Once I told Kitabu Roshi that I felt like an atheist madly in love with God. That’s even more true today. It’s hard to describe what the shift in my spiritual perspective feels like except to say, as I do, over and over, that “it’s not about belief”:/spirituality/its-not-about-belief/.
What I can say is that the general theistic idea of God as “someone” “up there” or “out there” simply no longer resonates at all. For me, it’s more like what the Christian mystics Meister Eckhart or Hildegard of Bingen said, “Isness” or “Thisness.” And because I exist, and everything that is exists, nothing in existence seems removed from This Isness, This Being.
It’s like how aware is a fish of the water? How aware were you, one second ago, of the air you were breathing and living within? That’s about how aware I am of God 99.999% of the time. In a strange way, it’s also like because God is so much, he also isn’t, as well.
What’s changed is that I had a concept of God before, that I could look at, and say yes, I believe in God, he’s like this, this and this, all apart from my feeling divine presence, and sensing This. Now, when I’m not aware of him, there’s like nothing there—it’s not like I don’t have any beliefs at all, but there’s a kind of emptiness, and it’s not “empty” feeling in any way. It’s like there’s no object. You might consider it like the hum of a refrigerator, or the soft, high-pitched ringing in your ears. It’s always there, but it’s never there, unless you’re quiet or you listen for it.
But something wonderful happens when I just stop. Stop wanting, stop worrying, and just stop. I don’t even try to “meditate” anymore, at least, not as a deliberate focussed activity with intention and technique, but rather to just stop, and feel the stopping. When I do, God is here, over-powering, undeniable. There’s no point in “believing” in God then—that would be like “believing” in warmth when you’re drenched in sweat! The only thing I can say in this stopping time is “I love You, Lord.” And that overwhelming feeling of love is the only thing that really seems to be there in just being with the One who just is the root of all Being.
So being an atheist madly in love with God isn’t quite as schizophrenic as it sounds!
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.
The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a WALL!”
The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, “Ho, what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a SPEAR!”
The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a SNAKE!”
The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” quoth he:
“‘Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a TREE!”
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a FAN!”
The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a ROPE!”
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
Moral
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
I changed the menu on the top from a large DHTML menu to a very light, fast, mostly CSS-driven menu. The old menu utilized over 30 KB of dense code, but this one has only 12 lines of JavaScript, plus some CSS. I’ve wanted to make the change for a while due to bandwidth considerations. It’s not a problem yet, but if this site keeps growing in popularity (and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down), it soon would’ve become a problem. As it was, that menu alone accounted for nearly a quarter of all my traffic. This should reduce the server load considerably.
The “About” pages have been expanded into a little “about” section; About Central is the index page to the section.
Tonight, at 12:01 am, an era ends: the last Star Warsmovie will be released. I’m looking forward to seeing Revenge of the Sith. I haven’t re-posted any of my earlier pages on Star Wars movies because I’ve been waiting for the final installment of the saga. I suspect it will cast many things into a different light.
The Star Wars era isn’t the only one ending, however. Last Friday, the final episode of what looks to be the last Star Trek series was broadcast. I’m sorry to see it go?Enterprise was a darn good show, and I felt that the most recent episodes were the best. Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) wasn’t the most gung-ho and adventurous captain, but I would rather have served under him than the histrionic Kirk or perennially uptight Picard any day. Trip (Cmdr. Charles Tucker) and T’pol were superb characters. Connor Trineer brought Trip to life in such a way you felt that he was someone you actually knew. T’pol (Jolene Blalock) introduced us to a fascinating and turbulent era in Vulcan history, before Vulcans became so “Vulcan.” And Hoshi was a reluctant crew member who didn’t like being in space very much at all.
The writing was usually excellent, except for the third season, which was wasted on the Xindi war. Enterprise had an earthiness (no pun intended!) to it which hadn’t been seen on television sci-fi before. It gave us scenes of throwing footballs in a low-gravity cargo bay, of cornfields in the Midwest, of metal catwalks in Engineering that you could almost feel rattling underneath you.
Its humans were very human, and made more than their share of mistakes. In the first season especially, it seemed almost every decision Archer made was wrong (What do you mean ‘cultural contamination?’ We’re going to help them!) Hate to break it to you, but when we become newbies exploring other solar systems, we’re going to do what newbies do best?screw up. I only hope that when we do, we do it with as much genuine goodwill as the crew of the Enterprise NX-01.
We live in an explosion of spiritual writing. In addition to tons of recent books on Christian inspiration, there are breakthroughs in scholarship, archaeology, and an ocean of writings on meditation, the New Age, and Eastern religions. In the flood of information, it’s only natural to wonder—What do I read? What will help me with something I don’t already know? What will be forgotten in five years, and what will endure?
Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now is a superb book already being hailed as a classic. Although nothing changes about enlightenment itself, Tolle has a wonderful new gift for teaching it. Dramatic teachers of enlightenment have sometimes described their transformation by the Divine Presence in startling terms, saying “I am God,” and such, which might highlight the profundity of their transformation, but does little to help their disciples to understand the way in. Other teachers, such as Thich Nhat Hanh, say almost nothing about enlightenment per se, and instead concentrate almost exclusively on the way in, mindfulness. Tolle strikes a middle ground; although he places greater emphasis on the means, he does not play down the profundity of his enlightenment. And no wonder! Enlightenment actually saved his life. He was near the point of suicide when suddenly he came to the realization of the false self and the true self, and awoke the next morning to a world of wonder which he’s lived in for years now.
time is mind
Eckhart’s genius as a teacher lies in his insights which may never been as clearly worded as before. The core of Eckhart’s understanding of enlightenment is that the “mind” (in the sense of conventional thought, feelings, sense of separateness and ego) is inextricably tied up with time (past and future). The way to get out of the activity of mind—the false self—and into the awareness of true reality is to step out of time, into the Now.
The Now is not part of “time,” but is simply how eternity is experienced by finite beings. The time is now. It is always now; it always has been now, and always will be now. The concept of past and future is a function of the mind, recalling past Nows and anticipating future ones. The past gives a sense of identity, (and thus the sense of being separate from God), as well as resentment, regret, and other emotions. The future gives hope for better things in the future, as well as fear and anxiety. Both sides of time remove us from the present moment, which is the only place where we exist, and where God exists. Salvation can only happen in the Now.
a brilliant clarity
Are questions and objections starting to surface in your mind? Great. The entire book is arranged in a Q and A format, answering questions such as yours. And Tolle’s answers are always lucid, understanding, and genuine, with the conviction of someone who knows and is not just guessing. Furthermore, Tolle’s suggestions are practical. Although like many enlightened teachers before him, (Jesus, the Buddha, St. Francis, Peace Pilgrim) he lived homeless for some time after his transformation, he later returned to the world of work, and gaining insight on how to use the Power of Now in day-to-day life. A particularly insightful chapter is “Enlightened Relationships” which goes beyond all popular surface psychologizing, to the real issue, (almost never discussed), that underneath it all, we want others to do what they cannot: bring us into ultimate happiness, and they can’t, only realizing our own connection with the Ultimate directly can bring us into that level of fulfillment. Because of that, relationships need to be worked on from the standpoint of the present and being, but from projecting the other with impossible demands.
Another important aspect of Tolle’s contribution to the enlightenment literature is a neutral language. Eckhart occasionally uses phrases from Christian and Buddhist spirituality, but prefers to use neutral words which are as objective and clear as possible. For instance, he says “Being” and “the Unmanifested” instead of “God,” to avoid the problems caused by our conceptions of God interfering with encountering the Ground of Being. Phrases like “realizing your connection with Being” are much less likely to cause confusion than terms such as “becoming God,” from early Christian mysticism. The non-dramatic language helps us accept that enlightenment is obtainable, and its neutrality is equally accessible to people coming from different spiritual traditions, as well as those coming to spirituality for the first time.
portals into the unmanifested
Of course, simply reading The Power of Now won’t make you enlightened. As Tolle would say, only “intense presence” can do that. However, throughout the book, he gives numerous exercises to touching the Presence. (One of which, feeling the inner energy body, is very like S. K. Goenka’s vipassana method and quite similar to the practice in the short 13th-century Christian classic, The Book of Privy Counseling.) Another “portal” is to listen to the silences between sounds. Tolle gives numerous other examples of how to make everyday life, as well as meditation time, into spiritual practice, no matter where one is on their journey. His idea is to cultivate the conscious, awakened state of mind, and gradually make it your dominant state of being. Tolle knows that Awakening isn’t to be sought, but experienced. Now.
His insights are sometimes startling in their profundity. He has a succinct definition of enlightenment: “your natural state of felt oneness with Being.” His answer to whether love is a portal to the Unmanifested is, “No, it isn’t….Love isn’t a portal, it’s what comes through the portal into this world.” How true, since God is love.
Do you want to go beyond devotional spirituality? Do you want the Presence of God to transform you into That likeness? Read this book or listen to the audio version again and again, and practice the techniques continually. As of this writing, I think I’m getting a glimpse of the other shore.
Brian McLaren, one of the leading voices in the emerging church, wrote this excellent piece, “Kneeling with Turtles,” in Dream Seeker magazine. This is good stuff. In it McLaren actually discusses enlightenment, although very briefly. In What’s all the Pomotion and What is Church, I had written that I hadn’t seen the emerging church touch upon awakening / enlightenment / theosis yet.
This is a start—the potential is there. (On the other hand, it was published four years ago!)
I missed Fight Club when it came out nearly six years ago. But it looks like the timing was about right. If I had seen it then, I wouldn’t have been able to understand it as well as I do now, and I would’ve dismissed its spiritual themes out-of-hand. And yes, it DOES have spiritual themes. Sure, Fight Club is primarily a punch in the teeth, but it’s much more; It’s a black comedy, a rage-against-the machine manifesto, an apologetic of nihilism, an indictment of consumerism, and an alternative take on enlightenment, with some ringing and frightening questions to ask ourselves and the world. There are some spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to do that first.
The protagonist of Fight Club, (played by Edward Norton in an amazing performance) is unnamed, but for convenience, I’ll call him Jack, which he very obliquely calls himself in the film. Jack is not only lost, but all the tranquilizers of modern life are wearing off, and he’s beginning to feel the cosmic suckiness deeply. He’s tortured by his cruel job that weighs the value of human life against the company’s bottom line. Desperate to wrench a purpose from the offerings of McCulture, he tries to find happiness in possessions. “I flipped through the catalog and wondered: what kind of dining set defines me as a person?” (The next shot pans his apartment with IKEA catalog prices and descriptions showing beside every piece of furniture in the room.)
Jack longs to be someone else, someone who is free. On one of his many business trips, he muses “If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”
His torment is beginning to affect his health. He can’t sleep, and in the great American tradition, asks his doctor for a pill to fix everything. Instead, he’s given a different prescription: tuning into pain instead of avoiding it. When he goes to a support group for testicular cancer (which he doesn’t have), Jack is amazed at the release that comes from hugging and crying instead of repressing pain. Having found the cure for his insomnia, he starts going to a different support group for every day of the week, and finds that in being able to freely weep, he’s able to freely sleep.
Trouble enters Paradise, however, when Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), another healthy support group “tourist,” starts attending all the same groups he does (including testicular cancer!). Her presence cramps his newfound emotional freedom. They agree to split the groups between them, and fight over who gets what: “Bowel cancer? You can’t have bowel cancer, I want bowel cancer!”
Soon Jack finds himself without a home, his apartment and all his possessions having been destroyed in an explosion. He turns to Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap salesman he met on his last flight. Tyler seems to be everything Jack feels he isn’t: confident, contemptuous, and above all, free. Jack was in search of a meaning for his life, but Tyler wants nothing except hard-edged reality itself.
Jack: I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete. . . . Tyler: We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra. Jack: Martha Stewart. Tyler: Fuck Martha Stewart! Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all going down, man!
Tyler goes on to inform Jack that “the things you own end up owning you,” which I believe St. Francis of Assisi said as well. Tyler’s style, though, is hardly Franciscan. Tyler introduces Jack to another way of working with pain: creating it and embracing it. He asks Jack to hit him as hard as he can. Tyler returns the favor, and voilá, instant male bonding sans hugging. Jack moves into Tyler’s house, a condemned squalid mansion which is more painful to behold than any of the ensuing fights. (Think of the toilet in Trainspotting getting an hour of screen time.) They become the best of friends, regularly beating the crap out of each other behind their favorite watering hole.
Soon other patrons beg to have their turns in the bare-knuckle matches, and Fight Club becomes a weekly event in the bar’s basement. (Eventually, the meetings become daily). A silent communion grows between members even though no words are spoken. (The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.) Jack begins wearing his bloodied shirts and bruises to work as though they’re the cutting edge of fashion. “I got in everyone’s hostile little face. Yes, these are bruises from fighting. Yes, I’m comfortable with that. I am enlightened.”
When Marla calls Jack after she’s taken an overdose, Jack walks away, but Tyler saves her. Soon they’re involved in an intense sexual relationship, much to Jack’s annoyance, although she only talks to Jack (the reason for which becomes clear later on).
Tyler has a disdain for almost everything except awakening Jack from fear and malaise; he’s a rogue guru with the perfect disciple. By losing all his material possessions and moving into Tyler’s pigsty, Jack has renounced worldly comforts as much as an ash-covered sadhu in a cave. And he does make progress. Jack increases in confidence and awareness: “the cries of the men were the tongues at a Pentecostal Church, and every Saturday night we were born again; we were redeemed.” The scene where he finally decides to leave his job is as funny as it is shocking, and will resonate with anyone who’s ever felt trapped in a soulless environment.
You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
—Tyler Durden
Lessons progress from slugfests to horrible ordeals (a chemical burn, a self-inflicted car wreck, and more), which Tyler forces on Jack to make him “hit bottom,” because Tyler insists that “only when we lose everything can we do anything.” However unpleasant this may be, enlightenment teachers have been saying it for millennia. Jesus said: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains but a grain of wheat.”
If the first act is a black comedy about consumerism, and the second, the drama of a brutal education, the third act is a surreal revolution. Tyler begins giving destructive (and often funny) homework assignments to other Fight Club members. One group sabotages an environmental poster to say “Did You Know You Can Use Old Motor Oil to Fertilize Your Lawn?” Another group commits precision-arson on a skyscraper to turn it into an enormous happy face.
Jack determines to stop Tyler when he discovers that the former Fight Club (now Project Mayhem) has spread to cities across the country, morphing into an all-American terror network. Like bin Laden, Tyler has some dramatic financial targets in mind, although Project Mayhem goes to pains to make sure no one dies unless it’s one of them.
The Tyler Durden School of Enlightenment
Jack’s final transformation is in realizing that he is not a separate person from Tyler at all. Although this twist is familiar by now (I can think of four other titles with the same surprise), its spiritual meaning really comes through here: there is no separate person; there is just One only, although there are different bodies and different wills. Jack had the enlightened teacher within him all the time, and as he progressively released his perceived needs—possessions, job, nice enviroment, fear of pain, fear of causing pain—he began to uncover his true nature—unbounded, free, powerful, and finally capable of love.
There’s a reason why no religion teaches awakening until first creating an underpinning of morality, namely that awakening is not dependent on morality. Without morality and compassion, Brad Warner cautions in Hardcore Zen, enlightenment can make people even worse creeps than they already are. Goodness is about the needs of beings in Creation, but awakening is simply realizing the truth that all things are one, all distinctions are false, and you are free. An awakened person can either be a savior like Jesus, a saint like Francis, a sage like Lao Tzu, or a nihilistic rogue like Tyler Durden. Even the Bible teaches this: Jesus said, “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free”, and St. Paul said that “all things are permissible, though not all are beneficial.”
To an outsider, it appears that Tyler cares only about the permissible part, but he sees himself as guided by an internal vision of what is truly beneficial for the world. He will do whatever is necessary for Jack get past the lies of the world and experience the freedom of his spirit, and he extends his “guidance” to others. In one scene, he successfully motivates a convenience store clerk to continue his education and realize his dream. (Tyler does this by pointing a gun to his head!) Tyler explains that having been giving a new lease on life, the clerk is going to live more fully than he ever had before.
Hollywood Jesus has an excellent review of Fight Club by Simon Remark, who also sees Tyler as a spiritual teacher. On the discussions page, another reviewer considers Tyler a Christ figure. Glenn Jordan points out:
The men gather not to inflict violence on others, but to have violence inflicted on them. This to me is the key to the film. FC was established for those men who have been numbed and brutalised by the culture they live in. Everything that Durden does is designed to subvert the intentions of the thuggish and to awaken the senses and the spirit of those who have been numbed to reality.
He goes on to compare Tyler using his blood to secure the basement from Lou to Christ using his blood to redeem his followers from Satan. Jordan also sees similarity between the entrance test for Project Mayhem to that of religious orders like the Benedictines, with evidence of determination and renunciation.
However, others compare it to the Hitler mystique, and caution that Tyler is dangerous, violent, and obscene. You almost certainly do not want Tyler to be your teacher, and you absolutely do not want him to be your waiter! You also have to ask if Tyler is any better than the world. Just as the meaningless consumer culture emasculates men, he uses the threat of emasculation to control the police, and even himself.
Personally, I’m glad for the moral cushioning that religion gives the world, and I’m very grateful that my teacher is a much nicer fellow than Tyler.
The First Rule of Project Mayhem: You Do Not Ask Questions
So here are some questions you shouldn’t ask:
What is the moral difference between exporting Communism, exporting jihad, or exporting democracy through invasions and revolutions?
Is our way of life really better when tens of millions of Americans find it unendurable without medication?
Is it better for thousands of people in a country like Iraq to die every year through crime and insurgencies or through totalitarian oppression?
If capitalism enslaves people, is it right or wrong to oppose it?
What is the difference between Jesus violently turning over the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple, and Tyler’s assault on the corporate temples of power?
Is Tyler/Jack simply crazy? Does he get better?
Do the members of Project Mayhem become free, or have they just enslaved themselves to Tyler instead of mainstream culture?
Is there more purpose in wars than in boxing matches? Underneath the rhetoric, justifications, and apparent causes, is the violent drama in the world ultimately an attempt to alleviate cosmic boredom?
Does Jesus want you to be a good citizen?
When you think you have the answers to these questions, look at them again, and ask yourself, Am I sure? How do I know? How do I really, really know, apart from conditioning?
Amoral characters are exceedingly rare in mainstream film. (We like our heroes good, and our villains evil. It distracts us from the difficult truth that the light and dark, yin and yang are simultaneously within us, that we are created in God’s image, the ultimate source of both what is perceived as “good” and “evil.”) Besides having an amoral character, Fight Club also surprises by not taking sides. You are free to draw your own conclusions. In fact, “You are free,” is really the only message.
Throughout the day, I’ve gone to Yahoo! and refreshed the page to see if there’s been any more news concerning the Pope.
I’m 44 years old, and I was raised Baptist. After a born-again experience that radically changed my life when I was 13, I devoted myself to apprehending as much as I could of what God had for me. The adventure took through every major expression of Protestantism, and 10 years ago, into the peace and turmoil of the Catholic Church (and beyond). I’ve never really known a Catholic Church that wasn’t headed by Karol Wojtyla, the pope known to the world as His Holiness, John Paul II.
By the time you read this, chances are that John Paul will be “dead,” a word that I have to put in quotes, because any mystic knows that there is no such thing as death. But his smile, wave, and sometimes-infuriating tenacity will be gone.
Most popes have been chiefly administrators of the Church. John Paul II was a maverick. He traveled to every continent and nearly every country of the world, praying for peace and preaching peace. Behind the scenes, he would meet with dictators and urge them to practice tolerance. He was instrumental in preventing the democratic movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from going the way of Tiananmen Square.
He lobbied consistently on behalf of the poor, against the exploitation of poor people by rich people, and poor countries by rich countries. He argued for dignity, fairness, and kindness to all, since all are created in the image of God. He fought against war and the death penalty; he had seen up close the horrors of war and killing, when the most terrible seizure of brutality that humanity has manifested enveloped his country.
He never wavered in proclaiming Christ as the Savior of the world. Yet he reached out with kindness and love to leaders of other religions, and invited the world to dialogue. He publicly asked God’s forgiveness for the Church’s past sins.
To many Catholics like myself, his weaknesses seemed to be in his official role of governing the Church. He resisted the reforms of Vatican II, and interpreted them as narrowly as possible. He scaled back the ministres of laity within the Church, as the priesthood continued to wither away. He often seemed unable to give the grace to more progessively-minded Catholics that he would give to the world in general. Proponents of change often found themselves silenced or censured, such as Matthew Fox OP, Anthony deMello SJ, Leonardo Boff OFM, Tissa Balasuriya OMI, not to mention dozens of lay teachers. The Church remains a largely pre-modern institution in a post-modern world, locked in Thomistic views about sex, birth control, and the capability of women to minister.
But whatever else can be said of him, he gave his all. He gave his heart, his hope, his health, and his life for his convictions and the world. He loved God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, and he loved his neighbor as himself. He will be missed, and he will be remembered.
Requiescat in pace, Papa Johannes Paulus.
Frontline has an excellent biography of John Paul II.
My friend Bob Griffith (Hypersync ?), a soon-to-be-ordained Episcopal priest, put up an excellent post, asking “Why? ?” He deplores pre-emptive war, and the support of so many Christians behind it:
>Why are our innocent civilians any more important or valuable than are innocent civilians in any other country . . . especially if we consider how God views us all? . . . I cannot say they don’t understand, because these are intelligent people. Yet, it seems they simply cannot see; they do not seem to understand. The crime, in my opinion, is that many of these same people claim Christ as their example–their attitudes, ideas, and actions are so contrary to the example and call of Christ that it is mind-boggling.
I couldn’t possibly agree with Bob more. Millions of Christians have little awareness of the actual teachings of Christ regarding universal, unconditional love and generosity. The question remains, why? I believe it’s largely that we do not understand what the Gospel is. The original Gospel (Good News) wasn’t about “believing in” Jesus, but the News Jesus dedicated his life to proclaiming and demonstrating–that the Kingdom of God is here. At hand. Within. Spread out upon the earth. To be in the Kingdom of God means that God’s presence is felt everywhere, that God is in control, not the self. The Kingdom is present when the ego is absent.
I believe it isn’t seen because it’s unacceptable to the ego. And so the Good News shifted from being the teaching of Christ, to the gospel about Christ. This is not nearly as threatening to the ego, which can choose to “accept” it or not, but still retains control.
The ego objectifies whatever it can. Realities such as regions of the earth are abstracted into concepts like “country.” We’re further indoctrinated into believing that there is “my” country and others are “foreign” countries, and their citizens’ needs are of a much lower priority. A lot more becomes “mine” to disguise simple reality. There’s *my* heritage, *my* race, *my* religion, *my* property, *my* desires, *my* rights, which are important. What’s yours is up for consideration. Or dismissal. Or labeling. Iraqi/American, saint/sinner, man/woman, gay/straight, black/white/Oriental, and most of all, good/bad.
The ego is like the surface tension bounding a drop of water. To fall into the sea seems like death to it, but the surface is not the water. When the drop falls into the ocean, the water is not damaged, but it is now without boundaries, connected to all the water in the ocean.
Jesus often used the metaphors of birth and children. Be born again, born of the Spirit, he said. Receive as a little child, or you cannot enter the Kingdom. Little children know nothing of the thicket of illusions that form the ego. Another child isn’t an Iraqi or an American, but a friend.
We need to know that concepts and distinctions are games of the mind. While they’re essential to
playing in the Matrix—working, living, thinking, building — they remain games. Reality is still unchanged. It’s the Kingdom of God.
Tonight, at 12:01 am, an era ends: the last Star Warsmovie will be released. I’m looking forward to seeing Revenge of the Sith. I haven’t re-posted any of my earlier pages on Star Wars movies because I’ve been waiting for the final installment of the saga. I suspect it will cast many things into a different light.
Throughout the day, I’ve gone to Yahoo! and refreshed the page to see if there’s been any more news concerning the Pope.