- Thorn in your side (Neshama)
- Human being (Neshama)
- Back in "real" space (Neshama)
- High, then low (Neshama/Poem)
- Sexual Energy (Neshama/m&f)
- Male/female dynamics (Neshama/m&f)
- Ego & Mind (Neshama)
- Infinity (Neshama/shaman)
Thorn in your side (Neshama)
Once could see the suffering associated with sin as the by-product of G-d's rehabilitation of the iniquitous soul. The analogy is the removal of an infectious splinter from a person's body: the pain that is experienced is not a "punishment" as such for the person's carelessness, but an inevitable part of the healing process itself. The fact that a foreign body has become embedded in living flesh and has caused its decay makes its removal a painful experience. By the same token, when something alien to the soul's bond with G-d has become embedded within it, the extraction of this alien body, and the healing of the bond, is experienced as painful to both body and soul.
Human being (Neshama)
Human, being the Divine and the human. Look at human as the limited side of our being (sometimes referred to as the ego). The Divine is the infinite side of our being. We can tell the difference between the two, by being aware of whether we are expressing the infinite side of our beings, or whether we are coming from the limited, part. The words that I associate with limited are fearful, belief in the Bad, restricting potential. The ones that are used with the infinite Divine are perhaps Love. From here we go to the next step, which is that this can only be expressed through our Love of God, the Divine. For if love is:
That is the similarity between Christians and Moslems. They each love the Son of God and the Prophet of Allah – not God or Allah, himself. This is the essential difference between these religions and Judaism. Now loving Jesus, Son of God, our Lord and Saviour, we do come to the cult of the divine human – for that is what Mohammed, Prophet of Allah, Blessed be His Name, We could continue here to look at the being that we are lauding, as a special being – the Son of God - for instance. Although Jesus did say we are all like Him too, did he not? So we end up with again with the doctrine of the divine human. Now the distinction here is that some of us are divine. However, the age of enlightenment of our society must be realisation that we are all divine. In fact, everything is divine, for everything comes from the Creator, Blessed be his Name, and everything contains an atom of His Energy. In fact, no Atom could Exist without His Hand in it. No Molecule can Form without His Blessing. And the conclusion of the conscious man is if you cannot see the Divine in something, it is only because of your blindness, and fear, and lack of love of the Energy that has Created us all.
Our eternal pain is not that we are bad (as the site of the eternal battle between ערה רצ׳, the will to evil, and בותה רצ׳, the will to Good), but that the will to evil might be residing within us. If we consider ourselves co-creators, in constant interaction with the Divine, we have to accept the fact that we have the Evil Urge imbibed in our very cores. This is where the doctrine of forgiveness becomes so necessary, so healing. It states that we start our healing from the place of forgiving ourselves for being aware of Evil. For if we are part of the creation, then we are creating evil in the world just by thinking about it, even if only for a moment.
Does this feed our evil sides in any way? By the acknowledgement of evil, we are in some way, creating it, giving it energy. On the other hand if we cannot admit that we have the urge to evil in our beings, then how can we ever forgive ourselves, and heal? For what is there to forgive? If we do not even admit to the urge existing within ourselves.
How can we enjoy ourselves without being bad? If God is all loving and does not care what we do, just that we love her, then how come we need to accept all these other rules that have been made, that make us so unhappy. So unhappy as to have the need to kill one another, and often in the name of the self-same god of love and peace and harmony.
If you are expected to uncritically accept something, then it is very likely that you are being force-fed a line of mysticism and superstition whose sole aim is to defraud you, possibly humiliate you and, in rare occurrences, cause harm to you. You are being asked to believe -- in the absence of all evidence -- that what some stranger is telling you is the truth just because that person says so.
Back in "real" space (Neshama)
4/13/02
It is painful to be back in my “real” space. We enter into a state of bliss, a place of unconditional love, of non-judgmental relationships, and then we return, as if from outer space to the dependencies and dependents, the enabling and the co-dependent relationships; the loves that manifest in the material – as of daughter, of husband, of lover and love, of Father, of friend – with all their limitations and expectations, and slowly we emerge from the fog and the harsh light of the day is removes all the shadows, all the soft places.
How come this bliss is not manifest inside me, in my life and my love?
High, then low (Neshama/Poem)
Neshama: 5/1/2001 9:32 AM
After the high, comes the low.
Flowing with you all, dancing, meeting, journeying, touching and being touched,
I return to my life changed, as always after being touched, and long for some more.
To spend my life dancing for and with the spirits, to be communicating with them, and
Help deliver their teachings and love to us all – is my dream.
Sexual Energy (Neshama/m&f)
Neshama: m&f
Thoughts on why we need a sacred ritual to focus the sexual energy that the feminine is the recipient of:
The masculine collects all this sexual-creative energy that needs to be made manifest. For his direction is transformation from the spiritual to the material – from the crown chakra down to the sexual chakra, from Keter to Shekhinah. The feminine, the receptive, awaits this energy to enter into her and she is the medium in which the spiritual is made manifest. So, sexually, she accepts the gifting of the masculine into her very being. What should emerge from this is a child, but now when we have sex for other reasons, the creative energy will need to find another outlet. This often manifests in possessive emotional energy. She needs to be able to move the energy from the material to the spiritual. This is why we need the sacred ritual. The Kundalini snake that will unwind the energy from the base of the spine into the heavens.
Male/female dynamics (Neshama/m&f)
Thoughts on nutrient absorption being a metaphor for male/female dynamics, or why we believe in the perfect partner...
The cell needs certain nutrients. It creates a protein receptor, a huge, macro-molecule, which then emerges from the cell wall. Its roots in the primal fluid within which the cell lives, its head in the universal fluid that surrounds the cell. There it waits, a receptor, listening to all the sounds, all the calls, all the music of the spheres that surrounds it. It gets enchanted sometime. But if it is healthy, and in alignment, it will recognize the sign it is listening for, and then it will morph, and change itself, to begin to send out the vibrational energy to pull this nutrient into it’s being. It does not know from anything except the musical vibrations whether it will fit or not. Assuming, balance and perfection, it will fit like a glove to a hand, the key that opens up the doorway to the core of the cell. There it will be consumed and in it’s giving aid the cell in its life and journey. It is why the masculine seeks annihilation, for through that there is transformation. And the creative journey is one of annihilation, transformation and creation.
A moment on the cell that is a little of center – emotionally, or otherwise, then the protein will accept a substitute, perhaps something that is close, and bring it in. This will provide some nutrition, but there will be a side effect. Thus you will need more than is healthy of this nutrient, you will have an allergic reaction to it, or it will hurt you.
So, this is why I end up putting these messages into Word.
Ego & Mind (Neshama)
The planets don't cause/influence/affect (thus making us passive recipients of their influence, something akin to a billiard ball theory of determinism) rather, there's much mirroring and interrelationship going on in the universe.
The ego and the mind also have their place, otherwise we would not able to put anything together, just that they tend to overinflate and conspire to control. They also have a purpose, a task to complete.
Infinity (Neshama/shaman)
I am not sure whether you said you liked physics or not. But perhaps this will help.
When we see how many absolute miracles of fine-tuning were necessary for a universe and sentient beings to manifest, it becomes a semantic quibble whether you invoke “the laws of physics” or “God”, because they share the same divine powers of manifestation
“The probability that the electron (unit of energy)---always viewed as a particle through and through---arrives at any chosen point on the screen is built up from the combined effort of every possible way of getting there.”
Yet, in our consciousness, it arrives at a certain place, we think. So, is it just our consciousness that is focusing on that particular place and thus it manifests in our reality? Thus at every moment we live in a universe of infinite possibilities, in fact the universe itself is living every possible occurrence at every moment, yet we traverse one path according to what we experience at that moment – according to what we are able to correlate.
This is known as Feynman’s “sum-over-paths” approach to quantum mechanics.
According to this theory, particles must be viewed as travelling from one location to another along every possible path. So, at every moment there are an infinite number of paths that are going to be traversed.
Then I read these pieces in an interview with Timothy Conway “On Engaged Spirituality” from The Sun Issue 328 Apr 2003.
From the mystical point of view, we are being challenged to question the illusion of our egos and awaken from the dream of “me” to our true identity as Divine Spirit.
“And what is going to lead us to that realization?”
Pain, anguish and a sense of absurdity or meaninglessness…. At a certain point, people feel life is so intolerable that they reject the traditional concept of an external “puppet master” deity. When God is up there and we’re down here, we’re under his thumb. As conditions worsen, this rather sadomasochistic view of the deity eventually becomes intolerable.
The mature panentheistic view says that G-d alone is. G-d plays all the parts in the phenomenal drama of existence. Like a single actor moving about onstage to create various characters, G-d is exploring all kinds of experiences: pleasure, pain, loneliness, popularity, fear, longing, resentment, euphoria. As some saintly Hasidic rabbis courageously stated, G-d is the Jewish families going off to the ovens in the concentration camps, and God is the Nazis sending them off to their deaths. God is the suffering Iraqi children dying of cholera, typhoid and diarrhoea because sanctions have deprived them of clean water and basic medicines, and G-d is the U.S. State Department and White House officials who keep the murderous sanctions in place. All are guises of the one God. God plays all possible roles---from the enlightened beings to the most unenlightened dictators and death squads. So many different possibilities (from Feynman we would say: All possibilities) --- and not just human, but also animal, plant, fungal and bacterial. All played by this one Spirit. This nondual view answers the problem of all creatures suffering at the whim of an almighty Creator who’s putting them through their paces. No! If you feel pain, this is G-d’s pain. God is here, finding out what it’s like to be “you”, experiencing this grievously troubled situation, just as G-d’s experiencing what it’s like to be George W. Bush, or Saddam Hussein, or a cancer patient, or someone who just won the Lotto. What an amazing play of divine creativity and courage and poignancy.
Engaged spirituality means spontaneously working for the collective welfare out of a deep sense of solidarity with all sentient beings… It’s basically radical empathy with “the other”, who at that point is no longer other, but a manifestation of the one Self, the nondual divine reality of Spirit..
“And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” And the beautiful secret of G-d was revealed to Juliana of Norwich, the great fourteenth century saint—that all beings would somehow be brought Home. No one would have to permanently suffer in hell, for G-d is our deepest truth, our real condition of eternal love and bliss. No creature can exile himself from his love forever.