Hoping for a Teacher

Seeking. Finding. Attempting to Discard. Well, so much for that idea. . . .

I had seen the book, “Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue” by Neale Donald Walsh over the years but never picked it up. The name put me off.

I’ve seen too many people ‘speak for God’, while saying things I simply refuse to accept, not to be wary.

I’ve seen and read about too many atrocities done “in the name of God” not to be put off by that word.

I suppose that’s probably one reason why when, years ago, Seth called it the All that Is [Is for short] and Michael called it the Tao [Path] that I warmed to what they had to say. They steered clear of that emotionally charged word and I was grateful.

OK, yes, I know. I’ve done those things that turn me off so vehemently. Over the ages I’ve been on the planet I’ve done them all. And that is why I reject them now. Been there/done that—and have seen the results.

I’m absolutely certain I participated in the Crusades or something similar. And I’ve been the hapless victim, an innocent bystander, of people who went to war in the name of one god or another.

I’m sure that I have pushed my viewpoint on others and burned them if they didn’t agree with me. And, I’m virtually certain I was drowned as a witch during medieval times.

Been there/done that.

So the title of the book put me off.

It’s funny, though. When something calls to you, you eventually hear it. Or it won’t shut up until you do. Have you ever had that experience? My life is full of them.

On a forum I visit, a woman with the handle, ‘Hairless Cat’ recommended the book. I respect her views so I was inclined to try it—but I kept putting it off. Then, last week, a woman in my neighborhood offered to lend it to me.

OK, already! I hear you! **smile**

xxx

In case you haven’t read it, some background: It’s a book of automatic writings.

The author claims the dialogue is with ‘God’. While I find that difficult to swallow and, likewise, have a hard time believing that an entity on the Causal Plane, for instance, would pass itself off as the All that Is, I’m working to keep an open mind.

In any case, the communication coming through fits with the other information coming from the Causal.

So, a post will be coming soon.

Learning to Be

Here’s the post I promised. The first of many, I imagine.
Conversations with God – Book I.

I’m not ready, yet, to call the entity that came through, "God" or "The All that Is" — I may never be — I’ll just have to wait and see where I go from here.
Neal asked the entity: “Everyone says the Earth Plane is a school. Is that correct?” And the entity said ‘No.’
Shock all round. We’ve all been told that this is a school. It’s the bedrock of most of our belief systems. Yet the short answer was an unequivocal ‘No.’

Here’s the long answer:
‘You can’t go to school to learn what you already know.’
Instead, the Earth is a playground. It’s where we come to experience everything we know to be true by trying out its opposite.
We can’t BE [fully understand] something until we experience its opposite.
We cannot BE tall until we have experienced short.
We cannot BE slender until we have experienced stoutness.
We cannot BE health until we have experienced disease.
We cannot BE acceptance until we have experienced rejection.
We cannot BE love until we have experienced hate [or, more accurately, fear].
The thing we seek [the thing we perceive as the positive side of the coin] cannot exist without its opposite—just as the Indian head cannot exist without the buffalo. It really is as basic as that.

That is why we demanded that we be set free from the Is in the first place. It cannot know—cannot fully BE — itself without the experience we bring back to it of all the opposites of what it already is. In essence, we are the senses and the limbs of the All that Is. Without us it cannot know itself.
I had known that the All that Is was crucial for my being. I hadn’t known that I am crucial to its.

And, so it seems, the very thing that put me off—the fact of having experienced the opposite of 'God'—was the very first story the book had to tell. And how’s THAT for a kick in the head?

And this is why, as both Michael and Seth have said all along, the Is doesn’t have a problem with our actions—no matter how despicable they may seem to those of us who are experiencing the Physical Plane. We see the negative consequences of such actions and that’s ALL we see. Those who are on other planes recognize the actions for what they truly are—the experience of the opposite side of the coin that must happen in order to BE the primary side.

There’s more. Much more. I’m only in the first chapter, after all.
[Arnold Schwarzenegger voice] I’ll be back.

Science Discovered God?

This material comes from Ervin Laszlo’s “Science and the Akashic Field”.
Yes, I’m going THERE again. Hang onto your hat.
xxxxxxx
The standard model of cosmic evolution states that the universe was kicked off by the Big Bang, twelve to fifteen billion earth years ago. After that assertion was made, empirical evidence showed that the universe is, indeed, about 13.7 billion years old.

The Big Bang came from an explosion in an unstable portion of the ‘pre-space’ of our universe—a fluctuating sea of virtual energies. This entity was labeled, inaccurately, as a vacuum. It isn’t. A vacuum, that is. It has energy—apparently a lot of energy.

Anyhow, part of it exploded. It created a fireball of “staggering heat and density,” according to Laszlo. Furthermore, in the first milliseconds of its existence, it synthesized all the matter that now populates cosmic space. In fact, it seems it brought into being much MORE than the matter that currently inhabits the universe. Space [what little of it there was] was filled with particle/antiparticle pairs which collided and obliterated each other. What was left was the one-billionth of the originally created particles [the tiny fraction of particles that outnumbered the antiparticles.] That’s what we’re left with.

About 200,000 years later the particles decoupled themselves from the radiation field of the original fireball. Space became transparent for the first time and clumps of matter became distinct elements of the cosmos. Matter in these clumps condensed as they were acted upon by gravity. The first stars turned on about 2 million years later. And, within one billion years, the first galaxies formed.

Until recently, this scenario seemed well established—now, not so much.
For one thing, there is no reasonable explanation in the Big Bang theory for the flatness of the universe [I’m not sure I understand the meaning of the word ‘flatness’ here—so I’m going to table that for the time being]; the missing mass in the universe [that I do have a nodding acquaintance with] for the accelerating expansion of the galaxies [I know about that, too].
I’ll skip over the stuff Laszlo mentioned about the coherence of cosmic ratios, the ‘horizon problem’, the uniformity of macrostructures and the ‘tuning of the constant’ for the simple reason that I have no idea what he’s talking about here. If anyone else understands these matters, would you comment please? We can take our discussion over to email so we won’t bother everybody else—unless of course, they’d like to be included in the conversation.

The next statement Laszlo made DID make sense to me—at least as much as anything on this blog does: he said that all those puzzles raise the possibility that this universe did not arise from some sort of random fluctuation of the quantum vacuum.
He suggested the concept of a ‘meta-universe’. The term ‘meta’ comes from the Greek, ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’. Laszlo is talking about a vaster, more fundamental universe that is beyond the universe we inhabit.

The possibility of a vaster, possibly infinite universe is brought home more deeply by the astounding finding that no matter how far our telescopes probe, even in places that we had been certain no matter existed, we just keep finding galaxies. They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere!
This fact is especially astonishing when we reflect that, as recently as the 1920’s, science believed that our Milky Way Galaxy was the universe! We believed that where the Milky Way ended - space ended. Today we know that the Milky Way is one of billions upon billions of galaxies—many of them far vaster than ours. How’s THAT for a kick in the head?
And let’s venture even further: We are now beginning to understand that the boundaries of our universe are not the boundaries of the universe.
The universe that we thought we knew isn’t the universe that is. It just isn’t.

Today several explanations are in the making [and who knows how they will shake out over time?] about the idea that our universe sprang, like Athena from Zeus’ forehead, from a far vaster meta-universe.
These emerging cosmologies may explain the puzzles of coherence of this universe including the astounding serendipity that the universe is so extraordinarily fine-tuned that we are here to ask the questions at all. According to Laszlo, there is no credible explanation in a one-shot, single-cycle universe for US or anything like us. A one-time universe which arose from random selection should not have allowed the development of living organisms to arise and evolve.

Well, Seth and Michael said it ages ago: This universe is #3 that we have, collectively, created. And, once again, Science agrees with them — even though it doesn't 'believe' in them.

Laszlo again: “The fluctuations that led to our amazingly coherent universe may not have been selected at random. Traces of prior universes could have been present in the pre-space from which our universe arose. . . . Do we come across here the footprint of a cosmic ‘Akashic Field’ that conveyed the trace of a precursor universe to the birth of our universe—and has been connecting and correlating the stars and galaxies of this universe ever since?”

And, yes, Michael has specifically stated that the Akashic Record of the previous universe hands off its blueprint to the universe-in-the-making at its birth.
xxx
First—I’ve said it before and I say it again: of all the hard scientists, astronomers and quantum physicists are the only ones I’ve encountered who, as a group, seem to believe in God. Maybe the stuff they deal with on a daily basis draws them to look at the bigger picture in ways biologists and chemists don’t. Or – maybe they don’t believe in God but can’t talk about the stuff they are investigating without sounding as if they do.
And, after reading Laszlo’s work [the small portion I've read so far], I have to wonder whether he has studied Seth and Michael. Just sayin.

And, second—while reading these two pages my conception of ‘God’ changed again.
When I was a child I took the view of my parents and Sunday school teachers: A bearded, Caucasian man sitting on a throne. Simple and straightforward? Certainly. Accurate? Certainly not.

When I discovered the idea of reincarnation I began rethinking my viewpoint. The closest visualization I could come up with was that of the universe itself.

Over the last couple of days I’ve come to the conclusion that I was thinking way too small. Now my visualization is that of the “fluctuating sea of virtual energies,” or the “vaster, more fundamental universe that is beyond the universe we inhabit.”
Any closer to the Truth? Who knows? But, somehow, it seems to me that it might be.

And third—all this information about the Akashic Field [especially the fact that science is closing in on it] strikes especially home for me. After all, I'm a scholar. The Akashic Field or Record or whatever you want to call it, is something I'm going to have more than a nodding acquaintance with when I dump all the knowledge I've picked up along the way into it in the not-too-distant future.
As a matter of fact, I've done it before. This is my third outing as a scholar. I guess I like this essence. I've chosen it more often than any of the other roles.

Addendum—
Just one more thing:
As I was rereading the previous post I noticed that I had done something Laszlo and, certainly, the other scientists have done. They may have meant to do it but, in my case, it was an oversight.

I didn't mention something about that 'vast sea of virtual energies' that is pretty crucial. I perceive that sea as self-aware.
Not only that, I perceive it as capable of uncomplicated self-love—which is why it loves us so much.

We are it and it is us. As I mentioned in one of the earliest posts here, we sprang directly from the mind of the Is. We are Athena to the All that Is' Zeus.

So, to my mind—the Sea is the Is, the Is loves us as it loves itself. Just as Joshua, Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tsu and even Mohandas Gandhi told us to do with one another.

Of course science, being science had to make the thing all complicated by denying the existence of the All that Is. And, no matter what he truly believes, Laszlo had to go all round the mulberry bush to talk about the Akashic Record without talking about what it really is or where it really came from. He had to use big concepts like 'the coherence of cosmic ratios' and 'the tuning of the constant' and talk about how the universe as it is simply should not be.

But, when you come right down to it: "Love one another because you are One."
What could be more simple?

A lot more All in the Is than we ever knew

This came from Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman [The Science Channel].

I had heard of Dark Matter and Dark Energy before but I hadn’t known all of this— It’s pretty astounding.

The latest episode concerning Dark Matter—the part where humans first became aware of it—begins with an ironic twist.
Back in the 1960’s there was an astronomer, Vera Rubin, who had 2 small children. This was a period when women were barely allowed to have careers at all and, if you had children, your career had better take a back seat. She could be certain that, if she undertook a study of something like Black Holes [the sexiest things astronomers were looking at at the time] for instance, her male colleagues would publish their findings before she could catch up. So she decided to study something no one else was interested in. Was she in for a shock or what?

Partly because no one else was looking and partly because she was fascinated by how galaxies work, she decided to investigate them. She looked at the closest one to us, Andromeda, first. She expected the stars orbiting the edges of the galaxy to act the way our planets do as they orbit our sun. The amount of sway gravity has over each planet determines its speed. The further away the planets are from Sol, the slower their orbits. Basic Newtonian physics.
But that’s not the way stars in a galaxy work—as she discovered when she trained her telescope on galaxy after galaxy after galaxy. The stars orbit at the same velocity no matter where, in the galaxy, they are. Surprise all round.

So, Rubin postulated, there must be more mass [and, therefore, more gravity] within galaxies than the atoms [the black holes and the star clusters] at the center of each one would suggest. Also, that gravity must be spread fairly evenly throughout the galaxy rather than being concentrated at the center.
She labeled this gravity-producing substance Dark Matter—since we can’t see it or detect it through any direct means. The only way we know it is there is by it’s influence on the matter we can detect.
Furthermore, approximately 90% of the matter in every galaxy she looked at seemed to be this Dark Matter. In other words, until that time, astronomers had been studying the tip of the iceberg that makes up our universe. Who knew?

Suddenly the field of study she had undertaken because no one else would be interested was chock full of other people either trying to prove her measurements and theories incorrect or scrambling to explain them. Out of the blue, Dark Matter was a hot topic.
She has received the Dickson Medal for Science, the National Medal of Science, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Bruce Medal and the James Craig Watson Medal. So much for tucking herself into a backwater niche in her field.

Carlos Frank, a cosmologist in England, followed up on her theory using Newtonian Law. He fed his computations into a super-computer and discovered something astonishing. When he fed all the calculations into a program that simulates the earliest universe as science understood it prior to Rubin’s work, the universe fails. A galaxy forms, the largest stars become super-novae and explode ripping the fabric of space apart. There simply isn’t enough gravity present to create the cohesive universe that we know. It certainly wouldn’t have survived long enough to allow life to evolve. It simply would not have.
So Frank began introducing Dark Matter into the infant universe he had created within the computer. First a little, then more, until he had added five times as much Dark Matter as the matter we can see. Finally, his universe created galaxies like the ones we find all around us. According to his calculations it would have taken about 10 billion years for the first stable galaxies to form and the basic spiral shape we’re all so familiar with would be the norm.
The universe includes 5 times as much Dark Matter as it does atoms.

Richard Massey in Edinburgh, Scotland, looked for Dark Matter using Gravitational Lensing. It builds on Einstein’s theory that gravity bends light. Massey postulated that Dark Matter, since it exhibits gravity, should bend light just as stars and galaxies do. So he set out to map dark matter using the bending of light waves to demonstrate its presence.
Lo and behold—wherever he found evidence of dark matter through the verification of bent light he found galaxies. Overlay a map of Light Matter [the kind we can see] and his map of Dark Matter clumps and you find galaxies on a one-to-one correlation.
Dark Matter is the skeleton of the universe.

Now, cosmologists and astronomers are grappling with a new problem:
The Big Bang is still rushing onward. Science had expected it to be slowing down but, instead, it is accelerating.
They’ve named this phenomenon Dark Energy and they’re using something they, so far, understand very little about—Dark Matter—to study Dark Energy, something they know virtually nothing about.
While the amount of Dark Matter in the universe seems to encompass about five times more matter than the matter we can directly detect, Dark Energy seems to be far greater in scope than either one. The latest calculations indicate that about 5% of the universe is visible to us, about 25% is Dark Matter and fully 70% is made up of Dark Energy.

Remember the post on the Genesis Story? Were these phenomena what the All that Is needed to include in order to create a universe that was not, by its nature, chaos? Or, just like the rest of its creation, are these forces conscious of themselves at some level? Are they, too, part of the dream the All that Is dreamed?

Good News

I’ve written before about something I call the Great Awakening here, here and here.
Just a synopsis:
Around 1986, humans moved from a majority of Young souls occupying the planet to a majority of Matures. We are subtly moving, step-by-step, from the mindset of, “What can I do to get a leg up on my competition?” “What’s in it for me?” to a viewpoint of, “How can we cooperate to make the world a better place?”
Of course, we’re in just the infancy of this new way of looking at and dealing with the world. The familiar Young methods will be around for some time to come. But change is in the wind if we keep our eyes and ears atuned for it. This morning I got some evidence of that. I was listening to the radio and two stories caught my ear.
The first concerned a young man who is stationed in Afghanistan. He is a local kid and is being followed by our local NPR station. He blogs regularly on a computer that is falling apart and is doing some important work there—over and above the assignments given to him by his military unit.
He solicits donations of beanie babies and other small toys to hand out to the children he comes in contact with. In effect, he is an unofficial ambassador. And, from what I heard during this story, he’s not the only one. Several soldiers and airmen have taken it upon themselves to reach out to the communities around them in unassuming ways. To try to make the lives of the people there better in small ways. This can only be to the good.
Further, as I researched this article, I found a group of Vietnam Veterans who are donating beanie babies to the cause. They give them to soldiers leaving for Iraq and Afghanistan.

The human condition has one unequivocal rule [among several]. Children grow up.
Children living in an occupied country stand a good chance of growing up to hate the occupiers. In our current world, those children could easily become human fodder for the terrorist movements.
However, if our troops do the little human things such as give toys to children of people who are, potentially, our enemies— they defang the terrorist beast. The parents of the children may begin to view the troops in a more benign light than they had previously. The children, in particular, are learning at a young age that the troops are human and, more importantly, that the soldiers perceive them as human.
Cooperation rather than competition? Even in the face of war? How unusual is that?

The second story I heard this morning came from Egypt.
The new brand of eco-tourists are beginning to perceive Egypt as a go-to place. Not to view the pyramids—though they may be on the itinerary as well. Instead, these folks are fascinated by cave paintings in the southern areas of Egypt. Deep in the Sahara Desert some of the most intricate paintings on the African continent are currently available for viewing.
To be honest, when the story began, I just shook my head. I expected to hear about how the sites are being overrun and destroyed by the very people who want to save the ecology.
Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. Astounded, really. It seems the Egyptian government and the local businesses are already taking steps before the hordes descend on the area en masse. Hotels in the area have been built out of local stone. Only the most lavish provide air conditioning. The majority use the natural insulation of stone and tile to keep their interiors cool. All are incorporating solar panels to augment their electrical use.

The caves themselves are being prepared for the inevitable increase in humidity as viewers traipse through admiring the art. The people of Egypt took a lesson from France’s experience. They want to avoid the problem of having to choose between allowing the art to be viewed and preserving it for future generations.
A government and businesses working together to protect the environment rather than exploiting it for short-term gain. What a novel approach!
And, amazingly, this mature approach actually helps the Young goals of enhancing the economy. Who would have thought? By cooperating to create a sustainable tourist industry in the area, the businesses and government see to it that the economy of Egypt benefits over the long run. Perhaps the Younger countries will take notice and follow suit—thereby moving the world further along the path toward Maturity, themselves.

And a third incident is quietly taking place in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I heard about this one on 60 Minutes a few months ago.
Greg Mortenson was mountain climbing along the border of the two countries and got lost. He staggered into a village where he was taken in while he recuperated from his ordeal. As he talked to the people he began to realize an important fact. They didn’t have a school and they desperately wanted one. He promised to help them realize their dream.
He returned home and began working to raise the necessary funds. Almost certainly, the people expected never to see him again. They must have been astounded when he returned with the money and began the process of building the school. It accepts both boys and girls—an unusual situation in the Middle East.
One hundred and thirty one schools later, in 2003, and after having been kidnapped for eight terrifying days before being released, he wrote a book about his experiences: Three Cups of Tea. A second book, Stones into Schools came out last year.
Other movements have been sponsored by his organization, ‘The Central Asia Institute’, to help his and other endeavors in the area. One is called ‘Pennies for Peace’. It engages elementary school children, educating them about the world outside their own countries’ borders and showing them how they can make a difference in the world one penny at a time.

I may be reading too much into these incidents large and small, but I take what glimmers of hope I can find. Maybe, just maybe, these are indications of the Mature mindset coming forward?

“Judge Not” in re Lessons to be Learned

Right now, I’m reading a new book, “Your Soul’s Plan” by Robert Schwartz. It brings up a point I knew about intellectually—but the book seems to have taken me to a deeper level within it. Here it is:

Prior to each birth we map out our coming incarnation. We use an ‘if-then’ technique. If we take a certain path, we open up new possibilities later on as a result of the earlier decision we made. These new possibilities may or may not be experiences we would hope to encounter from the physical perspective.

For instance, suppose you are living in a mode such as Passion, Power or Aggression. So you might take lots of risks—diving into your experiences and thinking about them later—if at all.
So, one day, you decide to go bungee jumping and you hit your head so hard your neck is broken and—POW!—you’re a quadriplegic.
Now, certainly, this is not something any of us set out to accomplish on the physical level. Who would do such a thing? No one.
BUT—our souls don’t operate at the same level and by the same rules our personalities do. At the soul level, we see the Big Picture in a way our personalities, operating within our self-induced amnesia, do not. There are lessons which can be learned only by being totally dependent on others and this may well be one of those ‘if-then’ situations we set up prior to birth: if I take a certain path [an inability to see the ways we need to depend on each other, for instance] then I’ll give myself a crash course in dependence.

Here’s another example:
Alcohol dependency runs in my family—on both sides. By the time I was 11 years old I recognized that it has a genetic quality about it and decided to steer clear of alcohol [and I’m glad I did].
In fact, I was amazed, years later, when the medical/psychology methodologies unveiled their theories regarding drug addictions and genetics. Hello??? I thought EVERYONE understood those basic facts long ago! After all, if a pre-teen could figure it out — what took the professionals so long?

Anyway, galloping back to the point here [lessons, remember?] when I was in my twenties an uncle died of alcoholism. He shut himself into his home and, essentially, starved himself to death—after a prolonged bout of drinking.

From the human/personality point of view, Uncle Marvin was a profound failure. He let his addictions get so out of hand that he saw no way out and—that was that.
But was it, though? From his soul’s viewpoint, his life may have been an astounding success. Who knows what lessons he, his family, his friends, his acquaintances took from the experience of seeing Uncle Marvin’s downward spiral? We often take on such huge tasks in order both to learn and to teach.
xxxxx
Here’s my point:
For many years I’ve recognized, “We are all where we need to be.” It’s such a basic tenet of this belief system that it’s posted at the top of the blog.

For a few years, now, I’ve had a composite picture of Hitler, Kim Jung Il, George W. Bush and a man who has obviously just been tortured and is about to be killed posted on my wall to remind me: WE ARE ALL EXACTLY WHERE WE NEED TO BE.

But until now this was, I think, simply an intellectual knowing. I posted the picture above my desk because it was something I needed to remind myself of. It wasn’t an inherent gut-knowledge.
Now, though, the book seems to be acting as a catalyst. I believe the knowledge is moving from the level of intellect to something more visceral. Maybe an emotional-knowing or, perhaps, something even deeper.

The admonition by Joshua bar Joseph not to judge others takes on a whole new meaning at this level. Judgment has no place in our world because we have no way of knowing what lessons a given soul has set out to learn. Or even more — if a soul has set out on a quest to undergo what looks, at the human level, like a failed life in order to teach the rest of us a basic lesson.
And if that’s not love, what is?

Awe

We don't have to agree about everything in order to see the wonder of the universe.