A PLANETARY AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE

 Two nights ago, at midnight I had one of my flyby thoughts. They usually appear when something is troubling me just below the surface of consciousness. I was remembering an ongoing war I had with my dad over trees, shrubs, and animals. I loved them, he wanted to subjugate or eliminate them. Of course, I responded instinctively because before they are tamed, children fall under the same classification.

From Dad’s Conservative Baptist viewpoint, earth was a war-zone between nature, including human nature and God. We offended God because of our weak character and wrong headedness. Given free will, we followed the law of attraction and Satan offered a delicious, exciting presentation of something appealing beyond the same old, same old walk in the park even if the park was the Garden of Eden.

Dad and I had a complicated relationship. I was a menace because I was always bringing up something that bothered him greatly. He thought if he could get me straightened out and reigned in, maybe the irritants would quit popping up. Of course, it wasn’t really about trees and shrubs, or a bit later, the four-legged beings, I loved, especially cats. It was about hammering misfitting pieces in the puzzle of life into the intended place with a sledgehammer. The very authority of God and the order of the universe was at stake. He had deliberately hardened his heart and mechanized his mind so that nature would stay in its appropriate place as a slave.

Dad believed children were like nature and therefore not yet enslaved to the invisible boss that was always watching us and had spies everywhere.  Children, with their urges, curiosity and questions could get everyone dammed to hell. The Big Boss had already decided not to allow ungrateful and treacherous humans back into the beautiful Garden of Eden. The punishment to the parents as well as the child would be even worse if the child managed to crawl in under the fence.

mom believed this stuff too, but she counted on her naïve helplessness to save her. Surely God would recognize that any rules she broke would be the result of innocent ignorance not any desire to rebel. Besides she was in constant fear and pain and that suffering had to compensate and knock off some negative points. She walked through the darkness with the wide unfocused eyes of a newborn deer, counting on the kindness of strangers. The strangers were often unkind however, and she had a “nervous breakdown,” that lasted for years.

I studied astrology for years but discovered the nature of people told me more about the cosmic actors than the cosmic actors told me about people. For some reason it always worked backward in my mind. Dad was a Scorpio and thus ruled by the planet Pluto, named after the God of the Underworld. Scorpio doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and he doesn’t pull punches.  His children expect the same from the supreme boss. They are tough and can eat rotten steak and drink vinegar. The degradation of matter seems to fascinate them. They can take it straight about the final fate of every living being, and they aren’t escapists.

Hard as I tried to believe this view of reality, I couldn’t accept it with resignation and hope that because I was a baptized Christian I would go to heaven. Just because heaven was only somewhat better than hell, it wasn’t any place I would want to live in for eternity. As I got older, I had terrible nightmares, of the second coming of Jesus. The story was that Jesus would one day appear on a cloud and draw all his followers to heaven before the unbelieving world was sent to hell. I didn’t want to go to either place, but I had to keep it a secret. I had many nightmares about Jesus unexpectedly appearing on a storm cloud surrounded by lightning bolts. His arms were outstretched, and this was it! On one of these last nightmare ascensions, I fought so hard to stay on earth that I was literally turned inside out. So began my descension into an entirely different reality. Now I see this incredibly painful flaying as the actual beginning of a rebirth, although it took many years to understand this, I really was born again and it began a process of being born, again, and again, and again. I’ve lost many skins. I now see this 3-D space/time planet as the place where we prepare for ascension to a higher state of being.  Probably there are many other dimensional iterations of this planet that exist simultaneously, I sense that this is so, although I can't get too precise about the way this would manifest.  

Of course, the Jesus story has masqueraded as literal history, and heaven and hell presented as places below or above the earth realm, (how does that work on a globe where everything is both above and below depending on the time of day). Literal minded fundamentalist Christianity is the most anti-Christ teaching I can imagine. It attempts to freeze people at a gross literal interpretation of an ineffable transcendent state of being.

For many years I felt sorry for myself for being born into such a gross, hard world of angst, poverty, war, and loss. The most beautiful and talented of our kind seemed to be inevitable victims of hungry demons. Beauty, honesty, and love were always under attack. I’ll include curiosity among the forbidden. It is an aspect of love because it is propelled by attraction. Even cruelty and greed are disappointed, and disfigured forms of love.

It is the intelligence of the heart that functions as a love filter. I’ve come to believe that our future fate as humans and the fate of our neighbors on this planet (maybe some neighboring planets, as well) depends on recognizing that heart intelligence is crucial for putting perception in balance and remembering that the heart is the central energy chakra and physically pumps our life blood throughout our body. This is literally true, but also symbolically, and spiritually true. There is a good reason that the heart is traditionally represented by the Sun.

We modern humans need to recover a crucial ability at which the ancients surpassed us, of seeing truth on several levels or dimensions simultaneously. The physical is not just physical but is only one demonstration of multiple perceivable states that exist simultaneously. Being turned inside out by a false representation of Christ gathering his followers was right on, and became my rebirth to another reality.

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

Dear friends,

The plight of Israel and Palestine is a piece of hot lead in my heart this week. I believe Israel’s government is largely to blame for this extreme eruption. They did push the Palestinians into a smaller and smaller and smaller space, both literally and as neighbors. Each was unwelcome to the other, but Israel has the power of the west behind it. The Palestinians believed they had only two options, to be captives with diminishing presence forever, or fight in whatever way possible. How ironic that the “land of milk and honey” promised by Yahweh is so full of poison.

Does it begin with a time of wandering in the Sinai Desert for forty years after the escape from Egypt? Alas, Israel’s ascent into the promised land given by Yawei quickly became descent into a territorial dispute and the removal of the present inhabitants, why? In their story, as soon as Israel arrived at the promised land, they clashed with the people who occupied it. As conquerors, killing, and or subjugating the residents, they simply switched roles in what seems to have been a war between gods. Are we human beings, pawns in an upper-level chess game told in the language of myth? Or perhaps it’s a lower-level game, and the brothers all the way back to Cain and Abel set the board for this cosmic chess game. Brothers are so often deadly rivals throughout history and even at the individual family level.   

 Yahweh and Allah have much in common. Do they symbolize archetypal brothers from earliest human times? In the Bible it begins as a rivalry for God’s favor between Cane and Abel as the sons of Adam and Eve? Has nothing changed except the destructive power of their weapons?  It seems that all humanity is represented archetypally by the story of these rival brothers caught in a loop of competition for the favor of a tyrant father. After years of subjugation by an earthly ruler, one of them, Moses razed among the enslavers realizes that all are children of a God who inspires corrections that liberate the enslaved.

 But it is not easy to overcome a slavish mind and the former slaves can’t see beyond a desert where they wander in unknowing for forty years, always waiting for a promise to be fulfilled. But the wanderers are fixated on what freedom and compensation would mean to those who still think like slaves. They are trapped in a too carnal interpretation of their liberator’s promise of a land of milk and honey. They regress to their former state of mind and worship the god of their now nostalgic days in slavery. Moses has not succeeded in liberating their hearts and souls.

 To this day the promised land is still bandied back and forth through ideologists stirring up wars between brothers over and over. This spiritual/trans-historical drama has been intense throughout the age of two fish tied together, swimming in opposite directions in the same waters: the age of Pisces.

As Einstein observed, it is impossible to solve a problem within the system that created the problem. An enlightened being outside the system appears now and then to give humanity a leg up on the ladder of creative evolution.  Thus Jesus (Yeshua), the crucial one who escaped the prison of the lower mind, attached to the physical sensorium, and confined in a temporal body, came to reveal, and propose another way than the tiresome stuck-ness of this war between brothers and to show something central was being overlooked. Wars are never won no matter how just they seem. What is the real purpose of War? What is never won? It seems that every war generates fuel for the next war and the brothers switch roles again and again. Is “milk and honey” baby food laced with poison?  

Jesus (Yeshua), trans-cosmic brother of Thrice Great Hermes and child of the Original Alchemist, was born to transcend this tribal dilemma. His role was foretold by the visitation after his birth of the Wise Men from the east. Then there are the silent years between the event in the temple with the elders when he was a young boy, and the launching of his ministry as an adult. There are stories in Egypt, India, and Tibet of Yeshua (his real name) having studied in those lands.  I think we can see the crucifixion as the event when Jesus as the Christ, the liberated man, breaks free and goes trans- cosmic. This is the only way to end the horrible 3-D war of brothers. The cross of crucifixion is more than a tragedy inflicted by evil enemies, who must pay with the same degree of horror as they meted out.  This is the reverse of salvation. Jesus said to his offended disciples concerning the Roman Soldiers who fought over his garments, that punishment would do no good, because they didn’t know what they were doing. Until humans know what they are doing, they continue exchanging horror back and forth. It can never be overcome. Only complete defeat by total annihilation of all parties would halt this trajectory. That is the devil’s solution.

I’m one of those skeptics who suspect that Jesus the flesh and blood man survived the crucifixion, but I’m not sure that is an important point. He definitely survived and became transformed by ascending to a higher level of being. We humans on this earth plane will never find the way beyond our little box locked up together and attacking each other because we need someone to blame, believe we can’t get out and don’t know who put us here. I’ve seen this happen among animals confined in a small space. One of my neighbors has four large dogs in a small kennel. They get into fights several times a day and their owner (god with a small g) interferes before they tear each other apart. Peace only lasts a short time before the next explosion.  But it isn’t true peace. Can the big daddy we pray to as humans be merely the boss that stops these fights between brothers, yet is really the hidden instigator? The Gnostics believed so, and termed this lesser god the demiurge, a reduced construct between humans and the trans-cosmic source of all that is and all that is becoming.

We must be born again in an environment large enough for the body of Creation to continue becoming. It is said that war inspires creative invention, and it certainly does, but this creativity is trapped by war, and the result is more and better destructive instruments. Is the fate of blowing up the planet possibly an inverted spiral taking us back to the first breath of Creator that enlivened matter. Perhaps we will be sucked down a black hole and our whole system will go through a hard restart. That is one way of being born again. This would be the most extreme form of rebirth. The choice is ours. God, Creator gave us the potential to become co-creators and we are fooled by our small vision, the border of our skin, and the limitations of our physical garment to believe we can be destroyed, and thus that we can destroy.  Those killed in war suffer but are not destroyed, they will emerge as an enemy we must accept as brothers and sisters, because they may in fact be us. I would hate to leave this lifetime feeling that having only acquired a few bits of hard-won knowledge here and there, I may return to find Israel, its neighbors and much of the world a pile of ashes.