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/ \  I read a bunch of stuff where people were arguing about who was right and this was the thought I felt was governing the core of the responses,

"Just worship me! I am so right!" Ha!
 

Thought it would be fun to post and see what happens. Seems like some of you added some spices and others added a little cream.
I am sure someone will come along and give this whole thread a stir at some point.

I don't see idiots as much as I see silly putty. As far as I can tell, we're all silly putty.

 

The whole thing is rigged. Fear is the fear of being wrong and everyone is.
What can we do but whatever our version of 'the truth' is,
whether we view life through the prism of religion,
spirituality,
science, or a combination of them all,
we are still looking through a prism of thinking,
still inhabiting a thought-made model of belief, and no model,
however sophisticated or refined, is ever the living reality.
 

Of course thought is a very useful tool.

This rich language we use to express our thoughts and feelings,
the numbers we use to quantify and calculate,
the ingenious concepts involved in the cutting edge of science and technology are all born of the inventiveness of thought.

But thought looking for who we really are is like a character in a movie searching for the screen on which it appears, or the hero in a novel looking for the paper upon which the story is written; it's not difficult, it's impossible.
 

In finding nothing 'out there' we conclude that there's nothing to find;
that the whole notion of something more to life is a delusion bought into only by the those who are somehow flawed, easily led or just plain stupid.

Or else we listen to our intuitive sense of something more, something deeper, and try to capture it, to pin it down, to give it a name, a form, a face, a gender, a size and a position, so as to understand, so as to maintain our vital sense of being in control.
The idea of going beyond thought, beyond belief, of free falling into uncertainty, into the unknown, of being totally exposed and vulnerable with nothing left to hold, is seen as the road to ruin, madness and oblivion.
 

But what if we're wrong?
What if we can go beyond thought, beyond belief and not be destroyed?
What if we can drop all the prisms of thinking and find we're still here, still breathing, still alive?
 

Then, without those conceptual partitions, this effortless, undeniable, self-evident sense of being, this 'amness', is revealed to be undivided from all of experience, is being all of experience; is being the thought that is now considering this statement, the movement and sound of every breath, every sensation, is being even the idea of a 'me' that is reading this text, the one that is supposedly in charge of it all.

Then all of our big experiences in which we place so much importance, of being touched by 'grace', of 'no self', visions of spirits, of light beings, of holy masters, 'out-of-body' experiences, telepathy, clairvoyance, speaking in tongues, communicating with angels, encounters with aliens, the whole gamut of the weird and wonderful are no more extraordinary, no more sacred or holy, than the wonder of right now, in all its everyday ordinariness.

All are unique permutations of image, sound, sensation, taste, smell, thought, feeling, arising and dissolving in, and only ever made out of ourself, 'the baseless fabric of this vision' as Shakespeare puts it. The infinite complexity of all our thought-made distinctions reduced to divine simplicity.

To know oneself as 'all that is', to be fully immersed in life, saturated with all the joy, bliss, heartache and pain, the triumphs and the disasters, the satisfaction and the crushing disappointment, to feel it all, in all its bittersweet glory, is the essence of love.
And as that love radiates throughout our life, there comes a natural movement to cherish our relationships, cherish our communities, cherish and celebrate each and every expression of what we truly are.
 
The transformational power of love becomes our living reality.

ps/smoh