Another collection of insights

[ethereal]

Just now I had a series of revelations that I wanted to share with everyone; I've been reading it in books on spirituality over and over but never truly realized them until now!

- God is reflected in Truth, Beauty, Love, Faith, Unity, etc.! God is radical subjectivity, the source of our consciousness and subjective experiences. Our normal experiences of love and beauty and delight and joy is basically connecting deeply with the Divinity within us and all things, that are normally blocked by our attachments/positionalities and our minds

- Judgment and assumptions block out love that would normally be experienced, that is why we are told to surrender positionalities, desires and fears!

- Why everyone is actually searching for God, even if they profess not to; Divinity is Love and Truth etc., what we all universally value!

- Keeping our minds and will and faith on God reveals His nature, by law of attraction (like attracts like, the spirit automatically floats to where it wills itself) and by valuing God's reflections we become those values, thus revealing God within and around us.

- Everything in the world is perfect as Love and Truth, but our egos distort Reality and create suffering by positionalities and attachments, thus "limiting" Divinity's Presence within us. Thus, our "external" search for happiness is basically continuously seeking where our preconceived notions of what "happiness" is coincide, which basically NEVER happens; which is why most people cannot be permanently happy. My analogy for it is, imagine God to be a 2D plane, and each "duality" we create splits God in half. With our many different dualities, we create various intersecting regions of higher and lower Divinity (i.e. happiness). The thing is, even if we reach a higher region of Divinity, it is projected outwards onto impermanent things and is always subject to loss. Why not remove those judgments and let happiness/joy flow through you no matter the external circumstances? Each duality we remove further reveals Divinity to be All That Is, which is the same process as raising our LOC (level of consciousness).

- Love removes these barriers and slowly tears them down, allowing Divinity to shine forth in all its Splendor.

- All external objects of desire are projections of value by the ego, based on positionalities and judgments, desire and imagination.

- What you desire you already have, only that you do not recognize it! It is "channeled" outside due to the ego's projections.

- What is fear? Fear is losing love/happiness, losing the various projections of happiness/beauty/truth/love/Divinity, fear is the fear of being separate from Divinity and God, disguised as the ego's different fears. Fear of death (ego) = ultimate fear of separation from Divinity, as fear of losing the Source of existence (ultimate joy of Being), hence we compassionately see the ego's and consciousness's innocence, the ego doesn't know better! It is actually trying to find God in the wrong places!

- Thus, fear and desire are two sides of the same coin! Projecting Divinity outside ourselves due to mistaken assumptions of the mind/ego, and so we are always fighting to gain what we never lost, and to keep what we never had.

Hope this additional personal rewording of the same everpresent Truth helped! Welcome any comments! As you can tell, I'm so excited to finally clear up these things

[Adam]

[proselytizing mode]You would make a very fine Universalist[/proselytizing mode]

Seriously, though, you have hit on some of the same thoughts that I've been working out recently, especially the subjectivity of God. (How could a creator be subjective, though? Isn't that a paradox? Not at all... but I don't want to give out spoilers. It just has to do with a few infinities multiplied together... Roughly an infinite number of infinities... )

I would like to add one more conclusion, for your approval: Evil is a perception of the ego, based on how it observes suffering. When you do evil, you perceive that you are causing others to suffer. When others do evil to you, you perceive them increasing your suffering. If you quit observing the suffering, then evil goes away... but it is awfully hard to stop observing something that is right in your face.

Perfect Peace (level of consciousness just below Enlightenment) is unconditional love for your entire environment... When the ego experiences evil, it becomes harder to love the source of that suffering, whether it be yourself or someone/thing else. Anger is a reaction made only while unconscious... While being angry forms a habit of anger, it is very easy to defeat anger by being conscious. Fear is a logical process caused by lack of understanding... Anger causes suffering directly, but usually in small amounts. Fear rarely causes suffering directly, except that it brings suffering directly to your consciousness, causing you to observe much more evil than you normally would.

Ergo, fear, more than anger, is the enemy to peace. I would argue that fear is the greatest enemy to peace. It is certainly the greatest enemy of liberty, which is a prerequisite to peace.

[Akashic_Librarian]

Thats really cool Ethereal.

Word of warning though. Don't get lost in an Ocean of thoughts like this. Don't forget life goes on and whther you think a nice house is a projection of your ego or not it still needs to be cleaned. If you know what I mean.

[Lychee]

Originally Posted by Adam

[proselytizing mode]You would make a very fine Universalist[/proselytizing mode]

Seriously, though, you have hit on some of the same thoughts that I've been working out recently, especially the subjectivity of God. (How could a creator be subjective, though? Isn't that a paradox? Not at all... but I don't want to give out spoilers. It just has to do with a few infinities multiplied together... Roughly an infinite number of infinities... )

I would like to add one more conclusion, for your approval: Evil is a perception of the ego, based on how it observes suffering. When you do evil, you perceive that you are causing others to suffer. When others do evil to you, you perceive them increasing your suffering. If you quit observing the suffering, then evil goes away... but it is awfully hard to stop observing something that is right in your face.

Perfect Peace (level of consciousness just below Enlightenment) is unconditional love for your entire environment... When the ego experiences evil, it becomes harder to love the source of that suffering, whether it be yourself or someone/thing else. Anger is a reaction made only while unconscious... While being angry forms a habit of anger, it is very easy to defeat anger by being conscious. Fear is a logical process caused by lack of understanding... Anger causes suffering directly, but usually in small amounts. Fear rarely causes suffering directly, except that it brings suffering directly to your consciousness, causing you to observe much more evil than you normally would.

Ergo, fear, more than anger, is the enemy to peace. I would argue that fear is the greatest enemy to peace. It is certainly the greatest enemy of liberty, which is a prerequisite to peace.

Hm, one could argue that the ego exists for a reason to enforce boundaries and respect. If someone disrespects you, they are not only insulting your ego, but your self. Your ego helps to defend that and stand up for yourself. True or false?

[ethereal]

Thanks for the replies everyone

Originally Posted by Adam

I would like to add one more conclusion, for your approval: Evil is a perception of the ego, based on how it observes suffering. When you do evil, you perceive that you are causing others to suffer. When others do evil to you, you perceive them increasing your suffering. If you quit observing the suffering, then evil goes away... but it is awfully hard to stop observing something that is right in your face.

Good thing you brought up the topic, there's a lot of good vs. evil going on, especially on this forum reflections of the spiritual warrior archetype.

Some thoughts of mine:

I agree that good and evil, pleasure and pain are both perceptions of the ego. It seems like there are two ways of reducing suffering:

1) to do "good" for people so that they are at a place where their desires are met - often temporary
2) to remove the duality between pleasure and pain - more permanent

I like Nisargadatta Maharaj's explanation that there is no good or evil, happiness or suffering -- only what is necessary and unnecessary. This would help explain the workings of suffering in order to repay karmic debts. In that case, most of what we call "evil" goes under unnecessary, since it ties you down with even more negative karma to transcend, though this depends on the situation, i.e. triage.

Perfect Peace (level of consciousness just below Enlightenment) is unconditional love for your entire environment... When the ego experiences evil, it becomes harder to love the source of that suffering, whether it be yourself or someone/thing else. Anger is a reaction made only while unconscious... While being angry forms a habit of anger, it is very easy to defeat anger by being conscious. Fear is a logical process caused by lack of understanding... Anger causes suffering directly, but usually in small amounts.

Some great points!

A quote about anger by Dr. Hawkins:
"You can be angry because you love and you’re devoted. You care about life. That’s different from anger as where you live."

I think that's a huge distinction that many people aren't making; they think some negative thought, or get irritated by something, and then they start feeling guilty about it, like "I wasn't supposed to do that, now I'll attract even more negativity," or "This anger isn't good, I should stop that." This often just represses the anger and emotions into the unconscious, so that while it doesn't seem to consciously bother people, the problem still remains unsolved at its core, and can have negative consequences.

Underlying many of these so-called "negative" emotions is Love; the key is to recognize that, and stay in Love, rather than get carried away by anger, fear, guilt, or desire. When this occurs, Love becomes the background and "equilibrium" state of being, so that negativity is spontaneously allowed when necessary but doesn't come up when unnecessary.

Fear rarely causes suffering directly, except that it brings suffering directly to your consciousness, causing you to observe much more evil than you normally would.

Ergo, fear, more than anger, is the enemy to peace. I would argue that fear is the greatest enemy to peace. It is certainly the greatest enemy of liberty, which is a prerequisite to peace.

Indeed, fear is more deep-seated and repressed into the unconscious more often than anger. We try to ignore what we fear so much that we unconsciously avoid it and forget that we are the ones projecting fear into the world in the first place. Thus, the way out is hidden by our own minds and so it seems like there's no solution!

The reason why people say to "conquer your fears" is that it forces you to confront that unconscious projection mechanism in your mind and see that it is fallacious and false. However, it isn't the action itself that conquers the fear, but weakening/removing that association in our minds. This would explain why sometimes we do what we fear over and over again, but the fear still remains, why hypnotism works, and why proper understanding removes fear permanently.

Wow, another long post; like Akashic noted, I've been thinking about these things a lot, perhaps too much for my own good I think I'm addicted to that "aha!" feeling, as probably many of you guys are also