Einstein’s Relativity tells us of the importance of the Observer, that it matters from where you look as to what you see. Quantum Theory seems to tell us that Consciousness is an integral part of the universe rather than just a facet of it. In science there are theories that the Observer affects the results of the experiment, including some quite strange results that seem to say the results change in strange ways.

Mystics talk of this world being just one place among many while science talks of the possibility of many dimensions. So why is it we see only this realm?

Our senses are not really enablers for our minds. Rather than opening us to the cosmos around us, when looked at realistically, they instead limit our view. Out of the huge range of the spectrum of light available, we ‘see’ only a tiny slice. Our ears pass very little of the possible spread of sounds that occur around us. Our noses have nothing like the sensitivity of the animals we keep as pets and we can feel only things which directly contact our skin.

All that it takes for a world to exist that we can’t perceive is for it to not react to the wavelengths we can see.

Today Seeker joins us again for part two of “The Birth of Religion” series.

The Birth of Religion - Part 2
by Seeker

Why do we humans think of things other than this purely physical world? What evidence is there that the world of the senses isn’t all there is?

A problem for those who teach in schools and who decry the idea that there may be more to life than making money and buying ‘things’ is that we actually have no real evidence that there is actually a universe out there. The physical view of things demands we accept evidence that the universe is ‘Real’ and that any other view has to provide real evidence that it has a right to be held as an alternative.

But what is ‘Real’? When an event occurs in the universe, (if it actually does) then in some way, that event creates an effect that has to impinge on our senses or we cannot know it has happened. From the moment it impinges on our senses, it becomes a series of electrical impulses that cause chemical reactions within cells. The impulses travel rapidly along the nervous system until they reach the brain where they cause and are affected by a series of reactions that include triggering previous memories and being ‘coloured’ by emotions based on past experiences.

Then and only then, do we become aware of the ‘event’ that triggered the process. At that point, if things go as they should, we think about all the information that comes attached to the signal, we come to a decision and we react according to rational thought.

But we need to realize – at no point do we have any real evidence that anything actually happened. Everything we know, everything we see, feel, smell, taste or hear is a construction of the mind interpreting the signals coming into the brain. In all we have learned of the physical world, there is nothing that allows for us to reach beyond those tiny signals coming into the brain and constructing our entire view of the universe.

Yesterday I talked about being moved by a video I watched and how it made me feel. It was amazing to me that one person was doing one small thing, but by doing that one small thing, he was connecting people across the globe. It was a beautiful sight to see.

Matt is not the only person doing beautiful projects and connecting people across the world. There are a lot of projects out there just waiting for more people to discover them. It inspires me to no end when I find a new one.

I recently found a wonderful site called HopeRevo.com where people all over the world are leaving anonymous messages of hope and inspiration.

When I have a little more time to work with, I will start working on my HopeRevo pages. Hopefully I’ll be able to take pictures of them and post them here as I make my progress. I’m not quite sure what materials I’ll be using just yet, but I am looking forward to it being a lot of fun.

If you take part or would like to take part in the HopeRevo project, please let me know. Link to your blog or website in the comments or, if you don’t have a site, just let us all know how you’re doing in the comments section.

I would like to start talking more about things like the video I posted yesterday and the HopeRevo project because it fills me (and others, I hope) with hope for the human race and what we can achieve together. At the very base, most of us what to connect and feel connected with other people.

If you have any sites, projects, or anything else that inspire you and help you to feel connected, please let me know.

Just in case anyone is offended by the title of this post, I would like you to know that the title comes from the website URL and video title that I will be talking about below.

Recently I was looking through my friends blogs and saw that one person had put up a video. This person often introduces me to funny/interesting things and new music, so I certainly wasn’t going to pass it by. However, upon watching the video, I had a reaction that puzzled even me, who was reacting.

Before I tell you what the reaction was, I’d like you to watch the video:

This video was made by Matt, who now runs WheretheHellIsMatt.com. What he does is basically what you see on this video; he travels to places all over the world and videotapes his strange and funny dance. As you can see in this video, he sometimes gets people to dance with him as well.

How did I react to seeing this video? I got teary-eyed.

Yes, as strange as it sounds, this video very nearly made me cry. As you can imagine, that puzzled me.

I was not crying for sadness nor for extreme joy. For many minutes after watching the video, I sat wondering what exactly I was feeling.

I think that in these days of rising prices, global warming, terrorism, war, etc, that we get run down. Sometimes we realize it, sometimes we don’t, but we get run down by all these images and stories of what is horrible and rotten with the world. It is because of that that I almost cried when I watched this video.

Matt makes it clear that the message of this video is whatever you think it is. I take it to be connection. That we are all human and we can all have happiness. We can all work together if we so choose.

Please take from this video what you will and pass it on if it makes you feel anything good. Because there are too many people out there who are run down and down realize it. Too many people who truly need a glimpse of hope.