The Isolation Illusion

 

6 degrees

You are born knowing the truth about yourself but by the time you reach maturity most of that truth has been replaced by the lies that others tell you. My favorite lie the the one that says you are alone.

This is the Truth:

You are born into a network of people who are connected whether it be through family or love or work or shared interests. These are real, visceral connections, measurable on a psychic level through a means that science is only now beginning to understand.

Imagine a long, elastic thread running from your core to the core of everyone who knows you. On the psychic level you would look like a starburst. Some of those threads are strong and bright. Some are tenuously thin. Some have faded to only an after image invisible except if you catch a glimpse of them out of the corner of your eye.

Now imagine all those other people being connected to everyone they know and those people being connected to others in the same way. It is hard for the human brain to imagine the infinite number of souls who are only a thought away along our long elastic thread of connection but the theory that you are only six degrees of separation from every human being on the planet is not far wrong.

We know about this network. It lies in deep in our subconscious, always there, always accessible. It is a comfort and a source of power that sustains us in our time of need. When people tell you that they are praying for you what they actually mean is that they have turned their attention to the long elastic thread that connects you to them and they are putting their attention and their intentions on that link, making it stronger while at the same time they are calling down the energy of the total network, channeling that energy through themselves, and passing it on down the line.

If you believe in your connection then it only takes a thought to open yourself to it and take what it wants to give you. The strongest links, the one that connect you to those who love you the most, these threads hold you in place and sustain you when  you are in deadly peril.

If you can let go of your fear, and trust that this network works as it was designed to work, then you can shift your attention away from the struggle to not die and shift it towards seeking the light that will heal you, body and soul.

When people die, they have to work really, really hard at it. Most of the pain comes from severing the ties that hold you to this place.

That part of what you think you know is true. Dying is very lonely work.

Read Full Post »

The Riddles of the Sphinx

Guardians at the Portals

Life is not like a box of choc’lits, as much as we adore that kind of folksy wisdom.

If you want a truer analogy, one could say Life is very much like Harry Potter’s TriWizard Tournament maze. You are on a path with high walls that keep you from seeing the way forward or the way back. The possibility of something nasty jumping out at you around every corner is very real.

So, there are choices to be made.

How do you avoid the traps?

You can refuse to play the game. That is one choice. But you are human. This means you chose to play the game else you would not have walked though the Veil. Or you could stop and refuse to advance any further. Here again, the rules of the game make this an unpleasant choice for there is only two ways out of the maze, death and the big doorway marked “EXIT”. The way is littered with those who stopped and let the life seep out of them until the only thing left was the mummified husks.

Let’s assume you are playing to win. You turn each corner cautiously, your weapons ready in case the next surprise is something that means to eat you. When something jumps out at you, you have choices. Run or Fight. Easy enough. You defeat it and move on or it defeats you and you must find another route through the maze.

Sometimes you come around the corner and there stands a Sphinx. Damn. 

You have three choices, Fight, Flee or solve the Riddle.

I do not recommend fighting a Sphinx. They are magical creatures of a kind that cannot be defeated by even the most powerful wizards.

Going back to the next turn does not appeal since it has taken you so long to get this far and each trap has been progressively harder and more brutal. The maze does not want to be solved and resists you at every turn and eventually there is no going backwards.

OK, we can do this, you think. Just solve the Riddle. But be careful. The Sphinx will eat you and suck you into its alternate reality. But you are clever. How hard can it be, this riddle solving thing?

The Sphinx is an old hand at this game. It wants you to win but it does not want it to be an easy win. It is immortal and bored and ever wishing for a challenge, after all.

It asks the riddle.

It is then that you realize how clever this game is. The riddle is a paradox with no solution. Damn. Double Damn.

That is when you cheat.

Oh, come on. You knew there were cheats. Every game has them.

The Sphinx exists on multiple levels in multiple dimensions. One must merely find an alternate reality and then, standing within this place, you rephrase the the question so that the riddle is solvable.

Der? you might say.

Think about it. In the center of every paradox, at the heart of the reality in which all possibilities exist as truth, simultaneously and in opposition, there is a place perfectly balanced between the thousands and thousands of true answers. Standing in this place you face the Sphinx and deny any version of its truth but that which lives in the Heart of the Oneverse.

The Sphinx will smile and bow, letting you pass. It might even follow you, guarding your back as you finish the game. It is not often that the Sphinx is bested at its own game. It follows you because you are not boring.

Damn. Triple Damn. How the hell do you explain the Sphinx when it follows you home like a stray puppy?

the paradox Riddle

Read Full Post »

Life After Death

Death, it seems, is our last frontier. It is the thing we fear most, yet, because of that fear, it is the thing we least understand. We manage to live our lives pretending that Death does not exist, hiding its manifestations behind polite walls of silence, and yet our fascination with it runs like a dark shadowy thread through all our popular media.

Those who are truly terrified of life become nihilists. Nihilist terrified of death call themselves atheists. A nihilist’s standard response to the question ‘What happens when you die?’ is “Nothing. The lights go out and that is the end.”

This conviction is very quaint, not unlike the geo-centric beliefs of science and religion that predated Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. Before 1600, it was taught that the Earth was the center of the Universe and all other heavenly bodies rotated around it. Geo-centrism pinned the Earth in one spot in space, stationary and non-rotating, while all else turned around it like the center of a pinwheel turning around its axis. The inability to imagine anything other than what the five senses tell one led to the conviction that the Earth, more specifically, the point of view of the person standing on the Earth, was divinely inspired and therefore the only point of view, making all other points of perception demonic.

Advances in technology, math and hive mind awareness changed all that. Now, without any difficulty at all, one can imagine what it would be like to stand at the center of an atom and watch the electrons whirl around you like planets. Or stand outside of our own Milky Way galaxy and watch it spin across the universe. Or look out into the vast and infinite limits of space and see billions of galaxies caught up in the fabric of space/time. Or, because of the advances in quantum physics, imagine oneself riding a quark through the walls of reality and meeting oneself on the other side.

We must take that same ability to view things from multiple perspectives, that same ability to move oneself out of the picture frame and stand outside it, looking in, before we can begin to appreciate death.

Your body, as much as you enjoy it, it not the center of your universe. The “I” of you does not disappear when you rip down the veils and plunge naked into the maelstrom that lies in the heart of all existence. The personality does not disintegrate forever when you go traveling on natural hallucinogens like LSD or psilocybin or peyote nor do you get lost when you go traveling by way of out-of-body experiences. Amputees and reiki healers who do distance healing will tell you the same thing. There is a body awareness that is not tied to the your physical meat, a ghost perception that wears the body like a coat. Without a lot of coaxing, we can learn to shed that coat as easily as a parka on a hot summer day.

Once shed, this ghost is not bound to this reality well called Earth. In fact, the “I” of you is pan-dimensional. It exists outside of time. It exists everywhere in time. It exists in all the layers of reality that surround this small three dimensional place our human meat calls home.

What is it like to die? Imagine you are the white mice in Douglas Adam’s “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the super beings who contracted to have the universe built so as to solve the ‘ultimate question’.  Being too big to insert themselves wholly into the universal superannuated computer, they had to be content inserting the merest tip of a tentacle, to animate an avatar in the shape of a mouse body. If the mouse were to die, yes, the lights would go out in its little brain as its meat began to disintegrate, but all its experiences as a mouse would still lie within the greater whole of the being who had animating it. All the connections between you and the other avatars still exist outside the reality well. Nothing is lost except the meat.

Is there life after death? The question itself is inherently flawed. Do you miss your hair after you have a haircut? Yes, but not for long.

Read Full Post »