The "Solo Way" of Enlightenment

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Your path of spiritual growth outside the boundaries of "organized" religion is totally understood. I have been called to an identical Way. Gnostic Christians in the first two centuries pointed to the interior Teacher, the Christspirit. One of their important criticisms of orthodoxy (and they had many complaints) was that the orthodox Church had tried to replace this interior Christ (the "knowing") with mere obedience to human teachers. If the orthodox Church had missed the point on this one, the Protestants, when they broke away in 1517, took this error into their administrations.

Thus, today, even very spiritual churches depend far too much upon human leaders, a human administration, and human teachings. The orthodox made another error still carried by Protestant churches today. They taught that "truth" was a "one size fits all" reality, and it is not; each discovers the level of "truth" (reality) for which her mind is prepared by the Holy Spirit of Love (Goddess).

This is why it is always necessary for the spiritual person, called to the individual Way of enlightenment, to "fly solo." The great mystic Dionysus, in the fifth century, called the Way "the flight of the alone to the Alone." This does not mean that mystics are, or act, alone; we do have each other, with deepest bonds of Love and friendship that we treasure; but it means that we generally act as our spiritual "ancestors" did-- outside the boundaries of "organized" religion.

Mystics have always felt that "organized" religion-- with its horrors and terrors, its stupidity and violence through the centuries-- was not a good idea. Religion was the worst idea in the history of the world; spirituality was the best!:)

So, we do not become disillusioned due to our freedom, but rejoice in it and celebrate it. There are so many "works" that we simply do not have to do when we know (with "gnosis") that we are "saved" (from ignorance and the lower nature) by grace-- not by "joining" the "right" religion!

For we are guided by the firm but gentle hands of the Lovegoddess, day and night, and She is tender, gentle, and universally forgiving in Her illimitable kindness.

So, congratulations on your own growing sense of spiritual independence and freedom. Ultimately, whether you choose to use a website or any other approach, or any other human teacher, you will be guided to the interior Master, and all true and genuine spiritual teachers will point you towards Her.:) So, never stop growing, dear friend, growing in "knowing" (the interior Goddess), wisdom, and, most importantly, Love.

For it is Love alone that grows like a flower of Light in the heart, and guides us into the Way of beauty.
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The Allembracing Mind and Mystical Experience

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The "bliss, good; no bliss, also good" is the Taoist perspective that is being developed and consciously cultivated here: If, for example, you give permission to use your latest letter, that will be very good, and will help many!:) But if you do not, that will also be good!:) ("Good" comes always in two varieties: Yes and no, black and white, an event occurs or it doesn't.) It is up to each person to figure out how it is "good" when what she does not want happens!

But if, as all mysticsaints and masterteachers agree, the world is formed from a perfect (flawless, stainless) Mind, then it too must reflect a symmetric perfection.

Cultivating the "allembracing" mind, as the Buddha called it, is one of the most challenging tasks of a seeker of enlightenment. For it means embracing lovingly, not only those things that we, and our parents, love, but also those that are despised.

This means that the kitten and puppy are good, as everyone knows, but so is the rattlesnake. The butterfly is beautiful; and so is the tarantula.
Many things that we have been programmed to reject as "bad" or "ugly"
have hidden interior goodness, with concealed beauty.:) This includes, finally, even death.

As a society, we are at last starting to move towards the cusp of the realization that, as early Christians always said, death is good, not bad. For it is as natural as the dewdrop shimmering on the rose in a shining sunrise, as natural as breathing. And it leads to a world far superior to this one-- a world, not of broken bodies, but of minds only-- minds that project "lightbodies" as real as, and far more sensual than, these poor imitations now in use.

For when the current "game" is over, we shall slip from the "sheaths" of these forms, and soar beyond the clouds, into the Milky Way. This is the greatest adventure of any life.

But we are solidly, repeatedly, gruesomely taught to fear death. If we do fear death, a pale is cast over the bright flowers, and warm sunlight, of everyday life. But it is demanded that everyone approach death with sheer terror-- an odd perspective for a "Christian" nation. For the earliest Christians did not fear, but celebrated, their deaths. (In rather unhealthy extremism, this led to the philosophy of martyrdom.)

And the famous mystic Solomon wrote, "The day of one's death is better than the day of her birth."
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Lovethoughts

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Enlightenment is not an achievement, but a discovery. It can dawn only now, and now. All things, in vast diversity, are but one Mind. That Mind is Love, and that Love is guidance. It leads higher and higher until the high and low disappear. When all disappears, your true Mind appears, alone and solo; it is all minds. It is bliss, ecstasy, and deep tranquility. This, the gold and jewels of the Way, can go on without end, without limitation.

Spiritual Teachers and Egos

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The ego is not the "enemy" of the enlightened. Instead, it is her teacher. As part of the Mind, it is also the creation of the One, and so, has a valid reason for existence.

Still, yielding to its domination (it is always wanting to control everything) is ignorance and darkness. So, especially in a spiritual teacher, we should look for the concealment of the ego, not its prideful display.

The ego is a small but real part of the identity of the Mind. Specifically, it is the "role" that Mind is playing in the "stageplay" of this earthly life. Everyone, including the sage, has one. But the sage, in wisdom, conquers or overcomes her ego with Love.

That means that she reidentifies with the Spirit of Love, or Lovemind. This process begins with a de-identification vis a vis the ego. She says, "I am not just this body," and, "I am not the identity that adheres to, or within, this body. I am not the timebased ego."

Gradually, her identity is transformed: "I am not a physical body" grows into, "I am a nonphysical mind." In time, that evolves into, "I am not just this conscious mind, but an ancient Mind that has lived for many ages-- a Soul." With the passage of more time, this realization blossoms into, "This Soul is part of the Mind of the One. So, It is Love Itself. I am an incarnation of Love, of the One."

This does not lead to selfconscious pride; if the thought leads there, it is anti-enlightenment. This realization leads to the egoless state. It is full enlightenment. This is becoming a sage, or master.

But, free of ego, and free of the need to manipulate others to approve of her (receiving her validation from within only) the sage or master would never, could never, claim to be a "sage" or "master." Thus, you can rest assured that anyone who ever claims to be any sort of "master" is working from an unhealthy ego; she is proving her absence of true masterhood. For one major mark of a master is always her humility. The unenlightened is always so very insecure that she feels that she cannot "afford" humility, and so, is very rarely humble.

So, any so-called "spiritual teacher" who puts herself "on display" is a fraud and a phony. Perhaps she is not simply deceiving, but selfdeceived as well. But any "teacher" who talks about herself rather than the Way is fake. You need to run, not walk, in the opposite direction!

Specifically, any teacher who tries to impress people with her "famous" students, or her "many" students is only pretending. The greatest masters in all human history, Jesus and Gautama (the Buddha(, did not value their disciples in terms of numbers. And anyone who tries to show you how "important" she is by saying that she has "thousands" of followers is only childishly, and ignorantly, selfdisplaying the ego.

Anyone who boasts of how "well-known" she is, how "famous," has also missed the entire point of enlightenment, and denied it. She is suffering from one of the most serious diseases in the whole of mysticism-- egotism. It is a disease that makes the pathetic ego-selfesteem feel better for a few minutes, but it seriously wounds the
Soulmind.

A teacher, in our world, must use an egoname. Jesus, Gautama, and other fine mystics used them. But, in the life of a true teacher, the ego or name must never be the center of the teaching, or the work. Any "teacher" who boasts or brags about her "many incarnations," and any teacher who amusingly claims to have been great beings from the past is laughable from a spiritual perspective. She is also quite pathetic. And she is certainly not enlightened-- not even close!
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"Purgatory" and "Hell"

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I believe that, in the history of religion, both "hell" and "purgatory" were symbolic terms concerning eternal life after death. Both concerned states or conditions experienced here on earth.

To simplify the complex literature, both "hell" and "purgatory" contain suffering. In fact, both conditions might contain the exact same suffering. But "purgatory" originates with a word that means "purification." So, in the condition of "purgatory," you are making real progress, both mental and spiritual. Purgatory improves people.

"Hell" does not necessarily improve a person. It is recognized as suffering due to negative karma. The person suffers, but does not know why. She knows why only after enlightenment. When a person knows why she is suffering, this transforms her state from one of "hell" to one of "purgatory."

For only when we understand why we suffer does suffering have a purifying effect on our Souls. So, hell and purgatory might be exactly the same conditions; the difference lies in the one suffering, in her awareness, knowledge, understanding, or wisdom.

An enlightened being is never so careless as to end up in hell. But purgatorial states are common on earth for both enlightened and some unenlightened people.

The very old tradition teaches that a Soul can be "prayed out" of purgatory. This superstition evolved from the awareness that total escape from purgatory was possible by discovering Union through communication with God (interior Love). For Love ultimately liberates us all from all suffering-- including all "hell" states and "purgatory" states.

We all suffer on earth. The wise are called upon to understand why suffering exists, to understand karma and universal justice, for Godmind is always just and never unjust. This realization alone, deeply felt, can liberate from hell and move a person into purgatory. With further study, work, Love, and yielding to the divine will, a person is moved, in time, from "purgatory" into "heaven" (bliss, joy, or ecstasy). This is, in the final analysis, an act of God (Love), and not anything that we "do." This is "salvation," and originates with only grace, although we can make our lives more beautiful by cooperating with the calling of Love.

This movement in Mind, from purgatory to heaven, is enlightenment. It is also called "liberation" and "salvation."
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Jesus and Immortality

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Jesus was an awakened, illuminated, and enlightened man. The great psychologist Dr. Carl Jung believed that the Gospel-stories were allegory, not literal history. As fundies, of course, we were dogmatically locked into the straight-jacket of insisting that every word was literal history.

But legends grow like weeds, especially around amazing or unusual people. Sometimes, these mythologies have nothing to do with "real" or literal events. It is not necessary to be dogmatic about this issue. Personally, a "middle of the road" approach is preferred here: Certain events and descriptions in the Gospels might well be symbolic legends, and others might well be literal, or have had a foundation in an actual event.

But still, it would be a terrible mistake (often made by fundies) to confuse Gospel writers with the modern definition of the word "historians." They often wrote, not to be "accurate" in the literal and scientific modern sense, but to get across spiritual lessons. At times, most ancient writers could not have cared less whether a described event actually, literally occurred. The important thing to them was not historical accuracy, but the lessons.

We know for certain that legends grew up around other "celestial" or spiritual messengers and teachers. It is said that the Buddha, for example, was "born of a virgin," and that he wrestled with Mara, the tempter, for forty days and nights before his enlightenment. But Buddhist scholars and experts universally agree that these were symbolic statements. They indicated a special being of light who recognized that he was not a body, but a mind (Soul). That is why great teachers are often divided from the rest of us by a story re parthenogenesis (birth from a virgin).

So, we need not believe in the literal virgin-birth to follow, understand, or love Jesus as a master, a "son of God." Nor, by the way, need we disbelieve. We can simply keep an open mind. Unlike the cults, people of sophisticated spirituality do not need "black and white," simple "yes or no" answers to every question.

In fact, recognition of Jesus' full humanity actually brings him closer to "home," as he was truly "one of us." The very ancient Christian formula said that he was "true God and true man." He was a man who realized that his true or higher Self was an immortal, non-physical Soul. At Its core, this Soul was the Spirit, God, or Love. In fact, he directed this Soul to become an incarnation or perfect reflection of Love
(God).

He was not a freak, a one-of-a-kind forever being. Instead, his early disciple got it right when he said, "Christ died for you, leaving you a model to follow his footsteps closely." So, our most active Love for Christ lies not in worshipping his human form, but in trying honestly to follow him, as he called upon people to do. In fact, he had a habit of saying, "Follow Me."

So, as he said, "The things that I do, you also will do-- and even things greater than these." So, do we see Jesus as God?

Yes, for he said the perennial statement of the mystic. He said, "I and the Father are one." But if Jesus is a model, not a freak, it implies that, deep down, in our minds, in the deep Unconscious, we are also unified with the great perfect Mind (Spirit) called "God." Indeed, like Jesus, we all have a Lovemind or Love-nature "buried" deep within the "unconscious" Mind. Our challenge is to tap this interior Christ-nature, this Christ-spirit, and to manifest Its Love in our world.

Ancient Christians such as Marcion (about 140 CE) clearly distinguished between "Jesus" the man and "Christ" the Spirit. Jesus the historical man was born, lived, and died. But Christ the everlasting Spirit lived through that death; as a Soul, he proved that death is a survivable experience. It was among his more important lessons: "I will die," he said in effect, "and I will come back to my friends and prove that you -- and we all -- survive death. Death is not the end."

And of course, his body (Jesus) did die. But his enlightened Soul (Christ) did not. (Indeed, in his Soul he had become the Mind of God, deep within him as It is within you and me, and all beings of Love.)

So, in our lives, "Jesus Christ" is a human image of the God beyond ordinary imagination, and beyond even symbols. In Jesus, we can see the "face of God," the full human and divine expressions of Love.

As you can see here, the knowing that God is Love changes everything. Then, we do not have the traditional difficulties of the history of theology. We do not have to explain how Jesus and God-- two different "persons"-- are "one," as Jesus declared. Love lives in your heart, as It did in the heart of Jesus. A human mind can "become one" with Love by living Its principles, for Love is not "another person." This very simply explains such profound mysteries as the "oneness" of Jesus and God.

Since Jesus was a model, we are expected to "follow" him, to live as he lived, and to act and behave with Love towards even our "enemies," again, as he said. For we, like him, are potentially "one with" God. God is not another "person" (this word means "mask") in outer space. God is the very deep Lovemind (Mind filled with only Love, overflowing with Love) at the core of all minds. It is a shared or collective Mind, the very deepest Unconscious. The entire "material, external, physical" universe is an expression of the Mind of God.

We usually live our everyday lives in a kind of sleep, or unawareness of spiritual ideas. That is why, in the symbolic book of Genesis, "Jehovah" (the principle of ignorance) put "Adam" to sleep, and the record never says that Adam ever woke up. Human history begins after Adam is put to sleep by the god of ignorance, Jehovah. Only later does the God of Love come to us, and awaken us. ("Awakening" is a synonym for "enlightenment.")

Again, a whole library could be written to answer your most profound inquiry. Several books have been written here about the deep mysteries of God and human minds, and the many relationships and interactions among them.

Your second question concerns the afterlife. That there is an afterlife is what gives deeper meaning to our actions and lives here on earth. For earth is a place of visitors, but no one really "lives" here.

For years, we were in total denial of death. As Jehovah's Witnesses, we suffered from a severe form of "thanatophobia," or death-terror. But, for the first time in history, tens of thousands of people have actually died, and biomedical technology has made it possible to literally bring them back from the dead. (See the breakthrough work, by Dr. Raymond Moody, Life After Life. It can be found at any bookstore, in a used paperback edition.) Medical interviews have proved, beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt, that these people continued as minds after their bodies were heart-dead and brain-dead. (They were truly clinically dead. To say that they had a "near-death experience is simply a way of giving in to sixteenth-century materialism, which denies survival.) Of course, Jehovah's Witnesses and materialists dismiss the afterlife because, for other reasons, they do not want to believe in it. They say that it is all brain-induced hallucination. But this idea must be wrong, for if you give ten people a powerful drug, such as lsd, you will have ten very different experiences; for the cells and structures of different brains are very different. But many thousands have died and returned with accounts of exactly the same experience. I can attest to this truth, for I have died twice.

How many people would have to return from a country called "Russia," where you have never personally visited, before you would believe that this country really existed? It is similar with the afterlife.

Antique materialism, and Jehovah's Witnesses, claim that all thought, and consciousness, originate in the physical brain. Modern medicine and science now question this dogma. The famous neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles said that the brain was merely the "switchboard" for a non-physical mind (Soul). People have been able to think even after huge portions of their physical brains have been destroyed in accidents.

Immortality is one of the clearest teachings of the Christian Scriptures. To limit this to 144,000, based on a literal interpretation of a verse in Revelation (14:1), inside the teaching that the entire book of Revelation is symbolic, does not make consistent good sense.

Again, entire libraries have been written on this most captivating subject, so they cannot all be adequately summarized here. Since cults keep their members in enforced ignorance, discouraging reading, I take the opposite tact: Read everything! As a free and independent adult, you can choose what you want to believe, and know, and need not fear "influence" by books. Books cannot harm you; that is simply a superstition designed to keep people in ignorance.

Much, much more to come later, my friend. In fact, would you like to read one of my other books? If so, simply say the word, for teaching and learning were the two reasons that I was born.:)
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Zen Judaism

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Zen Judaism:

If there is no self,
whose arthritis is this?
Be here now.
Be someplace else later.
Is that so complicated?

Drink tea and nourish life.
With the first sip, joy.
With the second, satisfaction.
With the third, peace.
With the fourth, a Danish.

Wherever you go, there you are.
Your luggage is another story.
Accept misfortune as a blessing.
Do not wish for perfect health
What would you talk about?

The journey of a thousand miles
begins with a single "oy."

There is no escaping karma.
In a previous life, you never called,
you never wrote, you never visited.
And whose fault was that?

Zen is not easy.
It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have?
Bupkes.

The Tao does not speak.
The Tao does not blame.
The Tao does not take sides.
The Tao has no expectations.
The Tao demands nothing of others.
The Tao is not Jewish.

Breathe in. Breathe out.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this, and attaining Enlightenment
will be the least of your problems.

Let your mind be as a floating cloud.
Let your stillness be as the wooded glen.
And sit up straight. You'll never meet the
Buddha with such rounded shoulders.

Be patient to achieve all things.
Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

To find the Buddha, look within.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.

To practice Zen and the art of Jewish
motorcycle maintenance, do the following:
GET RID OF THE MOTORCYCLE.
What were you thinking?

Be aware of your body.
Be aware of your perceptions.
Keep in mind that not every physical
sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.

The Buddha taught that one should practice loving
kindness to all sentient beings.
Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being
who happens to be Jewish?

Though only your skin, sinews, and bones remain,
though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away,
yet shall you meditate and not stir
until you have attained full Enlightenment.
But, first, a little nosh.

by David Bader

(Thanks to Mick Gallagher)
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