Music and the Chakras

It's a common belief that the chakras are aligned with the Western major musical scale, but it would be more accurate to say that that they almost are. Western music since the mid-18th century has been based on what is called an equal-tempered scale, meaning that the 12 chromatic semitones are vibrationally equidistant from each other. The upside to this is that it allows for instruments which can be played in many different keys. The downside is that the scales are slightly out of tune within themselves. We just don't notice this anymore because we've been listening to equal-tempered music for the last 250 years.

Also, the major/minor modality that we are so used to only developed in the West starting around 1650 or so. During the Renaissance and earlier, the major and minor scales were only two of six different scales (or Modes) that were commonly used (there is a seventh, but hardly anyone used it). An example of these modal scales is the song "Scarborough Fair" by Simon and Garfunkle. It's in what is called Dorian Mode; a minor scale with a sharped sixth. On a piano, play a scale on all of the white keys, going from D to D, that's Dorian.

So the idea that the chakras line up with the Western major scale is a misconception born from typical Western hubris; that the way we have things now is both the best way and the way it has always been. But this does not mean that music and the chakras do not have a connection, they very much do. But the connection is a more natural one, based upon harmonic vibrations and not a man-made scale. The chakras actually resonate with certain musical intervals, based upon what is called the "harmonic series". In a nutshell, the harmonic series is how mathematical ratios line up with music. All music is vibrations. If you take a certain vibration, a certain tone, and double the speed, you end up with a tone that is an octave higher than the original. If you triple it, you end up with a perfect fifth. If you multiply it by 5, you get a major third, by 7 and you get a minor 7th, and so on. I feel that the chakras resonate with the same musical intervals, based upon a fundamental tone: the second chakra with the octave, the third with a fifth, the fourth with a major third, the fifth with a minor 7th, the sixth with a ninth or major 2nd, the seventh with a tritone, and the eighth with the octave again.

If you are truly interested in experimenting with music and the chakras, try this out. Find a piano and play an octave with your left hand, down towards the bottom fourth of the keyboard. With your right hand, play a perfect 5th higher than the top note in your left, then a minor 6th higher than that. So if you start with C, you play two Cs with your left hand and a G and an E with your right. If you have the notes correct, you will notice this gives off a very open and powerful sounding major triad. The reason it sounds so good is because these three notes are in order based upon the harmonic series, vibrating at double, triple, and quintuple the speed of the bottom note, so they all resonate perfectly with each other. Now, start shifting chromatically up and down the scale, keeping the same intervals. Eventually you will find a chord that resonates more powerfully with you than any other, one that you feel almost as a physical force. For me, it is E Major, but it is different for everyone. This is your fundamental, the tones that resonate with your lowest four chakras. You will probably find, if you listen, that some of your favorite songs or musical pieces are in that same key, and that you will not like pieces that are in keys that clash with it.

This is all just my own personal conjecturing, so I'd love to hear other input as to whether or not they have similar experiences to mine.

JCS

The Ottawa store opens in five days. Wish me luck, and I'll check back when I can.

JCS

At an impasse.

Hello all,

So, once again, my favorite outlet for spiritual ideas has gone kaplooie. SpiritualForums.com has been down for 4 days now. Between this and the good news of my long-awaited promotion, I find myself adrift as to what to do with my ideas. I will have less time to devote to them, especially between now and Xmas, so do I seek out a new site to get addicted to, or do I focus my free time on creating something more focused?

More to come, I promise

JCS

The truth about "Psychic Vampires"

Back in the day, I really got into the whole Celestine Prophesy/energy vampire thing. Since then, my views have changed significantly, and I think the truth is a lot simpler than this idea of people sucking the life out of you.

Put simply, you do it to yourself.

Let me explain what I mean. People in this world have created this thing I call the Scarcity Myth, the general idea of not-enough-ness in the world. We have this subconscious belief that everything worth getting or having is scarce: money, love, time, good ideas, energy, happiness, and so on. I personally believe that our thoughts create our experience, so therefore if we believe these things are scarce, we experience that.

But where does this myth come from? What is the root cause of this assumption? IMHO, I think it comes from the Western monotheistic (WM) idea of a God whose love is conditional. Put simply, the greatest feeling of all is Love, and the greatest Love of all is God's Love. But, according to WM, God requires things from us in order to receive this perfect Love, namely proper worship and behavior. What worship and which behaviors are proper? Depends on who you ask: surrender, the Five Pillars, the Ten Commandments, what have you. If God does not receive what He wants, or worse, receives the wrong thing, His Love is withheld, and even punishment is meted out.

Each monotheist sect believes it has discovered the right way to placate and please this demanding God, and that all others have it completely wrong. Between these two, the capricious nature of the WM God and the confusion created by so many conflicting ideas about what the WM God really wants, we subconsciously believe that the Love of God is scarce and only given to those who are "worthy". The extrapolation from here is simple; if God's Love is scarce, all other good things must also be. If all good things are scarce, then we must compete, horde, and fight over all good things in order to make sure we have "enough".

So what does this have to do with psychic vampires? All of these ideas of scarcity and competition have created in us the belief that everyone else is out to "get" everything that brings us joy. When a person first discovers the wonders of spirituality and personal energy, they have yet to unlearn this scarcity mindset. They get this incredible jolt of inner energy which, while it comes from within and from the truth of our connection to All That IS, they still think comes from some "outside" source. If the energy comes from an outside source, it must be both scarce and losable. Which means others can "take" it from us, and thus is born these ideas of psychic vampires, demons, evil spirits, and all these other dramas. In truth, all there is are people who have yet to unlearn their reflexive belief in the scarcity of God's Love.

JCS

Oneness as honeycomb

Hey all, been a while.

A great analogy popped into my head when I was debating on SpiritualForums.com, and I needed to share it. For context, we were discussing the nature of Unity and whether or not individuations actually exist....

It really depends on what we mean by "exist", doesn't it? When I say "doesn't exist", what I mean is that the individuation is perception, a point of view. Let me use an analogy....

Picture a piece of honeycomb, all those little perfect hexagons. If you choose to see the honeycomb as the individual cells, then yes, it is a whole made up of parts. But in fact, the cells are just empty spaces, and the comb is in fact an interconnected lattice, all one continuous piece that merely seems to be made of separate parts. The walls that make up one cell also belong to all the surrounding ones, whose walls belong to the ones that surround them, and so on and so forth. The empty space created by this lattice is then used by the bees for the creation of honey.

Just the same, we are the "empty space" used by Oneness, the lattice of energy that permeates, that IS, all of physical reality, to make the sweet honey which is experience.

Desire vs. Attachment

IMHO, experiences are the whole point of physicality. As such, desire for experience is not something which "should" be transcended, nor should the perception of separation. What "should" be transcended is attachment to particular results and the belief in the reality of separation.

Many people don't see the difference between desire and attachment, so let me give you an example. You are on your way to work, and you usually catch the 8:17 train. You wish (desire) to catch this train because it gets you to work a little early, allowing you time to get situated before starting, maybe get a cup of coffee. Today, there was an accident on your way to the train station, and you ran late and just missed the 8:17.

Now the average person, someone attached to results, would get upset now. There is another train at 8:26 which can still get you to work on time if you hustle, but this means you don't get your morning cup of coffee, and you will start the day hurried and frazzled, and this would upset the average person. You would not be upset because of losing your desired outcome, but because you are still attached to that outcome and the experiences that would have resulted from it. Attachment is an emotional state that draws you out of the Present Moment and into the imagining of outcomes which are no longer possible. It is a clinging to the past.

Now, a more "evolved" person can still have desires, but can let go of unmanifested experiences. Take our example. Instead of becoming upset at having to catch the 8:26, you can look and see that no actions of yours could have kept this experience of missing the 8:17. This can now be seen as an opportunity, because no circumstance happens "by chance". Any situation which comes to you not of your active choosing is a situation drawn to you by your soul or higher self, for the purpose of setting in motion a new set of circumstances. Thus the missing of the train can be released, and you can now look around at your new experience and try to find why it has come into your life. Sometimes, such events are the triggers for serendipitous coincidences (what Karl Jung called "synchronicities"), initiating new possibilities.

Thus it is possible to desire an outcome but not be attached to it if it does not manifest.

Totally non-spiritual thing here... Winter Is Coming!

Winter Is Coming

JCS

James Cameron's Avatar: A Spiritual Critique

Hello all,

I don't get out to the movies much. Weird work hours, two preschoolers, long commute, makes it hard. So I usually don't get to see movies until they're out on DVD, if at all. I finally got around to renting Avatar to see what the fuss was all about. Fun movie. Lots of action, visually stunning even on my crappy TV, not the grand and amazing thing it was made out to be, but fun. Reminded me of a mix of Dances With Wolves and Braveheart, with some obvious Cameron touches.

For anyone who missed it, the basic story is as follows. In the not-horribly-distant future humans discover a habitable planet and name it Pandora. It has Earth level temperatures, but the atmosphere is toxic to us. The entire surface of the planet is a vast jungle, teeming with life and inhabited by the Naavi, a humanoid race that looks like 10 ft tall blue cat people. Humans discover a valuable mineral on this planet (called, in a horribly cheesy touch, Unobtainium), and start mining it. The Naavi don't like that so much, and so begins a conflict that closely parallels how the US treated Native Americans, us land-grabbing and driving them back and them fighting a guerrilla war with primitive weapons and stolen guns.

A paralyzed former soldier named Jack gets recruited to be part of the Avatar Project. Avatars are genetically-created human-Naavi hybrid bodies that a person can project their consciousness into via a machine that looks like a coffin filled with unflavored gelatin. The point of the Avatars is to give humans a way to interact directly with the Naavi. No big surprise, Jack falls in love with having a 10 ft tall body that can walk. He meets a female Naavi on his first time out who 1) doesn't kill him on sight because of a floating flower, 2) happens to be basically a princess, and 3) takes him home to Mom and Dad.

You can figure out where it goes from there. Humans do bad stuff, Naavi get pissed, Jack and Princess fall in love, Jack goes native, two secondary characters (who you don't like at first but you like more later) die, big climactic fight where things look bleak and then turn around, humans leave, and they find a way for Jack to be a Naavi permanently. Roll credits.

It was a very fun, if predictable, movie, but something about it got under my skin just a tiny bit, something I couldn't put my finger on right away. It took until a couple of weeks afterwards for me to figure it out. The Naavi are depicted as being very spiritual, very All Life Is One, Earth Mother, give thanks to the spirits kinda people. And yet they never seem to even attempt to extend this spirituality to humans. Humans are depicted as, and assumed to be, irredeemable, motivated by nothing but greed. Even one of the better humans, when confronted with one of the biological wonders of Pandora, replies "I need to get a sample", seemingly motivated by nothing but intellectual greed. Even Jack, in the beginning, really only loves being Naavi for the opportunity to walk again.

This is not to say the depiction of humans was wrong, that's not my point. My point is that, if the Naavi were so spiritually advanced, where was the attempt on their part to extend the olive branch? Why did the Naavi automatically assume that humans were not part of their Circle of Life, not connected to their Earth Mother? Why did the Naavi assume the irredeemability of humans?

Any race that truly embraces Oneness would automatically extend it to all living things, not just those contained on their little planet. I find the spirituality of the Naavi to be incomplete and inconsistent. Just my two cents.

JCS

Now Available on Amazon!

Hello everyone,

It's official, "The Curious Snowflake" is available on Amazon as a Kindle and iPad download! If you have one of these nifty devices, please support my dream and buy a copy for just $5. If you don't, then please help me out by spreading the word. Mention it to people, send out an e-mail, post it on Facebook, anything you can do to help me out, no matter how small, means the world to me. Here's a link to Amazon for anyone who would like to take a look.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Curious-Snowflake-ebook/dp/B003T0GIP4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1276992039&sr=1-1

Peace and joy to all, and wish me luck!

JCS

Autobiography of a Yogi

On my continued trek through my accumulated literature, I've come across another gem. Somewhere, at one book sale or another, I picked up a copy of Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi", and it is a wonderfully fantastic tale.

For those who've never heard of him, Paramhansa Yogananda was on of India's premiere practitioners of what's called kriya yoga, and the first major Indian spiritualist to spend significant time in the U.S., specifically the last 30 years of his life (he died in 1952). "Autobiography" was published in 1946.

Kriya yoga is not the typical, twist-my-legs-up-into-a-pretzel kind of yoga (that kind is called hatha yoga). Kriya is more focused upon specific mediation practices with the goal of conscious acceleration of spiritual evolution. PY called it the "jet airplane" path, since each meditative session, properly undertaken, is supposed to be the equivalent of years, decades, or even centuries of typical spiritual progress.

AoaY is half a biography, half a spiritual treatise. PY is very scientific in his explanations of his spirituality, but some of the circumstances in the book are incredible enough to make most people doubt it's veracity: co-location, precognition, faith healings, materialization and dematerialization of physical objects, levitation, people going years without sleep, all happen frequently throughout the book. For those with an open mind, the claims in it are fantastic, especially in the realm of spiritual progress.

The book is quite well written and thoroughly footnoted. I'd recommend it to anyone capable of keeping an open mind about miracles.

JCS

How to change the world

Hello friends,

One of my absolute favorite things in this world (I'd say not as far up the list as chocolate, but definitely beating out sunsets) is how the world conspires to bring you exactly what you need when you need it. Recently, I've begun to feel a little frustration at life, a character trait I try to avoid.

While on break at work a few days ago, I decided to go out and enjoy the lovely spring weather rather than sit in the back room and stare at cinderblock walls and video game cases for half an hour. I took a yellow legal pad and a pen out with me, and when I was done eating I started writing out my ideas on why it can be so hard for me to manifest change in my life. In a nutshell, my thoughts took a form of Issac Newton's Second Law of Motion, F=ma (the amount of force needed to move an object equals it's mass times the rate of change you want) and applied it to will working upon the Universe. From this rather depressing view, the reason I have been unable to change my life is that the Universe is too big and I am too little. I may be able to change the small things, give myself some good luck from time to time, but the greater changes were beyond me.

Well, leave it to the Universe to dispel my illusions. A few years back, I bought a book called "Notes From the Universe" by Mike Dooley at a used book sale, stuck it on my shelf, and promptly forgot about it. I pulled it out yesterday on a whim and fell completely in love. Philosophically, it reminds me of a more upbeat version of CWG, structurally it makes me think of the Messiah's Handbook mentioned in "Illusions". Just a series of 1 page or less thoughts and reminders, many having to do with.... big shock coming..... how to bring your desires into your life.

Someone trying to tell me something? Maybe? :-)

In a nutshell, this book brought me a wonderful, wonderful truth. I have been unable to change my life because I am trying to change what is, which is impossible. What is is immutable, unavoidable, and denying it is nothing more than an exercise in futility. On the other hand, what will be is as malleable as Play-Doh, completely up for grabs for anyone with the insight to realize it. Literally. Realize as in real-ize, make real.

Idiot that I am, I've missed this completely. I've been like a hiker who comes to a big boulder in his path. Instead of just walking around it, I decided "this boulder is in my path, and if I wish to stay on my path I will have to push it out of my way". This book is like another hiker who walks up and says, "Uh, dude, just go around", and I look up, smack myself in the forehead, and say "Duh!"

JCS

Unity solves nothing

I got to a place about 4-5 years ago where I thought I'd figured out The Big One, that my beliefs and ideas had found a final basic shape and everything else from there on out was just details. Unity was the Grand Truth, and our attachment to outcomes was the cause of all our misery. We needed to "let go and let God", surrendering our free will to the Will of All and just going with the flow. Problem was, as time went on I found myself feeling less and less content, less and less focused, less and less at peace. A little over a year ago all that changed, and I can now look back upon that time and put my finger on what the problem was.

My soul was bored.

You see, Unity may be the Ultimate Truth, but Unity is also incredibly, horrendously, cataclysmically boring, at least for your soul. It's great bliss for your mind and heart, don't get me wrong, but your soul just kinda sits there and says "yeah, yeah, been Here, done this, bought the T-shirt, didn't fit." You soul knows Unity already because your soul is Unity, and It/you came here to experience something that was not Unity. That's the whole point of physical existence, to be un-Unified.

We are the otters of the universe, to quote Richard Bach, playful, curious creatures who like nothing better than something new and different. Our soul is our inner child, and hanging out in nothing but Unity is the spiritual equivalent of taking your inner child shoe shopping; all well and good if the shoes light up and do neat things, but gets old really fast. Our soul doesn't want Unity, it wants to jump in mud puddles and sing loudly to bad songs and get the lyrics wrong and chase fireflies at twilight and imagine clouds as turtles and elephants and dragons and have fun!!

Realizing Unity helps us appreciate these things, but it doesn't bring them to us. They're already there, most people just don't see 'em.

How Time proves free will.

The existence of free will is inextricably tied up with the nature of Time. Part of the reason so many Oneness advocates deny the existence of free will is because the Oneness is something which exists outside the bounds of any linear timeline, and in fact could be considered as much the All-Time/No Time just as much as It could be considered the All Things/No Thing. This, the predeterminists say, shows free will cannot exists, because everything exists in the perception (if such a word applies) of the One Soul. If everything is known, no possibilities other than What Is and What Will Be can exist.

But does not such a concept place a limitation upon the Unlimited? To be locked into one continuing set of circumstances, unalterable, unavoidable, marching on from the Big Bang until the end of time, this would put a horrible set of constraints upon the experiences the One Soul can have. Every time we come to a situation where, to our perception, we make a choice, the Oneness would be limiting Itself to one circumstance, one possibility.

What would be much more logical is if, instead of one timeline, the entire web of probability were open to the perceptions of the Oneness. Then, instead of only one set of experiences, an infinite number of splintering timelines and possibilities would be available. Every possible choice and every possible shift of reality that choice could create would be there for the Oneness to perceive and experience, through us.

But what would this mean for us, down here in linear time/space? If every possibility actually exists for the Oneness, what constraints, if any, would we have upon the possibilities of our own lives? Lack of free will implies, and actually requires, that only one possibility exists. If all possibilities exist, what could keep us from choosing for ourselves?

So my logic is simple: if there is no free will, the Oneness is limited. If the Oneness is unlimited, then free will exists, or at least nothing inherently keeps us from having it. Me, I go with the latter.

Sleepwalkers and the Awakened

The vast majority of humans are what I refer to as Sleepwalkers, average Joes/Janes who wander through life thinking that life is something that happens to them and not because of them. They are constantly choosing and creating both their reality and themselves, but they do it all without actually knowing it. To them, the world is a scary, unpredictable place, a place of hardship, random chance, and capricious Fate.

Part of the reason that Reality seems so unpredictable to them is because they have not yet learned how to live consciously, to wake themselves up and really pay attention to themselves and to their world, thus my term Sleepwalkers. Until they learn to live consciously, their world really is unpredictable, because without conscious living they cannot bring their 3 creative tools, Thought, Word, and Deed, into alignment with each other.

It all begins with Thought. The entire universe is one huge field (called the Zero Point Field by quantum physicists) of electromagnetic energy, and that which we call "matter" is really just highly complex EM waveforms, so complex and tightly packed that they appear, to our limited senses, to be objects instead of energy.

Our thoughts are EM waves as well, just not as tightly packed and complex. Our thoughts radiate out of us and interact with everything, not only what's immediately around us, but echoing off into Infinity, shifting the ZPF faster than the speed of light. Quantum physicists have observed what is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal, that the act of observing a quantum object actually affects the object, and in some cases actually brings it into being. This is simply the waves of our thoughts interacting with objects, and this is most easily observed in subatomic particles for the same reason that a splashing hand can knock over a toy boat but not a battleship.

Words and Deeds are simply manifestations of our Thoughts. Words are Thoughts expressed, pushed out of us, transformed into other types of waveforms, either sound as spoken words, or placed upon solid objects so that they stay and may be observed by many people at many moments as writing. Words are more powerful than Thoughts, but less precise. While thoughts are experienced, words must be interpreted, and this interpretation changes the words, sometimes slightly, sometimes drastically, as we've all experienced in out lives.

Deeds are the heaviest creative tool. They are Thoughts in motion, actually shifting physical matter around. Deeds are the most powerful creative tool we have, but can be the most imprecise and even damaging. Everyone has had moments where they've lost their temper, lost control of their Deeds, and done things they've regretted later. Unlike Thoughts, which can always be changed, or Words, which can be re-expressed or modified, Deeds are moments, done and then gone. If your Deeds go astray, any resulting damage can be fixed, but never undone.

Now, the difference between Sleepwalkers and the Awakened is a matter of focus (pun intended:D ). Sleepwalkers have just as much creative power as anyone, but because they go through the majority of their lives not really paying attention, their creative power is scattered, intermittent, unfocused. Their belief in their powerlessness is a Thought like any other, it echoes out of them and creates their reality. Their worries, their fears, their insecurities, they create these things as much as they experience them. They are stuck in a feedback loop, thoughts affecting experience affecting thought affecting experience. Their Words and Deeds are similarly scattered and affected.

Every once in a while everything might come into alignment and a Sleepwalker might bring something intended, perhaps even something extraordinary, into their reality, but usually they are so convinced of their own powerlessness that they attribute their good fortune to either luck or the intervention of some outside force or Deity. Some rare ones even become so convinced of the reality of their chosen God that they may do great works, or even perform miracles, all the while believing that it something outside of them working through them. They have indeed brought Thought, Word, and Deed into alignment, but under a false assumption that they are powerless in and of themselves. This does not lessen their power, only limits the scope of it.

A few, a rare, rare few, have Awoken completely to the truth of this reality. They understand that this energy field which we inhabit, the ZPF, is merely One Thought, One Word, One Deed which they are part of, a manifestation of, and the controller of. They are a fractal of this Oneness, a part of the pattern yet the pattern entire and also containing the pattern within them.

This is the ideal to which we strive. None of us have gotten there yet, but we see the path to it.

My Will Be Done

I used to think that there was some all-powerful Guidance in my life, and if I couldn't understand the reason something happened in my life, well, that was just a shortcoming on my part. But the more I thought about this idea of predestination, the more I realized it just didn't hold water, mostly just because of our belief in our free will.

Predestination is the belief that everything we think, say, or do is merely an echo, a reflection of the Will Of The All, a belief that there is a Grand Purpose, an overarching Plan which All That Is has in mind, a Point B to our Point A, so to speak, and all this guidance on It's part works toward that (whatever "that" may be is irrelevant). Yet the greater part of humanity believes in free will to one extent or another. Why? According to predestination, our thoughts are not out own, but reflections of All That Is, so therefore this thought of our free will is "given" to us as well. If there is a Purpose to everything, there must then be a purpose for us believing that we have free will.

Those who believe in predestination believe also that our insistence on our free will is the cause of much of our misery and unhappiness, that we need to "let go and let God" in order to find peace. So my question is simple: if the Oneness gives us all of our beliefs, yet the belief in our free will makes us miserable, why does the Oneness give it to us? What purpose does deliberate misery serve?

No, my friends, I cannot believe in such a thing. I cannot believe that anyone is miserable not of their own will, for such a belief turns the One into a cruel, thoughtless thing, using us for It's own devices and purposes with no more excuse than "suck it up, it's only an illusion". I cannot believe that we are only the Potter's clay, or at best the Potter's wheel. I can't even believe that we are only the Potter. Instead, I believe we are all three, the Creator, the Created, and the Device of Creativity, and we may choose at any time to move into whichever role and perception we want.

As I said at the beginning, once I believed in predestination. Then one day I took a good long look at my life and saw that everything was a consequence of my thoughts, words and actions, even the things which, at the time, I thought were Fate or Destiny or the Will of God or what have you. I saw my whole life was one great example of My Will Be Done.

Why Right and Wrong exist.

I think most people agree to some extent that ideas of right and wrong are created by us, and that they are nothing more than points in a system, bases of comparison. Yet we often feel that we must use this system for the creation of labels. We want to call some things "Right" and others "Wrong" and we often feel good when we make such judgements. Why do we do this? The answer, IMHO, is very simple.

Because that is our purpose for being alive.

Let me explain. I believe that we are all actually One Soul, fractalized and limited in perception out of choice. In the Time Before Time, the One Soul existed perfect and complete, but alone and without anything to compare itself to. Without anything else, the One Soul did not actually exist, because we can only define "exist" in comparison to something else, and there was nothing else. So the One Soul created physical reality from/within Itself in order to have a basis for comparison.

Now (and I freely admit this is all personal speculation, but it makes sense to me) we are the One Soul in fractal microcosm, and as such crave self-definition as well. For this purpose, we come into physical incarnation and forgetfulness so that we may have things in our perception that (we believe) are Not Us. But due to our conscious minds, it is not enough to compare ourselves in a simple-location way as a means of self-definition. We do not simply observe the world, we interact with it and make decisions about it and name things within it. We want to know more than just What, we want to know Which and Who and Where and When and How, and most important of all, Why.

The Why is the key, the crux of the matter, for why is Choice, and Choice is what all this moral judgement-passing is all about. We create ideas of right and wrong in order to create a dualistic framework of Why from which we base our decisions. Thus we create ideas of right and wrong so that we have something from which to choose our idea of Who We Are.

So right and wrong do exist, and are horribly important, but they simply aren't absolutes, even if we all agree upon them. Yes, I think we can all agree that love-sponsored action is "better" than fear-sponsored action, but it really is only "better" because we say it is. The only real difference between the two is that one is action which acknowledges our Unity and the other is action that acknowledges our separation. Yes, that separation may be an illusion in the grand scheme of things, but it is the separation which is the truth in physical reality, and all this spiritual kanoodling won't change that one iota.

This is what author Neale Donald Walsch calls a "divine dichotomy", two seemingly contradictory ideas which are both true. We are all One Soul choosing to experience many limited ideas of self, and we are billions and trillions of individual souls each striving to define ourselves as singular points of view.

So the true key is this: we are free to create our ideas of right and wrong in whatever way defines us, but we must understand that our moral decisions are exactly that, decisions, and ours and no one else's. These choices are the tools with which we define ourselves, and that is nothing less than our sacred work in this reality.

Free Will and Destiny

The whole free will vs. destiny concept is something I've spent a great deal of time mulling over. The entire subject really hinges on two interrelated things, namely the nature of the Divine (what I call the One Soul) and the purpose of physical reality. So let's take a look at the idea of Destiny and see what that tells us about the above. If there is such a thing as Destiny, it must be put in place by God, or the Divine, or the Higher Powers, or whatever limited little name you wish to give the Unlimited. If this is the case, then the Divine must have requirements, desires, or preferences of some sort, otherwise there would be no purpose to Destiny.

So my question then is what sort of preferences would the Divine have? One does not have preferences simply to have them, they must fill some need, whether it be psychological, emotional, or what have you. Yet we are talking about That Which Is, the source of everything in existence, the Alpha and Omega. How could such a Being need anything?

Second issue has to do with Time. For something to need anything, there has to be Time involved, because there must be a moment when the thing desired is not possessed, then another when it is either achieved or thwarted in order for the entire process to exist. Thus for the Divine to have any desires or needs, the Divine must be bound up by Time. Yet we have proven that Time is actually an aspect of physical reality, that there is not Time and Space, but the Time/Space continuum. But if we are speaking of the Creator, we must be speaking of a consciousness which existed "before" Time existed, thus it cannot be bound by Time.

Thus in order for Destiny to exist, it must be possible for the Divine to have requirements and be limited by Time, yet there cannot be anything the Unlimited does not have, and the Creator must exist outside of Time, thus I cannot see how Destiny can exist.

Yet there must be a purpose to physical reality, otherwise it would not exist either. So where does that leave us? This quandary bound me up for a very long time, until a friend sent me a link to a very nifty video explaining how to conceptualize how 5th and higher dimensions work. Here it is if you wish to watch it yourself: http://www.wimp.com/tendimensions/

The important point is this: when a conscious being makes a choice, a "fracture" occurs in 6th dimensional "space", a splitting off like the branches of a tree, one path representing one choice, the other the opposite. What this means is that every choice, every possibility, exists multidimensionally. This was the final piece for me, because this meant that no requirements could possibly exist, since all possibilities already do! I cannot have a specific destiny when an infinitude of CSs exist in an infinitude of possible worlds doing an infinitude of different things, and the same holds true for everyone else.

This also solved my conundrum concerning the purpose of Reality. Put simply, the purpose is Experience. There is only one thing which a singular consciousness cannot do, no matter how transcendent, and that is to understand itself if there is no basis for comparison. For "I" to exist, there must be "not I", for "here" there must be "there", and so on. The One Soul created All That Is within/from Itself in order for there to be a way for it to experience Itself as Itself, and also as not-Itself.

We, as conscious beings, have a most important job. Since we can make choices, we can create those multi-dimensional fractures of probability I mentioned before. Basically, each time a conscious being makes a choice, it doubles the possible ways the One Soul can experience Itself by splitting Reality into two.

Thus, our entire purpose is to make choices, and which choice we make is completely irrelevant as far as the One Soul is concerned, since from It's point of view, both choices exist. But this does not mean that it is all meaningless, not at all, because our choices make all the difference in the world to us. It is through our choices that we forge our experience, our particular perspective. The more consistent we are with our choices, the stronger our particular experience becomes, the more we are able to tap into the creative power within us. Therefore, the closest thing we have to an official purpose in life is to decide and proclaim Who We Are. Thus, in many ways, we are on the same voyage of self-understanding and self-creation which the One Soul is, only in microcosm.

The Definition of Happiness

I've been chewing on the idea of happiness on and off for a while now, and I've noticed something. It seems like it's far easier to get a grasp on what happiness is not than what it is. We can see easily that Western society's biggest problems is a misunderstanding of what truly brings happiness and what true happiness is. For nearly 60 years we have been programmed, literally, to believe that happiness is Stuff, that happiness is Self-Sacrifice, that happiness is Falling In Love, that happiness is basically every self-serving illusion we can come up with. I think that half the reason that people get involved in sites like this is due to a dissatisfaction with society's ideas about happiness, so I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here.

But what actually is happiness, and how do we find it? That's a lot tougher, mostly because happiness is a pretty individual thing; that which brings me happiness may bring you boredom, or vice versa. But I think I have a pretty solid idea, so I wanted to post it here and get some feedback on how my ideas resonate with all of you. Happiness, I believe, can be broken down into two broad categories:

1) Happiness through self-definition.

2) Happiness through connection to others.

These two define the outward and return paths that souls take in their evolution, first one of movement outward toward the creation of a individual self, then inward toward connection to others and, ultimately, Unity. I believe that just about everything that can truly make us happy can fit into these two broad categories or into both to some extent. Let's look at a few examples and how they can be warped.

Love: The ultimate in the second category, but can be twisted into possessiveness, which distorts connection through the desire to deny others the "special" connection you have, or self-sacrifice, which denies self-definition.

Success: A form of self-definition, namely the achieving of goals, which can be distorted into greed (lack of self-definition leading to the judging of worth based upon possessions) and power-hunger (connection overridden by a desire for control)

Spirituality: Can fit into both categories. Distorted versions run the gamut from self-righteousness (lack of self-definition compensated for by surety gained by being "right" or "chosen") to herd mentality (massive overemphasis on connection at the expense of self-definition, thus the "church" is always right and never questioned) to escapism (ascetics and mystics divorcing themselves from society, thus throwing everything into self-definition and ignoring connection).

The key to true happiness, IMHO, is finding the balance point between self-definition and connection to others. Once again we see the seeming-contradiction in human nature, the "divine dichotomy" as Neale Donald Walsch calls it. We must define ourselves as individuals before we can become part of a group, we must have groups in order to define ourselves as individuals.

I would love to hear other's take on this.

JCS

Stopping by fields on a snowy morning

If I could choose my favorite thing about living here at the ass end of nowhere it would be the silence. I grew up spitting distance from two major expressways and close enough to one of Ohare International's main approach paths that I could tell the difference between an L1011 and a 757 and could identify every major airline company on sight by the time I was 9, so needless to say, it was never truly quiet there. Even at 2AM, the soft susurrous of the Tri-state and the Kennedy was there. But out here in my little town of 5500 it is very different, especially in the winter. The rest of the year, various animal sounds are everywhere, whether it's crickets or birds or what have you, but in winter there is nothing but the wind and the rare truck crossing the IL-89 bridge.

Now, if my place is quiet, my brother's is bloody silent. I at least have neighbors. He, on the other hand, lives on the edge of a state park and his closest neighbor is 3/4 mile away. I got to experience this yesterday. My bro, bless him, wants to be a farmer, and he found a good deal on a 14' by 52' greenhouse from a local nursery. Guess who got recruited to help dismantle and move it. Nothing like a little outdoor work in January to get the ol' blood going, eh? Even better, he and his teenage son show up with the back of his F250 loaded up with a cord of firewood to drop off at his place beforehand, lucky me.

So after stacking the wood, he and his son go inside to get some tools together, leaving me outside. It was about as nice a day as you can ask for in Illinois in January, about 20, sunny, only a light breeze, and I was plenty warm from all the work unloading the truck, so I took a walk over to the cornfields that border his property on the south. It was a beautiful view, the land gently rolling away, the nooks and hollows of the fallow earth filled with a thin scrim of snow, the sky that perfect, crystalline blue you only get on cold, clear, winter days, and everything utterly silent except for the faint, sandpapery whisper of the wind.

I have had profound, mystical experiences before, some so powerful I thought the top of my head would come off, but the feeling looking out over those fields was different. I could feel the calm and the dreamless sleep of Nature in winter, I could feel the silence and solitude. It was a far calmer, a far more steady and accepting experience than I'd ever had. Instead of being swept along like a leaf on a river, I was floating in a mirrorlike pool.

I had a good 10 minutes of just absorbing this sensation, this feeling of suspension, before I was interrupted. Ah, I do love the silence out here, but I did after all have "promises to keep", so I had to bid those fields goodbye.

CS

The Field, Part 2

Oh boy, I found a good'un!

I'm about 2/3 of the way through "The Field" (tis a little thing, only about 225 pages), and I'm loving it. I haven't gotten to the "now I'll tie all these ideas together into one coherent whole" chapter yet, but I can see where McTaggert is going with it. Basically, the whole thing comes down to what is called the Zero Point Field (yes, same Zero Point mentioned by the character Syndrome in Pixar's "The Incredibles"), a background energy state in quantum physics calculations which classical physicists are aware of but simply ignore. A great many scientists, going all the way back to the 1960s, have postulated that the ZPF can be used to explain a whole host of phenomena that give classical science fits, everything from how memories are stored in the brain to why momentum and inertia exists to how bodies grow from a single cell to an entire complicated being.

The problem for classical scientists is that these postulations, if taken to their logical end, lead to ideas that smack of either science fiction or mysticism: juvenile plants giving off energy fields that mimic the size and shape of adults, homeopathic remedies that contain no medicine but only the "memory" of it, imprinted somehow upon the water, memories that do not exist in cells but instead reside in an energy field which runs throughout and around the body, energy transfers that happen at faster-than-light speeds and aren't affected by distance, and so on.

But the biggest problem of all for the empiricists is that the entire concept of the ZPF flies in the face of the Newtonian/Cartesian worldview. No longer is the world a mechanical device, separate parts clicking away in predictable patterns. Instead the entire physical universe is nothing more than a matrix of interconnected contractions within an all-pervasive energy field, one that, if disturbed at any one point, affects all of it, not like ripples in a pond but like sliding blocks in a giant puzzle, a single shift instantly affecting all others. Worst of all for them, it seems like thought and intention have replaced cause and effect as the prime movers in this ZPF universe. If these postulations are true, the physical universe does not exist as an entity in and of itself, but as a projection of Mind and of expectation.

The vast majority of the experiments and hypotheses in "The Field" are not new. Most go back a generation or more, and the book itself came out almost a decade ago, so it should be interesting to do some research and discover how things have progressed since 2001. These ideas give me a great deal of hope. I have observed first-hand that there is a slow but steady movement in religious thought away from entrenched ideas and toward experience. Now I see a similar movement in science. If these two groups can get together, I believe that holds far more hope for our future as a species and as an ecosystem than anything else.

More to follow once I finish the book.

jcs

The Field

Got a book recommendation from someone on my SF site (which is still defunct, much sadness). Little thing called "The Field" by Lynne McTaggart. Basically it's about the spiritual side of quantum physics, something I've been meaning to look into for years. Interesting factoid: one of the later Apollo mission astronauts did an experiment with psychic phenomena during the return trip. He tried to "project" images to people back on Earth (the whole star/circle/square/wavy lines thing from the opening scene of Ghostbusters, actually), and found out that the success rate was no different 250,000 miles away than it was if he was in the same building, about a 1:3000 possibility of being pure chance.

I'll post more later on how the book progresses.

My New Year's Resolutions

I have never really believed in New Year's resolutions, probably because I'm a lazy ass and don't like change, but this year I think I will make some, and I think this year I might just keep them.

1) Start using this blog more.

2) Start working on getting Snowflake published.

3) Work out. Boring, but I need it, I weigh 220 now.

4) Pay more attention to my kids and my wife.

Reasonable. Good for me and those I love. Let's see how I do.

So.... what to do?

I think the universe is trying to tell me something......

I have a pattern I follow every morning; get up, make coffee, get the boys off to school, go to the computer, and jump on SpiritualForums.com, my favorite site, to post and comment and debate while my little girl plays and my wife sleeps in, 'til it's time for work Unfortunately, this morning I go to log into SF and get a "this site doesn't exist" message from my browser. WTF? I'm not too bummed about the writing I've done there (I back the good stuff up onto a text file... and just did it yesterday too, hmmm....), but I love that site and have enjoyed the back-and-forth I've gotten into with some of the other regulars. I'm seriously bummed about this.

But then I get to thinking. All things in our lives are there for a reason, especially anything which evokes a strong emotional response. While I have enjoyed SF, I do waste a lot of time there, time I could be using for other things: play with the kids, edit my book, work on query letters, do chores. I used that site and used it well to hone my ideas and clarify my writing, and yes, it did connect me with others of a like mind, but has it served it's purpose? Do I find another outlet for my thoughts, my ideas, my spirituality?

Thus I am here, posting for the first time in almost half a year on this blog I had such high hopes for but then became so frustrated with. Here I am with, not a loss, but with an opportunity. An opportunity to use my time better, to accomplish what I really want and need to accomplish, rather than just doing what feels good. What was I really doing with my time on SF? Debating the fine points of Unity Theory with a half a dozen other almost-but-not-quite like-minded people, verbally fencing with Vegans, hashing over whether negative spiritual entities are self-created or drawn in by belief. Basically, spiritual masturbation; pleasant in it's own way but accomplishing nothing. I feel the desire, the need to share my ideas, not with just a few people who basically agree, but with a wide audience, some of whom will hate it, some who will love it, and some special few who will resonate with the ideas and use that resonance to improve their lives, alter their spiritual trajectory.

Why did SF go away? Don't know. Why is this experience now in my life? To get me off my lazy floppy ass.

Use this.