Brent

Not even sure "Hearteker" is a real person with a real issue, but >I feel like all I'm doing is letting time pass, I'm just waiting for death. Everything that I do is useless.< Thoughts of the intellect have the capacity to be objective, "Feelings" on the other hand suffer from an illusion brought about by their subjective nature. To "feel" something is to create a false sense of absoluteness. A subjective feeling places you at the center of the universe, and if you are angry, then the whole of creation feels angry to you. Truth belongs to the intellect, it is perfectly fine to feel the way you do, there is a futility to life, and those who face life most honestly like the great poets speak of this. Many people are held aloft by their ambitions, to be enlightened, to be smart, to be one of the evolving ones, they all have a mental "story" that drives them. People keep moving so they don't have to feel, but sometimes life just slows down and the futility reveals itself. Life is simple, have some kind of work that can occupy you during the days, and try to enjoys friends or family when you are at home. Sometimes this balance is difficult because of things we cannot control. But the truth that the mind knows is everything is always changing, sometimes we wait, and breath.

@Zweistein This is a big problem but it is not Capitalism, it is Greed and Materialism. Capitalism is under attack by liberal democrats, especially as Trump is now seen as the poster child for it. Capitalism recently has taken a hit by "child labor" advocates AS IF it were responsible instead of poverty. In a wealthy society, there is little need for children to have to work, there are also more funds available for research and whatnot. Capitalism as just become the newest scapegoat to try to make conservatism look bad, if the pendulum swings it swings towards socialism and believe me, that does not open the doors for research, all it does is give the government more power. Greed and Materialism and the advertising that supports them are the culprits and there is no political solution because politics itself is corrupted by the same greed and materialism and power.

The only people that might truly effectively do this are yogis living in a cave somewhere in the Himalayas, and perhaps not even them. "Experiencing" is an engagement of the emotional reality, and this duality is one of pain and pleasure, and this physical/emotional duality, namely the avoidance of pain, is easily the most influential factor upon the mind. The idea of "Equal poised" in scripture has to do with out attachment to "results" In school you learned every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so does this law disappear when we get into the more complex actions of human interaction, no. People get lost in their own mind game as they play a shell game of "values" in their minds. Writing "stories" about their lives the repeat to themselves in their brains. And by playing with and manipulating "values", they can tilt a story in their own favor every time. So in their pursuit of self goodness, they minimize their faults and exaggerate others, and maximize their goodness while neglecting others. Now imagine all your actions have a good result, and a negative one, one result might make an immediate appearance but the other is hidden for a time. Knowing this then, you stop seeking goodness, you know that every action you perform has the capacity for good or evil. At this point then, unattached to results, you simply actualize who you are, just be you and no one else. Like a seed becoming a flower, it simply grows. And this is not an "achievement", it is like a medical practice, in life we practice this when means we might have to police ourselves often as we try to focus on the results instead of the expressing. We always do things for ourselves, even when we help others. You can only live your life. I'm not sure I fully understand this context, but I am a musician, and a poet, sometimes I hate it, but it has never been my choice. """""""What am I What am I and who are we Budding blooms or paltry weeds Majestic oaks or meager seeds Gallows bound or wedded free""""""

Dreams are dreams, normally they are working out more complex emotions that are tucked away during the day. A bit of anxiety about some bills, and in your dreams you might have craps walking around your feet on the beach. The symbolism in dreams is highly symbolic, if that makes sense, and the best way to interpret dreams is by the context and feelings. On occasion, you might have a vivid dream, one that you can remember in detail, sometimes for years, these can be instructive dreams, possibly sources from beyond your immediate self. Visions, from experience, can happen wide awake, like someone turned on a T.V. 18 inches in front of your face, they do not happen behind reality but rather override reality. It is possible a vision might attain full immersion but this was not my experience as I was still aware of where I was in my peripheral vision. You might not always understand what you see and it is not always necessary because if the vision comes from a higher power perse, it will do what it is meant to do. In dream interpretation, it helps to understand that you are every character in the dream, you ask "what does that person/object mean to me" and then they define themselves. A guidance exercise might be putting a pad and pen beside the bed, you will know its there, then just go to sleep every night,, if you wake up with a dream, write it down. These dream will be those you wake up to write, not necessarily those that ramble around in the morning. This is important, don't attach dreams to some self performance spiritually, it could be you are so dense that is the only way God could get it through your thick skull.

Alright, first off, most people seem only capable of thinking with the mind of the flesh, the subjective experience of which is a duality of pain and pleasure, with the illusion that both possess Being. IOWs, subjectively, you FEEL pain or pleasure and both FEEL real. The mind of the flesh, as it tries to interpret scripture, ends up with a theology where Heaven is the Paradise of ultimate pleasure, and Hell is the place of ultimate pain. This fleshly mind does not only effect Christians, but atheists, tree huggers, new agers seeking enlightenment, we ACT as if we are seeking higher ground but the truth is for almost all of us, is we are running from what we fear the most. The Objective universe, the same universe God created, presents a different duality, it presents a duality of "something or nothing", light/dark, sound/silence, heat/cold, matter/space, truth/lies, knowledge/ignorance. In the big picture, God as Infinite Being, is the only true Something, while the Creation, that includes time and space and all the multiplicity of FORMS such as angels, ants, or souls, are created from NOTHING, and so NOTHINGness, is still the foundation of our beings, though for a while, as temporal Beings, we might appear as something. From dust to dust, out of nothing and into nothing, the Creation was created past, present and future all at once, birth and death are inseparable, that which is seen as the all consuming fire simply consumes everything, it is the universal collapse of time and space and the dissolution of all things created. Listen, souls, just like every "thing" created, will also dissolve, along with the context of time and space that has allowed for even their temporal existence. ONLY God, as the sum and soul of the infinite reality, possesses eternal Being. Do not confuse the Heavens where we might picture angels and such as if they are eternal. Superior to the flesh, sure, but so are the stars and yet this is all part of the Creation. So everything that is created, will also return unto the void from which it came. Salvation, is where within this womb of the creation and its Created souls, God has sent a SEED of His own Nature, that SEED, through His death and dispersal, was able to share His divine nature with those souls who were infinitely dead, as they possessed merely a temporal nature and existence, God enters into His own Creation, to share His own Nature, with those beings which He had created out of nothing, so that He Himself might become, the very source of their lives, and thus when Creation collapses in on itself, God will take His Children into His infinite care. I am sorry to say that Christianity today rarely, if at all understands their own scriptures, preferring the legal arrangement of a substitutional theology, But Christ didn't die simply to take our place, He gave His LIFE to pour it out, thus there is the Spiritual Birth. But if God has not chosen to save you, their is no eternal soul to punish. God might use pain to adjust and correct a person, but He has no ego for which He would be vindictive. God always moves towards the positive, never the negative. If there is a future, then pain might mean something, but retaliation with no positive outcome, that is abuse even in people.

Don't Think

Everything I say would be a lie.

Dear Stretch, you asked so I'll give it to you straight, One think you are running towards something, but the fact is you are merely seeking to avoid what you fear the most. The true Spiritual path is not up but down, its not trying to become something but allowing yourself to become nothing. And I am not talking about the switcheroo of self deception where one pretends to be nothing so that the ego, the very subtle ego, is still hoping to be something. (Something and nothing often having to do with significance) The Universe is a big place, the more you see of it the smaller you feel and the more you will seek to compensate. There was a monk who unlike the other monks never snuck out over the walls at night to visit the ladies in town, he was absolutely sincere in wanting to attain his first samadhi, there was a very holy week coming up and so he decided he would remain upon the top of a tower at the temple fasting and meditating and so he did, but the week went by, and he found himself as he was and decided why bother, and so he slowly lifted his leg over the railing so as to end his life. He did not jump, there was no hurry, his mind did not obsess, he had simply let go of his ambition. It was at this point that he attained samadhi. This is a stage that cannot be faked, suicide is not even important in the story, he simply stopped thinking about himself. Now here is a truth you need to swallow, a man can never possess what he HAS, he can only possess what we GIVES AWAY. If you give love, then you burn that fact into reality itself and nothing in the universe can contradict that, people can write books about how selfish you are, media can carry it across the world to where every human being actually believes you are selfish, and yet if you have given it, the universe will know and you will know. So in practical steps, start thinking about something nice you can do for another, you don't have to know the mysteries of the universe, rather allow yourself to be insignificant, be vulnerable, be broken, but be wise.

"Windintheleaf" Using the symbolism of the bible, God HOVERS above the waters (formless void), then He speaks. "Speaking" engages three principles, The Father Creator as He "wills", His Breath (Holy Spirit) as His Breath acts upon the void, and that same Breath forms a Seed within the Creation is known as His Word (breath given form). Now God did not create in the past, that is our perspective, His voice continues to stimulate the void causing it to wave as such, so as long as Creation last, so is His voice continue to intone (sing). Since God Himself, as the Infinite something is undivided, He does not parcel Himself into the Creation, rather He looks upon the infinite nothingness and His Spirit, like breath upon a bowl of water, generates the compression that cause the nothingness to vibrate, produces patterns which appear to us as the universal constants and wave interference becomes matter as we know it. In quantum physics waves are particles and particles are waves depending upon how you seek to measure them but all matter is merely vibration, in this case everything in creation is created from nothing. OK, that's the big picture, now lets consider it from our perspective within the Creation. Within the Creation everything is finite, its vastness might give us the appearance of it being infinite but it is all truly finite, and within the Creation there exists no actual infinite. Potential Infinites yes, as there is "potentially" and infinite number of even numbers, but the true infinity of that can never be reached, as soon as you start counting you would always be counting and never reaching. Creation has a beginning, time and space a womb whereby we might exist for a while, and then a collapse, an ending, and these attributes of finitude are universal. (I should also add that Creation involves two distinct dimensions, namely the Heavenly and the Earth (matter), the Heavenly is superior, but even as it manifest a multitude of forms, so does it reveal its own finitude). The Infinite of God as in the Creator, exists apart (Holy) and unto itself and does not intersect the Creation except as His Breath is the mediator. From God's POV, He is the true reality as we are the potential, existing as if we are a dream. For example, take a car, now add a million years before and after and look all at once at that 2 million years, how real is the car, its identity is as if it were a passing face in a cloud. Things seem real to us only as we are observing such a narrow band of time and space, but from the infinite's perspective we are still nothing, waves created on the surface of the waters that will disappear as soon as God withdraws His Breath. People will ask me if I think God exists, my response if that I am sure God exists, I am just not so sure about us. Without the Infinite's reality, even this finite reality (so called) could not exist, so of the two He is always the reality. Yet as His Breath continues to direct this Creation, so then is His Spirit available, but His Home, the direct presence of the Father is beyond all of Creation even as His very Being is different from ours, as Infinity exists forever beyond our grasp, finitude never able to attain to it, God is not so much in the Creation as the Creation is in God, being merely a drop in the Ocean of His Being, as it were.

Is this a true question???? Without time, we would not exist, the "I am" of the soul could manifest no consciousness. So would you merge with God, no. The Infinite transcends Creation, it is ONE and it belongs to the consciousness of God as the Creator. To surrender our "I am" is to return to the nothingness from which we were created. It is, as it were, infinite, but infinitely nothing, not infinitely something. The only way to transcend the finite is if God Himself, His own Being, first enters into you. Christianity teaches a substitutional theology where the created soul is assumed to be eternal, and the death of Christ was payment to stay God's hand from punishing us. This is easily contradicted as God alone possess infinite and eternal Being. This theology is due to the influence of the flesh that divides life between pain and pleasure, hence paradise or torment. What Christianity all too often has not understood is the true mission of Christ. God creates the Creation as a womb, within that womb are created beings who can exists as long as they are protected from the all consuming Being of the Father (Creator), then into the Creation God sends a SEED of His own Infinite nature, in the heavenly realm that seed is YHWH, then YHWH incarnates into the flesh as Jesus, by His death, so was this seed, this divine nature, able to be incorporated into the create souls, now these created souls share in the Life Being of the Father (Born of the Spirit) and are made one in Christ as Christ has become there very source of Being. When the Creation collapses, ends, so that seed which came from the creator will return, and with it those souls, having their identity stabilized in Christ, can merge with the Infinite. God maintains the Infinite as ONE and one Being, and yet He brings children into the fold. So it is that Infinite is ever expanding. That the simplest version I think I can do here.

To gain enlightenment you must first search for truth above all else, but to see truth, we must first examine our instrument which is the mind. The mind has a bad habit of filling in gaps, you hear thunder and then the power goes out in your house, the mind uses past experiences to leap such a gap with its desire for cause and effect, but in truth, neither event may have anything to do with the other. The mind also perceives its own concepts, you see a river and think, "OK I know what that is", but then do you really know the river or simply what is in your mind. The mind also has set laws that we have placed within us when we were young, a classic illustration is Scarlett Ohara standing with her fist to the sky swearing "as God is my witness, I will never go hungry again" at which point her live was driven to manipulate her reality, losing even love in the process. The search for truth takes a great deal of mental courage, most of which is the courage to be vulnerable as such a state in abhorrent to us. We generate many "stories" in our heads to explain, excuse, or justify, but stories, like lie, possess no Being and sooner or later evaporate into the nothingness from which they were created. But truth offers something and that is Being, it is reality, unfiltered, it is living and breathing. Abstract truths can be relative but what is truly true abides forever. Now as for Enlightenment, it is not an all or none principle, we might consider their are some milestones though, breakthroughs, but if you search for enlightenment, such a search encourages the self, to uplift the self, the search for truth is to uplift God as the source of all truth for He, as Infinite Being, IS truth just as He IS love. The inner teachings and stories of Buddhism and Zen are designed to help one understand the mind. Meditation can help one watch the mind, because truth is everywhere apparent, the problem is our inability to see it, but it is not hiding. One more thing, prepare to be lonely, truth is a mental exercise few master, but even if one does, it does not necessarily bring peace because people are still people, and most of us desire relationships. So if enlightenment means freedom from pain to you, you might be disappointed, that is an illusion many who claim enlightenment project, a good percent of the population do not feel emotions very deeply, the fact that they are steady does not necessarily mean they are truly enlightened, just some thought for you.

Stop thinking about it as a religion and consider the possibility it is a political system disguised as a religion. As an imitation, so there are some good things like alms and such, but in all other ways, it growth, etc... it functions as a political system. Islam began by taking a tribal deity (Allah, moon god) and investing him with Omni qualities borrowed from Israel and Christianity. Mohammed, lived in a culture dominated by tribal societies, under Islam and conquest, he united these warring factions under one umbrella, but in doing so "conquest" was established as its form of growth. Since it is power based at the core, it knows no limits and will not ever be satisfied until it dominates the world. That being said, many people practice a more peaceful version of it, most people just want to live their lives and get along with their neighbors, but Mohammed was a conqueror and as such the scriptures reflect that. I apologize that this might be offensive to some, but having studied nearly every scripture in the world and religious practices most people have never heard about, this is my strong opinion.

The Five Gates Surely our eyes are aflutter with light Yet the thunder resounding, escapes from their sight Our ears are awakened to the slightest of sounds But a smile from a friend, it can nary be found To see, to hear, to taste, and to touch Each sense being bound by its own design, inasmuch To know only itself, and to all else be blind Circumscribed in its view, by its own nature confined Knit within the body wherein our souls now reside Five fountains of knowledge, so defining our lives How much more of the world might there really be If between light and sound, we had senses to see Could it be then that this world, is more whole and complete Awash by all the Heavens, replete with many angels just out of reach And these gates we supposed, would enlighten our minds Are forever blind to the prose, as they can discern only rhyme And the soul that we are, and its form in between Cast down and out of Eden, into darkness unseen To sweat and to toil, beneath the shadow of death And its many sins presumed hidden, by this mantle of flesh Will in death find greater dimension, from the senses then released Freed from this worlds subtractions, so will our vision greatly increase And our judgment revealed upon us, as we see though different eyes Naked have we been all our lives, and likewise, our motives and our lies So then who is more blind, than the man who can see Lost within a forest, so he perceives only leaves Who is more empty, than the man who thinks himself full And who is more wise, than the senseless old fool

I am not totally conversant with Leo's views, but I do know that very few people can even begin to understand the Infinite (not saying he doesn't) Our consciousness exists only as we are localized within time and space, in the Infinite there is no "here or there or then", its oneness is all encompassing. It is space and time that allows for even the temporary existence of any consciousness other than God as He is the One consciousness of infinity. But within time there is a "now" and a "here" wherein the "I am" of the soul can manifest. And so we are conscious only as time and space allows for such a multiplicity of localities. But from the Infinite's POV, as God creates, the beginning and the end are the same thing. His consciousness does not need time for His sense of self awareness. From His perspective everything He intends to happen will happen as it is fixed, creation being His dream as it were, His idea. Evolution implies something can become something it is not already, Maturation is a better concept, from the seed to the flower so was the flower always within the seed. As our physical bodies grow and mature, from fetus to child to adulthood, our body follows those limitations inherent within the seed of the body, its DNA. Even psychologically as we mature it is a process more of discovering what we are rather than any ability to change what or who we are. And so life is the mystical dance, everything is fixed, the creation is already whole and complete, but our consciousness is slowing moving through it, discovering what we are, discovering our path even as we walk it. Everything about you is not "working out" although in a time based system it seems that way, Everything in fact already IS.