Spirituality Guide

There are darker possibilities - I wonder sometimes if it’s the magicians trick - look over there, watch that hand, ooh, voila, I have produced something from where you didn’t see it coming.

I’ve been thinking over how to help those who want us to stop focussing on the negative side of what might be coming and begin to make our minds and views more positive - I think maybe the reason the hidden players are so cautious might be to do with numbers. If significant numbers of people start to focus on an outcome, given the quantum world, maybe that outcome is more likely.

If a small number of hidden people want a particular outcome, what they have to do is either prevent the masses from dream-fulfilling the things the hidden ones don’t want or get the masses to focus on the scenario wanted by the hidden ones. Maybe that’s the reason for the media push into fear, for how only the bad news is reported and the steady increase in hype words used to report things.
eg. the swine flu thing has died in the headlines as people realised it wasn’t as bad as a cold, so they hype it again by announcing that, instead of 28,000 people having it in the US, it’s a million. You have to read down into the article to find out it’s a computer model showing how many would have it IF there are huge numbers of unreported cases - and they say there are because lots of people have had flu-like symptoms so that must be swine flu.

All of it is BS, none of it reported openly or truthfully but all of it reported so, for the large percentage of people who glance at the headlines and turn to the sports, what they see is how bad swine flu is getting.

It creates a fear and helps formulate a view of the world that helps the dark side along. If, for example, there’s a surge in power available for consciousness to change the world in 2012, and (say) 75% of the people are in fear of…whatever, what is the chance that what we all manifest is a world where our fear is justified? Particularly if the other 25% are disordered, equivocal or even in disagreement as to just which positive outcome they want?

So what is coming in 2012AD? Should we be scared, will the Earth end or the forces of good and evil engage in the Armageddon of the biblical stories? Or will it be a time of resurrection of Jesus, a growth in cosmic harmony, or an energetic increase allowing greater awareness to all mankind?

There’s been any number of prophecies of doom or end of the world over the years. The Christians have apparently been awaiting it, and predicting every hiccup in society as being the harbinger of the Christ’s return, for most of 2000 years. Almost every culture has some story of how the world will end, or when, from the Tibetans nine billion names of God to the Hopi returning through a siapu into their next world.

But from the Mayans, all we have is the calendar. To be sure we think we know considerably more of them now than we did fifty years ago, but still all that we have is a date back around 3113BCE plus the 5125 years of a baktun, which brings us to 2012AD. At that point, the calendar ends. At that point, the Age ends.

Almost eerily, but nowhere near as exactly, it is also the time of the changing of the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. It is also close to half the Great year of the Egyptians, when the constellation of Orion reaches the highest point of culmination (where it crosses the North-South meridian) in its Precessional trek up and down the sky.

So we are left wondering about what is coming. Some people are talking a vast surge of fourth dimensional energy to transform the world. According to them some will be ready and will move to the next phase of existence – I’ve never been quite able to work out what these prognosticators think is going to happen to those unable to make the transition. Strangely, all those making this kind of prediction are on the transformative side of the line that determines who goes.

Others see it as a time when Aliens will make themselves known, transforming the world and altering forever our view of ourselves. Still others see it as a crux, a time when the final (?) battle between Good and Evil will rage, fulfilling the biblical prophecies of war and salvation as the Christ comes back to save the faithful.

There seems a growing interest in the year 2012AD, a swell of public concern and interest over what is, after all, a rather obscure relic from the past, the Mayan Long Count calendar. So what is it all about? Why could this be a different date than any other doomsday date?

Well, first, it isn’t a doomsday date. Those implications seem to come from a variety of sources, from people who in ignorance hear the words ‘End of the Age’ and see it as ‘End of the World’ to those who wish to emulate the mainstream media and use hyperbole to attract attention for their book, survival gear or religious dogma.

December 21, 2012 is the date of the Winter Solstice (in the northern hemisphere – summer if you’re south of the equator) when the night of 21st is the shortest night for the north. It’s a date that echoes across religious lines – any number of messiahs and deities have birth dates on 25th of December, three days after the Sun gets impaled on the Southern Cross and the day on which it begins its ‘rebirth’ as it slowly makes its daily path further north each day.

The Mayan calendar is shrouded in considerable mystery. The Spanish Catholics made determined efforts to wipe out all they could find of the Mayan people and their way of life. Every writing they could find was supposedly destroyed, or perhaps, given the voracious maw of the Vatican, transported back there to be stored in their crypts and archives.

By accident, several Mayan manuscripts were missed – they’d been shipped to Germany and France, and for a long time they lay forgotten. Those codices and the carvings on monuments and stone in the Yucatan, have been the subject of considerable debate over the years.

So when someone tells you with certainty, all about the Mayans, be careful what you accept as truth – the chances are they are telling you their prejudices, because we simply don’t know much.

If there’s a definition of implacably opposed, it would say Evolutionist versus Creationist. I honestly wonder if there has ever been a convert from one side to the other since Darwin wrote his Evolution of the Species.

I have tried several times to interrupt the vitriol that builds between these two sides, so I thought I’d take a moment here to outline the situation as I see it.

It seems to me there are a number of possibilities for the start of the Universe and of Life.

1. The Universe starts up randomly, out of who knows what. Almost magically, a set of processes develops which culminates in a universe where all the factors are in just the right ranges for a chance lightning strike on a particular planet to energise a chance combination of molecules into forming the first organelle, From there, a chance encounter of another group of chemicals enable that group to ‘power up’ and become the first life form. Or perhaps the organelle WAS the first life form.

Lots of random chance in there but it can be reduced a bit by assuming a multiverse, so this universe loses it ‘magical’ coincidence of ranges in the basic factors.

The Life then follows the path of Evolution, producing ever more complex entities until multicellular ones come along - then it really takes off.

Somewhere in here is the usual choice of the ‘evidence based’ Evolutionists.

2. Another possibility is the Universe starts up randomly, out of who knows what, and something somewhere ‘guides’ it into congruence with conditions suitable for life. This immediately raises the problem of just what or who this outside influence might be. The path of Life then flows pretty much as in No 1.

3. It’s also a possibility that an energy form was the first ‘life’ and this form set about bringing conditions to a point where they were hospitable to life based in matter.

4. There’s the possibility also that the ‘outside influence’ stays involved in the process, guiding and forming the life in whatever manner it feels is right.

5. There’s a possibility that the outside influence also caused the whole process to kick off, forming the universe, creating the life etc. This has three sub possibilities I think:

a. - the outside influence simply calculated a particular event very finely, ensuring it would produce the results wanted as it happened. Then it set off the event and went about it’s business, maybe checking every now and then and adjusting things and maybe not

b. - The outside influence kept careful control over things, adjusting here, manipulating there, altering a smidge of this and a touch of that to get the result.

c. - the outside influence went ZAP! and it happened, ZAP! and something else occurred, ZAP! and it was so, until at last it had the place it had envisioned before the first ZAP!

This is the one chosen by the Creationists, where their God is responsible for the whole kit and kaboodle, running the show from his throne on high.

A topic on a site was about gurus, talking about people with ideas and concepts, such as the Celestine Prophecy. While the Celestine Prophecy is fiction, it contains some valuable insights into how perhaps we ought to view life and maybe even how to grow in a real sense.

And somebody mentioned, in talking about gods of the past, that maybe, if someone got the people to believe in them, such as the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt did, the subject of all those beliefs might actually rise about normal human capabilities.

I try not to mention that possibility in public - we have quite enough wacko sects and cults out there already. All we need is for nut-jobs to get the idea they can get a few folk to ‘believe’ in them and it makes them God. Scary idea isn’t it?

It was something I thought long and hard about as I looked into ancient Egypt - that maybe the reason for the God-cult for Pharaohs had a basis in reality - that the people honestly believed their pharaoh was an incarnation of Ra or Atum and this made the Pharaoh (and his sister, something normally ‘overlooked’ by the male-centric historians) something more than mere human.

If we are energy beings or even something more ineffable such as fields of Consciousness, then the belief of others could easily ’strengthen’ or otherwise alter a field - and fields don’t need direct contact, they can operate at a distance, something for which we still do not have any explanation, let alone an adequate one.

If all the ‘fields of Consciousness’ that make up a group get together with one undistracted mind, of what might the focus of that group be capable? Maybe the only reason we don’t see it in daily life is the congregations are too distracted by the outside world to truly focus? Might that be the very reason for the ongoing media and entertainment blitzes? If the Christ came back, would He be more than a 30 second wonder before the people who might empower Him ‘changed the channel?’

There’s a problem with Hell. No, it isn’t about how bad it is, nor about how it is the home of Satan nor even how all us bad boys and girls are going there.

The problem with Hell is that, by the bible in its original form, it simply doesn’t exist!

Hell is a creation of the church. In the bible there are numerous places where, in the interpreted and re-written version, Hell is mentioned, but it turns out to be faked. The original words used do NOT mean what the Christian world has come to think of as Hell. About the worst version means the place the body goes when we die. Look it up; there are numerous sites online that will go through the various words and their real meanings.

Hell is a punishment for all the bad people who don’t toe the line as scratched in the ground by the church. Hell is the big stick for those who need the guilt goad, for those who might inadvertently wonder about the con-job that is Original Sin. The ‘if you don’t do as you are told you will suffer forever for your sins’ guilt whip is reinforced by making sex an evil thing – everyone thinks about sex, it is a natural impulse to look at a member of the opposite sex and wonder. So they make it evil and by pushing the message into us while we are very young they ensure that, just as we start to move out into the world and find out who we are, we feel the pangs of guilt which brings the fear of Hell and eternal damnation.

And right there is the church, ready to hear confession or pray for your forgiveness so you get your shot at Heaven.

From the texts of old, the ones that DIDN’T get manhandled by those with an agenda, and from the world of the Gnostics, it is clear that, not long after the time of the Christ, there was a Church of James, the brother of Jesus. This church wasn’t the sort that required large buildings or authoritative messages from ‘superior’ ministers.

The Council of Nicaea comes into this. Constantine, Emperor of the Roman Empire remnant, had a problem. As we see even today, the Christians were intolerant of any other belief. It was bad enough that the mores of the Empire were being ignored by Christians berating anyone who wouldn’t accept their God as the one and only, they were even fighting among themselves as to whose version of God and which version of how to be a Christian was right. Any who weren’t of precisely the beliefs of the one speaking were heathen, sinners and non-believing scum who needed to convert or die.

Constantine got everyone together and hammered out an agreement that would be enforced by the Empire. It ratified the Pauline concept of the Church and selected books for the new bible that confirmed the Christ as the Son of God rather than as a Man. The Christ told us we could do as He did, that we could grow from who we are and even exceed His works, but making Him the miracle Son of God removed that from us and legitimized the Church as the guardian of our souls.

From that moment on, the church ruled. Any who disagreed were excommunicated, thus losing their spiritual future and being condemned into a life away from the Light.

Not long after that, the church invented Hell.

The biggest wrong of the modern churches, the most galring way in which it is obvious they are NOT the inheritors of the teachings of the Christ, is something read out in every Christian church of which I’ve heard. The message of the Christ is that salvation is personal. It is a covenant or relationship between a person and God the Father.

It is very clear in the bible that the only help a person needs in getting close to God is the Holy Spirit. There is no mention in the message from the Christ of anyone being a teacher of groups of people, of anyone needing to listen on God’s behalf to the sins we wish to confess, or of any man being the one to decide what punishment we deserve for our ‘sins.’

In fact, the Christ makes it quite clear there is no penance or need for recompense for sin – all we need do is ask the Father to forgive us and it is done.

So what has happened that these things are seen to be part of the normal way of doing things? While the confession/penance idea might be the province of the Catholic churches, the intercession of an oversight of some kind is common to all the Christian churches.

How did it come about that a personal relationship between human and God got so rapidly entangled in authoritarian oversight and expert interpretation of things that were meant to be personal to each person? Why is it accepted by people all over the world that some fallible human can tell them what to do and how to think about their personal relationship with the Sublime?

Did he really exist? Again the issue is the bible. It is the only real testimony to the existence of a man who might have been a visitation of God. But the bible has reliability issues.

Some claim Josephus mentions the Christ and so is an independent confirmation. A problem here is the writings of Josephus were interpreted by exactly the same people who translated the bible several times. Back in the centuries after Christ, most people could not read. They certainly couldn’t read the Hebrew or Greek of the Old and New Testaments if they didn’t live in either of those places.

The folk who did the record keeping, the writing and copying, and the translating were exactly those who had very good reason to maintain the version of the bible they had inherited after the Council of Nicaea and also an overwhelming purpose in adding a touch here and there to Josephus to ensure an ‘independent’ confirmation of someone mentioned nowhere else.

I’ve also read a pretty solid theory that Josephus was in reality Saul of Tarsus; now there is a character who needs careful examination. The founder of the modern version of Christianity, the tax collector who originally persecuted the Christians suddenly became the champion of them, yet his conversion isn’t witnessed by anyone, his moment on the road to Damascus is evidenced only by his own story.

The Pauline Church was the model on which the Roman Church was built, but in the early days, as we’ve since found out, there were other models and those models seem to follow the original teachings of the Christ far more closely

Given the uncertainties of the writings that have come down to us, it is unfortunately necessary to examine whether there was ever a Christ. One of the problems we have is the main text, the bible, is not only full of allegory, metaphor and parable, it is quite likely written from a mystical point of view, it has obviously borrowed heavily from a variety of other religions, creeds and myths, and in recent times (the last 2000 years or so) it has been picked over, altered, translated and interpreted until it is likely the Christ would never recognize most of it as anything to do with his message.

Is it factual? Well if it is, Christians and most others have some startling facts to absorb. Men and women from the Old Testament lived extraordinary lives. Many pre-Flood lived for hundreds of years; Methuselah lived till nine hundred and sixty-nine years, Noah began to build the Ark when he was six hundred and even after the flood, Abraham’s wife fell pregnant at ninety.

And speaking of pre-Flood, we have the strange story of the Nephilim – beings who were the progeny of human females and (fallen?) Sons of God who found our women attractive enough to come mate with them. Their children were supposedly giants and men of might who rampaged at will through the world pre-Noah.

The story of the flood itself seems to be unsubstantiated if we accept the biblical story. At the time we can work out for the bible’s version there is no evidence of a huge Flood. There is, however, considerable evidence for a Flood that might even have been truly worldwide set in a time thousands of years earlier – in fact there may have been several instances.

This is a vexing question for most people who have an interest. The problem is, there is no solid evidence of such a person. The bible has no direct writings of the Christ, no books, nothing we can point to and say ‘He said that’ – all we have is 2nd hand reports of things he may have said. In fact, all we really have is 3rd or 4th hand hearsay.

You see, the problem is, until recently when some ancient texts were found, the only evidence of the New Testament was to be found in texts that were copies of texts written well after the time of the Christ. Even in our corrupt system, it is difficult to get people to accept hearsay evidence, yet for some reason the established churches demand we accept not only hearsay as being true, but that it is the unchanged and unchallengeable word of God.

Adding to this is issue that the recent texts, from both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi suggest that our books as found in the bible are, to say the least, a limited selection of those available back when the bible was put together. And unfortunately for the established churches, these sources are far more authoritative than the bible – they have been in situ for almost all the two thousand years, they have not been translated and preferentially chosen to further control of an empire, and at least some of them appear to have been written by direct participants of the time.

Sadly, the modern version of Christianity is as little able to adjust to new information as were the times when any slight differences brought Inquisition, torture and death.

As time passed I began paying more attention to working out who I was and what things I considered were ‘right’ and ‘good’ – this came about mainly because I saw myself doing things that hurt others and this would react inside me and make me depressed. Logically I figured that I needed to work out what things I thought were wrong so I could avoid doing them and so reduce the times I felt bad due to my own actions.

It took me probably more years than it should have, probably because of influences like alcohol and dope, but eventually I found a way to begin to like myself. It took more years before I could operate within my ethical limits on a regular basis. I think I’m a slow learner.

But maybe it is just that I am blocked; that veil I talked of earlier is still there. I listen to others talking about what goes on in their minds and I am constantly reminded that mine simply doesn’t work like that. Others seem to be able to look inside and find motives, or see events or actions; I seem to float on a dark sea of Me, where ideas and thoughts come to the surface after an unknown process floats them to where I can see them.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing all the time – I am quite a lateral person, able to connect the dots across wide gaps where none are to be seen. But it is highly annoying when one is trying to work out who one might be. Even finding something like personal goals becomes hit and miss – how does one run a scenario inside to determine if something might be true if one cannot see past the veil to the inner workings?

psychicI stepped away from the church as a youngster. I had no idea of where I was headed but I knew the church wasn’t along my street. Briefly I tried Scientology but soon ran into disagreements and failures there. I’m not sure if auditing didn’t work on me or whether the practitioners weren’t skilled enough or whether maybe the excuse given to me after I left was correct, but failures of the techniques combined with failure to agree with the money-tree approach and I walked.

When I left the church as a teenager, I wasn’t aware I needed a path; I was reacting against, not walking towards… When I left Scientology I pretty much gave up on the spiritual idea. I got into a life of letting things happen. I had little in the way of personal morals but I don’t think I was a bad person, just lazy and cynical.

But over time, little things came to my attention. Some were things out in the world while others were internal to me or based around me. There were new insights into the world that didn’t fit in with a pragmatic solidly materialistic view of how things are. And I pretty much had to accept them – they were coming from Science.

There were events in my life I can only describe as psychic, strange things but not major things. I had dreams that came true, some coincidences that eventually became too much to remain in that category and a developing awareness that the physical could not explain all these things. And I pretty much had to accept them too – they were happening to me.

Lots of people ‘find religion’ as they journey. For them it seems, they can walk a path being pointed out to them and usually accept what they are told and go along with the way they are taught to live. Sometimes I envy them.

I’ve known a few – I grew up in the Pentecostal religion here in Australia, going through the rites mostly as a child, and, as it turned out, being implanted with things it later took me years to find and eradicate. But I’ve never been a joiner. I wasn’t good with groups and failed miserably at fitting into them.

I found later in life that my folks were religious because of guilt and shame. For them, the path preached from the pulpit was a way to escape what they perceived as evil in themselves. Rather than deal with it, (and even in those days there was knowledge around on how to work on yourself) they abdicated (in my view) their responsibility and handed it all to Jesus to deal with.

I’ve seen that same pattern many times over the years – people who aren’t in their church because they see it as a meaningful way to commune with the sublime, but rather who are driven into it by their perception of self as being something less than human. They see the church (of whichever variety0 as being their salvation; for these it is an easy thing to ignore the fact that the Christ said their spiritual journey should be an individual path between them and God.

I’m not sure if they have moments when they wonder if the pastor, minister or priest is correct or if they actually simply accept everything from the pulpit is absolute truth, but I do know that it takes a major event in their lives to get them to question where they are going and how they are getting there.

I don’t think Religion should EVER be a part of school life, but I think an exploration of the spiritual is definitely something that should be there. Show the child there is exploration of the non-physical and let them look if they want. I don’t know what insights might come from allowing youngsters to explore the world they are so close to (as compared to adults0 but to me, that should be the purpose of awakening minds - whole new worlds could open if we get developing minds working on things without having to first fight through the hide-bound rules that get imposed on them by twelve years of authoritative training.

Where might humans be if we’d been allowed to explore, with guidance solely for safety and skills, the world around us as we grew? If we hadn’t had repressive systems mandating not only what we could learn but placing limits on what it is allowed to mean? How many times has humanity been held back, repressed and diverted from knowledge that has flowered later when it burst finally through the dogma, falsehoods and fixed ideas of those interested solely in keeping people under their control? Where might the mental sciences be if there hadn’t been the systematic slaughter of all who showed the slightest sign of psychic or other paranormal abilities - abilities we ALL experience even now at low level?

The Prussian model of education was never designed to free the mind nor develop the utmost capability in children. It was designed to remove the will, crush the free expression, stifle the creativity and produce obedient cannon-fodder. And worse, those who took it and mandated it into the Western societies knew this to be the case.