Sunday June 23 - Sitting at a bus stop - For those who want more

 

Life is in limbo now, a kind of living purgatory. I’ve done all that I can do. All I can do now is wait … for someone who loves me, and has the same desire for me.

Buddhists’ teach that suffering is the result of our desires. There is much truth to this. Although I am not sure it is as absolute as purported.  The Bible speaks of “Hope deferred” resulting in the same condition, but once realized as being a fountain of life. I use my own words here.

So I wait and hope, believing to sometime “know” that which is hoped for.

And where two or more agree “It shall be done”.

I am sitting on a bench, waiting for a bus. Not knowing whether it is on time, running late, or detoured.

Some can relate. Many maybe most just don’t get it and haven’t got a clue. When you “get it” you have begun to “think” and your mind and cognitive resources have begun to enter dimensions of reality transcending material limits. But this is only the beginning. Spiritual exercise is requisite to grow and there are few willing to accept the work and responsibility of associated character which is Christ. Not egoist altruism, but the manifestation of life transcendent to “monkey brains”, the material reflection, imperfect and pervasive, the only reality most can consider.

I have found that the Church, though believing and attempting to be faithful to the teachings of Christ have misconstrued the concept of the “new birth”, to be born again. It is filled with animalistic contrivances, minds materially bound. Thinking patterns and reliance on thought forms learned over years, centuries and millennia. Transferred one generation to the next, and compounded error upon error.

Bob Dylan expressed a concept of thought which needs to be realized. He said “I’m gonna change my way of thinking”. I’m not sure he realized the depth of his statement. But that is exactly what the Church has failed to do.

Si, or rather “sins” are most often reduced to our behaviors … alcohol, drugs, illicit sex, theft, attitudes of anger which manifest as murder and every other anti-social behavior. We are told it is of these and the like we must repent. But we have lost the meaning of “repentance”, metanoia. We repent, we commit to change our “evil ways”, but we have missed it. We are still thinking, relying on thought forms we have been taught which too often are unable to relate and transcend the material. We are stuck, for all practical purposes led by blind leaders who have never actually experienced the reality of life beyond the here and now. We have not “changed our way of thinking”, we have “monkey brains”. And do not think that this is a criticism of the Church only. It is applies to any and all stuck in the rut of material reality, atheist, pagan believer alike.

“God”, the word, like so many others which infest the religious Christian vocabulary, has lost its meaning, not being realized and experienced as reported in the life of the man known as “Jesus” the Christ. Not that we do not have the resources to “know”, but the corporate entity calling itself the Church as a matter of self-preservation remolded and redefined what it could not comprehend, could not comprehend because minds or ways of thinking had not changed. Altruistic notions, born out of materialistic religious forms, are substituted for the real, a “real” that cannot be manufactured and is not a product of natural human intelligence, but rather a transcendent enlightenment, possibly realized as that of the unconscious … the Self. That which is in us, and of us, and all that is … The divine life that connects us all and everything, but we, for the most part, have been taught otherwise, such is an illusion and not real, it does not have material objectivity. We have lost the reality of the “spiritual”. If it is not literally materially based, it is not real. We have confused the illusion of the material as the only reality which exists. It does exist, but it is not all that exists, not even close. It is a reflection, and each one’s perception is unique, and subjective and unverifiable, not in any absolute sense. And some see and perceive more than others, but most remain satisfied experiencing and knowing only what may be understood as the lowest common denominator. And we call ourselves the “Church”. This is a reality I question.