Hell-Dreams

Many humans long to believe that they are right and other people are wrong, that people will be punished for what they do that is wrong. We like to believe that those that do right will be rewarded and the rest will be punished, that the world is, in the end, a just and fair place. It bothers us, sometimes, that those we do like but believe differently may also be punished, and we try to correct them to believe as we do, but all in all, people like the idea that bad people are punished and that only other people are ever the bad people.

An eternity of punishment, however, is not something that anyone deserves, nor is it just, no matter what the crimes of the person. Hanging a threat of future punishment later as the way of justifying certain behavior now only encourages people to hedge their bets and find ways to play both sides of the issue. Some people will behave out of fear, but most people will simply do as they will anyway, and rationalize their behavior in a way that allows them to do what they would see as wrong in another, but acceptable in themselves.

The other problem with believing in a life of punishment, whether it’s an eternal afterlife or karma giving someone bad lifetimes until they learn, is that it takes the burden of judgement away from the Divine and into the hands of mortals. It gives comfort and smugness, knowing that those we like are going to be happier and those we don’t sadder. It doesn’t serve any real purpose to believe in such things. It doesn’t make people good or keep behaviors we don’t like from happening. It just causes more justifications and pain.

Hell, or bad karma, or whatever the horrid afterlife we might wish upon other people, is simply something that isn’t acceptable. We have no right, nor cause, to speculate upon what will happen to other people in the afterlife. We are all of the Divine, all special and sacred to the Universe, and should be treated as such, even when we disagree with the conclusions that people come to. If we truly have faith in the Divine, we need to also have faith that the Divine will choose to reveal Itself as It sees fit, and that we cannot dictate how that will happen from one person to the next. To do otherwise is to have no faith at all.

Questions:
Why do we wish bad lives or afterlives on other people?
Is there a more effective way to attempt to control people’s actions? A moral way?
What advantage do we get by believing in afterlives we can control? Is it a false sense of control? What are the dangers involved?

Creation

In the Beginning, there was Void, Nothingness. And in that Void floated a single speck of Possibility, of power and chances and potential. And it floated forever, for an instant, in a time before Time began. Nothing changed, everything in perfect stasis, until the speck of Possibility became aware of itself, and thought "I am."

There was not room, in that speck, for both what was there and awareness of Itself. And that speck of Possibility exploded into energy, expanding rapidly, changing from only possible to actual. Both physical and spiritual in every particle, a thinking, self-aware Universe exploded into reality.

As the Universe physically expanded, rapidly changing from superheated plasma to energy and matter, coalescing into suns and planets, it watched itself with amazement. Without frame of reference, there was nothing to compare its changes to, but changes were happening nevertheless, and each change was something new to wonder at.

In time, however, the Universe stopped changing so quickly. Change became predictable, regular, and boring. But awareness did not cease, so the Universe sought for that which would be interesting, different, new. As fascinating and beautiful as everything was, everything was somehow static. And so the Universe sought for something different, something to occupy the time.

A small corner of its body, a small planet, caught the Universe's attention, and it looked closer at the strange tickling sensation it felt there. There was life there, rapidly changing life, and even as the Universe looked more closely the burgeoning life changed more rapidly. It seemed even the very awareness of life's existence, and the noticing of it, changed that life and made it multiply and change even faster. And the Universe began to wonder, to speculate on what this life could become.

The first time the Universe saw one piece of itself consume another, however, it began to rethink the entire idea. How could one eat another? How could one piece be valued above another? For a long moment, the Universe speculated destroying this small world, finding a way to extinguish the teeming life that preyed upon itself for survival. But during the speculation, the Universe saw signs of communication, of awareness. Of something that might someday lead to intelligence. And curiosity of what might be became more important than the methods of survival. Currently, there was only rudimentary communication, seeking mates, seeking food. But if life could communicate with itself, however rudimentarily, perhaps someday something would be able to communicate with the Universe itself.

For the first time, with the possibility of companionship, the Universe felt desire. And it began pushing the possibilities of life around, attempting to force, as quickly as possible, that which would be company. A creature that would be sentient, that could be made in the image of the Universe itself, possessed of a mind, a body, and a soul. Anything that could be manipulated was for the desired effect, and ignored when they no longer served the main desire.

Finally, there was humanity. Using tools, using their minds. Capable of having souls in the image of the Universe, the Universe sectioned off parts of itself to be the souls of these humans, that which would see and remember, and learn from all that happened. And the combination of their more complex brain, and the soul, allowed for a mind that could ask deeper questions, have more complex thoughts than simple questions of food and mates. In them, the Universe saw the possibility of communication directly. To answer their questions of why even as it gave them, and give them hope as they gave It.

Communication proved to be harder than anticipated, however. The mind of the Universe is vast and complicated, and the simple act of touching that mind to the human drove the person insane. To understand the vast totality of the Universe was too much for any individual to comprehend, much less cope with. There needed to be intermediaries, or some other way of communicating that did not do so much harm, some way that would actually lead to effective conversation in time.

So the Universe created Gods, separate beings, but aware of their connection to each other and the Universe itself. And the Gods lived in the bits and pieces of human minds that they weren't using, and communicated with humanity. Some followed the wishes of the Universe, and tried to teach about the interconnectedness of all things, and advance humans to where they could speak directly with the Universe. Others were selfish, and tried to deny their nature, and sought to gain more worshippers for themselves, and live in more minds to the exclusion of other Gods. And the Universe itself sought for minds that could handle the contact.

And so we live, children of the Universe and yet still part of It, struggling to achieve that same sense of connection that the Universe itself craves. Struggling to find community and understanding, for our souls are also reflections of the greater Universe, and aware of loneliness even though we can never be truly alone, for we are all a part of something greater.

Questions:
Why is it nigh-impossible to communicate directly with the Divine?
What does Creation mean to you? Being a part of a greater whole instead of a specially created individual? Being a special individual instead of just part of a greater whole?
Why are we forever lonely and alone? How do we cope and adapt? How do we make life less lonely?

Divine Relations

Our relationship with the Divine is complex. All that we are is of the Divine, as the Divine is the entire Universe. However, our own ego and masks block us from the Divine, leaving it a thread that runs through us but not our entire personality.

We put faces on the Divine to separate ourselves from it, to relieve ourselves of the responsibility of recognizing that we are faces of the Universe. And we relate with those other faces as though they are separate beings, not a part of ourselves. While there is nothing wrong with relating with the Divine in this way, it is a fallacy and it does need to be recognized as such. We are the Divine, we are the Universe, and we cannot neglect this reality for the comfort of distance.

We are called to be greater than we are, to strive to make the Universe around us better. We do this through internal and external action, neither neglected for the other. We see the face of the Divine in our mirrors and in those we pass on the streets, and it is how we treat them (and ourselves) that is how we treat the Divine. Prayer, while important, cannot ever replace action and interaction. No amount of debasement can make up for refusing to take action when action is called for, and in fact, debasement goes against what we’re called to do. When we debase ourselves before the Divine, we also debase the Divine itself.

There are no simple answers for what the Divine is, for every definition merely excludes. There are no boxes in which we can place the Divine, and there are no boxes we can place in ourselves that we can remove from the Divine. We need to accept that we cannot hide from reality, cannot hide from ourselves, cannot hide from the Divine. There can be a hundred thousand views of the Divine, and all of them correct. We cannot declare the Divine is as we view it, because we all see with the eyes of the Divine, and these eyes see different things. While we can misinterpret what we see, none of us are capable of verifying another’s view.

The Divine can only be discussed remotely accurately in metaphor, allusion, and contradiction. There is simply no way to boil down such a being into the mundane world of language, because every word we use limits. Our relationship with the Divine, similarly, evades language. I can give ideas and hints, but there is no way to accurately describe a relationship with the Divine, other than the fact that it must be sincere and it cannot help but be life-altering, or it’s only a relationship with yourself.

Questions:
How do you see the Divine? Do you feel words are accurate, or do they fall short?
What do you wish you could hide from the Divine? What does it mean that you can’t?
What do you think is an appropriate relationship between yourself and the Divine? Why? What does it mean to mess that relationship up?

Dichotomies of Pleasure and Happiness

Humanity has always had a love-hate relationship with pleasure, especially "fleshy" pleasures, or pleasures of the body. On the one hand, pleasure is enjoyable and sought after, and for good reason. Every pleasure that the human body has comes with advantages, within reason. On the other hand, though, is the problem that pleasure, in and of itself, does nothing. It is an end, as opposed to happiness, which is more often a product of life.

Pleasure and happiness are often confused, considered similar if not the same thing. But pleasure is like a paper: thrown into our Flame, it gives a great flash of warmth, but is then gone, leaving us colder than before. Happiness is a log, placed carefully in our Flame. No great heat, no moment of astonished warmth, but a long growth of warmth that lasts as long as it is nurtured.

Of course, the flash of pleasure is more dramatic, more noticeable. It's much easier to seek, and indeed a search for pleasure may well be genetic, as well as the desire for happiness. But pleasure is easy, too easy. When sweets were hard to come by, sugar was a pleasure that could be safely indulged in, were there enough money to afford it. But over-saturation cheapens pleasure, like taking an occasional piece of chocolate and making it a daily habit makes that chocolate taste not nearly as good. As one becomes accustomed to pleasure, old pleasures become boring, no longer enough. So one must seek new pleasures, casting old ones aside in the heedless search for stimulation.

One might ask, so what? What difference does it make if we need to seek new pleasures? If it makes us happy, what's the problem? The problem is, pleasure doesn't lead to happiness. Pleasure leads to desire, and desire leads more often to sorrow than happiness, because everything is wanted and not had. Pleasure and desire are not wrong, but they must be understood for what they are, and weighed against long-term happiness, when one desires what is not had.

In many ways, happiness is learning to desire what it is we already have, as opposed to focusing on that which is out of reach. We consider ourselves happy when we have what we desire, and unhappy when our minds are occupied by thoughts of those things we lack.

Isn't happiness selfish, one might ask? By what right do I have to seek happiness, when I could be doing things, making things, creating wealth, whatever the excuse is. In truth, however, happiness is our gift to the Divine, as well as our gift from the Divine, if we are capable of simply grasping it. What we do and who we are reflects and changes the Divine. When we are happy, when we live simply, having good relations to those around us and the world we live on, we better the world around us and the Divine. Instead of happiness being selfish, it can be the most unselfish thing one can do.

Happiness is not easy, however. It must be maintained, must be nurtured, must be cared for. It is easy for desire to blow through the mind, a mental wind that carries beliefs of inadequacy and false needs, and such winds are hard to dispel. As long as we hold to happiness, however, as our goal, we can help ourselves, and slowly bring this concept to those around us as well, bettering their lives.

Questions:
How does pleasure differ from happiness? How can the desire for both be balanced?
How do we overcome our desire for pleasure?
Why is happiness unselfish? How would you define being truly happy?

Dreams of Perfection and Ego

We all carry multiple selves with us. The Hero. The Lover. When we interact with other people, each person has a self that speaks, and hears, and obscures the truth behind idealizations. The Winner. The Loser. We all do this, to an extent, and we treasure those dreams of ourselves, both the good and the bad. The Pious. The Sinner. When we find ourselves without masks, without a role to play, we are often struck silent with fear or confusion. The Strong Man. The Hermit. Seeing a true picture of ourselves, or even a truer picture than previously seen, can be frightening in its intensity.

Yet we are shackled by our illusions. They hold us in ways that keep us from truly changing, truly becoming better. "I am the Hero, I don't need to worry about ethics, I can't help but do what's right." "I am the Powerless, everything happens around me. I have no control and do no harm, for I do nothing." The more we use these illusions in our lives, the more they become our lives, and the harder change becomes. People expect certain attitudes, certain behaviors, and we act the part we've given ourselves to keep the peace and keep ourselves from seeing dissonance in our lives.

As children, we learn certain feelings and actions are not acceptable. As we grow older, we incorporate both the spoken and unspoken norms of our society, holding to those beliefs and attitudes that cause us the least dissonance with ourselves. We find ways to make our actions fit our image of ourselves, no matter what the necessary justification to ourselves, and assume that other people see us as we see ourselves or as we desire ourselves to be seen. Even though the pieces don't always match, and the masks slip and stretch to cover us as we wish to be seen and not as how our actions brand us, we hold to the beliefs that we are what we wish to be and have no need to grow and change.

We cannot change our true self, and become better people, until we realize who we are and how other people see us. Yet we fear our true selves. They are vulnerable, the reason for the masks in the first place. We can never fit completely into the proper role our society sets for us, the role we feel we should play yet do not. Do not show fear, weakness, ignorance, or anything else that does not fit the role we are to play in society. Especially to ourselves, we cannot show our true nature, for that nature does not match the nature we wish it to be. Our true selves cannot help but be weak, cannot help but have fear, cannot help but be ignorant. Not always, of course, but no one knows everything, fears nothing, and is undefeatable. It simply does not exist. So we hide our weaknesses with masks and shields, lying even to ourselves that we do not fear, or believing that no one will notice our fears.

When we come to religion, to the Divine, we come with our masks, hoping to hide behind them, be accepted for them. But the Divine sees no masks, only the truth of each person. For many people, this is a terrifying experience, even as it is freeing. No masks, no illusions, no questions, just the real person standing there without covering before the Divine. And we find fear, both of ourselves and of the other, because we don't know how to live without our masks, and we don't know how to face the power of the Divine without the safety of our masks. All the thoughts of the masks, seeking to hide that which we dislike, pretend to be that which we are not, stills, and we find ourselves quiet, and alone with ourselves. There, quiet with ourselves, we find the Divine waiting for us to turn to It.

Until we face ourselves, and see ourselves without our masks, we cannot easily face the Divine, because what we see is our own masks looking back at us, coloring everything we learn.

Questions:
What are the masks you wear and why?
What dissonance do these masks cause in your life?
How do you drop your masks? How do you live without them?

Dichotomies of Order and Chaos

A perfect world, a perfect heaven. The aspiration of so many people, for a perfect life, one without sickness, without death, without chaos. And that is a cruel lie, and a cruel hope, for there is no life without chaos, no order without change. Only nothingness is static, and even that lies full of possibility.

So what do we hope for, if not a perfect world to come? Growth can only come out of chaos, although understanding that growth comes from times of order. Our goal, our purpose, is growth and understanding of the world around us and ourselves. To find a static world, or to change to one, would make us useless and our purpose unreachable. Instead, we should hope for learning, for growth, for becoming more than we currently are, as painful as that can be sometimes.

That doesn't mean all chaos is good, any more than all order is good. Every change holds within it seeds both of growth and pain, of advantage and disadvantage. And times of order degrade over time, taking what had been good to simply what is, and often what is bad. Chaos and order are both good and bad, depending on what is done with the opportunities, not the fact of order or chaos itself.

Order however, is much more comfortable than chaos. We crave order, security, comfort. Even when the order is obviously not serving the people involved, it is still quite difficult to take the risk of chaos and make changes. When we cannot find order, we find ways to force order, see patterns, create comfort out of confusion. We call upon Gods to create order or explain what is, blaming chaos on divine disfavor. We deny growth because it scares us, because the potential for growth is always the same potential as loss.

We must learn to embrace chaos as we embrace order, to accept that our lives cannot remain pleasantly constant. To understand that how we deal with change and chaos are the things that truly define us as people. And to accept that our lives are short, and not constant, and that to embrace anything in life is to embrace the fact that it is impermanent.

Questions:
What are the limits of order?
What are the limits of chaos?
How do we balance our desire for security with our need for change?

Deserving?

What is it we, as humans, deserve? It's a common plaint .. "I do deserve this" "I don't deserve this" .. as though there's some cosmic scorekeeper, and we're supposed to get X.

But do we really deserve ANYthing? As Americans, at least, we are told in our founding document, the Declaration of Independance, that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights .. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That simply because we are alive, we deserve these things, and no one has the right to take them away from us. (interesting historical sidenote .. it was originally going to be pursuit of PROPERTY. interesting change). But at the same time, our own government has the right to take these away at times .. you transgress the law, you lose your liberty for a time, at least in certain ways. In death penalty states, you do something horrible enough and even your life can be taken by the state.

And these *simple* rights also leave questions .. we have a right to life. Does that mean that we have a right to health care to stay alive? Or simply that people can't go around killing us? Do we have a right to die? To sell ourselves into slavery for some reason? And, of course, these are only rights that our *government* guarantees us.

I deserve. Such simple little words. And powerful all out of their size. When we claim we deserve something, we've stopped thinking, stopped questioning. We're not asking anymore, when we claim we deserve .. we are demanding as a right.

Do we deserve anything from the Divine? Even our life is a gift, something given freely by our parents. (hopefully without strings attached, but we all know how parents can be). The basic building blocks of life are things the Universe gives freely .. air for us to breathe, sunlight so our crops can grow, soil for it to feed off of. We don't even question these things .. we take them as granted, as automatic. As things we deserve. No, when we say "I deserve" we speak of things that are not freely given, but of things we desire but have thwarted from us.

I'm truly uncertain whether we deserve anything in our lives. We can earn things based on societal norms, but that is not from the Divine directly, but from each other. When we play by the rules, we *deserve* a fair chance to win, for example. But even here we are closing our minds to other possibilities, to the idea that maybe the game is flawed, or a tie is the best option.

But the Divine owes us nothing. It gives us life as a gift, gives us identity and individuality so that it may live through us and so that we may experience life. But the Divine owes us nothing. We should treasure our lives as gifts, not see them as something we are owed, something we are deserved.

Questions:
What do you think you deserve? Why? Who owes it to you and why?
How would your life change if you saw life as a gift instead of something you deserve?
What is the difference between the community owing things to each other, and the Divine owing things to you (other than the ease of collection)? What do you owe to other people? Do you owe anything to the Divine?

Submission of the Self

There are many times and many places in our lives where one can wish to submit. Submit to the system, to the rules, to another person. It appears easier, in many ways. When we give up our own filter of moral judgment, we allow another’s judgment to step in, let them make the decisions. While it is necessary to submit to reality and to ourselves, to accept our limitations and the consequences of our actions, it is just as necessary to not use submission as an excuse to abrogate responsibility for ourselves. Even though the consequences may not be what we would wish for, they are still the consequences we earn.

Submission is directly tied to the concept of consequence. We fear consequences in our life, both not getting the consequence we desire and receiving the consequence we don’t. So we try to find ways to dodge the consequences, ways to change our realities to match what we desire. We play games with ourselves, find excuses where no such excuse can possibly exist. One of those games is submission.

Submission is an attempt to give to another our own responsibilities, to say that another person has the right to say what we can and cannot do. We say, “We’re just doing our job,” when we realize what we’re doing isn’t something we’d do otherwise. Or, “It’s the law,” even if it’s something we morally disagree with. We sometimes even come to finding a desire to give all our responsibility to another person, and become totally submissive to another’s will.

The problem is that we cannot truly give our will over to another at any time. While we say we are not responsible, that does not make it so. We cannot simply give up responsibility morally or legally, for we are what we do, not the spin we put on it.

When we try to give our responsibilities to another, we saddle them with something impossible.

Questions:
Why is submission wrong? Why is it impossible?
Why do we try to dodge moral culpability for our actions?
Why is the law not a good excuse for moral submission? Do you think such an excuse exists? Would you allow it if someone else used it and hurt you in the process?

Submission and the Divine

Submission is a scary concept. It involves giving up control, perhaps for just a moment, perhaps longer. We like to believe we're in control, that we choose what we allow to happen to us. Or we go to the other extreme, believing we have no control, that everything is out of our hands, and that some other agency, either mortal or divine, has control. As in most things, the truth is somewhere in between.

We have total control over ourselves, although not all of that control is conscious. No one else can truly take away our ability to choose how and if to act at any given point, although the world around us does limit the choices we have, and limits even more our appearance of choices. The choices we make, and the consequences that come along with that, are our own, though.

So where does submission enter the picture? Part of submission to the Divine is the knowledge that we can't control all variables in our lives, that we must know what we do and do not have control over. We must let go of those things we do not control, and realize our limits. We must control ourselves, but the rest is left up to the Divine in the shape of other people and the world in general.

The other part of submission to the Divine is realizing that no matter how we may try, we will never be and have never been perfect. We must transcend our limited, daily selves, and see ourselves as part of the Divine exploring itself. We are individual, but we are also a piece of the Divine, and we must accept that duality of existence and submit to the fact that our ego, our *I*-ness, will someday pass, leaving us once again one with the Divine without artificial division.

What of submission to mortal agencies? Clergy, spouses, bosses, friends? Do we submit to them, and if so, how? All I can say here is that the choices we make are still our own, no matter whether another person ordered it or not. We are each the center of our own universe, and no one has the right to attempt to change that fact. To attempt to completely submit to another, or to require or allow someone else to completely submit to you, is both immoral and impossible. This does not mean we should ignore authority, for authority exists for good reasons. However, the moral culpability rests in each person’s hands that does (or doesn’t do) the act in question.

In short, we must submit to reality, to our lack of control over anything not ourselves. However, we must also realize that each person has control over their own selves, that there is never anyone but ourselves able to have control over our actions. When we submit to the Divine, it is a freeing submission to ourselves, allowing us to blossom to the extent of our potential.

Questions:
On what issues must we submit? What does that entail?
What does moral culpability mean to you?
Why must we accept a lack of control in our lives? The existence of control in our lives?

Wilderness and Chaos

We live in a world of rigid order run by external forces. People seem to control us, telling us what we can and cannot do, when we can act and when we must wait. We feel forced to conform in every way, with sanctions for when we behave in some way other than what’s acceptable. So we find places that we feel are safer, places there are no humans to make us conform, and we romanticize them. Currently what we romanticize is the wilderness, a place of unimaginable potential and believed safety.

However, this belief of nature as some kind of romantic safe place is incredibly incorrect and historically inaccurate. Our ancestors never worshipped the wilderness. Indeed, they feared it. The idea of worshipping nature as a being to be loved is a completely modern idea, and one usually done from the safety of civilization, or the ability to return to it quickly.

Nature is harsh. When we rely upon the weather, we realize that the moods of the Earth can be quite deadly and are completely impersonal. The planet does not care if we live or die, if we eat of other being’s lives or feed the animals with our still-living body. We believe that we’re different, that we’re special to nature itself, but there’s no reason to believe that other than the conceit of viewpoint.

We romanticize what is separate from us, what we see as pure. That doesn’t make it true. When we separate ourselves from our reality, and view nature as better than the world we actually live in, we lose a great chance to actually affect our own world. We’ve already written it off as impure, profane as opposed to sacred. And that which is profane is something which cannot be improved, only destroyed or hidden from.

We deny our own nature when we deny the world we live in, when we try to recreate reality to degrade the world we live in. It cannot serve us, only cost us dearly. We must learn to accept the world of humanity as sacred as well as the world outside of ourselves, for truly, we are part of nature anyway. The dichotomy is false.

Questions:
Why do you think we try to separate ourselves and our world from the natural world?
Why is the Earth impersonal? Why do we believe otherwise?
What happens when we deny the sacredness of our own surroundings?

Comment on Copyright

I've put my posts under a Creative Commons license, as is clearly seen on the sidebar. I should probably attach that to every post .. but I'm challenged enough I'm not quite sure how. :D

I think, though, that my choice deserves an explanation, because I think it's important. Religion is free .. I cannot own it, nor can anyone. While one can copyright one's work (and ooh, I'd be ticked if someone took it!) the religion itself isn't mine. I'm just a messenger, a carrier. If it is to survive, other people will take up what I write and add to it, create from it .. and that's a GOOD thing. I do not want to stifle that. In fact, I'd HATE to stifle that, which is what current copyright law does.

So I encourage people reading .. come up with your own rituals, essays, beliefs, experiments. Let my work be an inspiration to your own. My only requirement is that you make your own work free for other people to use as well .. to find as inspiration to build off of. It's not open-source software .. it's open-source religion.

Let it go, and let it grow. Let's see where it leads us.

The Virtues of Doubt

Doubt is often viewed as the opposite of faith, a problem in our lives or a moral failing. The pain of doubt causes us to try and avoid the question, cling to certainty, pretend we do not feel the questions we have. We go to great lengths to avoid being in a place where we can even hear the questions, fear being alone with our thoughts and nothing to block them.

There is no question about the discomfort of doubt. When we question, it can be difficult to find a point upon which we can stand, a place where doubt fades to certainty. It’s true that few people doubt the world of solid objects, that the sun will rise the next day and the chair they sit on will continue to exist if they stop thinking about it. But questions without concrete objects, questions of faith and virtue and wonder have no clear-cut answers no matter how strong one’s faith is. When doubt raises questions about those articles taken on faith, it can feel as though our very foundation is being attacked.

Doubt is the act of questioning, looking at our beliefs and thinking about what they mean, what they’re worth, whether they are still correct to us. The very fact that we are questioning our beliefs does not mean we do not still hold those beliefs or that our faith is in question, but that we are learning more about ourselves, and understanding more. Doubt is not the opposite of faith. It is instead an integral component of a mature faith. It is a form of spiritual exercise, like physical exercise in that is painful when performed, but has the long term virtues of greater physical health. Doubt cleans our minds, helps identify what is toxic in thought and what serves us no longer, and reaffirms those beliefs that are truly meaningful to us.

The pain of doubt is the pain of realizing that what we believe is uncertain. The morality of such doubt, of such uncertainty, is more difficult to articulate and frequently sneered at, particularly by those who are not brave enough to confront their own doubts. But beliefs unquestioned are not strong faith, but a weak faith that totters on a slender foundation. When questioning destroys faith, the faith was weak or nonexistent to begin with.

Doubt is not the opposite of faith, but the complement. Indifference is the opposite of faith, that uncaring avoidance of the entire faith question. Doubt is the questioning that keeps faith alive and enables one to explore and grow in that faith. To fear doubt is to fear faith itself, to be so convinced of the flimsiness of that faith that it will disintegrate when examined closely. Doubt is a blessing even as it is a curse, as it makes us what we are: Thinking animals that can determine for ourselves what we believe and why.

Questions:
What about doubt scares you the most?
How can you doubt and hold faith at the same time?
What aspect of your own faith are you most afraid to question and why? What do you think you may find behind it?

Membership and Separation

We belong to groups, ideals, religions, creeds, and races. The very act of belonging is important to us; it gives us meaning and companionship, a bulwark against the loneliness of the human condition. In return for that gift of companionship, we do for those in the group what we would not do for those outside it.

The Divine surpasses groups, defies group definition. We are all part of the Divine whether or not we believe in it or care about it. There is, at heart, no out group, for we are all made up of a greater Self, and when we connect to that Self we lose the illusion of being alone.

When we deny our commonality, our greater Self, we feel free to behave differently, even cruelly, to those we see as an out-group. We deny our universal nature to justify our behavior, our lack of compassion. We blame those in the out-group for their out-group status, figure out ways to believe they picked out-group status for themselves in a way that makes them look bad, wrong, or evil, and use that as justification for whatever we wish. After all, they are outsiders, and that makes them wrong.

When we believe that all people get what they deserve, we find ourselves denying reality itself. Not only that, but a large part of understanding of how to associate with other people is gone. We all need help sometimes, regardless of the choices we make or the beliefs we hold. Only extending that help to those that match our religious convictions or personal friendship implies that people outside that circle do not deserve help, denying their humanity and need.

While we do, and should, react to those closest to us before we reach out to those farther away, that does not mean we can refuse to help those in need at all. Indeed, it is our duty, as fellow-humans, as part of the Divine, to extend that Divine love with each other as well. There are no answers in isolation, only lies.

Questions:
What harm does loneliness bring? Why is it true? Why is it illusion?
Why do we form groups?
How do we find compassion for people that are for some reason out-group?

A Universe of Knowledge

Of all the creatures on the planet, we are (so far as we know) the only ones that exist aware of time and choices, able to chose one thing over another. To learn, not simply through direct cause and effect, but from being told from one to another.

What makes us no longer the creatures that once lived in caves, but instead the society we are, is that very ability to transfer knowledge from one person to another. With that, we can learn from each other’s experiences instead of simply repeating our own. This knowledge is more than simply what we store in books and in our heads. Knowledge by its very nature is meant to be shared, passed from one to another. Concepts are shared both deliberately through direct communication, and indirectly through shared knowledge base, individual minds distilling the same concepts from the data available.

As we are part of the Divine, so are our thoughts shared by the Divine and rippled back outwards throughout humanity. Our thoughts are both our own and of the Divine, distilled and learned and shared. When we learn a new skill, a new piece of knowledge, that knowledge or skill gets strengthened throughout humanity, reinforced as worthwhile. Knowledge cannot be stopped or hoarded, because understanding ripples throughout our species, one to another as we can understand.

Knowledge and learning are holy, precious gifts from the Divine that we can return unto it, sharing knowledge with ourselves and each other. It is transmission of knowledge and the discovery of new things and new ways to understand things that helps us grow, that makes us better than we were the day before and gives us hope for the future.

We are creatures of knowledge, learning, and beauty. What we learn and share, what we create, betters the Universe and betters ourselves, radiating inwards and outwards. It is through learning and sharing knowledge that we better ourselves and the Universe.

Questions:
Why is learning important? Why isn’t it an absolute good?
What is the difference between information gathered firsthand and that obtained by other sources? Is there one?
How does knowledge pass between ourselves and the Divine?

Belief, Faith, and Divine Love

Belief and Faith are irrelevant, Love is not.

Faith is a very delicate issue. We believe, but we are never quite sure how to explain that belief, how to share that belief. It's incredibly important to us, and yet faith is by nature private. We face the reality of our isolation in our faith, for even when we celebrate together, the experience with the Divine is forever personal. Because of the vastly overwhelming experience, we find doubt when not directly interacting with the Divine. The overwhelming reality of the Divine, of the Gods, seems impossible when not directly interacting.

That doubt we feel is good, a blessing and not a curse. As long as we allow ourselves to doubt, we can continue to grow, and our understanding can continue to deepen. Only when we fear doubt, fear not having answers, do we being to obsess about rules, about security. We cannot have security in this world, and perhaps not in any. When we fear doubt and seek that impossible security, we give up an uncomfortable reality for a harmful illusion, an illusion that leads us to attempt to regulate the doubt out of our lives, to deny that doubt wherever it might be, and to try and force other people to believe the same as we do to hide that doubt from ourselves.

When we experience the Divine, the Gods, and feel Their love for us, there is no room for faith or doubt. However, we cannot stay in that safe place where we live in the Love of the Divine. Daily life interferes, with bills and duties and problems, drags us out of communion with the Divine and makes it hard for us to remember what that feeling was. It takes work to bring that feeling with us throughout our lives, to keep it even in situations which try our patience. At times, we even feel betrayed, because we cannot keep that feeling with us and cannot understand why.

However, the Divine can only act in our lives as we allow. The more we try to control and regiment the Divine, the more we lose the Divine. Love cannot be contained in a box only opened when it is convenient. Either we welcome the Divine into our lives, and allow ourselves to be swept away by the changes or we do not; but we can't live halfway. The Divine will love us the same, but we pull ourselves away and block the Divine off and refuse to be changed. And that love the Divine has for us will keep the Divine from forcing the issue, as well. After all, sooner or later we all return to the Divine. The hurry is only one-sided.

This is not to say we should surrender our lives to the Divine and take no control of what we do or what happens around us. We are the hands of the Divine, but we are also responsible for our own actions. We are called, not to inaction and passivity, but action, thought, and work. We need to accept our callings as active, and do our best to take the love of the Divine and share it with others not through proselytization, but through having large hearts and being loving ourselves. When we can do that, we can become better people and make the world a better place. When we accept the love of the Divine and don't take that love back into the world, we betray the Divine by not fulfilling our end of the bargain.

Belief is, in most cases, irrelevant. For when we have faith and belief, there is no room for doubt, for our hearts are filled with love. And when we do have doubt, clinging to belief while fearing to question robs us of a chance to learn, and grow, and understand that love and faith better.

Questions:
What does faith mean to you?
How do you handle doubt?
How can we embrace love of the Divine even when we doubt?

Human Relations

Part of what religions speak to is the relationship between humans and each other, and humans and the greater world. We do not live in isolation, but instead are deeply nested in a world of overlapping responsibilities and friendships that ripple outwards, linking every person to everyone else.

What does this mean? Humanity is interdependent upon each other, and upon the planet on which we live. All is part of the Divine, and we are all part of each other, unable to survive without the rest of creation. We believe in self-reliance and self-sufficiency, but the only way we can believe such a thing is by viewing all that we do rely on as nonexistent and unworthy of consideration. We are part of a greater world, and it is through seeing our interrelation we can find our true selves and how to interact with others.

We like to see ourselves as individuals, in control, having the power to change our lives and the lives of those around us. The problem with this view is not that it’s false, but that the power that we have is not always what we think it is. We have ultimate control over our emotions, over our actions and reactions, although we do not always have control over what the choices for those actions are. We are not responsible for the choices set before us, however, only the ones we choose to take.

Power is responsibility. The two cannot be separated out, one cannot have responsibility without the power to do something about it, nor can one have power without the fact that how you use that power will affect other people. As we have power over ourselves, so do we have responsibility for ourselves, for being what we desire to be and making the choices we believe are right.

Seeing ourselves, our powers and responsibilities, in a clear manner is essential to improving our relations with other people and the world around us. When we ignore our responsibilities, we betray ourselves and the world around us, causing a rippling effect. Even as the Divine teaches us, so do we teach the Divine, and when we betray, and are untrustworthy, and claim that power is not linked inexorably to responsibility, we tell the Divine and the world around us that their power is not linked to their responsibility either. We do not exist in a vacuum. Everything we do affects others, teaches others, and we must be careful to make sure the life we lead is one we have no shame of being used as an example to others.

Questions:
How are we related? How are we separate?
Why are we not responsible for the choices set before us? Why are we responsible for which choices we take?
How does having power over ourselves give us responsibility? What responsibilities does it give?

Inner Relations

Religion speaks of the relation of a person to themselves, of how we relate with ourselves when there is no one else to see us. How we temper our minds and hearts and learn to be the best person we can be. It is easier in many ways to simply look at religion as how we relate to the Divine, but when we remove ourselves from the equation we remove that which chooses and gives force to our choices.

We are each the person we spend all of our time with, the person whom our relation with affects all other relations. When we like ourselves, we are more likely to like other people. When we see ourselves as connivers, as people out to get the most for ourselves, we see other people as falling only into the categories of user and sucker. How we see ourselves affects everything in our lives.

Which begs the question of how we are supposed to see ourselves. There is not one simple answer. It’s not a matter of simply saying we should be X or Y and forcing ourselves into that mode, for we are all different people with different needs and desires. When we try to force ourselves to be other than we are, we simply make ourselves and those around us miserable.

Instead, we must first learn to love ourselves. Not as the young girl that preens in the mirror, but a true affection for who and what we are. In seeing ourselves as we are, we are bound to find flaws that we do not like, and start to work to change them. It is when we find ourselves worthwhile that we can even begin to try and make ourselves better.

We are each the center of our own Universe, the primary actor in our own personal dramas. When we treat ourselves with respect and room to grow, we give ourselves and the world around us a chance to improve as well.

Questions:
How do you find love for yourself? What about that is hard? Is easy?
What does being the center of your own Universe mean to you? What does it mean to know that everyone else you know is ALSO the center of the Universe to themselves?
How do you see yourself? How accurate is that image? Is there something you’re trying to hide from yourself?

The Flame

We are all a part of the Divine. Sentient and self-aware projections of the Universe, we are part of a greater Whole, and yet individual. And we, collectively and individually, are part of the Divine, and able to change It.

As we improve ourselves, we improve the Flame of all as well. However, self-improvement can only occur when basic needs are met. Therefore, to improve the Flame, we must help all have access to the basic necessities of life: food, clean water, shelter, and medical care. Those that seek to survive cannot care for more esoteric things, for they are constrained by survival needs.

When survival needs are met, then we can seek improvement for ourselves and others. No one has the right to stand between another person and the fuel for their Flame, or the basic needs they must fulfill to become able to seek their Flame.
Our Flame burns most brightly through proper fuel, through feeding our souls as we feed our bodies. We feed our souls through caring, through love, through creating. Through finding our passion, and then sharing the results of that passion with others. And through helping others find fuel for their flames as well, helping others learn and grow. We all benefit from each other's Flame's burning brighter.

We are an interdependent species, reliant upon one another for our very survival. However, we are also separate individuals, with our own desires and needs. We must learn to nurture our own Flame while constricting others as little as possible, to let each Flame burn brightly without inhibiting another. We can, if we so choose, help everyone achieve their goals. For the first time in human history, survival to old age does not need to be in doubt through lack of basic necessities, if we choose to make it so.

Like any fire, however, we must also be sure to keep it fueled only by appropriate things, and burning controlled. Simply desiring something is not enough of a reason to obtain it. We must school ourselves to feed our souls what is appropriate, what nurtures us, what helps us grow and become better people. Our Flame can be bright and warming, nurtured carefully and a joy and blessing be part of, or a raging forest fire that consumes all that it touches and brings only destruction.

All which is, is Divine, part of the self-aware Universe. There is nothing in existence that is profane, no split between the body and the soul. There is nowhere and nothing but the Universe, physical and spiritual. That is not to say the physical world is the sum total of existence. The Universe is bigger than any one mind could hope to comprehend, and the layers of existence and possibilities are endless. But there is no beyond to move to, no better life elsewhere. What is here, is.

Many people speak of "seeking God" and talk of places to look to find the Divine. And they define God, and place limitations and strictures upon what God can and cannot do. And people say how one can and cannot reach the Divine, and where God is and isn't, and refuse to acknowledge that God may very well choose to ignore human strictures. In many ways, the defining characteristics of the Divine is that human strictures are ignored, and that the Divine is free to all humans, irrespective of social status. We like to limit what God is, and pretend we know what is and isn't what the Divine wants of us, and more, of other people. The truth is that we can only surmise what the Divine wants of us, and work as hard as we can to be the best we can be. Any rules we try to place to comfort us, and place sections of our life as safe from Divine intervention, are doomed to failure.

We all like to believe we're good people, and seek ways to prove that belief. However, we also all like to be lazy and seek the easy way out of things. We like scapegoats, villains, a bad guy that tempts us to do what we already know is wrong. We want to believe we are good; that someone else is evil and not us. And we seek to justify those things that we do and we know are wrong, and find ways to make our transgressions correct while punishing the transgressions of others.

We need, to become whole individuals, to learn to accept our own faults and flaws as well as our virtues and abilities. We are human, we are divine, and we stand wholly responsible for what we do. The constant struggle to justify, to explain, to create excuses, only keeps us mired in confusion and sorrow. When we can truly accept our mistakes, learn from them, and take responsibility for them, then and only then can we grow beyond them and cease to make the same mistakes again and again.

This is not an excuse to play the blame game, however. Only we know the real reasons why we do things, and no one else can decide what is someone refusing to live up to responsibility. All the blame game does is make everyone wrong, and confuse the real issues that people need to deal with on their own.

There is no way to avoid misfortune in our lives. Bad things happen to everyone, including people that seem to have done nothing wrong, and our problems are always bigger to ourselves than other people's problems. However, although our problems are always biggest to ourselves, it is a falseness of context to believe that our problems should be as big to other people. The difference is how misfortune is handled, both in ourselves and other people. We need to learn to face the vicissitudes of fate with grace and poise, and to keep from getting knocked down more than we get back up. The more we glory in our own misfortune, and label ourselves by our failures, the harder it will be for us to succeed. And when we glory in the misfortune of others, we simply lessen ourselves and dim our Flame.

Penance and forgiveness are unpopular concepts today. We want to believe that what we do is okay, as long as we had a good reason, and that feeling sorry for our mistakes should be enough. The truth of the matter is, good intentions only carry so far. Good acts, repairing ones mistakes, those are the acts of a good person. We will make mistakes. There is no way to live life without sometimes making horrible mistakes, either of action or inaction.

Questions:
What are your flaws? What are your virtues? Which question was harder to answer and why?
What feeds your Flame? What stifles it? Which do you court in your life?
How do you nurture other people’s Flames? Allow your own to be nurtured? Do you live in a nurturing environment?

Starting out

Yes, it's one of those horrible starting off posts saying that Hi, I'm HeartShadow, and looky, a blog!

This will be a replacement and update of my website about Keeping the Sacred Flame. I'm hoping for lots of useful feedback to keep me motivated in writing my essays and finding out more about myself and humanity and the universe.

Please, let me know what you think!

*added*

I have study questions attached to my essays. You can answer them here, answer them to yourself .. never answer them at all. I think they're important questions related to the essays .. if you come up with other ones, feel free to post those as well. They're meant to be an aid to understanding, not a test with clear answers. I don't expect any two people to have the same answers .. or even the same person to have the same answers two different times!