A letter I recently wrote a friend, my last will and testament I suppose.
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Also, let me share one terrifying aspect to the consciousness I feel about death, just my opinion, the true nature of death is entirely spiritual and not just physical. I kind of came full circle
: on that point. The stoics say Amor Fati, love your fate and Memento Mori, remember you will die. I love them for this simple view. We each of course, are entitled to our own definition of “death”. I define death as the end of consciousness, and the experiencer. The body will not know its own death. The organs cease to function and with them the faculties of the soul, or consciousness, ceases as well. Usually that’s the order. For some, and maybe they are freaks, consciousness ceases first. The cessation of consciousness for me is the true nature of death. So what is all the fuss about? I think we have to ultimately let go of the unitive self we can find through this path of no path. You can’t sell that to people. Self is the cause of our conflict, not the answer. There can be no self after life. We want to grasp at an object or point. There can really be no subject or object of it all in the end. No more interiority. No vessel to be filled with anything any longer, so it is poured out. So pondering my death I saw what Jesus meant by saying, it is finished. The person dies and there can be no resurrection for the person. We each have a deep inner rebellion that takes time to subside. The self dies once its usefulness has been outlived. Then, comes the revelation of what remains in the absence of a self. Finally, even that which remains is absorbed into a mysterious dimension of existence. After the unitive state, consciousness seems to be needed less and less. Consciousness arises out of protection and fear, so I understand well your strong boundaries. They are good and natural. But I’m hinting at the result of what you seek. Does this make life meaningless for persons? Hell is the journey of realizing that the form is void. I am an expert in nothing but my experience. I wouldn’t wish no-self on a dog. Actually, I would. Something in us is determined to be alive. Senses are a form of limitation so we can live here. Why does this matter at all? Be mediocre, it can mean nothing or live as a human being, which might mean everything. Well, I know it means everything. The unitive state leads all it seems to the same place, being alone with the alone and they recede from the normal world. You find infinite amounts of compassion for your neighbor. They live fearlessly and courageously because they have all that matters. But this leads to living formless and non-personally. How can this happen, because death is spiritual and not physical.
This last year I faced my death, my physical death. I felt myself slipping away, but I recovered. When this happened, a wind blew into me. A calm and peace and a fiery playful focus. Perhaps one must experience this to cross the abyss. I had found the unitive experience before that, but after, it was finished. No more bullshit. I became spiritualized. I partially came back to consciousness, but a part of me didn’t. The love of God is the strong desire for it. The unbound Will is the most direct route. I fell in love with god at an early age, I think you did too. It came to me. It told me what I would become, but I didn’t understand then. Remember? Probably one reason we reconnect now in our 50s. Whatever happens, I don’t care. So be it. My whole existence is from it anyway, what happens doesn’t matter really. One needs consciousness to function in the world. I have no right to tell people to give it up, I have not totally given it up. I stopped at the threshold. “If you really want to see me, stop looking. It’s what you are.” Was the answer I got back from my search. The ego is fine, it is the seat of the Will. But the ego allows great evil too, it is unstable. But my will became joined with the all. No one can ever take that from me, so fearlessness lives here now. I am incorruptible. I could never go back if I wanted to. I would never wreck my life. I refused to accept I had to die to know this. In a way this has made me a freak. We are meant it seems to live life consciously. Evil is its own punishment and virtue its own reward. I have no desire to drop all consciousness, it seems insane to do so. For then I would be dead in life. Or so I feared. There is nothing in the process of transformation for the self. No person becomes the Logos’ human nature. In regards to individuality and personhood, here is what St. Maximus the Confessor has to say, “Loss of individual personhood in union with God” and “Having God through prayer as its mystical and only Father by grace, the soul will center on the oneness of its hidden being by a distraction from all things, and it will experience, or rather, know divine things, all the more as it does not want to be its own, or able to be recognized from, or by itself, or anyone else’s, but only all of God, who takes it up becomingly and fittingly as only He can, penetrating it completely without passion and deifying all of it and transforming it unchangeably to Himself.”
Christ is non-duality.
Another quote from him, “As Creator, the Logos stands at the beginning of creation, and as the incarnate Christ, He stands as its end when all things will exist not only through Him but in Him. In order to be in Christ, creation had to be assumed by God, made God’s own, this is the final glorification of man”. Not a who but a what. God as infinite existence, is the only real existence of all that exists. Consciousness is, as it were, a veil put over the mind that precludes the direct vision of God. The object of consciousness is always itself.”
Your boundaries protect your self. I think they are so strong for you, because you know what is beyond your boundaries. Maybe you don’t fear complexity, but reality. Just this. I can’t speak for you. Objects of the senses are different from the object of consciousness. One's self is always the object of consciousness. Consciousness is, by its very nature, dualistic. It is constantly bending back upon itself both voluntarily and consciously, as well as involuntarily and unconsciously. There is also the dualism of the head and the heart (or right hemisphere and left hemisphere of the brain). It is only in the absence of consciousness, sometimes glimpsed momentarily in ecstasy, and eventually as a permanent condition, that this dualism is thereby absent.
I like the flower analogy. Think of people like flowers on a flowering tree. These flowers are all different. Because they have conscious free will, they can choose to hide and remain closed, or they can choose to open up to the sun, to strain towards the sun, to smell as sweetly as they can. In the end, they will all die and fall off. But some will have been beautiful, and others not. Perhaps we could say the flower becomes “Christ” when it realizes that, while it looks very different from the branch, it has never been anything other than an extension of the branch.
The Stoics believed that there was no separation possible between spirit and matter. Physicists today are well on their way to proving that they were correct. As they try to penetrate into the essence of matter, what it is at its core beyond leptons and quarks, they find things like “wavicles” and “tendencies to exist”. In other words, matter is fundamentally non-material. If matter is really not separate from spirit, then perhaps miracles are simply spirit acting on matter in such a way that is consistent with its laws and not the laws of the material world as we currently understand them.
The Eucharist then is not man consuming God, but the divine Logos consuming man.
Tasty treats.
My wife keeps me connected to my self, I allow this for her sake. For that I hate her and love her. Or I’d be living in a van down by the river
I suspect the same is true for you and your family. But it’s better to live a life with her. I ran from every woman I knew, until one wouldn’t let go.
Recall in Plato’s analogy of the cave how the man returning to the cave after having seen the sunlight was treated by those who had only ever seen their shadows. Not well. I lost it all trying to relate the sunlight I found outside of my friends and families beliefs. I became a scapegoat for them. Perhaps it is because the risk of the Incarnation was idolatry and we have all become idolaters. Fear paralyzes and fear of the Absolute paralyzes absolutely. No-self doesn’t automatically usher in some terrible form of existence. One still writes and has friends and makes love and laughs, but the joy is everlasting. A Buddhist would say this state is just Enlightenment and therefore you don’t need to be reincarnated any more. However, central to “enlightenment” is the understanding that you can never separate the soul from the body. They are two sides of the same coin. Nobody needs to know if you are one with God. That is between you and God alone. It turns out holiness is ordinary and not mystical after all. The personality, or phenomenal self, is not transformed. The transformations happens only at the depths of one’s being. So people may not see any change at all.
I don’t need you to see this or believe me. Not at all. I may be crazy after all. But I know better. I think we are evolving to be able to hold this vision better in mind. Yuh and I are an experiment perhaps. I think the invisible guides genes. It is not random chance. I can’t prove this of course. No one can.
Things fall away and you are able to let them go because there is less self holding on. All spiritual work done before the unitive state, is merely reformation. It is offering, but then in the unitive state those offerings are accepted. Reformation is the level where most of us are at. We’re plodding along barely able to perceive the Spirit within, telling ourselves we’re doing just fine. In reality we haven’t got a clue. The path to the unitive state is well mapped out in all the major world religions. Classic Christian terminology calls it the purification of the faculties of the soul - memory, intellect, and will. These were the words scholastics used to describe distinctions in consciousness.
Ultimately my journey has been back to total trust. How ironic. How beautiful and wonderful is all I can say. Trust and love turn out to be two sides of the same coin - two words for the same thing. Another term that could perhaps unite these two would be Faith. By Faith, does not mean anything to do with concepts or beliefs for reward. Rather, it is the “truth-sensor” in humans. There is the Truth of what is beyond consciousness, and Faith can lead one to seeing It. I use the word “seeing” instead of knowing or experiencing because, beyond consciousness, there is no “knowing” as we usually understand the word. There is also no experiencer. All of this has led me to mean for the first time in my life,
“Not my will, but thy will be done.”
The option is to be, or not to be. It takes tremendous courage and trust to voluntarily accept our own non-existence. Our biggest spiritual problem is that we want to hang on to ourselves. Let’s face it, it is very comforting to have a self. We want to offer ourselves to God, but not all of ourselves. We want to keep the good parts after they have been transformed and enjoy ourselves in Heaven/Eden with God. We want to have our cake and eat it too. We have to let go of our very sense of existence. This is very scary for most people. What would life be like if we all lived it without fear? I’m answering that for myself everyday now.
Joy.
In the end it is not “who” we are that will be cared for, but “what” we are. And this, in a way that is far better and more glorious than our wildest expectations. This is because “That which is not assumed is not saved.” In the incarnation God assumed no particular person, but human nature. What we are is a mystery that is miraculously being changed into something even more mysterious. (And we think we have all the answers!) Reason leads to mystery!
Ultimately, it all comes down to trust. Only after all hope, thought, and experience had come to an end that what Is could reveal itself without any medium. This is because self or consciousness is man’s way of knowing. The Experience of No-Self, to know as God knows, self must disappear, be consumed, or get out of the way.
As we know, love casts out all fear. I prefer the word trust to love because it is in the will, not the emotions. Fear of the unknown, fear of absolute nothingness, fear of death is what gives energy to the self. The spiritual path, then, is one of growing in courage. The spiritual warrior, rather than running from the nothingness of his or her own existence through addictions of any kind, embraces his or her own nothingness. This is why I have no addictions any longer. A truly courageous spiritual warrior I feel will even actively seek out their own dissolution in spirit. Why would anyone do this? Because you cannot have more or less of God. You can only have more or less of self. Once there is less self to get in the way, then God can act more fluidly in the world. The Logos, the beautiful business, intelligence, and plan of the universe is no longer thwarted at every turn. Of course, being thwarted is itself part of the plan perhaps. However, the choice remains ours to be ignorant and blind regarding our process of transformation, or cooperate and go willingly with the Tao. When we walk in the Tao, we fear nothing, including ourselves. Even that most ugly part of ourselves may not be feared. Fearing oneself is a strangle-hold on the ego. One will never walk in the Way as long as one is afraid of any aspect of their self. That aspect must be loved and embraced into nonexistence. Then it simply becomes, “this is what is happening here.”
I ended up coming to a simple conclusion, “Have a good time!”
So, if you want to live with integrity, I think you have to choose it. I accept my own mortality, I embrace it. It’s super scary at first. You feel so all alone. But now, when I’m at my best, I don’t put off for the future attuning my way of thinking to oneness. I do it today. I am fully alive. The time to live, learn, laugh, and love is now. Samuel Johnson said that nothing so concentrates the mind as the knowledge that one will be hanged in a fortnight. Ha!
When you embrace your mortality, you see everyone around you in a new light. We are all just here for a flash, a blink of an eye. We are united by our aloneness. What we share is fallible and glorious.
Too bad for Aristotle who poo-pooed the philosopher Empedocles’ idea that the One Existent was love. Empedocles held that love is the foundation of all existence. If God is the source and foundation of my life and being, and Love is the foundation of all existence, then it stands to reason, that God is Love.
I just sang you a love song. I’m just dancing until I let go of this self once and for all. I have shared the reason for my joy. I won’t belabor the pointless point with you.
I truly wish you joy and peace ****. We never have to speak of these things again.
All my love.
by Big Bunny Love Thu Oct 07, 2021 2:32 am
ass.
from Dr. John Pordage’s Theologia Mystica 1683.
comes out from behind the clouds. https://www.facebook.com/100008250645780/posts/3202785726673084/?d=n Show me a greater magick than that. I know a better trick, when the sun dawns with us. ]Sun appears from behind the clouds 
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for it
Earnest Becker argues that “the basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.” Becker suggested that a significant function of culture is to provide successful ways to engage in death denial.
time for me to mosey along. 
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