Easter

Easter really has taken on two meanings. The familiar bunnies and decorated chicken eggs that bunnies have to stay up late to hide so their kids (and/or family pets) can find them the next day. That part of Easter is really a fertility rite; bunnies and eggs, symbols of fertility; it's spring, crops are planted, we hope they do well and provide an abundance come harvest time.

Easter as a religious holiday is the day Jesus rose from the dead, after having died on the cross for our sins, to give us the gift of forgiveness.

I'm not a member of any organized religion. I've explored many, and I've found truths in many. But I do feel that Jesus was a real person, and that God sent Jesus with a message of forgiveness. This isn't the message you usually get from most ministries. The message we usually get is, "if you don't do as we say you're going to hell".

If you take the time to read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you find a message of Love and Forgiveness, Jesus died to give us the gift of forgiveness, but it comes to us only if we also accept the responsibility to love and forgive, to love God with all of our hearts, soul, and mind, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to forgive and not to judge.

God didn't create us just to judge us and then send us to hell. What sense would that make? God didn't create us to hate and judge each other, we are all God's creation.

We all have what we would consider flaws; we hurt each other; we do things that are harmful to other life, and that can be anything because everything, even the rocks have life. But these things aren't really flaws; for if we were all "perfect", if none of us ever did harm, then there would be no choice to love, and that wouldn't be real love at all.

God could have made us perfect beings that always put others first, always thought in terms of least harm, the best for all life; the way we know we should think, but then our love wouldn't be genuine because it wouldn't be of our choice, and to the degree any choice did exist it wouldn't mean much. How hard is it to love someone who has always treated you perfectly, always put you first? God loves us and wants us to love God, and God could make our lives free of pain and suffering, but we need to make an unbiased choice to love. God gave us what we need to live a good life, but collectively we have to make that choice.

It seems pretty obvious to me why we have to forgive. Can you imagine a bunch of people going to heaven that still hold a grudge for each other? That wouldn't be heaven at all! And we can't ask God to ban others from heaven because we won't forgive them. We are all God's creation, why would God favor one over another? We could make this planet into a heaven if only we could all get love and forgiveness into our heart, and hatred and bitterness out. I believe that will happen eventually, but I do not know if it will be within my lifetime.

God has given us what we need to live a good life if we can get those things down but they are tough lessons and humans seem to be hard learners, some more than others, and unfortunately I'm pretty high up on the hard learner curve, but it's a question of how much pain we have to cause ourselves before we learn.

I believe this is why God has us here now; to learn to love one another; to learn to forgive. It's still a choice that we have to make ourselves, but the longer I live, the more I realize that not doing so only leads to pain.

I have wondered for a long time why God requires us to live in a way that is not our nature; when God does not place that same requirement on animals. But then I thought, what animals hold a long term grudge? And animals are infinitely better at giving unconditional love, real love; than people. It's already in their nature; for us we have to learn it. But then it occurred to me but that IS our nature; our human nature. Animals are born with instincts, they can do only what those instincts drive them to do, but humans do have the unique ability to adapt our behavior and learn; it just happens that pain is an unavoidable part of that process.

So I hope this Easter; we can see that Jesus came here to help us with that process; set the most perfect example that could be set for us and told us that we are capable of the same. Even greater deeds shall you do we were told.

Still, the world is full of discordance, bitterness, hatred, uncaring, greed. But I feel optimistic in that God has done things in my life that seemed impossible; and to be sure there are still some unanswered prayers requiring miracles, but I know all things are possible to God; and all things are possible to us with love, forgiveness, and God's help.

Hopefully, as a species, we can get over the name hangups, God is God whether God is called God or Allah, or number of names used by various world religions. Language is never completely adequate for communicating, it can only use symbols and all these names are only symbols for what God actually is. When we hear our leaders suggest that God will lead us to victory against our enemies, we must remember that our enemies are equally God's creation and God does not wish any of us to harm each other.

The basic truths underlying the world's religions are really all the same; even more so when you look closely at source documents and avoid the biased interpretations of religions institutions.

We need to give thanks for each other and love and forgive each other while we are here. Whatever comes next, right now we are here, and right now each other is what we have, and God's love. If we can love and forgive each other than I think there is hope for our species and our planet and God won't have to hit the cosmic reboot button.

Ongoing Life Experiments, New Format, New Theories, etc.

I decided to change the format of all my blogs for several reasons. I've learned a bit of context style sheets and a bit of graphics image manipulation which gives me an opportunity to improve the look a bit. It is my experience that if people don't like the packaging, they won't even bother to look at the contents.

I hope I don't offend people with the banner image, but the image of God portrayed in the Monty Python film, "The Holy Grail", is not far from the image that I was presented with as a child. That God image involved jealousy, anger, insensitivity, and egotism. The image of God I was brought up with made God some kind of super-human with the emotional maturity of a below average thirteen year old. Most of all, God was external. This seems to be a fairly mainstream view of God still, however, it is no longer my view.

A blog is kind of like a public diary. Because it is intended to be public, I separated my thoughts to some degree and created blogs for different areas of interest. I feared that if I did not do so, my jumble of thoughts would confuse people beyond their ability to follow. However, it creates a problem because of the relatedness of everything.

I am interested in learning as much as I can about the nature of our reality, and I view spiritual paths and scientific paths as both valid avenues. Science and spirituality both have their limitations. Only phenomena that are readily reproducible on demand really lend themselves well to the scientific method of investigation. Spirituality and direct knowledge can teach us personally, but we can't share directly with others. We can know something but when we tell someone else, we can't prove it, unless they also experience it directly.

I have come to believe the following about God; that God is forgiving, loving, and continuously creating. I've come to believe that God is inherent in everything, and that God primarily creates our reality through directed selection of random events.

Let me explain that, evolutionists hold that life evolves by random mutations and natural selection. Religious fundamentalists believe that God created everything in seven days and from that point forward, it is static. I don't believe either theory is complete. Rather, I believe that natural selection isn't mindless, that "intent" of spirit drives the outcome of random events.

In the Bible when it says that in the beginning, there was The Word; it is my belief that what is meant by that is God's intent, and God's intent seems to have been to bring about the creation of a living, loving, conscious universe, of which we are one component.

There are still a lot of aspects that are mysterious to me; in particular why suffering is necessary. Is it necessary to have suffering in order to experience love? Is it a necessary part of our learning experience? Why do we have mortal bodies? I can speculate on these matters but really I don't know.

I do feel though there is a plan, a way that everything fits together harmoniously, and that we all have an inherent feeling when we deviate from that and then things don't fit well, are not harmonious, we have problems relating to each other in the loving manner that was intended.

I heard someone say that we have to be able to make wrong choices in order to make choices, and if we couldn't make choices, didn't have free will, then we couldn't really love. Maybe that's true, but wrong choices and their consequences seem to carry a high price.

Details

Actually, here's a small detail I think I can share.

We can still believe in things we believed in as kids.
... from the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie

The relevance is that the physically impossible used to be regularly invoked in response to prayer when I was a child; and my question was, is it still possible as an adult; and as I was thinking about this; and actually writing about it, I heard that statement made by a character in the movie as if it were a verbal response to my question put forth to God.

If you're feeling like life is hopeless; think back to the difficult situations in life you experienced as a child. I had a few friends check out early over the past couple of years; and that's tragic because it eliminated any possibility for them to experience better times again.

Experiment Update

After years of what felt like almost complete spiritual isolation, with only rare sporadic exceptions, I am finding myself flooded with communications. A conversation with God no longer seems one-way; and no, I don't have "voices in my head", but what I have been experiencing is an incredible amount of synchronicities and relevant dreams.

Unfortunately, I feel like I can not share the details right now. What I will say, if you feel lost; if you feel like there is no hope for your life; don't give up.

Jesus Doesn't Hate

I went down to Alki today and there were a couple of people in a boat with religious hate messages. If one actually reads the Bible and tries to understand things in context, it becomes very clear that Jesus came here not to condemn the world but to save it, and Jesus repeatedly commands us not to judge and to love our neighbor, in fact he states after loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, that to love our neighbor as ourself is the second command and that these are greater than all of the others.

I had a discussion with one of my customers recently. They told me, if you want to understand the nature of Jesus, read the book of John. Having done so I've come away with the understanding that Jesus came here not to judge but to save and his message was a message of love and not hate.

Likewise, it is not my desire to pass judgment on the people in the boat. I am sure their intentions were good if misguided. However, I would like to encourage them and others like them to go back and read the book of John and also the other gospels.

If you want to motivate people to do the right thing, I feel it is better to motivate them through love, than through hatred, threats, and intimidation. People are attracted to love and repulsed by hatred, threats, and intimidation. If you want to bring people closer to God, it must be done through love.

Matthew 7:1

Do not judge or you too will be judged.

Mark 12:31

And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

Luke 6:37

Do not judge, and you will not be judged.
Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.
Forgive, and you will be forgiven.

John 3:14

We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death.

Things

Well things seemed to be going well and now a bit bumpy...

But, I ran across an article that was just too weird. I won't explain, go read it for yourself.

Experiments

My experiment isn't exactly a pure one, and that's the frailty of human science, in as much as we try to be objective, the observer is part of the observed system and so true objectivity is not obtainable. None the less, things seem to be turning positive to some degree but there are still significant clouds as well.

I have been trying to be more spiritually aware, I've been trying to listen to God, if that makes any sense, and I don't have a firm belief system in any particular religion but I do believe in God, so I've pursued things on different levels. I have been saying the Lords prayer, sometimes several times a day because I believe in it pretty much everything important we can ask for is there and it helps to focus my intention on being what I believe God wants me to be. I've also been experimenting with some new meditative techniques and I think there is some benefit there as well.

Some positive things have happened, I was first put on Wellbutrin for ADD symptoms last August, and it would give me about three really good days and then about a week of moderately improved functionality and then by about three weeks I'd be more or less back to baseline. They'd bump the dose up and everything would repeat. I was told that "usually" one would reach a point where the benefit would remain but for me, I reached the maximum safe dosage and increasing beyond that had the potential for inducing seizures. So then they had to wean me off that and during that time I pretty much locked up.

Then they tried Provigil, again, it was beneficial initially, but I rapidly adapted to it.

Finally, Ritalin, or at least it's generic equivalent and that has given me lasting benefit. There was a couple of initial dosage adjustments to reach a beneficial dosage, and then it has provided me with stable benefits for about three months now.

During this time I've been able to get one years tax returns out of the way, still have more to do but I'm making progress, and I've been able to get much better broadband infrastructure in place for my Internet company, Eskimo North, and that is selling reasonably well and I expect will do much better once it's well documented on the web and advertised.

So those are bright spots.

On a very negative side, there are family members with age related health issues, and I worry about how long they are going to be on this plane and I feel like I'm losing a bit of them every day, and that's really hard to deal with.

My grandparents are all dead, many of my aunts and uncles have died, many of my friends have died and I am not yet at a point where I am either comfortable with their loss or my own mortality.

One of the things I really want to do before I die is document what I've learned and what I've experienced, and share those experiences and teach other people what I've learned. I feel that a lot of people could potentially benefit from what I know but I'm not a great communicator, or at least I don't think I am.

I made the mistake of borrowing money from my father when I hit bottom and I haven't been able to pay that back yet, so in his mind I'm scum of the Earth right now, but then I think I've always been too weird for him. Even before that I always had the feeling like I was being cross-examined when I'd talk to him but then I suppose that in part has to do with the fact that part of his career was working as a detective so perhaps that's just a natural response.

I wonder too though if being adopted isn't part of it, that being genetically unrelated, and different, is something that we are both unconsciously aware of. I was adopted when my parents didn't think they could have a child of their own and then my adoptive mother did get pregnant and they had my sister.

So I don't know, I pray for help with this but so far it doesn't feel like that help has been forthcoming.

One of the things that has always been puzzling to me is the nature of the Father/Son/Spirit relationship, it's something that has brought me disfavor with clergy I've asked because they always have pat answers that seem not to make sense. One of my customers made the simple statement, if you want to know about Jesus, read the book of John, and I've been doing that recently.

It's funny too because I've read through the Bible when I was younger, but now re-reading the book of John I am getting a lot out of it that I didn't before. One of the things I am finding through John is that Jesus is as I had felt Jesus was, someone who was loving not condemning which seems very contrary to the teachings of most churches that I've been exposed to, save for one, and that one wasn't successful at raising enough money to continue operating where they did.

I do wish I could read in the original language because I have read so much about inaccurate translations, and having learned foreign languages I understand that there are things that just aren't translatable. Languages do not allow us to fully express everything that is possible, at least not any one language, they all have words that have nuances that just do not directly translate. I learned Swedish and I found myself thinking things in Swedish that I could not directly translate into English; and not even indirectly entirely. There just weren't words to convey some of the nuances. I've been learning Chinese, and I am finding the same true of Chinese to the limited degree that I know it, I am not even close to fluent yet.

So I have to think that languages so far removed from English in time, there are going to be many things that just aren't accurately translated. I've had an interest in mythology for a long time and one of the things I find is that most stories in the Bible, there is a very similar story in mythology that predates the books of the Bible, but with one significant difference, the earlier versions are always polytheistic, while the Biblical versions in modern translations are mostly monotheistic though there are still some plural references to Gods. The similarity of the stories makes it hard to believe the Biblical versions didn't derive from earlier polytheistic versions and I've been told that references to God in Hebrew is mostly plural, but since I don't know Hebrew I can't confirm that myself.

Anyway, what I am learning about Jesus from John seems less "western" that the teachings of many churches or even other books of the Bible. I try to apply what I'm learning but I'm still not real good at it, still I am beginning to see there are many real truths present.