We talk a lot about it.  But I don’t think many of us really know what Love is.  I know I didn’t.

You bet, I was taught a version of it.  Littered with enough gems of truth to make it easy to want to believe in.  A lie, what my husband delights in calling “black magic”.  Black because it’s dark and dark because it hides something.

That’s the only purpose for dark…to hide something.  Something we fear to see.

I looked.

There is a poem by Kahlil Gibran “On Love”, from his book “The Prophet”.   Here is how it reads, free of any polarity/duality ideas.

“On Love

When Love beckoned to me, I followed,
Though Love’s ways were hard and steep.
And when Love’s wings enfolded me, I yielded,
Though the sword hidden among Love’s pinions wounded me.  When Love spoke to me, I believed,
Though Love’s voice shattered my dreams, as the north wind laid waste my garden.
Even as Love crowned me, so was I crucified.  Even as Love supported my growth, so did it provide a pruning.
Even as Love ascended my heights, and caressed my tenderest branches,
So Love descended to my roots and shook them from their clinging.   Like a sheave of corn I was gathered.
I was threshed to make me naked.
I was shifted free of my husks.
I was ground to whiteness.
And kneaded until I became pliant.
And then I was assigned to Love’s fire, in order to become bread for God’s feast.
All these things Love did to me, that I could come to know the secrets of my heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s Heart.
If in my fear I would have sought only Love’s peace and Love’s pleasure,
Then it would have been better for me to keep covering my nakedness and pass out of Love’s thrashing floor.
Into the season-less world where I would laugh but not all of my laughter,and weep, but not all of my tears.
Love gives nothing but of itself and takes nothing but from itself.
Love possess not nor will be possessed.  For Love is sufficient for Love.  When I Love I do not say: “God is in my heart”,
but rather “I am in the heart of God”.
I am not so foolish as to imagine I can direct Love’s course, being found willing, Love now directs my course.
Love has no other desire then to fulfill itself.
But since I love and have needs of desires, this is my desire,
To be like a running brook that sings its melody into the darkness.
I know the pain of too much tenderness.
I am wounded by my understanding of Love;
And bleed willingly and joyfully.
I wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of Loving;
I rest in the afternoon and melt in Love’s ecstasy
I spend the evening at home in gratitude
And then fall asleep calling for the beloved in my heart,  with a song of love on my lips.”

Love loves us even when we’re unlovable.

But it is only in facing how unlovable we are,

That we become Loving.

I think it’s time to share this understanding.  I really have been clueless in my lack of Self Recogition and Realization.  Really *clueless*.

I had NO idea that so many of us were not AWARE of what has become for me, a very basic fact of life.  And it hasn’t been till *now* that what I consider as fact, is even beginning to dawn on the Mass of us.

Whenever any one of us says, ” I am” we are invoking in the ‘name of God’, whatever quality follows that decree; it becomes manifest as our reality.   For as a Child of God, a Being of Freewill,  our decrees are the same as God decreeing.  It is impossible for Creator to Create anything unlike Itself.

It is the responsibility of each one of us to invoke into our reality, for the Law of our Being requires each of us use our own energy of life.  We cannot pass this responsibility to anyone else, nor can anyone else’s life energy be of any use to us, when it comes to manifesting the nature of our own realities.

Once we comprehend and assisimilate this awareness, we can see that not only is it possible, it is natural and necessary to transcend all outer activities, laws and limitations.  These were all created by Humanity, in our ignorance and are expressed in our outer activites because we have allowed our Intellect to operate without the Light of our Source illuminating it.

Conclusions drawn from partial information, rather then complete information, quite naturally produce unsatisfactory and unfulfilling results.  Garbage in, garbage out.  It’s known as the “Law of Correspondences”.  If we choose to create with only one spoke rather then a whole wheel, then we are at Liberty to do so.  It is our Right and Privilege to create that experience of limitation for ourselves.

Divine Love embodies every aspect and quality of Source/God.  And as we embark upon a Path of Self Mastery, it becomes clear that everything to be accomplished, can ONLY be accomplished through the Power of Unconditional Love, drawn from the I AM Presence within us.  When consciously expressed, we become invulnerable and invincible to negativity.

Therefore, if we would begin to love ourselves as an expression of Divinity, then nothing untoward could enter our beingness or our reality.

I Am That I Am

Namaste’

{{{Simon}}} has asked me if I would share some of my story of how I got to where I am, what I have been through to get *here*. So this is a little bit of it. Many of us are under the illusion that we have done the work required of the process. *Illusion*, I say, because most of us haven’t even started. There are issues still to be faced. Issues of co-dependency, issues that make smothers and fodders, SMOTHERS AND FODDERS.

I had a smother. I also had a fodder. Smothers usually raise little smothers and fodders raise little fodders. But in my family, my older brother became a smother, which left me the role of fodder. Smother/fodder, that was me, after both my smother and fodder had died.

My fodder died first, delegating to me the role of fodder for my smother, which in turn, meant being fodder for my older brother and sister, too, since they both lived off smother, being smothers themselves. Each one of them claimed the freedom to do whatever they pleased, feel however they pleased, believe however they pleased, and then turn to me to make everything in their lives work out the way they wanted. Just like they had done to fodder.

I was the family’s fireman, spending most of my waking moments running around putting out the fires they had started. At one time in my life, I was taking care of a baby born deaf, taking care of a smother with Alzheimer’s, and maintaining three houses, which also consisted of paying all the bills on those three houses. “Look at me, aren’t I a heroic fodder?”

I had no life of my own, and no role or meaning in it, except for being at smothers “beck and call”. But I wasn’t my smother’s fodder. I also wasn’t my siblings fodder. But like all co-dependents, once our fodder was gone, they looked to me to fill in for him. Seems like being a codependent was all the reason they needed, to demand sucking the energy of my life from me. Using the very idea that I would not jump at the chance, to prove how much I loved them, as the basis for all their demands on my time and energy. “Prove you love me, make me happy.”

Time passed, with smother’s Alzheimer’s steadily progressing. The very worst time for smom, was when she still retained enough of her functions to know that everyday she would wake up knowing less and less. It was both mentally and emotionally torturous for her. We spent many afternoons talking and that’s when she shared her own personal hell. For she expressed there wasn’t a moment that went by that she didn’t spend in regret and remorse. She was soooo sorry for what she had done over the years but could not apologize, because fodder was gone. But he had been right and her wrong. And now she knew it.

My smom could boohoo at the drop of a hat. As she often did when things did not go her way or her idea of the way things were suppose to go. That’s when she’d hit us over the head with guilt trips for “making her cry.” The very worst possible trouble we could get into with fodder, was upsetting smother. And what she admitted to me, is that what she had done all her life, was use guilt trips whenever she was unhappy, especially on fodder and especially when it came to my older brother. The sibling that had returned ‘home’ right after fodder’s death and been living like a leech off smom ever since. Forty-five years old, with two college degrees and had never earned a living in his lifetime.

This all stopped the moment that smom handed the reins of the family to me. For I lifted the burden of regret off her shoulders by promising I would take care of my brother and do what fodder would have done long ago. If she hadn’t manipulated him. I made a promise to clean up her mess. And told her not to waste one moment of her life feeling regret for me, for placing this burden on my young shoulders. I had broad shoulders, I could carry the load. I had been raised the youngest child after all, following behind two irresponsible nitwits. I had been the “garbage can” child of the family. Whatever the family’s garbage, it fell to me to deal with it.

Many thought of me as “tough” but my fodder had been the one person that *knew*. I wasn’t “tough” at all. I simply knew how to ACT “tough”, just like he had shown me. Just like is expected of all fodders in our Society.

I was made Steward of our family’s values. And I *knew* what my parents had wanted of me. I was their only hope they said, their only child that would ever have any kids of my own. They asked me to heal the family of our dysfunctions and pass along the Values they had, as parents, always striven to teach. On their respective death beds, both my smother and fodder asked me to become a mother and father, instead. “Find a way out of our box”, they instructed me. Knowing all along my penchant for finding loopholes in boxes.

I don’t get along very well now, with either smothers or fodders. For what makes us a smother or a fodder is being a co-dependent. And the very energy of codependency is what is no longer being energetically supported as a viable relationship pattern. Quite honestly, because it sucks and at its very foundation is a belief that is disrespectful towards humanity.

My smom sucked off my fodder. Exactly like the way my brother sucked off her. I realize many smothers and little smothers contend that the ‘feminine’ has been “abused” by the ‘masculine’ but this is not so. Smothers are the very ones responsible and accountable for the cultivation and nurturing of the debilitating pattern of “abuse”. Without any smothers, there would be no fodders, for one is the cause and the other, an effect.

Smom had tried her tricks with me after fodder died. They didn’t work. “I don’t want to talk about that; it makes me upset” she would say. And I would respond that we have to talk about it and to get over it, meaning her upset. My brother would also try the same tricks. Try, being the operative word. “I’ll walk out of this house and you’ll never hear from me again”, he would say. Just like he had threatened smom all her life. And I would respond by asking him if that was a promise, for it was my intent to hold him to it.

After smom was safely in a care facility where she could receive constant around the clock care, I informed my brother that if he wanted to continue to live in the ‘family home’, he was going to have to start paying the bills. He was going to have to get a “job”. He was going to have to provide the fuel for his own life, rather then expecting anyone else to pay for the costs of his choices for him. So with 2 college degrees to his credit, both bought and paid for by ‘the family making sacrifices for him’, he went out and got a job, finally, as a frozen food stocker at the grocery store.

I knew this brother of mine. I knew his excuses for avoiding responsibility. He would say ‘just tell me what to do that will please you’, then wail in self defense that he would only be doing ‘as he was told’. So I undermined his escape hatch, by simply telling him he was free to make his own decisions, of course, he was also going to be responsible and accountable FOR all those decisions and choices. Then I waited. Waited for him to leave of his own accord, because I wasn’t going to give him any ammo to use against me in the future, that I had ‘kicked him out’.

After finding another woman, a smother, that he could suck off of, he finally vacated the house. Just what I had been waiting for. I knew my smother’s lovely home had been trashed. I also knew that it was futile to try to restore it, so long as my brother was still in residence. Just as a house trashed by animals, has to have the animals removed before any real clean up work can be done.

We had to wear face masks as we first started to clean it up because of the fumes. The wall to wall carpet was soaked in urine as we carried it out of the house. We had to use snow shovels to scrape the carpet pad off the foundation, as it had started to rot and decompose. The parquet floors had been left in standing water and they had to be removed. And we had to use a small jackhammer, to break up the imported tile, since all the grout had been permeated with urine, too. Litter boxes were over full and feces were all over the place. Gaping holes had been chewed in the walls, and a houseful of antiques, gnawed beyond recognition. We took the house down to its very bones, then rebuilt it back again, from foundation to roof.

When my brother got kicked out, the woman finally catching on to what kind of cad he was, he called ‘me’, trying to weasel his way back ‘home’. I’m getting “all my ducks in a row”, he said. And that’s when I told him all his ducks were dead. He was owed nothing and better count himself lucky that I didn’t sue him for damages. That’s when Reality sunk into him, that I had truly meant what I said. That I WAS going to hold him responsible and accountable for all his choices. And his days of sucking off of family, were OVER. My foot came down right across his throat. For I wasn’t a smother and I wasn’t a fodder by that time.

I no longer believed nor supported the moral code of smothers and fodders. I found the role of parasite or the role of the fresh meat that all parasites live off of, unbecoming, which basically means, not something I was about to even try to become. Smothers had no value for their own lives, where I did.

The idea that made my smom into a smom, was the idea that the greatest value she could achieve in her life, was to lay down that life, for those she loved. It was a pitiful ideal. Of course, “pity” was what she counted on to feed her role of martyr. And while I had compassion, after all I had been through, I was fresh out of pity. I was fed up with castrating men into becoming fodders for poor pathetic smothers.

As a mother, I considered fodders unattractive and uninteresting. When it came to sharing my bed, I felt no desire for sharing it with an emotional child. I had no Oedipus complexes.

Over a period of years, every so often a smother or a fodder has tried their little game of trying to suck the energy from my life in order to feed their own. One time a young couple needed help, so we extended it. We gave them one month’s worth. At the end of that month, the young lady stood in my kitchen, yelling at me for not lying to her parents when they called. Don’t I know her parents worry about her?

“Well”, I said, “of course I do. It’s your game to make them worry. Every time their lives don’t revolve around you, you pull some stunt to make them snap to attention. Worrying about you is what you count on. If you REALLY didn’t want them to worry, then you wouldn’t choose to lock yourself in your fodder’s bathroom, and pass out in the tub, after swallowing a bunch of pills. You’d go swallow your pills some where they wouldn’t find out about it.”

“They worry about me dying!”, she shrieked.

“Of course they do and it is what you count on to manipulate them every time. But it doesn’t work with me. If you want to die then I respect your wishes. Go right ahead. I’ll do nothing to stop you. I simply ask that you do it someplace else.”

“You don’t care if I live or die?”, she asked, extremely perplexed.

“Of course I CARE but I’m not in charge. You are. And if your own life isn’t worth your own effort when it comes to surviving, then what makes you think it is worth mine? What makes my life worth less then yours? Nothing, that’s what. I love life. I cherish it. So much that I’m not about to throw mine away on someone who has none. Your life is your own. Go ahead and trash it. Throw it away. Just don’t expect me to trash mine, in any attempts to save you from yourself.”

She took off walking and I haven’t seen her since. I’ve heard about her, though. She’s a tweeker, heavily into meth, whatever that is. She’s a dealer for her fodder, who uses her dealership, as a way for her to show how much she loves him and he, her. She’s still leeching out a life from whomever buys into her pitiful story and game. Which sure as hell isn’t me.

I’ve learned the lesson of co-dependency: Don’t be one.

For those of us who haven’t yet learned this lesson, prepare for your life to start falling apart. “Aversion therapy” is what I think it’s called. For “our family home” which is our planet, has been trashed the same way as my brother trashed my smother’s lovely home. Irresponsible, emotionally self indulgent drama queens, willfully choosing self sacrifice and trashing the value of their own lives have been in charge: “smothers”.

Well…”Mother” is back in town and she in not pleased with the way her home has been treated while she has been away. She’s cleaning house. All of us who don’t know any better then to enable dependency patterns will learn – the hard way. As ability TO enable is taken away.

Every single one of us that has thought to drain other people’s lives in order to serve our own, will now find the living energy being drained out of our lives, instead.

I might be considered “rough” and “rude”, especially to some women, but I’m a cream puff compared to what is coming. Just consider me like a shot in arm. An immunization shot, for the purposes of jump starting our immune systems, so they will be ready to survive what’s coming. It isn’t a “good” time to be caught being a smother or a fodder. And the very best and most loving thing we can do for ourselves, our world and humanity in general, is to drop the whole idea of “laying down our lives for the love of another”. For there is NO Love in the ideal at all. None. Nada. Zippo. Nor any Honor or Self Respect either. There is only Need and an irrational wish not to be accountable for it.

Life. We’re in a cycle now of learning to love it or die trying.

All ‘animals’ are going to be housebroken or are not going to be allowed to enjoy our “family home” at all. It’s not fair nor respectful for family members to have to live with the filth, that those who know no value for family, create in their wake. Nor is it fair for some to have to keep cleaning up the messes of others. For it is by cleaning up our own messes, that we learn the wisdom to stop making them.

“Take up your bed and walk.” – Christ

Sincerely,

“Mother”

~grinning~

I wrote that title this afternoon, along with another, but first things first. I wrote it while I was waiting for a monthly broadcast of a “Shoud” performed by and for a group called “Shaumbra“. We each gravitate to messages meant for us, in tune with us. This one happens to be the one I enjoy.

Between the duh..duh….duhduh.duh.duh.. of the buffering, I heard most of the message.

I began to chuckle at the mention of dragons, echoing something that I had been pondering earlier. And I was literally rolling on the floor in laughter, after hearing the message that Obama was the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln.

I mean I was rolling…Truly, Real-ly, Genuinely and Authentically.

GRIN.

I AM A Dragon. (as if you hadn’t noticed *blushing*)

And my name is Puff. It’s my last name.

I come from the Puff family. My full name is Huff N Puff.

I come to blow some houses down.

In terms of consciousness I’m going to exhale. For the purpose of throwing us off balance.

This awful feeling, teeter- tottering, see saw act, where the only “balance” we ever see, is as we run from one extreme to another. Politics. The Economy. The Stock Market. Back and Forth, Back and Forth. The only balance we ever see is in passing. It’s making me see-sick.

Left wing, right wing, a bird with only one wing always flies in circles.

That’s why I have come to knock us off balance. Putting my capacity of Breathe to use, in One very definite direction.

Now…as for Abraham Lincoln, I’m not surprised he got shot. I probably would have liked to have done it myself.

I don’t know what Treason was worse in consequence, the Executive Powers Act, which transferred the decision making authority from Congress, the People’s Voice, to the Executive Branch during times of war.

*naughty naughty*

Or the Act that wiped out the one about the President being the winner of the electoral vote, and the Vice President being the runner up. Not BOTH from the same political party. Thus insuring a majority of the People would be represented when it came to enacting CONGRESSIONAL decisions.

Both such Acts fall under the definition of Treason as defined by the US Constitution. It’s in the Supremacy Clause. Which states that The Constitution be accepted as the Supreme Law of the Land. Liberties can be extended, to be more inclusive, by Amendment, through the Legislative powers delegated to Congress. But there is not at ANYTIME, delegated the power to ANYONE, to negate ANY part of the Constitution Itself. To do so, is called Treason.

BOTH of the above Acts nullified the Beauty of the Checks and Balances System, of the document, and the very Idea of this Nation.

Now back to Lincoln…

The Civil War was never about the issue of Slavery. It was about State’s Rights, about the Representation on a Collective level, the State, reflective of the values, beliefs and cultures of the people living there. After the first battle of the War, the “North” found out it wasn’t going to be any walk in the park. To manipulate the people into support for ‘the war’ effort, an already emotionally charged issue was used. That of slavery.

Slavery was already on its way out. With the industrial revolution taking off and the invention of the cotton gin, manual labor wasn’t profitable in terms of costs and production. Just like all the horse and buggy businesses wore doomed the moment cars began running off assembly lines.

The war was also about profits from resources recently opened up in the West. There were big profits to be had, by a few individuals, and key to the scheme, was to get the People to pay for the cost of the war, itself.

Values were split according to the Mason Dixon line in terms of What was of Value and to Whom. But either side really had the heart for a REAL war, until the issue of ‘slavery’ was used, to whip the People into an emotional frenzy of waging a “righteous” WAR.

The tail waging the dog…

*bark bark*

(Wait a minute, I know I have a flea collar around here some place.)

That’s right, its the Constitution Itself. Delegating Sovereignty to each and every single one Of The People.

NOT to the State, or Federal, or Local branches of government.

So I suggest We ALL, “We The People” start picking the Constitution up and waving it like a flag signaling our government.

SOS.

Breathe…

You see, if Lincoln had never emotionally manipulated the strictly Northern excuse for a Congress into passing the Executive Powers Act itself, then Bush wouldn’t have had a leg to stand when it came to repeating the same exercise.

Isn’t Justice Divinely Humorous? The very idea that Obama, in another life made the mess and now he’s asking to clean it up, is funny. And he’s part *black* & part *white*, too. Facing issues of resources and who gets to profits from them. I bet he gets the job.

Isn’t “karma” interesting?

And then there’s the issue of Union. What’s been masquerading as one ever since the end of the war, doesn’t even come close to what the concept of a Union is fundamentally all about.

We’ve been living versions of a “union” caveman style. Caveman takes his club and hits cave woman over the head, then drags her back to his cave and says, “We’re married. From now on we act as one.” Anyone trying that act with me, personally, would most likely be flattened on the spot. Like a balloon, robbed of all its hot air. You can just ask any of my ex-boyfriends. For I am the Dragon Huff N’ Puff. I can Huff AND PUff.

The very idea of a “Union” in the first place rests on the concept of WILLINGNESS. Once WILLINGNESS is negated, no “Union” is possible. It is the fundamental Principle underlying the basis of all contradictions: conflict.

A “Union” can ONLY be created when and where there is WILLINGNESS on all parts. NO conflict of Wills or interest. All are Served or None. “One for ALL and ALL for One”. This Willingness can not be had, or manipulated, or forced in ANY way, for then it would not be FREELY given. It would be coerced. Extorted. Therefore, an Illusion, since it would have no foundation or Substance, of Reality. It would be a lie, an Appearance only. And maintaining these appearances takes energy, doesn’t it? LOTS of energy.

According to OUR Constitution, We are a government OF the People, BY the People and FOR the People. There is NO way we can divorce or separate ourselves from our government. They are accurate reflections of Us. If we don’t consider the ethics of our values, and the means of force we use in the pursuit of them, how could we expect a group of us to miraculously manifest those Virtues?

What our government has done has been in Our Name. If We, as a People, didn’t support conflict, and it wasn’t in Our Nature, then Our government would not behave that way, either.

Isn’t the ‘”karma” of Nations interesting? In pursuit of the goal of Domination, we lost it.

We went out of Our EVER LOVING MINDS.

Now it’s time to Resolve our mess. Starting where it all begins, for *shit* only runs downhill. Running around at the bottom of the hill cleaning it up isn’t cost or labor effective. There’s no Economy of motion in it. We’ve got to stop it where it starts.

In our religious beliefs.

It is by and through our religious beliefs that we define our Philosophy of Life. Our choices define what we deem of Value and the means we choose in pursuit of those Values. Freedom of Religion is a Constitutionally dictated Liberty.

L I B E R T Y

Which is the Freedom of choice while being RESPONSIBLE and ACCOUNTABLE for all the costs and consequences of those choices.

What’s been going on is called “License”, not Liberty. For there is no Accountability nor Responsibility being claimed for the costs and consequences of believing in ideas that are not only un-LOVING and exclusive, but make no sense. Thus having disastrous and destructive psychological costs and consequences. Especially in the areas of social skills and emotional coping skills. With bucket fulls of self worth and self esteem issues.

What kind of idiotic Value system is it that would choose to value a lack of it? To Value means to Love. Exactly how much Love is in ANY Conditional Value system? Only as much as the conditions allow. The basis for Self Denial are Legion.

And are at the foundation of our Economy. Where the Worth and the Value of the breathe and sweat of our lives has slowly been eroding away to nothing in terms of trade units: our currency. We work more and enjoy less. A Value system that Values a lack of it. Where is the cents in that? *Gotcha* There is none. How much less then zero can we be worth? The answer is our National Debt.

Aren’t the workings of the Quantum Field Interesting? We really do reap as we sow.

It’s time for a new idea of God. One that isn’t modeled after a caveman or a fossilized fool. As Neale Donald Walsch would say, “Because the God in whom you believe isn’t real. The God in whom you believe is made up. It is a God you created out of thin air, having nothing to do with Ultimate Reality.”

What’s important about the Idea OF God, is that it represents our chosen Ideal. And whatever Ideal we choose to strive for, we eventually become. So let’s choose a different Ideal.

One of Principle. One of Peaceful Responses. One that is not limited when it comes to Understanding, Accepting, Tolerant, Merciful, Compassionate and Forgiving. One of Genuine Substance of character, rather then one displaying all the mental and emotional problems of one lacking it in. One that is Lovable. One that is Adorable. Thereby easy to Love and Adore and Emulate. One that considers each and every single one of our lives as Precious and of great Worth, no matter how we choose to spend them.

I don’t know about you but I’ve outgrown the worship of a lessor God.

Continued from The Urantia:  (the underlines are my addition) 

“Some day a reformation in the Christian church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus.  You may preach a religion about Jesus but, perforce, you must live the religion of Jesus.  In enthusiasm of Pentecost, Peter unintentionally inaugurated a new religion, the religion of the risen and glorified Christ.  The Apostle Paul later on transformed this new gospel into Christianity, a religion embodying his own theologic views and portraying his own personal experience with the Jesus of the Damascus road.   

The gospel of the kingdom is founded on the personal religious experience of the Jesus of Galilee; Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of the Apostle Paul.  Almost the whole of the New Testament is devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to a discussion of Paul’s religious experience and to a portrayal of his personal religious convictions. 

Jesus’ life in the flesh portrays a transcendent religious growth from the early ideas of primitive awe and human reverence up through years of personal spiritual communion until he arrived at that advanced and exalted status of the consciousness of his oneness with the Universe.  In one short life, he traversed the experience of religious spiritual progression.  Jesus progressed from a purely human consciousness to the sublime heights of realization of his divine nature.  He progressed from humble human to the consciousness of achieved divinity.  And this progressing ascent from the human to the divine was an exclusively mortal achievement.  And when he had thus attained divinity, he was still the same human Jesus, the Son of Man as well as the Son of God. 

The greatest mistake was made in that, while the human Jesus was recognized as having a religion, the divine Jesus (Christ) almost overnight became a religion.  Paul’s Christianity made sure of the adoration of the divine Christ, but it almost wholly lost sight of the struggling and valiant human Jesus from Galilee, who, by the valor of his personal religious faith and heroism of his indwelling Spiritual Presence, ascended from the lowly levels of humanity to becoming one with divinity, thus revealing the way all mortals ascend from humanity to divinity.   

Jesus blessed the poor because they were usually sincere and pious; he condemned the rich because they were usually wanton and irreligious.  He would equally condemn the irreligious pauper and commend the consecrated and worshipful man of wealth. 

Jesus led men to feel at home in the world; he delivered them from slavery of taboo and taught that the world was not fundamentally evil.  He did not long to escape from his earthly life; he mastered a technique while in the flesh.  He attainted an idealistic religious life in the very midst of a realistic world.    Jesus did not share Paul’s pessimistic view of humankind.   The Master looked upon men as sons of God and foresaw a magnificent and eternal future.   He was not a moral skeptic; he viewed man positively, not negatively.  He saw most men as weak rather then wicked, more distraught then depraved.  But no matter what their status, they were all God’s children and his brethren. 

He taught men to place a high value upon themselves in time and in eternity. 

He offered no rules for social advancement; his was a religious mission, and religion is an exclusively individual experience.   

Personal, spiritual religious experience is an efficient solvent for most mortal difficulties; it is an effective sorter, evaluator, and adjuster of all problems.  Religion does not remove or destroy human troubles, but it does dissolve, absorb, illuminate, and transcend them.  True religion unifies the personality enabling effective adjustment to all requirements.   Religious faith – the positive leading of the indwelling divine Presence – unfailingly enables the God–knowing man to bridge the gulf existing between intellectual logic and positive affirmations of the soul. 

There are just three elements in universal reality: fact, idea, and relation.  The religious consciousness identifies these realities as science, philosophy, and truth.  Philosophy would be inclined to view these activities as reason, wisdom, and faith – physical reality, intellectual reality, and spiritual reality.  We are in the habit of designating these realities as thing, meaning, and value. 

The progressive comprehension of reality is the equivalent of approaching God.  The finding of God, the consciousness of identity with reality; is the equivalent of the experience of self-completion. —- self-entirety, self-totality.  The experiencing of total reality is the full realization of God, the finality of the God-knowing experience. 

The full summation of human life is the knowledge that man is educated by fact, ennobled by wisdom, and saved – justified – by religious faith.  

Physical certainty consists in the logic of science; moral certainty, in the wisdom of philosophy; spiritual certainty, in the truth of genuine religious experience.  

The mind of man can attain high levels of spiritual insight and corresponding spheres of divinity of values because it is not wholly material.  There is a Spirit nucleus in the mind of man – the Divine Presence.  There are three separate evidences of the Spirit indwelling the human mind.  

1. Humanitarian fellowship – love.  The purely animal mind may be gregarious for self-protection, but only the spirit-indwelt intellect is unselfishly altruistic and unconditionally loving.
     
2. Interpretation of the universe – wisdom.  Only the spirit-indwelt mind can comprehend that the universe is friendly to the individual.
3.  Spiritual evaluation of life – worship.   Only the spirit-indwelt man can realize the divine Presence and seek to attain a fuller experience in and with this foretaste of divinity.

 The human mind does not create real values; human experience does not yield universe insight.  Concerning insight, the recognition of moral values and the discernment of spiritual meanings, all that the human mind can do is to discover, recognize, interpret, and choose.  

Unless a divine lover lived in man, he could not unselfishly and spiritually love.  Unless an interpreter lived in the mind of man, man could not truly realize the unity of the universe.  Unless an evaluator lived in man, he could not possibly appraise moral values and recognize spiritual meanings.  And this lover hails from the very source of infinite love; this interpreter is a part of Universe Unity; this evaluator is the child of the Center and Source of all absolute values of divine and eternal reality. 

True religious worship is not a futile monologue of self-deception.  Worship is a personal communion with that which is divinely real, with that which is the very source of reality.  Man aspires by worship to be better and thereby eventually attains the best.  

The projections of the human intellect may indeed originate false gods – gods in man’s image – but the true God-consciousness does not have such an origin.  The God-consciousness is resident in the indwelling Spirit. 

Some men’s lives are too great and noble to descend to the low level of being merely successful.  The animal must adapt itself to the environment, but the religious man transcends his environment and in his way escapes the limitations of the present material world through this insight of divine love.  This concept of love generates in the soul of man that is super-animal effort to find truth, beauty, and goodness; and when he does find them, he is glorified in their embrace; he is consumed with the desire to live them. 

Be not discouraged; human evolution is still in progress; revelation will not fail. 

The great challenge to modern man is to achieve better communications with the divine Presence that dwells within him.  Man’s greatest adventure in the flesh is the well balanced and sane effort to advance the borders of self consciousness out through the dim realms of embryonic soul-consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the borderland of spirit-consciousness – contact with the divine Presence.  Such an experience constitutes God-consciousness, an experience mightily confirmative of the pre-existent truth of the religious experience of knowing God.  Such spirit-consciousness is the equivalent of the knowledge of the actuality of sonship with God.  Otherwise, the assurance of sonship is the experience of faith. 

God-consciousness is equivalent to the integration of the self with the Universe, and on its highest levels of spiritual reality.” 

This journey of man getting to know God and God getting to know man, takes place in 12 stages.  Just as any seed requires different radiations of the sun to come to full expression, spring, summer, and fall, so does Man.  Each of these 12 (radiations/gates) cover approximately 2400-2500 years; the sum total of which equals a full progression of the ages, coming full circle, every 25,000 to 26,000 years.  It’s one of these events that keeps being discussed concerning the year 2012.  It is a time of Completion.

What follows are the 12 steps, the 12 gates we pass through in dancing the dream awake.