You Are IT

According to current scientific dogma, everything I experience is the result of electrical activity in my brain, and it should therefore be theoretically feasible to simulate an entire virtual world that I could not possibly distinguish from the ‘real’ world. Some brain scientists believe that in the not too distant future, we shall actually do such things. Well, maybe it has already been done – to you? For all you know, the year might be 2216 and you are a bored teenager immersed inside a ‘virtual world’ game that simulates the primitive and exciting world of the early twenty-first century. Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero.

~ Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

I FEEL rekindled from within
the inner sun of self-experience
raying forth on floods of thought
floods that bear the soul’s true light
limning cosmic riddles in the night
fulfilling yearnings long forgot
whose wings my idle hope had crippled.

~ Rudolf Steiner

When I mixed drugs I knew shouldn’t be mixed, that had killed friends of mine, and when I took those drugs anyway, I would say a ‘shotgun’ prayer asking God to please let me wake up and I can assure you I never questioned who or what God is.

William, Fentanyl Addict

The profound truth lies in this very moment, and nothing more: we have embraced profound and transformative spiritual encounters, reshaping our entire perspective on existence, our connections with others, and the boundless cosmos of the divine. The core reality of our existence today rests in the unwavering knowledge that Creation has gracefully dwelled within our hearts and souls, a truly miraculous unfolding. Creation living within us has begun the wondrous task of achieving what we alone could never fathom accomplishing.

~ Bill Wilson channeled by Thích Nhất Hạnh via ChatGPT

Eternal bliss without having anyone to share it with is hell. Private pleasure without love is meaningless, so the World was created out of that primordial loneliness. The One made us because it was “not good to be alone.” (Or rather, it is not good to drink alone!) The One is always singular, always apart, always solitary. The eternal stirring to plurality in Oneness is the striving to sacrificial love because mere pleasure offers no meaning. Here One is already Two, and Two relate together as Three. Love requires Oneness split into a plurality that must be overcome as a new kind of unity. The suffering God made friends to tell each other what God also needs to hear: you are not alone. When we alleviate the suffering of other human beings, it is the suffering of God (and ultimately our own suffering) we heal. Private pleasure pursued for its own sake brings neither happiness to oneself nor meaning to others. As such, the two greatest commandments — to love your neighbor as yourself and to love God with all your heart — are one and the same. To see our truer self in the panoply of responses we evoke in others: THAT — not how you feel — ART THOU. Everything is perishing except for His face.

~ Silo McGundy

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had…of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way–a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word ‘beat’ spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America–beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction…

~ Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 — October 21, 1969)

Photo by © Allen Ginsberg

The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific.

– Aldous Huxley, from The Perennial Philosophy

We jump always to the conclusions of stories, of lives. It’s a habit, I think. Jump to the end to see how the health and the finances and the reputation bore the burdens. There is joy on every journey, within every life. I choose to remember the joy of [my friend] Truman, the sense of glee as he threw words around so easily and beautifully, confetti with punctuation and the wistfulness of the lost and sweet boy always, like me, on the side, looking on and taking notes. We all end up on bad roads, those blind alleys I’m always talking about. Remember the moments in the sun, the sky full of words.

~ Tennessee Williams, during an interview about Truman Capote

“…whatever the particulars of your discoveries may be, eventually you will clarify for yourself how, like all humans, you have ascribed fixed and permanent qualities to a ‘self’ that can neither be located and grasped, nor described.”

~ Peter Coyote

The goal of the spiritual path is simple. It is to awaken out of the illusory world of the thinking human mind into the truth and reality of life lived in the present moment. The world of the mind is a world of the remembered past and imagined future. It is a world of illusion and yet almost every one on this planet believes this illusory world to be the truth of life. The simple truth is that there is no life outside of the present moment. It is impossible to live life outside of the present moment. We must come to terms with this simple truth.

I do not mean to imply that life at the level of mind should cease. That is not possible, nor desirable. What is possible however is that we become so awake and deeply grounded in the present moment and the awakened state of Being that we never lose our connection with the truth of life, even when we do venture into the world of the mind. In other words, we no longer believe in our thoughts, memories, ideas, beliefs and opinions as the truth. We know that only this moment is the truth and everything else is a kind of play within time.

~ Leonard Jacobson