home | what's new | other sites | contact | about

  

 

Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Editor's Essay: 

Truth is a living thing

 

 

return to "Truth" main-page

 

At age 45 I happened to come across an article on the near-death experience. I’d not heard of this before.

In those days, I assumed that an afterlife report represented “just how it is” over there, everywhere. Like visiting any US city, we expect a certain uniformity, the usual McDonalds, Home Depot, and Walmart.

But it's different over there, there is no homogenous texture to society.

In “The Wedding Song” I quoted Andrew Jackson Davis, the great mystic and spiritual teacher of the latter 1800s. He speaks of his visions of Summerland, corroborated by many others. He tells of a wild-west commotion, all shapes and sizes, concerning what he terms “brotherhoods” dominating the lower sectors of Summerland.

Jackson reports of groups representing the Catholics, the Muslims, the Shakers, and indeed every religious sect; some of these groups go back thousands of years to the Gnostics, and to the ancient Egyptian mystery cults, ones who still believe in Ammon Ra; groups devoted to philosophies of ancient Greece, Babylon, and other early civilizations; groups representing primitive peoples, such as the American Indian and the Australian Bushman; there would also be the Flat-Earthers, the New-Agers, the Pythagoreans, and the Platonists; groups promoting atheism, polytheism, or animism; groups divided according to country: the Germans, the British, the French, and every nation; groups who live like Gypsies, just wanting to travel all the time without putting down roots. We could list many more; it’s a zoo.

All of these groups, like Kipling's "Just So" stories, would attempt to sell you a cosmogony, their theory on how the universe works and came to be.

The multiplicity of paradigms is actually more varied than this. In the “500 tape-recorded messages from the other side” I presented a synthesis of this hodge-podge of views over there on “how life works.”

And I finally saw that all of it could be divided into two major philosophical camps, represented by (1) Father’s Benson’s reports, versus (2) the cosmic narrative put forward by what I now term “the insane 500.”

These two dominant gestalts or metaparadigms or overarching blueprints for the meaning of life – like a tree’s main trunk bifurcating into primary branches…

… can be characterized in terms of those who live according to perceptions of (1) the true self, the inner link to God, and (2) the false self, the dysfunctional ego.

But the result of this differing foundation is more than competing opinions. Over there, where the principle of “thoughts are things” gathers to itself enormous strength, we learn that a strong focused intention, especially if supported by a group consensus, can actually create an alternate reality; or many of them.

This is why we have this riot of differing reports. It’s why Swedenborg, in his astral travels, met Christians on Mars, Jupiter, and other planets. It’s why there are reports of people encountering a “rock star” glitz-and-glamour Jesus over there. It’s why many among “the insane 500” experience the “seven levels of heaven.”

We could go on listing all sorts of conflicting versions of reality. For those living within these illusions, it’s all very real to them. They walk on solid ground and live in solid houses as do others. And they are convinced that “this is the way it is.”

Some years ago, during my early investigations, I visited a Spiritualist church. The ministers on staff were psychic-mediums. And they made much of the fact that their church had been founded upon the teachings of a particular afterlife entity, a kind of “patron saint”. In the main, these teachings were alright and represented part of the truth, but it quickly became evident that the church and its ministers were not interested in any other good information. It had to come from the “patron saint” or it wasn’t valid.

Later I realized that this closed mindset pretty much reveals how all of the “brotherhoods” in the next world operate. They might have part of the truth, but that little they possess is tainted by a certain narrowness and bigotry. They’re not really interested in objectively exploring the truth, for the sake of loving the truth, but only a clinging to – like a child’s security blanket – or an identification with, some distant august one’s opinions on how things work. They’re afraid to veer from Dear Leader. You can feel their fear. What is the underlying fear? As usual, at core, it’s the ego’s terror of annihilation.

It’s commonly said that people need "heroes,” people are sheep and need “leadership,” need “inspiring examples” to guide their lives. Well, a good example and heroic icon, taken in moderation, can do us no harm. However, fundamentally, no, we do not need these to better ourselves. Children, for a time, do need guidance and leadership, but only as “training wheels,” until they come into their own. Children should be gently guided to discover their own "inner riches"; mainly, by asking questions, leading them to perceive the "two selves" within.

But, the religiously-minded will question, should we not be like Jesus, or be like Buddha, or Mother Mary, or Krishna, or some such untouchable. Should we not be asking ourselves, what would Jesus do, what would Mohammed do, what would Buddha do? While we do not wish to be disrespectful to any stellar figure who’s gone before, what they did in their lives was for them, is not transferable to our account, and cannot help us. The fact of the matter is, nothing external to ourselves can take us to where we need to go.

Now, if you haven’t looked into what I’m about to say, it might give you pause, but I can’t tell you how many channeled sources I’ve come across that say something like: “We are in touch with very advanced teachers on the other side, very ancient, very wise, they speak from the highest sectors of heaven, way high on Mount Olympus, and from their lofty vantage point, they really know, they really see what's best for you, and so you really need to accept all we say about these uniquely elevated ones.”

Except that there’re so many of these "uniquely" supreme teachers; and, worse, they contradict each other in their omniscience. And, by the way, when you were so impressed by their empyreal zip-code, did you bother to ask from which side of the tree they were sending their purported pearls of wisdom?

If we transition to the other side in a frame of mind – like the church with its coddled and vaunted “patron saint” – identifying with this-or-that heroic blessedness, we will quickly take our dysfunctional and stultified place among the thousands of “infallible” philosophical brotherhoods over there.

Krishnamurti was not a perfect teacher, and when he died certain troubling facts came out about his life, but when he was right he was right, and he was right about the concept of “truth is a living thing.”

What does this mean?

Well, it’s difficult because “truth” is not actually a thing, as such, and to label it is to limit it. It’s related to Universal Consciousness, which has no coordinates in spacetime, neither is it an energy to be located on the electromagnetic spectrum. The best we can do is talk about process. But, even here, Krishnamurti would caution, "truth is a pathless land," we can't "bottle and sell the truth-discovery process for 29.95". It could be a little different for each person.

Nevertheless, how can we find “the truth”?

In my youth I operated on the premise that truth was in the Bible, and for many years I devoted my spare time to this study. Many would have agreed with my then-view, we need to find a very wise teacher, or the best religious group, or travel to holy places, or sing loudest in church to receive “the spirit” – but, as we’ve intimated, all of these efforts to find the truth assume that “it’s out there somewhere.” And this is the crux of the problem.

In many Word Gems articles we’ve discussed that the truth, or God, or ultimate reality, is to be found within the deeper person, the sacred soul. However, granting this, what does it mean, “truth is a living thing”?

I wrote the following for the "life.1-minute" page, but it helps us here, too.

 

attempting to define life and consciousness

K. Elenchus, it occurs to me that the reason why we see things more clearly when we enter the state of “no you and no me” is because, as we’ve said, what we are as “persons” is not a stand-alone entity before God.

E. This can be confusing because the Little Me Ego constantly preaches separateness.

K. It has its own agenda. But in reality we’re extensions of God, each of us a subdivision of Universal Consciousness, and not separate at all.

E. As Dr. Kastrup said, we’re like whirlpools in the same pond.

K. And so there really is “no you and no me” but only an illusion of separateness. No wonder we see more clearly when we mystically enter “no you and no me.”

E. It’s funny, the very word “individual” means “undivided”.

K. That is strange because we use "individual" to indicate “separate,” which is the very opposite of its literal meaning.

E. And the word “person,” too, means “mask”; again, the separateness is just a mask we wear.

K. Another false reading.

E. And so, what would you say, Kriss – what are we exactly?

K. Well, we have this sense of a thing called “I”, or a perception of self-awareness.

E. The term “ego” itself means “I” and imparts a feeling of self.

K. And "self" is accurate, but only to an extent. We are separate, but not as stand-alone entities, only “wholly owned subsidiaries of a parent corporation.”

E. I like that.

K. We say that we have “consciousness,” we say that we have “life.” But we have nothing of and by ourselves for what we have derives from a central Source.

E. From a larger perspective, it’s more accurate to say that we, not have but, “are” consciousness and life; because, beside these, there is no “me”.

K. We’re falling deeper down the rabbit-hole here, but when we say that we have self-awareness, a sense of “I,” this would mean, I take it, that the essence of Universal Consciousness is a perception that “I exist.”

E. Kriss, it’s noteworthy that one of the famous names of God in the Bible is “I am that I am," the self-existent one.

K. The original writer or shaman of that document channeled this information from higher sources. It's one of the accurate things in the Bible. And so we, as derivatives of God, experiencing a sense of “I am,” are in fact affirming that we're part of Universal Consciousness.

E. And how would you define “life”?

K. Fundamentally, what we call “life” is not a product of chemicals interacting – these merely sustain and perpetuate, but cannot originate.

E. They are editors not authors.

K. Yes, very good, editors not authors. And so it seems that “life”, necessarily so, is inherent within, or naturally flows from, Universal Consciousness, along with self-awareness. All these are indissolubly united, with no division possible.

E. You can’t have awareness without life. Can we have life without consciousness?

K. Many would say that consciousness resides only with higher-order entities. But maybe this isn’t totally true as even a stone, filled with the "life" of quantum activity, “knows” its place in the cosmic order. (See more discussion in "The Wedding Song".) But I think Dr. Sheldrake was onto something when he said that “consciousness is a quantum field of possibility.”

E. We confuse the definition of “life” with things like heart-beats and blood flow, but there are entities in worlds beyond ours, more alive than we, who don’t necessarily have heart-beats.

K. Mortals are prejudiced in favor of bodily definitions. But as we look at the issue more closely, the heart-beats and blood-flow are just a transient feature for lower-level creatures. The real essence of life has to do with Sheldrake’s “quantum field of possibility.”

E. What would you say this means for us still weighed down with the mortal body?

K. I think it means that each of us is a vast field of “no upper limit”, unbounded potential for growth – growth toward emulating Source.

E. We’re waiting for you to say, “oh, that little thing.”

K. I was getting to that.

 

 

Consciousness is synonymous with, is the source of, what we call life. It’s not possible to have one without the other. But this “have” strictly speaking is incorrect. It’s not so much that we have or possess consciousness and life but that these become the essence of what we are.

Truth means reality, “what is,” and when we say that “truth is a living thing” we indicate not that it has or possesses life but that truth itself, reality itself, is consciousness, is life. Universal Consciousness, of which we derive, is also Universal Life, Universal Truth.

The problem with the thousands of “brotherhoods,” in this world and the next, is that they always want to say, “we’ve really got this figured out, we’re the last word on how things work.” But these disdainful haughty could never be correct in this assertion. Truth can never be absolutely quantified, defined, mapped, pinned to a chart for study. This is so because – truth, consciousness, life – are merely words for the unfathomable essence of the nearly-unknowable Great Spirit. And good luck to us trying to put a picket-fence around this, saying, “we’ve really got this now, we really know.”

And so how shall we access “the truth as a living thing”?

Not by allying oneself with the right “brotherhood” or right set of teachings. Some teachings might be right or true enough but, if they are, we will access them in a more authentic way. As we “surrender and accept,” as we become an “open channel” to the personalized instruction of God, one will be led, almost every day, by insights, brief “sparks” of illumination. In this process, a kind of "living thing" that cannot be pinned and labeled, we will be led, over the coming years and endless time, into “truth,” into reality. And what is this “truth”? Nothing less than a growing perception of the Mind of God.

There is no end to this "discovery" of God. She needed to invent eternity to play it out.

“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength, and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.” Nikola Tesla

 

 

Editor's last word:

I think I gravitate toward the brotherhood and sisterhood of the Troubadour Guides who teach that Twin Soul love is the best way toward spiritual maturity. But the right way of "joining" a group is by way of loose confederation, with personal sovereignty intact, not a federal, top-down government. There can be no surrendering of sacred autonomy.

Summerland civilization, unlike that of the Earth, is not built around power-structures of the group, the institution, or society, but, instead, focuses on the individual, the growth and development potentialities of each person. We need our freedom and autonomy to negotiate this pursuit of individual happiness.