My Story

Cognitive dissonance the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in a person is relieved by one of several defensive maneuvers: the person rejects, explains away, or avoids the new information, persuades himself that no conflict really exists, reconciles the differences, or resorts to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order in his conception of the world and of himself. The concept, first introduced in the 1950s, has become a major point of discussion and research. (Encyclopedia Britannica.)

If a person has the impetus to question their beliefs they will find a conflict between them. If they feel that conflict deep enough they will seek a resolution to that conflict. This process is called mysticism. We are seeking to end the conflict between our inner sense of wholeness and our belief in our separation from the whole.

There was so much talk of love. We should love one another. We should love ourselves. God is love. Love is the fulfillment of the scriptures. Love makes the world go around. Love is all that we want.

Ok, so what is love?

I researched everything that was written about it and found little or nothing actually explaining the mechanics or physiology of what the human body was doing when it experienced love. I had a desire to get real, to get out of my head where the concepts and ideas where and into actual behavior that I was labeling as love. The usually definitions that I read or heard were too nebulous for me. They talked about emotions and feelings. They talked about affections, attractions and devotion. I wanted something more concrete than that.

I had heard the line in Saint Francis' poem, "where there is fear let me sow love." So, I concluded, that love is the opposite of fear. Since there was more information on fear it seemed easier to me to understand fear first before I would understand love. AND, I knew how to experience fear quite easily.

I spent a long time watching my body's reaction whenever I was experiencing what I had come to know as fear, particularly under extreme fear such as being physically attacked. I noticed that under this type of situation I would contract down my body to protect myself. I realized that it is the reaction of contraction, the tensing the nerves and the muscles to the thought or belief of impending injury or loss, that we call fear. Fear is experienced when we narrow our consciousness down to only focusing or placing all of our attention, awareness or importance on some thing, particularly our own body.

Fear, therefore, has two elements: the thought or belief of injury or loss and the reaction of contraction in our nerves and muscles of our body to that thought.

I realized if I wanted to experience more love, I had to overcome my fear by working with both my ways of thinking and my reactions to my thoughts.

If fear is contraction then love is expansions. If fear is tensing then love is relaxing. Love was the expansion of our bodies and minds. Love was relaxing the tension. Love felt good where fear did not.

If I love somebody or something then I want to reach out and touch it or even embrace it. I want to expand out and include it in myself. I want to become one with it. Is this not the motivation behind marriage? If we love somebody we want to expand out and become 'as one' with them. Or as a more base person might say, "The urge to merge." (Ok, this is only the Eros version of love, but it is still love.)

I saw that if I could practice relaxing around certain thoughts that I had a habit of contract around then I could overcome my fears. I also saw that if I narrowed my awareness down and focused on anything, this would manifest as tension in my body. If something touched me when I were tense or if I perceived something threatening what I were making important then I would react like the strings of a piano react to tuning fork.

I did not realize the depths that this understand would take me. I did not understand the hurting, caring, longing or sad feelings that are a rich aspect of love. Later I was able to not just see how these are also urges to expand, even painful yearnings to expand and that they would become so much a rich part of my life. The yearning for union with God or the infinite is the desire to expand beyond the narrow confines of our perceived being. Love is the emotion that takes the yearning out of the head and into the cells of the body. Love manifests the union with the infinite.

For now, I was only concerned with the basics of relaxation or overcoming my fears. Now I had to learn HOW to relax. It is simple in concept but seemed to be very difficult in practice.

After my enlightenment and after I had seen that the individual self or the belief in a separate self was an illusion, I wanted to understand what the human instrument's desires or motivations were. Since I no longer identified with the human instrument I could watch this process completely detached from the ego. I wanted to see and understand how it operated down to the subatomic particle level.

Why do humans seek God? Why do we seek union with God? What is the actual experience of Love and not just the ego's interpretation of the experience? Why do we appreciate drama? Why do we still cling to beliefs of separateness with the associated fears, doubts and pessimism? Why would an awake person who recognizes the true self is infinite still enjoy things like war.

Basically, I wanted to understand why I was thinking like I did or do.

One of the things I had been looking at for quite some time was the affect that some experience, belief, attitude, behavior or way of thinking had on the quality of my life experience. Since the quality of my life experience is a function of how I react to whatever happens to me, my beliefs, attitude and ways of thinking all influence my emotional reaction.

My journey had lots of incidences of mystical experiences as well as insights. I realized that the incidences themselves were not what was important, it was their effect or affect on me. If they effect my ways of thinking or affect the quality of my emotional life then they offered me something. If they did not change me in some way then they were just entertainment, not inner attainment.

Each time I had an mystical or spiritual experience it offered me a little more peace with some aspect of life that I had not had before. Each insight I gained enabled me to overcome some fear that I had.

When I had the pain in the stomach and it was cured before getting on the bus I was free from the pain or discomfort of the stomach ache. But more importantly I was now aware that there were other options available to me, or other ways of dealing with pain and discomfort that I was not aware of before. This gave my heart a greater sense of freedom, not just my stomach. This experience opened my mind up and help me start to think outside the boxes of my limiting beliefs.

When I had the mystical insight of not wontedly injuring others I became aware that knowledge could come to me that was outside of my own brain. Again, I became open to greater possibilities.

All these experiences opened me up. They softened my mind and my attitude toward the possibilities of what life could offer. It was the rigid ideas or beliefs that I had that limited me and created my hell. It was the softening of my attachments to those rigid ideas and beliefs.

So what is most relevant is the effect of my behaviors or ways of thing on the quality of my life experience. I therefore looked at all the spiritual teaching or practices that I had been exposed to and looked at the effect they had the quality of life their believers or practitioners. And, of course, I looked at my own beliefs, practices and ways of thinking to see how they effected my life.

That is how I came up with the Four S's. I saw the essence of all the teachings I had been exposed to and saw that each of these qualities or effects is what they were all trying to get at. For when we are simple and soft we are better able to smile and find stillness. In stillness we can find the clarity that enables us to see through our false beliefs or misconceptions and are then free to enjoy and love what life is offering.

It is not so much what we do or our ways of thinking. It is the effect that those behaviors or ways of thinking have on the quality of our life experience.

We start out as being relatively unconscious beings who hurt ourselves and one another in our unconsciousness. Then fear is used to wake us up to our abusive behaviors. As we get more light or more conscious we start to resist what we intuitively feel is the falseness of the beliefs that creates the fear. We start to resist this falseness with anger, which is still fear but also has an element of passion to break free from the falseness. The violence of the anger is what keeps waking us up until eventually we see the truth that sets us free from our fears. When we are free we are conscious enough to neither injure ourselves or others.

This is the process. All the philosophies, theologies, behaviors, practices or ways of thinking are not relevant. What is relevant is how they effect us inside.

By understand how the human instrument works we would understand the essence of why we are attracted to religion, spirituality and mysticism. For religion, spirituality and mysticism all produce an affect on the human instrument that the human instrument is motivated to experience. when we understand why we want these experiences or we understand the physiology that motivates the human instrument then we will understand the essence of religion, spirituality and mysticism.

Once upon a time I had read so many people who talked about the illusionary nature of time. Yet it seemed real to me. I could remember the past and see how it had effected my present. I could see how I was going to have to deal with events that were obviously coming in the future.

What was my relationship to time? I wanted to get free from any delusions I might be harboring about time.

In my awaking I could see that there was no time. When the mind had stopped then time stopped. I could see that the past was but a memory, and reverberation or echo travelling through the brain. I could not touch the past. I could only react to thoughts of the past. I could feel guilt from the past but that was just a subtle fear of the consequences of the past.

Moreover, I recognized that I was not reacting to the past. I was reacting to a reflection, reverberation or echo that was in my mind NOW. The past was only a thought. It was just another thought that I was reacting to. How silly of me. Memory is but an echo in the material of the brain. With the brain (body or matter) there can be no memory and hence no past. God knows no past.

Then I looked at the future. Ok, so I would right off the bat admit that it too was only a thought in my brain that I might react to. But if I continue to live I will be living in what is not the future. So does it not make sense to prepare for that future? Does not the squirrel save up acorns for the winter?

I had to get honest with myself. I did not know what the future held for me. I could lie to myself and belief I did know what the future held, but then I would be lying to myself. Since my awaking I realized that I did not want to do that any more. I wanted to be fully honest.

I was reading the Gospels now and I read where Jesus said, "Be not concerned about tomorrow. Concern yourself with today and let tomorrow concern for itself." (Matthew 6:34) A lot of good that did Jesus. The night before his death is was ONLY concerned about the future. No wonder he was so filled with fear.

I looked up the word concern in the dictionary and it says 'be troubled or distressed by.' That means to me that we should not do what Jesus did that night before he died. He sure seemed troubled by tomorrow to me.

When I am most honest with myself I have to admit that I do not really know what the future holds. It takes real discipline to stick to the truth and not pretend that I know what the future holds.

I also realized that time is an element of memory and imagination. Both are just images in the mind. When we make those images important we are practicing idolatry.

So the past and the future are not real. They only appear real. The present moment is all that is real.

Physiologically I can see how thoughts of time create tension or 'disease' with my mind/body.

When I was moody and dark people would describe me as very serious. I was very serious and earnest. I was a very intense person. I can see now that this is part of the reason I went so far into the darkness and also why I was able to get broken and found so much clarity.

I was a hard headed and hard hearted guy. I had such a strong will with its associated passion that I frightened people.

I asked myself, why was I such a strong willed person? I was I not easily persuaded to go alone with the crowd? Why did social pressure not have much influence over me?

I realized that social pressure had little influence over me because I was a solitude person. I was not very social. As a kid I had moved so much that I did not usually have any friends. I was always the 'new guy' and a social outcast. Being alone so much I did not rely on people to make me happy. If they rejected me, which they mostly did, I had to find a way to be happy without them. I was not emotionally codependent with society.

Because of being a social outcast if I got an idea in my head I went with it. So I became hard headed and not open to almost anything people would say. I was a hard headed and strong willed young man.

Hard headedness has a lot of drawbacks, but it also has some advantages. That strong will served me well in my pursuit of the perfect truth that set me perfectly free. The more hard headed I was the more intense I became. And when my will was finally broken the more profound the peace and its clarity I found. With this great clarity I was able to experience the absence of this delusion called 'self'. This, of course, lead to seeing through all the produces of the delusion called self; soul, sin and salvation.

All of this clarity happened because I was hard headed and had a strong will. All this because I did not have friends.

I remember reading once that Jesus' father was a journeyman. That was translated into carpenter, which is about the only term that is real today for a journeyman. But the originally meaning of the word journeyman is one who travels from place to place. Today this would be a travelling salesman, or a person who buys and sells things. So it is possible that Jesus' father traveled around a lot and probably took his son with him. Therefore, Jesus would not have had many or possible any friends. Therefore, he would not have become attached to people and would not have been susceptible to social pressure. He would have been a hard headed guy too. This would have created his strong will that drove him to the level of clarity that he had.

Being hard headed keeps you active. If you are really independent then you will have to keep doing things for yourself. I once went backpacking with a seventy four year old man who insisted on doing everything himself. I could see that he will probably live to be in his nineties.

With Heaven as my reality I have an opportunity to experience anything I want. I am totally free to have it all. There are no limits in Heaven.

Heaven gives me the opportunity to feel a profound passion. I love the deep, agonizing pain of hurt with others. I love being able to anguish will the heart felt pains of all of humanity. I feel free to go into this profound passion because of my awareness of the Perfect Truth that has set me perfectly free to love these experiences too.

The Gate to Heaven is in the depths of Hell. I realize that the above paragraph may sound very strange to most people who think of 'agonizing pain' or 'anguish' as something they would like to avoid. How could somebody WANT to experience this kind of suffering? Intellectually I can see that passion is part of compassion and compassion is an aspect of love. Love is a VERY rich experience. When I go into the profound passion with all humanity I have an extremely rich experience.

When in the depths of this profound passion I sometimes only feel the agony and anguish with no thought of appreciation, joy and love. But then I move to a consciousness of my motivation, that which inspires me here or the spirit behind why I allow myself to experience crucifying pain. I can only do this because I care and caring is as aspect of love. So with consciousness of my motivation I again feel the extremely rich experience of love.

Profound Passion is so rich that I recognize that the human body can not withstand that kind of energy very long so I must limit the time I spend there. If I do not limit the duration of profound passion then I will destroy the body. Without the body I can not experience anything.

Sometimes I will us fantasy to stimulate this profound passion. I might start with the reality of people's rejection and hating of me. I might even go into the extreme perception that everybody hates me. I would have no friends, no family and nobody likes or can even tolerate me. I would be terrified of and reject everybody. I realize that this is not Jim Freedom's experience but it was Jim Freedom's experience and it is somebody's experience now. With the pain, anguish and agony of this isolation I can feel compassion for those still trapped in this place.

After my enlightenment experience I sat there for several months and pondered what had happened. I did not realize what I had done but I did do it and I did it very quickly. I had read of many people who were seeking for twenty, thirty or even forty years to find what I had found in three years. Siddhartha had taken seven years to reach enlightenment. I had done it in three. I had no idea as to why I was were I was so quickly but I wanted to understand it so that I could offer it to others.

Someplace alone the way I did figure it out. Of course it was not because I was so brilliant that I was able to get were I was going so fast. It was because of all the events of my life that lead up to that moment. It was part an accident of birth and part a desire to find a new and different way.

I had always looked for ways to improve whatever it was that I was doing. So I did not accept what other told me until I could understand why they told me what they did. Since I wanted to know the why I wanted to know what motivated them or me to do something. What motivates us is that which inspires us, or to use ancient language, the spirit behind our desire. To know what motives us is to know the spirit. God is spirit (John 4:24) so to know our truest or most profound motivation is to know God.

I found that what I wanted most was to be free to appreciate, enjoy and love all that life offers. I want to love.

What had I done that accelerated my opening to love?

I remember somebody once giving me a book titled, "The Fanatic". This person thought I was a fanatic. I would have to agree. I just looked in the dictionary and thesaurus for fanatic. A fanatic is "marked by excessive enthusiasm and often uncritical devotion." I do not know anyone who would say I was not critical. Maybe now, but definitely not back then.

The key word for me is 'excessive', I went to the extremes of consciousness. By day I would allow myself to feel the extreme hatred for humanity and the God that created it. By night I would drift toward totally emptiness, innocence and openness. By night I was approaching death. By day I was filled with passion and vitality.

The passion of the days would wear me out so much that I was mentally and emotionally exhausted at night. But my body was not exhausted so it did not tire and want to sleep. I hand no choice but to be still and silent to the depth of my being.

I would take my passion to such an extreme that I could not hold on to it any more. My passion, my hatred hurt so much that I wanted to die. I was willing to die unto the world. The pain was so extreme I was willing to let go of all that I made important, all that I believed, all that I knew, all that I wanted, all that was me.

This path of passion and peace, of extreme passion and extreme peace, was new as far as I knew then. I am not sure it is a new perspective now.

I had thought I had discovered something new. I am not sure I have now but I still think I have a new way of talking about it.

The eastern traditions all offer us the slow way of reaching enlightenment. It offers us the dispassion and stillness of meditation. In this the eastern traditions are far superior to the western traditions. The slow way has the law of diminishing returns working against it: the longer you hold a certain belief or habit the harder it gets to break through it. With time you lose the energy or strength to push beyond the limit. Thus one rarely if ever reaches enlightenment the slow way.

The western traditions offer us passion but no way to peace. There is little to no understanding of the way to stillness. The western traditions only offer humbleness as a way to peace. But they do not take humbleness to its extreme where it can do real good.

The ultimate humility is to realize that you are not real, that the separate self is not real. This means you deny your separate self. But the western traditions honor and seem to worship the separate self. Their separateness is very important to their belief systems. So they do not offer real peace.

Extremism as a method is frowned upon by normal people. It frightens them. It is dangerous because terrorists are extremist. It frightens them because they see the great eastern mystics doing nothing but sitting on their high mountains meditation and not offering anything to this world. We want to change the world not live in denial of our connection to the world. We want a sense of passion and vitality in the world. We want the passion of love of life. We do not want to let that go.

In extremism both the passion and peace are there, just to the extreme. And if done with awareness they will not hurt you, they are actually good for you.

So after seeing this I started to think that I had something valuable (and important) to offer humanity. With this thought I became extremely arrogant. I sometime still think I have something very valuable to offer humanity and this comes across as arrogant.

I realized I had a long way to go before I would be able to offer what I had to others. I had this problem with arrogance and that judgement of others. I had a big problem with judgement in itself. If I was going to offer anything to others I would have to deal with that.

The deeper the valley, the higher the mountain, the greater the view from the top of the mountain. The more contraction, tension or darkness that you can go into in the valley, the deeper the valley will be the greater the distance be between the bottom of the valley and the top of the mountain. The deeper you go into the valley of tension the greater the release you will find and the more profound the peace you will experience. The more profound the peace the greater the clarity. The greater the clarity the more profound the truth you will become aware of. The greater that distance between the bottom and the top the richer the experience.

To release anger, to release fear I would implode upon it until I had no choice. Then it will be gone.

The doorway to Heaven is in Hell. I would have to go to this hell before I could release it and return to heaven.

I realized that it was my intensity that enabled me to go as deep as I did. For most of my adult life I was a very intense person. Some would say that I still am. Intensity is passion. I was and am a passionate person. I hurt a lot and a love a lot.

Zen is a Quick Way method. From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Zen teaches that the Buddha-nature, or potential to achieve enlightenment, is inherent in everyone but lies dormant because of ignorance. It is best awakened not by the study of scriptures, the practice of good deeds, rites and ceremonies, or worship of images but by a sudden breaking through of the boundaries of common, everyday, logical thought. Zen has methods leading to such an enlightenment or Satori.

This Quick Way is just a relaxation method for body and mind. We use it to release the tension that is 'self', that is fear, discomfort and pain. It is the same as a person does with yoga or other relaxation method, you stretch yourself out and then return to a place of rest where you will be more relaxed then before you started. You can try to sit there and just think yourself to relaxation, and this will work, but it take a LONG time to get there.

Passion is just another way of stretching your 'self' out. You are only stretching your mind and emotions (the nerves of your body) so that when you come back to a place of rest you are more relaxed then you were before you started.

Passion can come from longing for something. You can long for or yearn for the freedom from fear. You can long for you concept of God or for the truth behind your concept. You can hunger and thirst for righteousness.

"In your patience possess ye your souls. " (Luke 21:19)

I could see after my enlightenment that it was my patience and persistence that enabled me to continue the seeking process. Of course, I did not feel patient during the process. I felt very impatient, but I did keep seeking. I did keep looking for the clarity and peace I wanted. I never really gave up on the process. So I guess you can say that I was patient.

Maybe another word for patience is faith, but I do not like that word, so I use patience. To be honest, I did have a sense of faith that something would change my world for the better. I was steady and constant in working at understanding myself until I finally found what I was looking for. I kept focused on gaining clarity. I was focused on finding the light. Patiently with persistence and perseverance I kept at it.

Just thinking about it now, from hindsight, I feel a sense of pride. Pride, being one of the seven deadly sins is not something I want to wallow in, but it does kind of feel good.

I can clearly see that I needed to be able to focus my mind but I could not see what to focus my mind on. Then I realized that I WAS focused; I was focused on finding clarity. I wanted perfect clarity so that I could see the perfect truth that would set me perfectly free to fully love and enjoy all that life offers. I kept at it over the years until I found what I was looking for.

If I had focused my mind on worldly things then I would have gotten worldly things. If I had focused my mind on being a great doctor or lawyer in the world and kept at it I would have become a great doctor or lawyer. If I had wanted to be materially rich and had focused my mind on it then I would have eventually found a way to do that.

But my heart did not want worldly things so I could not find a worldly thing to focus my mind on. I had to find something that I really wanted. I wanted something inside of me. I wanted a skill. I guess that doctors and lawyers are skillful just as Buddhas and Christs are skillful. They just have different ends.

It is the same thing if you focus energy on anything. You create a lot of power there. Like if you use a magnifying glass to focus the suns light/energy on your hand you will burn it. A laser beam is just focused light and it can cut through almost anything. The same amount of energy in a flashlight will not cut anything. It is the ability to focus that creates the power.

Ok, I graduated, I am enlightened, I have awaken, I am able to unconditionally love life. So what? What good does that do me when I get pissed at the driver that just cut me off on the freeway? Yea, I can see that it is all meaningless, it is all vanity, but my blood is still curdling. The mind might be free but the body is still reacting violently to what life offers.

Becoming a master is going beyond enlightenment and manifesting that clarity in my body and mind. If I was still afraid to be honest with anybody then what good does enlightenment do. If by habit I still see things as ugly and evil then my 'light' is only superficial. I could see that there is a value to seeing things as ugly and evil but I did not want to do that out of habit. That is unconsciousness. That is stupid.

I was still stupid, at least as far as my ways of thinking or philosophy and other habits. My reaction were based on a lifetime of conditioned response or beliefs based on what I now could see as ridiculous.

I realized that I wanted to love the world. I wanted to love everybody. But I clearly saw that if I could not even love myself then I could not love another. So I develop the axiom of "Self Love First." I have to start with myself. That means I have to be nice to my body and mind first before I an experience goodness in my life.

Intellectually I was free but practically I was a long way from being able to live that freedom. At least at nights I could laugh at my silliness but by day I was very silly. I still had fears but I realized they were only relative, they were not based on reality. They were relative to the flesh of the body but I now knew that nothing could hurt me, the real me. My fears were real, or my reactions to the thought in my head are as real as my body is, but the thoughts were only relative to the body.

I could not love the world and share with them what I found unless I could become a master over myself. After the enlightenment experience my mind still had all these false ways of thinking that caused me to experience a lot of fear. I recognized that from now on I would be cleaning out my mental processes to free myself from the habitual fears, which is to say I would be manifesting the courage to love.

I could see that if I was not a master over myself then the world would be a master over me and I would be a slave. If anybody could make me happy, sad or angry then they are masters over my emotional state. If I do not have the ability to unconditionally enjoy and love all that life offers then I am nothing but a slave to the whims of the world.

After my motorcycle accident I bough a van to live and travel in. I then went to visit the monastery that I had visited in Arizona. When I got there I heard that one of the priests that I really liked there was very sick so I want to his room to visit him. His room was so full of 'stuff'. He had stuff for music, books, computers and lots of writing projects. His room was so full that there was almost no room for me to stand while I talked to him. I thought to myself that he had a lot of distractions.

He was so sick that he could not do anything but lay there in his bed. He could not even read. The monastery was so far away from civilization that there was no television single for him to watch so he had to just sit there with his thoughts.

In our conversation he said he had been wondering why God had abandoned him.

I said to him, "God has not abandon you. You have abandon Him. Look at all the distractions you have in your life. Get simple guy. Get focused back on what you really want and God will come back into your life."

When we get simple we focus our attention on what we really want and we create power for ourselves. A magnifying glass focuses the light and energy of the sun and that power can be used to start a fire. If we focus our energy and light, our attention, we become very powerful beings.

After that I started to realize that I knew how to get to God. I had been through the process and could offer what I had learned to others who were interested in finding God.

Around this time I met a woman who lived in a house with lots of spiders. She was terrified of spiders. She was so terrified of spiders that when her five year old son brought a plastic Halloween spider near her she screams and cursed him. So I told her I could cure her fear of spiders within an hour or two. She was interested.

We started by just practicing some basic relaxation exercises like tensing and relaxing parts of the body. I got her focusing on her breath while she would do these relaxing exercises. This got her out of her head and into her body. She was feeling what her body was up to and not just what her mind was up to.

This woman was used to being in her mind. She had a Ph.D. in philosophy and thinking was very important to her. She could intellectually see that being afraid of spiders was stupid but she still was. We had to get her out of her head and into her body.

Once she was able to relax her body pretty well and feeling good I started to talk to her about spiders. I asked her how she was doing and she said she immediately started to tense up. We went back to the relaxation exercises until she was relaxed and feeling good again. Then I started talking about spiders again as she would continue her relaxing exercises. This time she did not get as uptight. I could talk all I wanted about spiders and she did not react.

Then I got that plastic spider from her son and showed it to her as she did the relaxing exercises. She was watching her body and noticed exactly where the tension started at and did the tensing and relaxing of that part of her body. After a few minutes she was able to sit and hold the plastic spider without reacting.

Then I went and captured a spider and put it in a bottle. When I brought the spider close to her she started to react but knew the drill and went back into her relaxation practice. Within a few minutes she was able to sit and look at the spider in the bottle without reacting. She was even able to see how beautiful it was and innocent looking.

Then came the big test. I opened the bottle and put the spider in her hand. It was not a dangerous spider; she did have black widows in the house, so there was nothing to really be afraid of. She kept breathing but within a few minutes she was able to fully appreciate the spider. Moreover, she was able to fully appreciate that she had overcome her life long fear of spiders. She was free.

This whole things took less than two hours but she had spent a lifetime trapped in her fear. Sad that so many people are living their lives trapped in their fears. I see that I can do something about it but how do I reach them.

The fear of a spider is pretty easy to cure while the deeper fears usually take more time and effort. What I want to point out here is the system for curing fears, which I took my friend through. The same technique can be used with all fears, including the fear of death. All fear can be dealt with by being honest to ourselves. No matter whether it is the spider or the lion attacking if we are honest with ourselves and admit that we do not know what is going to happen next then we will not experience fear. This does not stop a person from getting out of the way of a Mack truck headed in their direction; it actually frees them for the paralyzing effects of fear.

What is better is to overcome the root of all our fears.

When we discover that our true self is eternal and infinite then the root belief that causes all our fears will be broken. Life is perfect when we can see it as infinite and eternal.

I did not like the word truth. People would say to me that they could not trust me in a relationship. I felt no NEED to trust them. At least not in the relating part of the relationship. I did feel a need to trust my banker, but that is because I felt that I stored all my money (treasure) with this banker. When I realized that my money was not all in this bankers bank, that most of it was being used by other people right now, then I no longer felt a need to really trust this banker.

What I noticed was that most of the relating part of the relationship was about talking to one another. People were really saying to me that they did not trust me to not say things that would upset them. The reality was that they did not trust themselves. They did not trust that they would not react to the words in such a way as to abuse themselves. It was not a matter of trusting me, I had never indicated that I was going to actually do something that would cause them injury. It was only the words that they did not like.

I found that if I developed trust of myself, to not react to words in such a way as to abuse myself emotionally, then I could be in any relationship and not have fear. When I trusted myself I was free to be totally open, honest and intimate with anybody and everybody. I did not need that 'special someone' to have a relationship with so that I could experience intimacy. I could be intimate with anyone.

Now do not tell this to most people out there. They want you to think of them as special if you are going to be in a relationship. (I purposely used the word people there instead of women because I see that most men do the same thing. Although I have mostly experienced this with my attempts at intimate relationships with women.)

With the trust of the banker that I talk about above if I do not make my money important then I do not need to trust the banker. He can steal it and it would be ok with me. So I only need to feel a sense of trust if I am making something important here on the earth. So to be trusting I listen to Jesus when he said, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." (Matthew 6:19) I do not make things, including my soul, important and I will never need fear anything.

Why is this so? Why do we define truth as something that liberates? I had found that truth liberates but I was never comfortable just accepting Jesus' quote for this. I wanted to understand why truth liberates.

I liked that line in the Bible where Pilate said to Jesus after he said that he came to bear witness to the truth, "What is truth?" (John 18:38) Jesus did not or could not answer that. I felt really motivated to be able to do that.

What is Truth? I started with the dictionary and learned that truth is sincerity in action, character and utterances. Truth is what is real or factual. The word REAL interested me because it was defined as something fixed or permanent. Since anything limited is not permanent it is not real. Truth is not something that changes from day to day or even lifetime to lifetime. Truth is eternal. An antonym of permanent is temporary.

So why does truth liberate? If truth is permanent and all that is temporary is false, then all the manifest world, with all its limits which make it temporary, is not real truth, just relative truth. It is true the body is born and eventually dies, but do "I" die? Since the absolute reality or truth is infinite and eternal, there are no limits to it. All things that are limited are transitory and will pass away.

Therefore, anything that talks about limitation is only talking about a limited truth or relative truth which is conditional and subjective.

Obviously, with the experience of the absences of my limited self in my enlightenment I saw that my true nature is infinite. Therefore, I realized that the concept of a limited soul was false too. The soul is transitory so it raises and declines as all things of the manifest world do. Therefore true eternal damnation is not a reality but only a subjective idea based on false beliefs or misconceptions. We can experience eternal damnation only if we believe we are the false, temporal self or soul. We can believe we will burn in hell for all eternity, but it does not make it so. Therefore, I had to lie to myself to experience my eternal damnation.

Since truth is a liberating thing then all beliefs that limit us are based on falseness. Such would be the belief that we have but one life to live or that we have a limited soul. The false concepts only create fear in our being. Of course, that fear creates great drama so if that is what we want then the belief in a limited soul will get us there. I believe I am a limited being sometime too, just for the drama of it. Yet, when I get tired of the drama I go back to the truth that sets me free from the drama. That truth is that I am an infinite being, always have been and always will be.

The ultimate reality is infinite. All finite things will pass away. They come and go so they are not real. Realness is eternal. It has always been and always will be. It has no beginning and no end; it has no limitation. This ultimate reality is what primitive people called God.

The Ultimate Truth is infinite and permanent, it never changes. That which is perfect or whole and complete, lacking nothing. If it is perfect then it is infinite. Any finite truth is not as real or true as the ultimate truth. these finite truth are not real only convenient perspectives. So anything that does not speak of freedom and infinity is really not of the truth.

Therefore, all temporal truths, when compared with the infinite truth tend to fall away. Just as when you divide any number by infinite the resulting number goes to nothing. So it does not matter how big your definition of whatever it is that you are calling truth, if it is finite it is nothing compared to the Ultimate Truth or that which is sometimes called God.

From here we can see that beginning and end are based on a falseness. As well as concepts of soul, individual personality or self.

The more one gets into truth the more it sets them free from all your limiting and fear producing beliefs.

In truth the present moment is all that is real. The past is but a memory and the future is but our imagination. The NOW is all that is real and true. Jesus said, "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day." (Matthew 6:34) Those who fear for what will happen to them once they die do not understand this. The now is, of course, infinite in its space. Time is but an illusion for the mind to play with.

It is one thing to intellectually understand that truth is infinite or that you are God. It is another thing to actually experience this truth. it is the difference between reading a recipe or eating the food. It is the difference between believing that there is all this great food in the next room and actually being in the room eating it. It is the difference between looking at a map of a country and visiting that country.

Only experiencing the truth will really set you free. Believing in the truth will only partially set you free. For if you are not really free you will serve your fears over your love. This is what Jesus was trying to say when he said, "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." (Matthew 6:24) If you are not free from your belief that you are separate from God, that you are the flesh or the separate soul, then you will serve your fear for that flesh or soul.

So intellectually believing this truth is not enough. One has to let every cell of their body experience this truth. the cells of the brain are not enough. Your body is a colony of cells so you have to convince all the cells of your body that you are not just the body, that you are infinite in being.

Fear is falseness. Whenever we are dealing with fear we are dealing with falseness. Where there is fear there is falseness. As long as we believe that separation is real we will always have fear.

Why did humanity create this concept called soul? I asked myself that for some time. After I had seen the falseness of this concept I still wanted to use the concept. Why? What was true about it that added value to my life? What was I reaching for in the use of this word?

Person comes from the Old English word persona, which means an actors mask. It is something that you put on to cover up who you really are. That is what our personal soul is, something to cover up who we really are. This is just like the little hand puppets we put on to create a puppet show. We are not the puppets but some of us have been playing the puppet so long that we have forgotten who we really are.

I could see that when I was immature I could not grasp the concept of my infiniteness. I saw myself as being limited with a beginning and an end. I could not grasp the annihilation of my "self" or being. "I" had always been as long as I could remember so what would happen to me when the body died.

I could imagine a tribe of primitive people sitting around the fire. The young buck (me) asks about what happens to me when I die. The older and wiser ones want to give me an answer that will calm my mind so they tell me about the happy hunting grounds where I go. Since I have seen old people die and do not see them go anywhere I question this. Then the tell me that I have a soul, that the soul is separate from the body and it is the soul that goes to the happy hunting grounds. This satisfies me and the questions cease.

Later some unscrupulous and unconscious person tells me about the not so happy hunting grounds. He says that if we are not good people here on earth then we go to a place where there are no animals to eat and starve, but we can not die because we have already died so we starve forever. This puts the fear of God in me and I immediately agree to do what this person tells me is good. If we are immature enough to believe these unscrupulous and unconscious people then we can be easily manipulated and controlled.

Eventually these concepts get so much engrained in our culture that everybody believes them. but just because everybody believes them does not make them true. Everybody once believed the earth was flat. This did not make it so, only that the not so intelligent ones, the ones who did not see that the sun and the moon were round, believed the earth was flat.

I do have a soul. One of the dictionaries definitions of a soul is the moral and emotional nature of human beings. I like to think of my soul as the deeper parts of my psychology. It is the part of me that feels the pain of others. it is the part of me that cares and feels compassion. It is the part of me that loves unconditionally (not romantically.) My soul is the collection of all my experiences and knowledge. My soul is transitory, it changes. My soul is what hurts when I feel trapped in life or trapped in misery.

My soul is part of the brains functions and hence, when I die it dies with me. When Jesus said, "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell," (Matthew 10:28) I felt this is the soul that he was talking about. It means to me that I should respect those who can intimidate me with the threat of death. For Jesus goes not to say that God is looking out for us and will not let anyone harm us. He is trying to comfort us in our fear of our soul going to hell for all eternity.

Again, where Jesus says, "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Matthew 16:26) He is saying that it does us no good to go after worldly things if we live in constant fear. Even if we have power over the whole world it does us no good if we are constantly fearing for our lives. Duh!

I most like Jesus' line, "In your patience possess ye your souls." (Luke 21:19) He is saying that if we have patience our souls or hearts will be at peace.

My soul had not been at peace and this "dis-ease" is what motivated me to seek understanding and peace. I no longer fear for my soul when I die. I do keep watch over it in live that I do not get caught up again in thoughts that will destroy the peace of my soul.

Since the concept of Salvation that is based on the individual soul is therefore obviously false, at least that part of salvation that relates to what happens to us when we die. We can be "saved" from our own stupidity if somebody stops us from or wakes us up about abusing ourselves. Jesus tried to do that with out belief in sin that condemns our soul to eternal damnation.

I have more than one drunk who recounted that his soul was condemned to eternal damnation for something he believed he had done. For these kind of people I would recommend they listen to the fundamentalist Christian who preaches redemption. At least that will get them to stop drinking or other forms of self abuse.

So there is truth in Salvation only in the relative sense but not in the eternal sense. There is no truth to the concept of eternal damnation. The only eternal damnation that you will ever experience is like the eternal damnation that I experienced because I BELIEVED in it. At least I THOUGHT I was eternally damned.

If we pretend to be something we are not long enough then we will come to actually believe we are that something. We have pretended to be the false self for so long that we actually believe we are the false and limited self.

We own a soul like we own a body, a mind and a automobile. It is just another possession that the self thinks it owns.

How big is your soul? Does your soul have a beginning and an end? Where does your soul begin and end?

Why does humanity seek God? What value does it give to them?

We can look at God as something that is very big. When we define God we lose the bigness of God or the infinite nature of God. So we have to let go of limiting definition. When we let go of definition then we go into the mystery of God, as the mystic does. When we delve into the mystery we admit that we do not know, we allow ourselves to go into a cloud of unknowing, we become innocent as children.

Was we let go of all our concepts, ideas and beliefs we start to experience Goodness. When we finally let go of all our beliefs then we experience Eternal Goodness, which is one of the definitions of God.

Why?

If we were to understand the human instrument and how it operates

In high school biology class we dissected frogs and shocked the leg muscle which caused the leg muscle to contract. That taught us that when an electromagnetic impulse (EMI) travels down the nerves to the muscle that the muscle will contract and the frog will jump. The muscle was less dense then the nerve so it contracted radically, while the nerve only contract a little.

If we practice experiencing contraction by tensing up every muscle in our body and holding it, you will feel that this does not feel good. So contraction does not feel good. Why? Because in order for use to hold the contracted state we must continually send electromagnetic impulses down the nerves to the muscles. This heats up the muscles and nerves which cause a burning sensation. The burning sensation then sends impulses back up to the brain saying that this is damaging the body. We call this pain.

When we think about something then we are sending EMI through a certain set of nerves in the brain. If we think about this thing long enough we start to burn the nerves we are using. This also causes the nerves to contract which creates a tension in the nerves. If we go far enough we get a headache or damage the brain. This is a 'not good' experience or a not God experience.

When we focus in on the mystery of God we are not thinking about any 'thing'. So there is no activity in the brain and the nerves relax. When there is little or no activity in the brain we can become aware of subtle activity there or subtle thoughts that are going on in the brain. When there is no activity in the brain we experience no discomfort or goodness, in fact, when there is absolutely no activity then we experience Eternal Goodness in our entire body/mind/being.

In order to do this we have to let go of ALL thoughts, all ideas, all attitudes, all beliefs including the most subtle belief in separation, which we call self. This is also called Union with God, Atonement (at-one-ment), Self Realization, Enlightenment and so forth. It is called Self Realization because we have seen through the false or limiting belief in the limited or small self and realized that we are infinite and eternal real Self.

Expansiveness is the opposite of contraction. In fear we contract down. As it is written, Perfect Love drive out fear (1 John 4:18), so we would say that fear is the opposite of love. Therefore, love is expansive or relaxing. The intentional feeling of love will help with the expansive or relaxing process that leads toward the experience of Eternal Goodness or God.

That is why the human instrument seeks this thing call God or Love.

We do not need to know some mythological concept that we call God. What would help us is to know why this human instrument wants to know God. We are told that the intellect can not understand God, but it does not have to. It only has to understand why the intellect WANTS to know God. The intellect is part of the brain and the body of the human instrument. It is made of matter and in such is completely knowable and understandable by us. If we seek we will find.

So do not believe those who say that you can not know God.

When I discovered the Buddhist concept of sunyata I realized that God is a method created by humanity to get at something. God is a method to help us get at something Good, Eternally Good. Sunyata is also a method to help us get at the same Eternal Goodness.

I liked sunyata better than God because it did not have all the baggage, all the silly little personal god stuff or the concept of will of God that gets in the way of finding what we are looking for.

I did not see how either God or sunyata could help me get there but I started to look at ALL theology and spirituality as just methods of reaching some thing. I opened my mind to seeing the reality behind the concepts.

God is a method as mysticism is a method of eradicating fear. Meditation is a method of gaining clarity to see the truth that sets one free from fear. Prayer is also a method like meditation is.

In the early 1990's I saw the nature of thought. Because I had plenty of experience with computers and knew how they worked I could see a real correlation. For instance, in the computer you have nothing but a bunch of switches that are either on or off. If you are looking at a computer screen you can see a beautiful picture, like the image you can see in your mind, but in the computer all there really is is a series of switches that are either on or off. The computer screen is just a bunch of pixels that are turned on or off dependent on the computers memory. The collection of pixels is what the image is made up of.

The human brain works the same way. But instead of switches we have an analog type situation where the neurons are can both fire or not fire AND there is the intensity of how strong they fire. When you have billions of neurons firing and at different intensities they you have what is called a thought or image that we experience in our minds.

When all the neurons stop firing then we experience peace and clarity. When there is activity or firing of the neurons then there is tension.

When I would get very sensitive in my meditations I could feel the origin of a thought. I can remember a time when I was have a lot of thoughts come from the low left back part of my brain. They would then move up over the top toward the right front part of the brain. They felt like waves of neurons firing. The thought would start small and as the wave built it would expand out across the brain. At this time I was able to feel the firing of each neuron.

Of course, I could not have experienced any of this if I had not let go of my ego identification with the human instrument. Our ego does not allow us to see the pure mechanical nature of human consciousness. It is the egos job to protect the human instrument. The ego believes that if we fully understand how the human instrument operates then we will lose appreciation or reverence for it and have less sense of value in it. If we do not value the human instrument then we will have less motivation to maintain it. So the ego throws up warning signs of fear when we get close to understanding how the human consciousness operates.

I saw that I had been evolving and was continuing to evolve as I made an effort to change myself. As I have studied history, particularly spiritual history, and watched myself and my society, I have noticed the changes we have made and direction we are all growing toward.

The evolution of individual consciousness happens as a person becomes more aware of what motivates them. We evolve as individuals and as a species. Since our individual and collective motivation is to experience Goodness, the evolved individual or community is one that experiences more Goodness. Primitive or immature people just react to the situations life offers while the conscious and evolved person can experience the same situation and choose how or if they will react. Therefore, if a situation or stimuli appears they look for ways to experience in such a way as to experience Goodness. The unconscious person would just be a victim of the situation or stimuli.

This is evolution in personal empowerment.

I have seen this in myself and humanity. As I became more aware of how to operate the human instrument I had more options on how to reaction to a given situation. I gained the power to choose the positive response of appreciation, joy and love over the negative reactions of guilt, fear, doubt and hate.

I looked back and saw that thousands of years ago individuals had much less personal power then they do today. Politically we went from serfdom to democracy and we are not done evolving politically yet. I can see that someday we will have no need for governments, that all people will be masters over ourselves and will be responsible for ourselves.

Spiritually, primitive religions we all about keeping the people bound the ruling classes. They did this by encouraging people to think of the power (God) as outside of themselves. While today's more evolved traditions encourage people to "be gods" in their own rights and find the power within themselves. Christianity is a religion on the verge of this evolution. The more primitive elements of it still encourage people to think that God is outside of them and that they should serve the will of God as told them by the religious hierarchy or by other authorities. Then there is Jesus and how he encourages people to question authority, from our parents to the clergy, and to find the Kingdom within. His example is of a person who forced himself to evolve from the son of a earthly father to son of a heavenly Father.

I have also seen this natural evolution in the computer revolution. When I first got involved with computers they were these big machines that took up whole rooms and were controlled by large university bureaucracies. Today, I am typing this book on a personal computer that is more powerful then all the computers the university used to have only twenty five years ago. That is personal empowerment at the technical level. Technological evolution is not the same as personal evolution.

I also see how each generation has do go through the same cathartic experience before it is ready to be its own generation. I had to go through this cathartic experience in my crisis before I could discover myself. We start to go through this crisis as teenagers and usually finish in our thirties. Some people start earlier than others and some end earlier than others. The ones that start earlier do not necessarily finish first. In fact, the longer the gestation period usually the greater the evolution. Jesus saw this when he told his parable of Matthew 20 and Luke 13 that end with, "So the last will be first, and the first last."

The premature rebellion does not necessarily mean one will break free from the tyranny of authority. I have seen that many of those in my generation, the Boomer Generation, who rebelled in the 1960's with long hair, drugs and the like are today's conservatives and religious fundamentalist. Their rebellion and questioning of authority was not deep enough for them to see the truth that would set them free from the fear based philosophies and theologies of the dark past.

There are those who want to see a cathartic crisis for the whole planet or all of humanity before they will allow themselves to appreciate all that life offers. They are like the person who refuses to graduate from high school until all the students graduate. All the students will NEVER graduate from high school. For there will always be students coming in who are just starting. We want new students because we want to be the teachers of those students.

Humanity will never be "perfect" in itself because we will always want new challenges to evolve through. We want to generally improve, and will, but we will find new ways to evolve and become better. Yesterdays idea of perfection will be tomorrows mediocrity. The process of evolution is the fun or joy of life.

Today's image of perfection is the one who can perfect and unconditionally love all that life has to offer. When we 'arrive' at this perfection then it is time to turn around and give back to others. The faithless or immature person will say that it is not possible to 'arrive' at this perfection, but people like Jesus and myself (and many others) have shown that this is not true.

Each generation will hopefully improve upon the understanding and methods of operating the human instrument. Our mythologies today gives us a direction to evolve toward. Starting with the likes of Jesus and his so called miracles to the X-Men of the movies. If Jesus can walk on water and the X-Men can levitate then someday we will all be able to do this. We will probably start with extra-sensory perceptions (ESP) and eventually move toward psychokinetic (PK) or telekinesis. This is only the beginning.

First we have to learn how to operate our emotions and that means learning how to love unconditionally all that life offers. As we learn how to do this we will also find ways of teaching it to the next generation so that the process with easier and quicker.

Spectrum of Consciousness

I developed this concept of the spectrum of consciousness to help me understand and explain how I saw our human evolution. The squiggly line represents the intensity of our experience. The farther from the center the more intense the experience. As you can see love can be very intense to, but unlike fear, it has an attractive element in it.

[PUT BOTH OF THE SPECTRUM FIGURES HERE]



Like the numeric spectrum of mathematics, the spectrum of consciousness has a center, datum or zero. When we are experiencing life from the left side or negative consciousness than any move toward the right is experienced as positive. The first goal becomes rest and peace.

As you move farther from the center the intensity of the emotion get greater. Even moving far to the right side or toward love can be very intense. Both directions will tend to destroy the body, but the right side or love side feels a lot better.

I recently created another version of this spectrum but one that has a top to bottom perspective. As we move up in our consciousness we experience more of the positive or heavenly experiences we are attracted to.

???The unconscious person can be controlled with words. They can be manipulated emotionally by either making them feel the pain of fear of the pleasure of appreciation, particularly the negative feels of anger, low self worth, fear. These are all negative experiences on the spectrum of consciousness.

An awake person would have the choice of reaction to words and can choose to move to right on spectrum of consciousness, from the negative to the neutral to the positive.

To move from the extremes we relax and stop reacting to what life is offering. If we get too far out on the fringes and it becomes destructive all we have to do to get back to peace & equanimity is to relax and let good of what we are making important.

Our life will always have ups and downs, but as we evolve the ups will be higher and the downs will less intense. That means the center of our experience, the average or mean, will be moving toward the right side of the spectrum of consciousness.

Our naturally engrained intent is to evolve spiritually, which is to grow in our ability to appreciate, enjoy and love what life offers. This means we want to our center of experience toward the right side of the spectrum.

Love is the desire or motivation that moves us from the left side of the spectrum toward the right.

Appreciation and joy do not hurt, but once you start to move into the experience of love then it starts to hurt. The more you move into love the more intense that hurt becomes. But it is a good hurt, a hurt that you are attracted to.

Types of Love

It feels that the appreciative, excitement, enthusiastic, positive attitude aspect of love is more intellectual or mental. The hurting part of love, the sorrow, sadness and compassion is more a part of the rest of the body. One form of love seems to originate or radiate out of the head and the other out of the heart.

The kind of love that says, I love you but I just can not stand you, is the kind that seems to come out of the head. It is more conceptual and more elementary. It does seem to come out of the desire to love just to the ability to love.

The Greeks have three words for love, Eros, Philo and Agape. In my experience of love the first kind of love, Eros, is about the desire to have sex, the urge to merge. We want to 'make love'. It is the most basic and base of the aspects of love. Sexual/erotic love or Eros, is the most beginning level of love. It is fun and very enjoyable. Sex is a stepping stone to romantic love.

The second type of love is Philo, which is like brotherly love or having an infinity for. The third type is Agape or divine love. This is the love that is of no object and has no limits. It is unconditional love. It there is an object or sense of separation from that which you love (agape) then you are still in Philo type love. This is the type Jesus was expressing when he said, My Father and I are one. This is the type I felt when I realized I was God. There is no separation.

Romantic love happens when somebody else gives you permission to love yourself by saying to you that you are lovable. When they say, I love you, they are saying that it is possible for somebody to love you so you can love yourself. If nobody says that then you can not love yourself.

Romantic love does give a person a sense of excitement. Because of the narrowing of the consciousness or focus of our awareness or ignorance of others we create agitation like the magnifying glass example. When you focus the magnifying glass on your hand it excites the molecules. When you focus your attention on one person it is very exciting. But to do this you have to ignore all the rest of you. You have to pretend you do not care about the rest of humanity.

Romantic love is fun. It is not a bad thing but it is something that if you keep growing in your ability to love then you will out grow romantic love.

Relationships are only stepping stones to something better. Relationship work when they are seen as a step to something higher, to that experience of perfect, unconditional love. When relationships are seen as an end in themselves, such as romantic relationships then they corrupt, for the sense of power in the relationship is finite and separation is still real. This also goes for the relationship with a teacher, guru, messiah or church.

All these types of love pale in comparison to perfect, unconditional love.

There is nothing wrong with any type of love. After a person has awaken to their true nature it does not mean that they can not experience or have an interest in the lessor types of love. Eros and Philo love will become less interesting to the awakened on. The habits will probably take you into these lessor loves and that will not hurt unless you get attached again to the form that you believe brings you love.

 

Evolutionary Love

In Jesus' time he taught a step of the evolution of love. In his day they taught that we should love our neighbors and hate our enemies. But Jesus taught that we should now learn to love our enemies. This was a radical step to the hard hearted people of his time. The conservatives of his time rejected what he had to say here. They reasoned that if they loved their enemies then their enemies would destroy them. it was the hardness of their hearts that allowed them to fight and destroy their enemies.

But now it is time for me to go beyond Jesus' teaching to the next level of love.

In our time they teach that we should love the sinner and hate the sin. I say that it is time now to love the sin. To find the good in all that is there. For the great commandment is to love, not hate.

Jesus and I are trying to push to you to a higher level of love. I want you to see beyond the belief in good and evil. To return to the times before you took of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. To the time before you believed in sin. Detach from our materiality. Let go of our attachment to material things that causes us to see things as evil or sinful.

Find the good in all that is there and you will be able to love all unconditionally. Then you will be perfect in love.

The concepts we have of God and love have also been evolving. The Old Testament depicts a God that is mean and vengeful. Their God was more of a blood thirsty savage, which reflected the consciousness of the day.

But Jesus tried to show us a new more evolved concept of God and love, one that gentle, compassionate, caring, forgiving God that is here to serve us. Yet, is apostles and disciples were raised under the old concept of God and they could not let go of that concept completely when they taught after Jesus' death. Hence, the more conservative of the Christians still embrace the old mean God of the Old Testament.

The Christs of the world have embraced a more loving image of God and have gone beyond even Jesus' image of God and love.

FIRST

The first task of any truth loving person is to remove the fear based motivations in their life. This means that we are to experience the truth beyond the falseness of the belief in separation. The belief in separation can be the separation from anything; the belief in separation from one another, separation from God or the Universe, from plants, animals or the earth.

The belief in our separation is the root of all fears.

After the truth loving person has found the fear abolishing truth then they go on to manifest.

Every human being has the desire to eradicate the lie of separation from the consciousness. Every person on the planet wants to be free from fear. They may not be conscious that that is there motivation.

Once you remove the root delusion that is the foundation of all your fears then life becomes perfect and you become perfect. Life does not start until you are perfect. That is heaven. Life starts when you enter heaven, nirvana or Eden.

There is a difference between thinking one is separate and believing one is separate. You are still on the negative side of the spectrum of consciousness as long as you believe you are separate. Once your belief of separation is going, even though the thought of separation is still there, then you move the right side or heavenly side of consciousness.

The left side of the spectrum of consciousness is the hellish side. The more you believe you are separate the deeper your hell. The more you experience your oneness with all life the greater your experience of heaven will be.

Jesus was trying to tell people about our oneness when he said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matthew 25:40)

If one rejects any part of the whole then the reject the whole. To know God is to know the whole and to reject nothing.

I did not like the term Evil. I did not like the way it was thrown around so easily. So I looked at the concept called evil and this is what I found.

First I recognized that evil is a word, a word that humanity has created to express something or remind ourselves of something. What is our motivation for using this word evil? It reminds or awakens us to things that we have learned that cause injury or harm, harm to the body or flesh. Therefore, all that is evil is related to the flesh. If we no longer make the flesh or body important then there is no such thing as evil. If we do not take care of the body and protect it from harm or injury then we will die.

Then there is the idea of sin. The word sin means a serious fault or offense. Offense means to strike or injury. Sin, therefore, is still associated with injury or hurt. Divine law or religious law was only created to teach people to not injury one another. The injury may be physical, as in Thou Shall Not Kill, or emotionally as in Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness. To lie to another can cause them to injury themselves either emotionally or physically.

In the Bible's Genesis 2 it says, "And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Therefore, thinking we know what is good and evil, right and wrong, destroys life. However "whosoever will save his life shall lose it." (Matthew 16:25) The desire to survive, which is attachment to the flesh, destroys our capacity to enjoy and love all that life offers.

We are the creators of the division between good and evil, right and wrong. If we are attached to material then if whatever threatens what we are attached is evil. Our attachment to material things is where we have 'stored your treasures here on earth . . . " and not stored our treasures in heaven, to use Jesus' language (Matthew 6:19).

What looks like evil in the short run always turns out as good in the long run, assuming we eyes to see. An example of the good of sin or evil is a Biblical story that comes out of Genesis 37 about Joseph, the youngest son of Jacob who changed his name to Israel. Joseph was a smart aleck who got in trouble with his older brothers. One day his brothers beat him up and then sold him to slave traders. The slave traders took him to Egypt where he was sold into slavery to a servant of Pharaoh. Several years later the Pharaoh had a dream which Joseph was able to interpret for Pharaoh. The dream indicated that there would be seven good years of plenty and then seven years of drought and lack. The Pharaoh, impressed with Joseph, ask him to prepare Egypt for the bad years. So Joseph became the Pharaoh's right hand man and virtually controlled all of Egypt.

Many years later when the drought came Israel and his people were suffering. So Israel, who was getting old by this time, sent his sons to Egypt to buy food. When they arrived they had to deal with the Pharaoh's right hand man, Joseph. When they realized that it was Joseph they were sure that he would have them killed for the 'evil' or sin that did to him. However, Joseph had a bigger vision or perspective than his brothers. He could see that if they had not done the 'evil' to him then he would not be in the position he was that would enable he to support all of Israel's family. So what looked like an evil, and was an evil to Joseph when it happened, really turned out to be a good and benefited all of Israel. Sometimes what hurts the individual is a benefit to humanity.

Therefore, evil, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Evil can only exist in the eye of the narrow minded person.

From God's perspective (a broad minded perspective), all is very Good (Genesis 1:31). From the human's perspective some things are evil. Which experience would we rather have, all goodness or some evil. For a whole and complete life experience we would have both. We pretend to be human and invite the challenge of evil into our life, but, when the play gets to be too much and we need rest, we switch back to being God and seeing all as good.

Without the duality of Good and Evil we could not have the fear and love or drama and comedy of the play of life. The illusion of evil is necessary for the illusion or play of life.

If we seek we will find that is all things that appear to be evil really have some good in them. All things that are evil in the short run are good in the long run. If we seek to understand why God has created everything as it is, we will see why and will understand all that is.

Jesus said as much when he answered Nicodemus, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. (John 3) When we are coming from the perspective of Spirit then there is no evil. When we are coming from the perspective of water (body) and Spirit then we will sometimes see evil and sometimes not see evil. When we are coming from the perspective of flesh (body) then we will see evil all the time.

The choice is ours. The power to choose comes with practice. If we want to experience evil then we can choose to see evil. If we do not want evil then do not choose to see evil.

I like to see things as evil. I like the passion it creates in me. I particularly like to see the evil in the falseness of the belief that words can hurt people. When I hear people saying this I become very passionate and alive. I love that feeling. Thank God for people who are asleep. Thank God for evil.

I also have this fundamental desire to address. I do not just want to be in harms way and see how I deal with it. I want to oppose evil, I want to fight. I can see now that there really is no evil, but I still want evil to be there. I want to oppose evil. I want to engage evil. I want that conflict. I want the vitality that conflict offers.

That is what confrontation is for me, it is opposing what I want to see as evil. Opposing evil is dramatic, it is powerful, it is a rich experience.

Why do war movies, conflicts and strong opposition attract our attention? It is because they are dramatic. We want the drama. Drama gives us the richness in life. With the drama we can fully and completely feel and unqualified sense of YESness.

I was getting very interested getting involved with the Christian community. The idea of becoming a minister crossed my mind so I started to investigate that. I decided to take a trip across the country and visit some seminaries.

I visited one seminary near Atlanta and attended a recruitment seminar they were having for a weekend. I did not fit the usual image of a seminary student for I had long hair, a beard and wore loose fitting and natural clothes. I looked like a hippie, or like Jesus. I must have been quite a fright to both the administration and the potential students.

At the introducing lecture there were many of the theologians and instructors from the seminary. When they asked for questions I asked all the instructors and theologians if they had entered the kingdom of heaven yet. Not one said they had. So I asked, "if you have not entered the kingdom of heaven then are you not the hypocrites that Jesus warned us about who have neither entered the kingdom of heaven nor do they allow others to?" I do not remember what their actually response was but the question made people very uncomfortable. After the weekend I decided to hang around an attend some of the classes and study in their library, as they had invited all of us to do.

Every day they would have one of their advanced students give the sermon of the daily services in the chapel. Like most church services they had a printed program with some text that the congregation would be asked to recite. I read the text with some dismay for there was the line; "We will resist evil with all our heart."

After the congregation had recited the text as written and the service was over I stood up and questioned the congregation (made up mostly of seminary students and theologians) about this line of text. I pointed out that they were teaching directly opposite of what Jesus taught (Mat 5:39). Not one member of that congregation recanted their pledge to resist evil or even questioned that idea.

Jesus knew what he was talking about when he encouraged us to resist not evil. Resistance itself is a form of control.

We assume that we must either resist evil or comply, but here is another choice, to do nothing.

I could see that this seminary had no integrity or was not interest in being anything but the blind leading the blind. In fact, this particular seminary seemed the most open of all the seminaries that I visited. After this trip I was discouraged about reaching out to Christians. I started to let my desire to reach out to Christians go.

When we conform to the expectations of others we are complying with evil. For doing the will of people is denying the spark of light that we have within. If we are being told what to do or how to act then we are not listening to the truth within ourselves.