Tygarjas Twyrls Blog

I’ve noticed that when people use the term “God” they often put themselves in the midst of a fairytale with dangerous ramifications whence compared to the reality within which we find ourselves residing. In this fairytale there is an invisible all-knowing father or mother figure that does whatever it wants, and often is blamed for what happens in our lives, or worse, is our tormentor-master with a plan and we its helpless pets. God is something big and has nothing to do with us, or worse, is controlling us without there being consciousness attached to our actions, because, after all, the will of our puppet-master is too great to fathom. And with this notion, I do not agree.

There maybe something very large, very pointedly conscious that decides the flow of existence in some way, but for now, having interest in a notion of deity too large to grasp doesn’t seem helpful. That is, it doesn’t seem helpful when there is a version almost too large to grasp, but not quite, which is helpful.

So I start with what is easy to grasp, and that is whoever you happen to be. And when you look at yourself, what you can see, aside from the set of circumstances that are beyond your control, are a set of circumstances that are within your control. To an ant you may easily be as mysterious and powerful as “God” is to you, while you are no more mysterious than an ant when viewed from a different angle. And with your God-like abilities, no sarcasm intended, you do have the power to decide the life of that ant. In fact, you have the capacity to decide the life of an elephant. And, for that matter, your power is so great it can decide the life of another human being; of many human beings. You, just little old or new you, has the capacity to determine death on a scale as large as the planet on which you reside. If you don’t take out the trash, it stinks. If you wash the dishes, the odds of your personal health rise. You can choose to fight an addiction with everything you have, thereby not only determining your physical health, but the amount of joy, the quality of existence you give to any human being you may care about; and for that matter, by extension, many you may not care about. You can hand a child a balloon, make a silly gesture, or inflict your own inner-torment upon that young life with anger, thereby filling that life with anger that it gets to resolve. Or, you can choose to channel your anger productively into practice of patience until what was once anger becomes a source of Love the likes of which you’d never guessed at before. And all this is what a small perception of what creation entails; a micro-cosmic rendition easily understood, at least, by those not in denial. Personal influence is to God, this version I am describing, like a cell of the body to us. And without these cells, we are not, and likewise, nor could it be.

But for God as we utter it, it is larger. Consider that our actions can create further life, more of us. The interactions of that life create immediately something much larger than ourselves. And so it gets larger. Families as a unit have a structure like a body with every member playing a role if they function well together, helping each other in all their endeavors. A neigborhood with another neighborhood creates a town, which only functions as people agree to do certain tasks. And this becomes a city in which the more people contribute in pleasant ways, the more it is pleasant. And before considering the world, which is obviously where I am heading, let us stop and consider the city for a moment.

The family can be too personal for those whose family unit is far less than ideal, which unfortunately afflicts many of us, but let us look at a city. Its beautiful lights, its waste management faculty, its businesses and theaters. Parks, and police, and trash, and bums, and cabs, and stadiums. And it all functions together. And the resources that are put into it maintain its cleanliness and security. The more people take ownership for their often “insignificant” actions, the more pleasant can be a place in which so many cohabitate. And the more people without minds of there own roam without proper care, the more the urine scent of the city tells its tale. The more people pick up their own trash and look each other in the eye, the more visitors will feel at home. Look for just a moment at what a city could be.

Now look at the world.

I was inspired to write this by a friend of mine who is about to die from cancer. This coming several weeks after another friend of mine died of cancer. After years of watching people struggle with their cancer, often to an inevitable conclusion. And then I stop to consider if the plastic bags in which all the food we eat are BPA free or not. If you don’t know what BPA is, it’s the chemical found in plastics that is now well know to cause cancer. And I think of how many billions of bags are made and used to carry our food each year; how many we are handling daily. And then I think about what chemicals go into the paper bags which decompose into the soil that grows the food we eat. Then I think of the great pacific plastic gyre, the two-Texas’ worth of plastic being eaten by birds and fish that end up on my plate regularly for supper. You see, farmed fish doesn’t have the nutrient content that wild fish does; if only I could purchase it without the side of cancer . . . And then I take a walk and see the plastic bottles bobbing up and down in my local small-town creek. Not one or two bottles, a murky-dirty little pool of water with six or ten bottles churning in their own filth. And then there’s the pesticides with which we grow our food, the gallons of chemicals dumped into our water supply by the pharmaceutical companies, and then, of course, the oil industry just dumping raw crude into the water every chance they get. The oil industry which insists that there is nothing harmful about their product, and which our government pays to keep poisoning us day after day. Enjoy the air with the millions of cars, the poisons dumped into every major body of water on a fairly regular basis, and, yes, plastic bags.

So, we can choose whether we want to take responsibilities for our own actions, or whether we want to continue to wait for daddy God to come make our boo-boos better. But when someone asks me why God would let a good woman die so young, what I have to say in response is this, “Please forgive me for continuing to drive a car that isn’t a hybrid. I was too shocked at how much I was paying to consider I could buy a car that pumps less cancer-causing agent into the air she breathes and would enable me to give less money to a dominant cancer-causing company that poisons the food she eats, and supplies the materials for the bags that poison the food she eats and the hands with which she carries them. I would trade the car in now and buy a new one, but I have harmed it in such a way that they won’t take it back in trade at this point, and I have to pay the government that uses my money chiefly to pay the oil companies and fund the killing of innocent lives, and make sure that people who have way more than they need can have even more, otherwise I would have the money to buy a cleaner car. So, my answer to why she is dying so young is that apparently I, along with the vast majority of the people on the planet have chosen to live in such a way that it means she dies. That is why God has chosen her to die. Why we, as God, have chosen her to die. But, at least, while I pay for the oil company to continue to poison us all, I never use a non-reusable bag to carry my goods. I walk to work whenever I am able, and I vote for somebody who might not immediately give the country away, somebody who at least doesn’t boast about the fact that they will sell our lives to the highest bidder. I do what I can to ease the eventual caused by the rest of God. And for not doing better, God forgive me!” And that’s my answer to that.

Smile at someone today, no matter how you are feeling. It will make you both feel better!

Salaam!

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I was asked earlier this week if I was under the impression that God wanted us to do something. While specifics alluded me, and I couldn’t help but refer to the whole of All Combined Consciousness as being in nature somewhat impersonal, the answer was ultimately: Yes.

The implication of the question asked of me was, of course, what does God want us to do? And, again, while specifics don’t quite seem productive from the perspective of an omnipresence that may appreciate from its perspective the very existence of itself regardless of the activities of its infinite parts, I do believe there is a general mode of being that would be more pleasing to that which created us than other modes of being might. Which is to say: God wants us to live so as to contribute positively in all our actions to the existence of all others in existence. Too lofty? Naah!

To contribute positively to the existence of anyone, first one must be clear on what it means to act positively for one’s self. Eating is good, it maintains one’s existence and continuance, but there are habits of eating that may not be helpful. Earning money, at least in the economy as we currently have it, is a good thing since it enables us to eat and enjoy our lives; though, again, there can be habits in making money that are pernicious. Sex creates life and can bring two people together in ways that transcend verbal language; though it can also reduce human beings to toys and create lives that get to suffer the consequences of the immaturity that created them. The point is, in everything that can be done, one method of going about it can be an asset to all of existence, whereas another approach can result in being a burden. I believe that that which created us, if asked, would reccomend going about things one way rather than the other.

And I believe this because in one version creation continues of its own volition; those creations which are conscious of themselves are more inclined, according to the circumstance that created them and nourished them, to create in kind. Otherwise, it is not consciousness that is created, it is more difficult for consciousness to be created, and where there is no consciousness, there no divinity dwells as I write of it. In that place, there are composite parts waiting to be reconfigured into something that will be existent in terms of self-knowing, inevitably as is the nature of the universe. But to those parts, no course of action can be recommended, and so they wait for something conscious to make use of them. I suppose what I am recommending is that when it comes to human beings, what is desired of us is that we live an active existence rather than a passive one. We do things to further creation and enjoyment rather than being used by whatever existence we happen to find ourselves in, selfishly using those same circumstance accordingly.

To choose self-love and the responsibilities that genuine self-love entail, rather than selfishness with it myriad follies that cause problems not only for others, but ultimately always for whomever believes foolishly that it will make life enjoyable for their selves.

And thus the answer to the question is: God wants us not only to love ourselves and others to the best of our ability at any given point in time, but also to seek out how better to love ourselves and others.

Peace.

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So, while I was looking up a song I could stick into last weeks post about forgiveness, I ran into the video below about forgiveness by Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Now, as I was watching this video, I felt like she was talking about a slightly different form of forgiveness than I was.

Last week I was describing letting go of carrying hatred and rage toward a person who has wronged you by viewing them in terms of who they are. If one can see where someone else is coming from, how it is they came to wrong you, it tends to be a lot easier to let go of the pain they have saddled you with, because, odds are they were saddled with a sort of pain that was probably pretty unfair to begin with. And I talked a bit about my own efforts in forgiving someone who has a great deal of trouble not acting selfishly. I wrote that while at this point in time I’m learning not to carry animosity forward, the first step being to see how much pain that person is in, I also value myself enough not to stick myself in the path of his actions. And I’m disinclined in this moment to physically interact with that person because that person hasn’t learned to deal with his pain in a healthy manor yet, despite forgiving him his actions for my own sake. And if I were to forgive in terms of putting behind me his actions so as to continue a relationship forward, Dr. Laura’s advice below would then become more or less exactly what I would be looking for in order to feel like that person has matured past the problem unfortunately created within him to begin with.

Once again, enough about me, this is about you . . . Okay, maybe a little bit me too, but I’m going to start with a supposition: Without taking full responsibility for the harm that one has done to another, just as it clouds one’s connection to something bigger if one cannot find a way to let go of the pain caused by someone else, so too it clouds one’s connection to the divine if they lie to themselves about the pain they have caused others, and do not try to correct the problem existent in one’s self that allowed them to hurt someone else.

So, before coming to the punchline at the end of this video, I was already thinking to myself, “Well, I think I’m talking about a slightly different kind of forgiveness here, but this is really good advice for someone looking to correct their own errors of body and soul.” And so it occurred to me as I reflected even briefly upon the harm I have done people in my life, and what I needed to put myself through in order to make sure I committed myself fully to never acting in such a way again, that the advice Laura gives on forgiveness, while not necessarily in alignment with my views on forgiving others, is perfectly in alignment with my views on what a person needs to go through to forgive themself.

I mean, how can a person Love their self if they do not act in such a way so as to grow to become something more, something better than what they have been? In which case, if a person does not admit when they have harmed another, to themself, they cannot learn from that action so as to become someone who would not harm another in that way again. If a person cares about themself at all, they would look honestly at the pain they have caused others, even though it is painful to one’s self to look upon, if sincerely they don’t want to cause pain to people they believe that they care about in any way and on any level. And coming to the conclusion that it is painful to cause such pain, one will work as earnestly as possible, at least, never to act in such a way again. And at best, they will strive with all their being to make right what they have made wrong, if they are allowed to do so by whomever they have harmed to begin with. Otherwise, if a person is not willing to take such responsibility for their own actions, what does that make that person?

If we are created in the likeness of the divine, what view colors our perception of the divine if we do not seek genuine forgiveness of ourselves for our own actions by becoming someone who can never act in such a way again; by showing true remorse for what is apparently animal-like to be?

That being said, as you watch this, may you consider it advise not in what is necessary to forgive another for their wrong doing, but to forgive oneself for one’s own errors of being. Of course that being said, if you do find that you may wish to correct something about yourself so that you never harm another in such a way again, remember to have a little compassion for yourself, afterall, their was a reason you were mistaken in your approach to begin with, even if now it is time to grow up and out of the past that had created you accordingly.

Peace.

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It’s kind of like gratitude. One of those things that somehow makes things a whole lot better in a big hurry.

The problem is that if someone has wronged you, and no wonder you became as annoyed as you did by it, if you carry an animosity toward that person, it takes from your energy to get things done, and the things you are doing it must color if it sits so heavy upon your mind. And I write this in the second person because there seems to be a law backing this that has some basis in physics. Like trying to run with bricks in one’s pockets, it just aint as effective as not caring what wrong was done to us, i.e. pockets without bricks.

Personally, the question in my mind was, “How do you forgive someone who can’t seem to stop hurting you.” And the answer I came up with, was: Compassion. It was the only thing that fit. Thanks to the grace of an angel, and in this instance I do believe I am speaking metaphorically about a very beautiful person who has inspired me every time I have tried to look in her direction, lately I’ve been reading a book about the Dhali Lama’s approach to living happily. As a result, thankfully, thoughts of compassion have recently been readily available at the forefront of my brain. And after spending some time flirting with the notion of trying to forgive someone, internally, who seems incapable of not harming others by his actions, myself included, revisiting the notion of forgiveness I was delighted to find that compassion seemed a likely key to unlocking an otherwise impossible problem.

Still need plenty of distance from that person, because, after all, that person has not yet learned how not to be as selfish as he is, but, by considering even for a moment how that person came to be as selfish as he is, at the least I don’t have to take it personally that in this moment, or at least those moments, he could not stop himself from being so selfish. And this is a first step. Looking from a fuller heart, I can’t help but admit that if I had been filled with so much horror so early in life, I do not know if I could have turned out any kinder than he. And this, for me, is the first step to forgive. A step that enables me to let go of angers that would otherwise haunt me; distract me from my work at hand, drain me of the energy to do that work. In fact, to the contrary, this week it gives me something productive to do, a topic I can write about.

So, enough about me, how does this relate to divinity? I answer with another question: How do you feel when hatred, or even disdain, is at the forefront of your mind? Does that feel divine to you? And if so, is that a God you want to be worshiping?

Peace!

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What can be said, for that matter written, that might motivate any among us to work harder for one’s own best interests, and in doing so, so too for the best interest of all others? This week a prayer as I wind down from a very long night:

Next week may I be inspired to write such a thing that it be pleasing in the sight of God, in the sight of any who may read wanting things to feel better consistently than they already do.

Peace

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At the highest “level,” when I found what I had spent so many years seeking with all my heart, there was no me, there was only that. How can one speak of indifferentiation? How do you tell another who only knows existence within the context of themselves, that they are also the rest of existence simultaneously? What word could be uttered to tell what you cannot truly say if the person you are speaking to has not experienced the same? How can you describe the taste of steak, if the person to whom you speak has only eaten lettuce? How can you describe the intoxication of wine when to whom you speak has only ever sipped water?

So I can describe around it that maybe another will find themselves where I have experienced; not been, since it is not a place one can walk to, or drive to, or fly to, or rocket to; not seen, since no eye can conceive; not hear, save perhaps for the sound of the sun, but even that would be lacking the experience of existing as the pulse of the universe itself. I can describe my journey, as every other has who has been where we have been. In the truth of the divine, which we are, oneself can be put aside for the experiencing that we are as much that which created us, and thus each other, and thus one-self, as we are a unique perspective. And perhaps even more-so the former.

So, think about this: Given infinite potential, must not all possibilities of existence exist, or, attempt to exist? And thus look at your world. But more than that, as we have created existence thus far in the image of where we come, from what we come, pure light, but not yet realizing fully together this simple truth of a single point of infinite that created us. Does it not then make sense that as we learn to be aware of ourself, creation appears haphazard and perhaps even unpleasant? But then consider this: As we naturally become as that which created us, in the image of that which created us, not merely individually for a fortunate few who rise above the morass, but together collectively, as we agree upon the good we are, so too the good we create.

On a sunny day 9 years ago this week, as I returned from an understanding of my greatest potential as an individual, it was made clear to me that all existence, even those parts that seem as though they ought be horrible to look upon, work together perfectly and harmoniously for the sake of the perfect functioning of all existence. If what has come before draws us naturally to know ourselves, to look closer at existence as we know it and experience ever clearer that which is desirable and that which is not, I do believe we have the capacity to work together for perfect pleasantness amongst us; a simple choice of moderation of what we enjoy that we may accomplish by the action of our labors, and rejecting flatly anything that is obviously unhelpful despite any possible laziness, not of nature, but learned repetition alone. Regardless of our choice, it is obvious to me that the universe will run like clockwork regardless. It seems merely that as we become aware of our own existence, we have the capacity within that awareness of personal enjoyment as well.

And for the moment, that’s about all I have to say about what can be experienced by any whose intention is unwaiveringly sincere.

Until next week:

TTFN

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So, I was apparently so in need of my vacation last week that I couldn’t tell the difference between one week and two. Or for that matter two and three. Anyway, as the anniversary to which I alluded last week is on June 1st, I shall post accordingly . . . next week. And as I’ve been letting myself relax, I’m hesitant to post anything long, so I’ll mumble visually for a moment before putting up a video that will be worth a watch . . .

This week’s subject, in short, what over-arching theme did I glean from my trip this week? Less is more. . . Or rather, more helpful . . .

Peace

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On vacation this week. Going down to Louisiana, one of many birth places of soul. Will post a special anniversary post in a week. Not the anniversary of the blog mind you, but of something else . . . In the meantime, this video seems particularly appropriate. Enjoy!

TTFN

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So, I was thinking about the problems that can arise when one’s focus of study on a certain topic is particularly narrowed by a single line of thought. And that statement is left ambiguous so as not to be rude about it. Anyway, I recently read a book about understanding the solution of Loving in a real way, which I read due to somebody who inspired the same basic teachings to infuse within me organically when she left me staring earnestly at myself some time ago. The phrase that wound up sticking out in the foreground of my consciousness as I read was a typically well known phrase from a particular a book that goes something along the lines of, “Love thy neighbor as you love thyself.” And in this instance this phrase stuck out to me as the obvious cure of how a believer calling themself an adherent of a particular doctrine might be converted by their own hand into a real practitioner of that said doctrine. Let me explain . . .

To know the teachings of a particular group is all well and good. In fact, within the context of, say, Christianity, there may be many perspectives to choose from: Catholic, Baptist, Episcopalian, etc . . . And this can be said of any group with any teaching. But in the case of loving one’s neighbor as one’s self, if one is prone to studying the religion they believe their-self to be a part of, it seems immediately, by the line of thought spoken accordingly, that as one would study one’s own religion, so ought one study those of others.

And here I was reminded of the saying from the book I read because that saying is used to demonstrate that without genuinely loving oneself, it is impossible to genuinely love anyone else. But if the object in this case is the study of the divine, if one studies one’s own named God to the exclusion of all others, then one cannot possibly love other’s as they do those of the same religion; for starters, they don’t know what they’re excluding to begin with!

However, if one can see how others view the divine, as though with their eyes, then they have a basis for comparison, a basis for respect, and a basis for seeing what is similar, and, yes, what is different. They have a basis for discerning truth, and a basis for respecting other faiths as they respect one of their own.

As for myself, and I have studied a few different beliefs, the result is that I can respect the foolishness of believing too strongly in any story in a book, but, I can also see clearly that even believing a fairytale can bring one a richness of existence that can help one cultivate appreciation for existence, even if not always accurately perceived. To see a beauty through another’s eyes is to see beauty, even if it is not the beauty I cultivate my time in seeking. To see the many colors tinting the common truth is to perceive more accurately what truth looks like, and can make clearer how to see past tinting so as to see clearly.

And so, when it was recommended that one love one’s neighbor as one’s self, it was not merely courtesy implied, but that one seek actively love that they may find it everywhere they look. It was implied that what one finds to love in all others is also that which one must learn to love in order to truly be able to love one’s self. That that within all others is too within one’s self.

So, if you are really a good Christian, then also you are a good Muslim, a good Jew, a good Buddhist, a good Taoist, and a good Hindu. And if you want to pull it off without wearing too many different styles of hats and minimizing what you can order off the menu, you will love that others worship, even if they have not fully realized that their God is no different, in truth, than yours.

And a wonderful way to understand this is to study other’s beliefs as you would study your own, or, in other words, to love thy neighbor as thyself.

Salaam!

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