A Journal Chapter 17: The Problem With Me

. . . . . For the most part it is quite difficult for me to write of such matters as me being God's instrument of miracles and such. (An example would be the cataracts disappearing from this horse's eyes when i spoke.  Perhaps a better one was the baby's shoulder being healed when she heard my voice.  People couldn't believe i didn't get her mother to witness for me ya know.  Like i was somebody.  Because she talked some.)  This might be mostly because I realize that such things tend to trigger disbelief in people, and as I've said over and over, my greatest fear might be that people need to listen to me (because I see how long the odds are that will happen).

            But a little big picture: consider my efforts, my difficulty believing that this could be happening to me (versus the eagerness of my ego to believe this and more), my work on myself long long after I saw miracles.  How about the fact that most of my witnesses would probably choose to lie rather than admit they saw signs and wonders which they in fact attributed to me (in that instrumental sense I've mentioned before).  Interesting how Jesus was reviled because of His works (see Mark 3:5-6, e.g.); this simply must be because of the people (who lived where He grew up basically) who said that He was a sinner (see a Sunday School lesson here); the church leaders could not possibly have had the influence they did if Jesus had grown up with even a good reputation, let alone a perfect one__the gossip of the people was critical.  (Because it was and is the will of the people that rules the world, big picture anyway.  Lao Tsu said something like "There are four great powers in the universe . . . and the [collective] will of the people is one of them."  Ordinary mind happening all over.  All over the space/place and all the time.)

. . . . . And look at what Jesus said about the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, leading us unto the truth which can set us free.  Notice that i said "can set us free," not the "will set [us] free" which we like so much.

. . . . . also insert how would-be relatives have possibly viewed me as a have-not, making me the more hated because of the duties often considered commensurate with family.  which reminds me of how churches tend to be so very condescending about people who might be in a bad financial situation being interested in joining their church__not that they're judgmental, you know.  which reminds me of how people hate to see people of a lesser financial stature to move into their neighborhood because there's a lack of distance.  Psychological distance is much harder to maintain when somebody needy (ain't that a word?) is in sight of your front yard.  (Apparently walking by needy people on a busy city street is a little different; not real familiar with that myself.  i remember nashville i was real real tired )  (2021 note:  have told several what a great kountry this is to be homeless and destitute in, since most of these people can get free food every day, in the big cities anyway)

. . . . . One thing I have never mentioned to anyone in any way is a series of dreams of mine that apparently are kind of a reality.  Like I had a dream about having sex with a girl I knew as Susan S.  The dream was after she was out of my life, but it (really i guess) happened before I met her, in a house that she told me a little about.  It was quite odd.  Like other dreams (more down on this page here) I've had that in retrospect I believe were experiences other living people shared with my dream being (i remember trying to talk if anyone is listening into sharing the blame for a dream somewhere), the ghost/spirit/whatever that I have come to understand has appeared to others as I have listened to music and read books.  And dreamed.  But no, that's not right. I wasn't listening to music. I was understanding it. And I wasn't reading books.  I was understanding what I read.  And I wasn't dreaming.  Was I?

. . . . . Naturally those to whom I have appeared have not necessarily understood what I was/am doing.  It kind of goes back to that Sunday School Lesson where I said it doesn't get any better than "without blame".  I just know that no one is capable of being obedient to the spirit of the commandments of God.  I have also come to believe that people, myself included, are capable of committing transgressions against man and God and law without being shall we say liable for the consequences of said transgressions because of the nature of the negative attention they received.  I mean, the argument so prevalent today that Jesus was without sin must first have been forced on Paul by people who (generally even) said that if Jesus committed the sins that His erstwhile neighbors (and friends and family too probably) said He did then He could not be/have been the Messiah.  Paul yielded to the pressure, just as the priests in Isaiah's time yielded to the pressures of their parishoners to the point that Isaiah wrote that "the priests bear rule by their means and my people love to have it so" line.  (Remember when Catholics weren't supposed to eat meat on Fridays?)  Nothing else makes sense.  (Not that I'm a big fan of common sense, but logic and truth are way beyond that huh?)

. . . . . All of this rather pointless entry, of course, is because of my past, which must be called dark anyway.

May 15, 2001  *******************************

here's a parable from Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith:

. . . . . "What could explain this store, this country, this life?  A fork with three out of four tines, two kopecks.  A fishhook, twenty kopecks, used, but fish weren't choosy.  A comb as small as a seedy mustache, reduced from four kopecks to two.
. . . . . True, this was a discount shop, but in another, more civilized world, wasn't this trash?  Wouldn't it all be thrown away?
...
. . . . . Perhaps it was the idea of buying.  The idea of a market.  Because this was a cooperative shop and people wanted to buy . . . something.
. . . . . On the third table was a bar of soap, shaved and shaped out of a larger, used bar of soap, twenty kopecks.  A rusty butter knife, five kopecks.  A blackened light bulb with a broken filament, three rubles.  Why, when a new bulb was forty kopecks?  Since there were no new light bulbs for sale in the stores, you took this used bulb to your office, replaced the bulb in the lamp on your desk and took the good bulb home so that you wouldn't live in the dark."

and

. . . . . "Arkady found her midway in a line of a thousand people queuing for beets in the small park next to Petrovka. . . .  There were other lines for eggs and bread, and a line that wound around a kiosk for cigarettes.  Food vigilantes patrolled the lines to make sure no one switched...
. . . . . 'Are they selling by weight or by count?' she asked her neighbors.
. . . . . 'Dear,' the old woman said, 'it all depends whether they have rigged scales or little beets.'
. . . . . 'Do we get beet greens, too?' Polina asked.
. . . . . 'There's another line for greens,' the woman said."

May 21, 2001  *********************************

From Stephen Gaskins' Monday Night Class (bits and pieces):

(Q)How does the astral plane relate to Christ consciousness?

Here's how it works on the continuum of astral planes.  The lower astral, like if you had a puddle that had been stirred and it had settled partially … well, the water toward the bottom of the puddle would have more mud in it, you know, and as it got up toward the top of the puddle the water would be clearer and clearer.  Well, the higher you go up the vibes in the astral plane, the higher the vibration, the clearer the transmission gets, also the more strength of character and intelligence and will and love does it take to get into the higher and higher and clearer places.  So when you get really high and really clear you're telepathing in very good company.

But when you're just barely beginning to, you have to go through the lower astral, and in the lower astral you're going to run into like, wow, everybody … everybody has a subconscious, and the subconscious is the no-no box, and it'll have, you know ,"gillies and ghosties and long-legged beasties that go bump in the night."  So you just dig that there's this continuum of, of thing …

Now like Christ consciousness is way high clear, where you have to be really truly altruistic to get high enough to transmit at that frequency.  You know, and that's like Christ consciousness.  And then we can get there when we're like really stoned, because the stoneder we get the more we can let go of our material ego and our material-plane identity and stuff and the more we start thinking of us as mankind, as us-kind, this thing that we're all one part of, and the more our decisions become for the larger thing, as our consciousness expands it includes more of us.

Astral travel is a lower astral phenomenon because it involves a mobile center of consciousness, but still a center of consciousness, whereas the Christ consciousness place is less a center of consciousness and more a centerless consciousness.  And it becomes all-pervading and immanent and is completely all-encompassing, and so it's not a centralized thing.  The astral travel is moving one point through the matrix.  Christ consciousness is being the matrix.

Wouldn't it be weird if suddenly being telepathic got to be popular?  If that got to be a new fad it would be very interesting, cause the only way you could join in on the fad would be to go in and shovel out the communications room.  That's the subconscious.  For too long the culture has taught us that the subconscious is the garbage dump instead of the communications room.  But upon learning that there is such a thing as a communications room, and that we all have one, and that it's just in there behind all the beer cans and orange juice packages and stuff … you can just shovel right on in and dig it out.  And it really feels good to know that there's this many folks around that know something about that kind of thing, that can help with it when it gets to be popular.  What else we got happening?  Somebody hit me with this thing (newspaper) on the . . .

That's why I stress the purple, because that visual symbolic thing of blending red and blue into purple gets the kind of shading of your mind and body principles that are necessary to put you in a place where you can be detached.  Cause to get detached you gotta get cool first.  You can't become detached cause it ain't cool, you know, like you can't teach philosophy to people whose stomachs are not full because all they're gonna hear is their stomach.  You gotta feed 'em first. . .

the only way to bring about anything on the material plane, like any kind of fairness, is to go for broke for the spiritual plane as hard as you can in order to educate people out of the idea of having more than they need. . .

(answer)  All the time.  Keep pushin'.  Cause we gotta get it all off.  There's no sense startin' with any favorites.  You don't have to do a lot of structure stuff.  All that structure stuff just hangs you up in linear stuff.  What you do is just be groovy as you can all the time.  Why say, okay, now I'm gonna sit and spend this thirty seconds thinking about the well-being of other folks?  Why not just dedicate your life to it and do it twenty-four hours a day and not have to sit around and do rituals about it? . . .

We're like shock absorbers. . .

(on being a bodhisattva)  you should probably be careful that you don't eat more brown rice, drink more water and breathe more air than is absolutely necessary for your survival. Because you 're using up a place where someone else could be working out their karma, and so you gotta come on strong behind it or you're just wastin' a place.  Of the twelve criteria of a bodhisattva, about nine of 'em have to do with conservation of energy.  Not usin' up the trip for other folks.  The other three have to do with your ego.

(Q.....what is your reason for existing?)  The deluding passions are infinite.  I vow to extinguish them all.  The way of the Buddha is unattainable.  I vow to attain it.  The laws of the dharma are impossible to expound.  I vow to expound them all.

. . . . . looking back a little on my journal in particular it seems that i have tried to be kind of flip.  maybe in counterpoint to some of the shall i say zealous portions of this site.  Maybe strident would describe my tone better on occasions.  Well, it behooves me to mention that, yes, i hope it comes across as flip but it doesn't feel flip to me.  know what i mean?

. . . . . i mean, for actual decades when i would read Isaiah 51:23 saying "thou hast laid thy body as the ground, and as the street, to them that went over" i would have no doubt that was about me too, and that that was supposed to be my approach, and to make it easier i would suppose that these people afflicting me were angels of God testing me.  well, things have changed.  i've started asking God for retribution, and i've been meaning it. and yeah, i've made mistakes, and don't in the least feel like that is reason to change my approach.  collateral damage i'm tempted to call my mistakes.

Stephen again: "

When you reach a point then where everything — all of the matter and all of the energy in the universe — is homogeneously distributed throughout the entire universe, that's the condition of chaos.

But that also happens to be the most rigid order possible.  And then in that condition any change is first cause.  Any change from that condition is first cause, and begins a whole cycle of existence.  And that's the way of the cycle of the kalpas, in the Vedanta.

They say there are four … that there are cycles of time — the yugas.  Like the kaliyuga is supposed to be the one where everything's going to hell.  And there's one where everything's cool.  Now all of those yugas are taking place simultaneously.  All of those harmonics are going on right now.  The Aquarian age and the kaliyuga are here and now. The Kingdom is at hand.  That doesn't mean next week, that means at hand. .. you know, at hand, right there.

June 13, 2001  *********************************

. . . . . Heard Lucinda William's new album, and maybe it was the second track when she sang about holding hands and I lay down on the floor and put my head on a box of tapes and it reminded me of the time in like 1980 when I went hurrying down the hall to my bedroom, really feeling in touch with everything around me, and I heard Stevie Nicks on my stereo and as I kind of blasted through the door it hit me that she hadn't seen or heard of me, and I really love(d) her so I just fell on the floor.  I recall clearly being amazed my feet were as flexible as they appeared to be during that experience.  I mean, my toes didn't point backwards when my knees hit, they pointed toward my knees.  But I guess you had to be there.  I thought I was good enough at my astral projecting that I was invisible unless I didn't want to be.  Very unobtrusive.  Lot's of friends in the music business ya know, 'cause I was doing this for a while before I realized it and I like connected with some oldtimers.  I mention this because a cousin definitely didn't say in so many words but I'm pretty telepathic when people are open and she felt kind of proud of the fact that she was in enough to hear about the time I like threw myself at Stevie's feet.

. . . . . For some reason I wrote down on a piece of paper to address another failure of mine.  Now first let me tell you that for a lot of years I really enjoyed going to church.  Any church.  Baptist, Episcopal, Mormon, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Methodist, Jehovah's Witnesses to name a few.  I enjoyed all of them, from the staid rites of the Episcopals to the near-madness of the Pentecostals.  The energy you know.  People like naturally tune in to their idea of God in church, and God is love a lot of people are down with, and once a week ain't too much to give up a little love devotion and surrender ya know.

. . . . . Okay, failure.  This was not too many years ago actually, and this buddy of mine came by early one Sunday morning and I was depressed (as usual; the best face I guess I've put on it on this site is Ecclesiastes 1:18:  "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.") and this guy says 'i've got some killer smoke' and i took a few hits and went to church in a faded t-shirt and ragged jeans and no shoes.  The Episcopal Church.  Serious suit situation.  And I walked in like I'd done a couple of times before and walked down almost to the front of the church and sat next to my eighty-something-year-old rather-not-know-me dad.  No problem.  I'd been there and done that.  Smoke and church.  (i think it helped a little really [one more thing about that: I guess I've quit a whole lot of times because I couldn't find any, but there have been several times I've quit for three or more years, like now, and it didn't take very much to get cosmic, which is where i spent a lot of time])

. . . . . Anyway, there's this big procession up the main aisle to kick off the ceremonies and later the procession comes back down the aisle but they stop different this time.  And it was like they were stopping for me.  And i said to myself,  'oh no.  i'm tuned in to somewhere else.  some other time.'  Yeah, I've actually thought it quite likely that I was the cause of some arcane ritual.  Lots of little circumstantial things to back up this hypothesis by the way.  Like my going to the group study maybe ten years earlier, studying to like become an Episcopal.  Have to admit I was a star student (but that's another story).  And my dad talking to me about what "level" he was on regarding church doctrine.  And the really bizarre ritual I went through (thought it was gonna be communion, in the hospital with my dad, his wife, and the associate priest that I still don't know what it was but I had communion at that church and this was a different ball park.  There's more.  But mainly it's the feeling, and not just during the service that day. . . .

. . . . . The main thing I thought about during the rest of the service was the abomination of desolation, standing where he shouldn't.  It was over twenty years ago that the antiChrist people stepped up and struck.  Maybe i'll write about it some time.  Some real terrible vibes for a real long time, 'specially in this neck o' the woods ya know.  No, i take that back; my reputation has preceded me for many years.  And paranoia been part of my life.  But this church experience was just a few years ago.  Yeah, I'm some kind of down with the beast and guess i've read Jesus's parenthetical insert in Matthew 24 and Mark 13 for years as something that would be spoken rather than written.  Actually i've addressed my defense of it in what could easily pass as a rationalization of ordinary mind.  Well, an ordinary paranoid mind.  Anyway, like I've been saying, so what if I am the devil?  Getting people to turn away from the world to God is what should result from the beast walking the earth huh?

. . . . . Yeah, whatever.  mstr delusions of grandeur.  Read it "mister" or "monster", you got it. Doesn't matter a bit.  But wait, I lost the thread of my discourse.  Believe it or not.  See, I had this absolutely amazing dream this week, one of those like I guess everybody has, and this one was about this lady who looked/looks like Lucinda Williams I was/am absolutely in love with and one of the focuses of the dream was us walking along holding hands.  You know, I reached out my strong hand and took hers.  And it was one of those dreams that wake you up, and I wanted to go back to where I had been and yeah, what I'm wondering now is if it was another of those dreams where my astral body projects and like materializes enough that I can do things like hold hands.  Because the same spirit surrounds Lucinda and my Dream Girl.  And Stevie.  And all the ladies I have loved.  But anyway, all the stuff I don't like to really think about because it won't really change the way I be no matter if any of it's true or not kind of relates to this.  And believe me I know like how much responsibility I've assumed, and continue to assume.  No option.  And if the gover'ment came and said we're taking you away for your own safety I'd say something like "Not a good idea 'cause I'm not cooperating with that."  I feel like I can really relate why Jesus said 'don't tell people who I am', because then maybe they'd quit asking favors, i dunno.  I just feel "Into Thine hands I commit my spirit" is the right approach for me now.  Here's my kitchen floor now:

and here's one more:

okay, i know these photos are pretty mundane, so the next one, another Zen Bible search, is the last (hopefully 4ever) but first let me add that Lucinda and/or people in the recording studio saw this one <smile>; i did it a little different, with my new Study Bible, and had no idea (as i often do) if it would be Old or New Testament.  Also you might wonder with me if this exposure reveals at least partially the manner in which at least some of the students of the Torah speak of knowing what word is on the page behind the word you are studying.  so, drum roll please (yes, when The Book opened i blindly stabbed my finger just like below) and make of it what you will; hope it's humanity's bottom line if ya get my drift:

Top of Page
To the Journal Contents
To the Table of Contents
To the SAFE Home Page