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The Law of Distraction

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When I finished the exegesis of John’s Revelation, I went around to several local congregations to advertise the work. I went first to the pastor of the church for the Bible study I was attending – a meeting that went so well that I was soon disinvited from the Bible study.

I then went to the Center for Spiritual Living just two buildings down the street. Having read Ernest Holmes’ work, I thought that the ministers there might be receptive to other work that clarified the intentions of Christ. The conversation with the two female leaders was uncomfortable, the energy shifting decidedly when I handed over my business card, turning even more sour when I suggested that “there were certain constraints on the focus of our intention.” On the way home that evening, I was nearly run off the road by a man that I clearly perceived was under their influence.

Oh, boys and girls.

The marketing of the power of intention for our society – whether as “The Secret” or “Spiritual Living” or “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” – tends to treat it as magic. You set your intention, and the “Law of Attraction” brings together the elements that will manifest your desires.

Unfortunately for the neophyte, the management of intention has a lineage that predates even humanity. Among the pre-historic intentional fields we might include “predation” and “lust.” These fields accumulate power by giving those under their control a brief moment of satiation that requires persistent struggle to attain. In every other moment, their subscribers focus intention toward that satiation, making others in their community susceptible to the same urges.

At one time, human society recognized these intentional fields as corrupting personalities – known variously as devils or demons. But the devil’s greatest trick has been convincing us that he doesn’t exist. The sexualization of romantic love follows from the idea that we’re just acting naturally – like all the animals around us. The “dog-eat-dog” culture of high finance is seen as a defense against the testosterone-fueled aggression of our peers. The problem is with other people and the cultures they create, rather than with the sinful intentional fields we inherited from our Darwinian past.

Purging sin was the challenge of monotheism as undertaken by the ancients. Socrates preached that there must be one God, and this was also the conclusion reached by Abram, the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Both observed that the gods fought among themselves for our attention, forcing upon humanity patterns of behavior that corrupted our societies. So they chose to celebrate one god – a god of higher human intention.

A god that was eventually refined into pure love.

So try not to be distracted by attraction. Yes, it will draw people to you that share your intentions, but when you reach a certain critical mass, you will come to the attention of those ancient animalistic tendencies, and the weight of their power will humble you if you do not take refuge in love.

It’s not magic. There are mechanisms, and the choice of mechanisms is still a choice that binds your soul – even if the devil no longer appears personally before you with a feathered pen and parchment in his hands.

So choose love, and trust that love will choose you. After all, that’s its only purpose.

Welcoming the Light of Love

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Stephen Harrod Buhner closes The Lost Language of Plants just as I would have hoped. After recounting a healing session with a young lady, the book closes with four autobiographic sketches, each by a herbologist recounting immersion in biophilia. Left behind are the recriminations and the tone of moral superiority that marred the preceding chapters. Each of the writers focuses on the opportunity before us now – an opportunity to call into being relationships built around affirmations of love shared with the world around us.

As the book progressed, lunging between the yin and yang of natural and industrial chemistry, I found myself remembering my experiences of being stalked by predators. One was at a Webelos overnighter, of all things, at Camp Whitsett in the Southern Sierras. A Native American elder inducted a number of the senior scouts in a fire ceremony. As the ceremony progressed, I had a strong sense of the bear in the man, and felt the fire of predation building in the camp as the boys settled in to sleep. Rather than hiding from it, I let it enter into my heart, sent my will into the forest to demonstrate that no bears were present, and then breathed peace into the space I had cleared. The fear resided, and the camp settled into slumber. Several years later, I was driving home from work on Friday night, knowing that my youngest son had been sent to the Sierras on a camping trip, and felt the bear again in his presence. I sent the warning “Wake up, Gregory! Get Mr. Povah!” When he returned that Sunday, I learned that on Saturday morning, he had woken early, and heard a noise as Mr. Povah’s son Braden was dragged away from the camp by a black bear. The onrush of shouting campers scared the bear off, and Braden survived with only a bruised ankle.

Given his immersion in the natural world, I doubt that Buhner has not had similar experiences. But perhaps not – he has been chosen by the world of chlorophyll, the deep, patient source of renewal. That touches the animal realm through the herbivores, an intimate co-creative process that Buhner documents in loving detail. But the animal kingdom has another dimension as well: in Love Works, I enumerate the rites of blood – sex, maternity, the hunt and sacrifice. Each of these has its unique pathologies, and the fragility of animal existence means that those pressures are often driven into fear and rage.

In Dune, the great science-fiction author Frank Herbert advances the Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

It was this discipline that I exercised in Camp Whitsett. It is the discipline of the rational mind, a discipline that safeguards our ability to perceive clearly and so to exercise our intelligence when facing circumstances that our natural talents could never hope to overcome. It is to perceive the forces in play with the aim of negotiating a win-win outcome when the predator’s zero-sum mentality holds sway.

As I finished the life sketches that close The Lost Language of Plants, I was filled with the desire to find these people and join forces with them. A great barrier arose, followed by a vision and memory. Buhner shares the plant kingdom’s experience of light, that great source of love that originates from the sun and desires to merge with us through them. But when discussing with my sister the ecological disasters that will confront our children, I told her,

This is how we heal the world: by teaching the plants not simply to receive passively the light, but to reach up to the sun and guide its power to rebuild the devastated forests and savannahs.

This may seem like a little thing, but to accomplish it we have to convince them to surrender the conventions of the chemistry that Buhner celebrates so tenderly. It is to recognize that it is not the plant that is important, but the spiritual transformation that gives courage to the fearful through its physical manifestations.

Buhner touches on this metaphorically in describing his healing work. He testifies that he meets people that are missing parts, and is guided by visions of plants that can fill those voids. It is in establishing those relationships that healing arrives, through an expansion of spirit that occurs when our hollowness is filled.

I spent the rest of the day struggling with the grief that filled me then.

It has two parts. The first is that the plant is only an intermediary – it is a reservoir in which love gathers, but it is not the source itself. It was the source that disciplined me, forcing me stand apart until people realize that all intermediaries are imperfect. Secondly: in that place apart we are beset by those that would ravage the gardens that Buhner and his peers create. We plant the seeds of knowledge, and watch as they are corrupted by the predators. We heal the wounded, and set them again into the world, hoping that each time the light of love reaches more deeply into them.

It is hard to be told that our path has led us into evil. I wish that Buhner could see that scientific reductionism is a means of removing the primitive triggers of predation from the world. Yes, it has gone too far, but it has also created the field in which he and his friends plant their garden.

Lest we wish to repeat the experience of Eden, we must leave recrimination behind. I take solace that in his closing Buhner celebrates the light of love that will ultimately unite us all.

Anti-Christ Anti-Scientist

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A few years back, National Geographic ran a photo essay on the Alaskan tundra. In the publication notes at the back, the photographer recounted a conversation with a native regarding the urban tourists that passed through each year. When asked to characterize them, the native, a man who lived in solitude for most of the year, remarked that “They seem lonely.” That loneliness reflects not a lack of human association Rather, it is a deep disconnection in our souls from the root of life.

This problem is so characteristic of modern societies that, in our search to escape our constructed reality, we tend to gloss over the defects of ancient cultures. Pagan worshippers extol the virtues of Roman worship for its naturalism, ignoring the paternalism that gave license to fathers to murder their dependents. The homeopathic intuition of native healers is lauded, ignoring the vicious lore of hexes and curses. And nobody appears to want to reflect that xenophobia was endemic to all the ancient cultures, with outsiders that looked and spoke differently treated as inferiors.

But if the ancient world mixed its spiritual vices and virtues, it is still fair to ask why the spread of modern civilization has resulted in a spiritual divorce. Naturally, critics seeking to heal the divide focus on the dominant elements of modern culture. I am sympathetic to these concerns:

  • Science applies methods of analytical reductionism to reveal creative possibilities. Unfortunately, reducing things to their constituent parts is not something that souls engage willingly: to do so would be a form of suicide. Therefore, science achieves its most impressive manifestations in the material realm. Scientists seeking funding for fundamental research have a strong motivation to ignore their failure to explain spiritual phenomena, and tend actually to pretend that souls just don’t exist.
  • Capitalism heralds the efficiency of the free market in responding to unforeseen public needs and opportunities. Unfortunately (as recognized by Adam Smith), the metric of success – the accumulation of wealth – is too crude to support political control of resource exploitation by the greedy. Worse, concentration of wealth has allowed the exploiters to broadcast rationalizations for their behavior, almost all of which cast the exploited resources as spiritually deficient, and therefore not deserving of protection.
  • The traditions of Abraham (dominated by Christianity in American society) tackle the problem of masculine aggression by heralding the power released through submission to unconditional love. Unfortunately, the target population persists in its aggressive recidivism, to the extent that scripture is often quoted selectively (when not completely rewritten) to justify destructive behaviors that are decried universally by the avatar(s). This perversion divorces us from the noblest masculine manifestations of spiritual maturity.

Given the problems outlined above, I would be surprised if it were impossible to assemble evidence that each of the three elements can facilitate depravity. The science of eugenics justified medical experiments on populations (both human and animal) that were considered to lack souls, and therefore believed to be unable to feel pain. Unbridled greed first drove the adoption of slavery in the New World – both of native populations and imported Africans, and now drives us pell-mell down the road to ecological collapse. And the “Great Commission” to propagate the good news of Christ’s resurrection has been used to justify violent suppression of indigenous cultures.

But is it fair to stop there? After all, is not the material construction of our modern reality, with its buildings, appliances and tools, far more conducive to liberty from fear than the natural world we inhabited previously with its predators, diseases, weather and natural disasters? Does not capitalism also distribute wealth and create monetary velocity that supports personal initiative, thereby providing an escape from exploitation? And have not the traditions of Abraham been foremost in providing charitable support of those in need?

For those seeking spiritual reconnection, this seems to leave us in a limbo of ambiguity. If we cannot find the seeds of disconnection in our history, then how are we to escape from the mistakes of the past?

The answer I have held out here is that the way out is to recognize that it’s not just about us.

One of the great gifts of the Bible is that it charts the progression of human spiritual maturity from the heralded “era of innocence” experienced by primitive cultures. In The Soul Comes First, I explain the Biblical days of creation as the history of the evolution of the senses as revealed by the souls that survived the experience. The Garden of Eden is a similar metaphor, in my view. It describes the ideal state sought by the pagans – man and spirit united to create a world of peace. But that unity is sundered by the serpent, who tempts the woman – the nexus of life-engagement – into partaking of the “fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” For that sin, man and woman are cast out of the Garden.

As I expressed it recently to a friend, the great tragedy of the Fall was the sundering of trust. That trust was not only between mankind and spirit, but between man and woman. Ever since, we have been engaged in the sterile course of trying to fix blame for the problem. What we fail to realize, however, is that the source of the problem existed before the Garden. We did not create the serpent, although we were susceptible to its wiles.

We were cast out of Eden not because application of our intelligence was evil, but because we had admitted sin as a guide to our intelligence. Rather than allowing Life to guide our intelligence for good, we became committed to a course of resolving the difference between good and evil, and of developing the strength to choose the good. This is an extremely dangerous path, and the spiritual collective decides that we must be cast out lest we partake of the “Tree of Life” and live forever.

Again, we can think of this in material terms, but from the perspective of the soul of life, this is to say “if man, having admitted the serpent into his mind, enters into the Soul of Life now, then we will never be rid of the serpent.” In Revelation, this aim is made quite clear: the serpent/dragon attempts at one point to assault heaven, and is ultimately destroyed in the final confrontation with Christ.

But what is the serpent? The best way to characterize it is in the contrast between reptilian and mammalian parenting: while the mammalian newborn is nurtured for weeks or years before being forced into independence, the baby Komodo dragon must climb a tree to avoid being eaten by its mother. The reptile manifests the virtues of the predator, seeing in others only resources to be consumed.

So the problem is not science, or capitalism, or Christianity – it is with the ancient reptilian spiritual infection that we must purge. It is our path, on the knowledge of good and evil, to master that influence. It is a skill first encouraged in Cain (“sin crouches at your door, but you can master it”) and delivered by Jesus to the Apostles when he says “what you loose here on earth will be loosed in heaven, and what you bind here on earth will be bound in heaven.”

But until we as a species accede to the disciplines taught by Christ, we will discover, the further we walk with sin down the path of knowledge, the more distant will become our relationships with the Spirit of Life. Not because we can be expected to do differently, nor as punishment for our weakness, but as a matter of its own self-preservation.

A Demonstration of Strength

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The juxtaposition could hardly have been more jarring: after completing today’s post, at morning break the lead story reported the attacks in France. In the worst violence since WW II, in coordinated attacks jihadists murdered as many as 120 people at three separate locations.

The reference to WW II is notable in revealing how much the world has changed. In relative terms, civil war and ISIL’s terrorist opportunism has brought Syrian suffering comparable to that of European populations during WW II. However, where indifference allowed Hitler to spread war across the continent from 1938 to 1944, cautious intervention in support of the rebels coupled with airstrikes and economic isolation has limited the spread of violence from Syria. As a result, to date the net cost to France of its intervention in the Middle East is tens of thousand of times fewer deaths than it suffered in WW II.

The natural response of the French government to these renewed attacks must be heightened scrutiny of Muslim populations, and Islamic authorities in France should be expected to both increase cooperation with security services and publicly condemn extremist activities.

But how do the events in France reflect on my post this morning, obviously an assertion that peace must be our aim?

While I will not participate in physical violence, I am not a pacifist. We fight cancers with surgery and chemotherapy. Both courses of treatment weaken the body. So with our struggle against terrorism, whether state sponsored (as in Syria and Ukraine) or indigenous, we must reduce its virulence by withholding resources and legitimacy from the perpetrators and seek when possible to destroy the mechanisms of its operation.

But there is more than that to the process. We must maintain vigilance in the spiritual domain to ensure that in the course of executing our campaign of violence, we do not become infected by the mentality that sustains self-justification in the mind of the terrorist. My practice extends even further: in manifesting that discipline, we also gain the power to immerse the jihadist in our knowledge of the benefits of peace.

It is this second battle that I have joined, and I am merciless in my own way. The mentality against which I struggle is ancient, and thrives when the actions of specific individuals are characterized as justifying violent prejudice against entire populations. That was the response of the victors to German resolve in WW I, with WW II the inevitable consequence. It is also the response of the jihadist to global inequity in the allocation of wealth and political influence for the benefit of Western populations that do not comprehend the egregious magnitude of our self-indulgence.

As I see it, every military action should be advertised as a failure of the mechanisms of peace, and reported with regret even when it is successful in reducing the threat of violence on tactical and strategic terms. Even more, I would hope that every announcement would be accompanied with a summary of diplomatic efforts to empower peace-loving peoples seeking to reassert control of regions in turmoil.

So in the months and years to come, I pray that the French people recognize the strength reflected in the asymmetrical results of Middle Eastern intervention. This will almost certainly not be the last such experience they will suffer, in a history dating back to attacks in the ’70s and ’80s, and modern access to secure communications almost guarantees that individuals committed to violence will continue to succeed in their aims. In absolute terms, though, the jihadists and their dependents, isolated and starved of resources in their caliphate, suffer far, far worse.

But to reiterate: it is essential, on the spiritual level, to recognize that the attacks reflect the insanity, in the context of modern technology, of the expression of ancient patterns of predation. While that mentality will lash out more and more violently in its attempts to survive the return of Christ, its impotence is revealed in the increasing brevity of the interruptions it can generate in the creative outpourings that emerge from love.

Warriors and Healers

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In The Soul Comes First, I interpret the Bible as the story of the investment made by unconditional love to organize matter with the goal of allowing spirit to purge itself of selfishness. That process is manifested in all of the physical processes of this reality, spanning history from stellar evolution to the knowledge economy.

The apparent contradiction is that these processes appear superficially to reward selfishness. The most impressive lights in the sky are the giant stars. It is the massive dinosaurs that capture our attention as the pinnacle of pre-human history. And civilizations are recognized for the geographical extent that allows them to acquire resources to support promotion of their culture, with limited weight given to the degree to which the benefits of power were distributed to the common citizen.

The antidote to selfishness is rapid energetic collapse. The stellar giant, in a fraction of the time allotted to its lesser peers, exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses, ejecting its hoarded mass in a supernova that populates the heavens with heavy elements that become the seeds of planets. While the dinosaurs (and other giant life-forms) are prolific consumers of biomass, the biophysics of large life-forms ensures that they are vulnerable to ecological stresses, among which include the global effects of asteroid impacts and ash spewed from volcanic vents. In human history, great civilizations collapse when vulnerable urban populations face the collapse of agricultural and energy supplies, whether due to the accumulation of clay on irrigated land, loss of soil following destruction of natural flora, or the burning of energy stored in biomass faster than the rate of replenishment.

Humanity has been granted two great boons that allow it the opportunity to escape this course. The first is the mammalian amygdala, which includes among its affects social bonding that causes us to mourn the loss of our intimates. The second is the intelligence that allows us to understand causation, and thus to manage our lives to minimize painful experiences, extending to the loss of our intimates.

In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin posits the possibility of a transition from predatory consumption to empathic sustainability. Rifkin catalogs the technological capabilities that make the latter possible: global information systems that expand the geographical reach of our intimacy, materials science and engineering that will allow us to tap into reusable sources of energy, and modelling methods that will allow us to design economic systems that are sustainable given the known limits of raw material supplies.

In my experience, the manifestation of that potential collides in the tension between the warrior and the healer. As I explain below, these are behaviors that both support the transition to sustainability but that often contradict each other’s expression.

In the early stages of cultural development, the natural context is dominated by predators. Survival of a species lacking either prolific breeding or natural armaments requires tools that can be used to defend against predation. Naturally, these same tools, sufficient to protect against species that survive by destruction of weaker animals, empower the wielders to become predators themselves. As technology advances, the destructiveness of weapons makes organization of their deployment a source of social power. There is no great civilization in human history whose origins cannot be traced either to a monopoly on weapons technology or to superior military organization.

The warrior culture is a domestication of the primitive predatory impulse with the goal of protecting access to the resources required to sustain civilization. A true manifestation of this culture dates only to the Cold War era, when military planners in the West realized that generalized conflict, always guaranteed to produce a loser, no longer even produced a winner. Furthermore, the complexity of modern weapons systems ensures that maintaining and deploying military dominance requires the involvement of a citizenry firmly committed to the survival of the society. In fact, while the warrior is often the recipient of sophisticated training in the use of destructive force, they rarely possess the intellectual skills to design and manufacture modern weapons. Thus the Cold War was not just a struggle over the efficacy of planned vs. liberal economies. It was also proof that in the modern military-industrial economies, nations that turn military force against their citizens (tyrannies) cannot compete with nations that cultivate a warrior class.

The problem with this social contract is that it preserves our focus on the dominant threat to the stability of civilizations – homo sapiens sapiens itself. It simply ensures that our predatory impulses remain focused on those parts of the ecosystem that lack political representation. Thus, while Europe responds to Russian adventurism in Georgia and the Ukraine by seeking alternative supplies of fossil fuel, still the world failed to control effectively carbon dioxide emissions that some predicted (as far back as 1950) would undermine ecological sustainability all across the globe (much as did the asteroid that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs). Even now, most of the larger wild species have been decimated, being replaced by domesticated herds.

As a result, we are faced with a future that is going to require extensive investment in healing of broken ecologies. This requires another huge leap in human culture. The psychological force that motivates the healer is empathy, or compassion.

Working ecosystems are enormously complex. The biogeneticists struggle even to control the metabolism of the cyanobacteria in flooded iron mines. The biochemistry that leads to cyanide production has a multitude of pathways – remove one protein catalyst and another pathway springs up in its place. The only means of control appears to be annihilation – make the environment so poisonous that even bacteria cannot survive. But that would be to introduce poisons to the environment worse even than cyanide.

Given this overwhelming Rube-Goldbergesque complexity, accreted through billenia of random trial and error, the only means of assessing the wellness of an ecosystem is to engage spiritually with a sense of its workingness.

The fundamental disconnect is that, while western economies proclaim the domestication of war, the forces that drive conflict – scarcity of resources that make the daily lives of most humans a desperate search for basic necessities – have not been resolved. Desperate people adopt predatory behaviors, stealing sustenance from one another, and the surviving communities celebrate the strength of the predator. This is visible in Russian idolization of Vladimir Putin, and in lionization of third-world potentates all across the globe.

In the framework that I have defined, we cannot escape the reality that the workingness of the ecosystems that sustain human life are irretrievably broken. This spawns predators, which the warriors of the West beat down in order to secure access to resources needed to sustain our unstable societies. But the healer recognizes that the problem is one of sustainability, and the only way to ensure peace, over the long term, is either to annihilate the exploited populations (a la the Third Reich) or provide them the resources to create a sustainable society.

Of course, the warrior looks at the latter proposal and says: “But we just finished destroying this threat, and now you want to go and stand them on their feet and give them the power to attack us again? Do you understand how many of us have surrendered our futures to protecting you? And you want to do what?”

And of course the healer says: “But have you been to see these people? How can you ignore their suffering?”

In America, to this point the warriors have been given priority. The era since the Vietnam War has seen a steady erosion of the influence of the Department of State in deference to the Department of Defense. This slide was reversed only recently by the Obama Administration. There is some justification for allowing the leaders of those sacrificed in military conflict to control the adventurism of inexperienced civilians. While Muslim extremists make much of the revelation that the Bush Administration asked military planners to chart the conquest of the tyrannies of the Middle East from Iran to Libya, my understanding is that the carefully couched response was, in effect, “Are your out of your fucking minds?!?”

While I celebrate the ascendancy of economic containment over military conflict, I attend still the creation of institutions that extend that practice to cultures that exploit ecosystems. It is only then that healers will have the opportunity to address the root cause of predatory behavior, and thereby justify the reallocation of resources from military competition to cultural development. Predation is not the only urge that destabilizes ecosystems – so too does procreation. It is only when the vast majority of humanity has the psychological strength to subject all such urges to rational control will the ultimate goal of global sustainability be secured, and the healers be able to succeed in their essential work.

Until then, warriors, please recognize that it is for your children that healers assume these risks. And healers, recognizes that the warrior’s anxiety has a rational basis.

Suppression

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She asked, “What does that card say? I can’t read it.”

“Guilt.”

She waved it off, and then, ignoring the facilitator’s instructions, launched into a description of how she would run a workshop like this.

I broke in. “Mine says ‘suppression.’ When I read it, I remembered a conversation with a man that told me it was time to ‘unleash the dragon.'”

She smiled slyly. “Dragons are powerful creatures.”

“Yes, but my power comes from a different source. That’s why what he said didn’t work. I’ve spent a long time dealing with hostility to my aims, as a means of understanding the reasons people pose for resistance. I guess that it’s time for that to end.”

Our shadow cards put aside, one of our late-arriving “tricksters” found the “maturity” card as the lodestone for our journey. To aid in activation of our shadow side, we were instructed in “shaman breathing”: two sharp inhales through the nose, and then a vocal exhale. My partner escaped to the far side of the room before we donned our blindfolds.

I knew what I needed to do, but I have always tried to keep others out of my struggle. I filled my lungs with short snorts and breathed out with a low moan. Focusing on my brain stem, I allowed it to fill with energy, placing fingers on my neck to guide it more deeply. Distracted by the moaning and grunting around me, I concluded that trying to control the process wasn’t going to work. I inhaled harshly and deeply twice, raised my face, and roared at the sky for ten seconds.

When I finished, a man’s voice exclaimed “Whoa!” But we were no longer just in the room. I was in a jungle, 140 million years ago. The air around me was filled with frightened chirps and the thumps and grunts of herbivores. The echoes of the day filled the room.

Thus began the long dance forward through time. I gloried in all the tools of the predator: teeth, thumb-claws, powerful legs and tails. We swept through the sky and water, and bestrode the land. For a time the dance became arhythmic: music did not move us – it was the twisting of the land and the rolling of rocks that punctuated our steps.

I rolled myself into an egg and listened for danger before cracking the shell. My snout dug into the belly of my prey. But the pressure of disaster dragged at me. I became the last saurian, dragging my limbs through the smoke-laden air into death.

Settling on the floor, I listened disdainfully to the shuffling around me. I had lost my body, but I still had fear. I pounded hard on the floor. I am present! The room shifted nervously. Again! I sat as a king and surveyed the herd, turning my will first this way and then that. I ruled as Emperor from the pyramids in Tenochtitlan. When Europe arose, I sent cannons into the field. After war was tamed, I rose heavenward on skyscrapers, driving my claws into the flow of money to suck energy from human industry.

And then, with a sudden startle, I realized that the game was wearisome, tawdry, boring. There was no evolution, no innovation, no change. I was sinking into abstraction, losing myself.

And then a higher understanding came to me.

“I was told this by a woman that I loved very deeply:”

It’s just a process, Brian.

“Don’t feel guilty. Destruction clears the field. It prevents us from repeating the mistakes of the past.

“Work with us.”

The back of my skull twitches. It’s trying to get back in, but we don’t need the personality any longer. Just the principle, as one among many, in service to love.

Religious Intolerance in the Military

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I’ve been active on the Religious Tolerance group on Facebook. I declared my position fairly early on in a posting that stated “all great religious teachings serve to transform an existence driven by lies, fear and death into an existence guided by truth, hope and life.” However there are those that see me as a Christian proselytizer, largely because I quote scripture. This makes me sad. I write there because I believe that “Christian intolerance” is rooted in false teaching, and that if we look in scripture, we will find evidence to that effect. I quote scripture because I believe that it is the best tool that we have for combating intolerance masquerading as Christianity.

This is nowhere more evident than in those that use death threats in order to conquer institutions in “the name of Christ.” I have been made aware recently of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and the death threats issued against its members and their families by Christian militants.

We don’t have to attain much depth of spiritual experience before we become aware that spiritual evolution did not begin with humanity. The dominant personalities in the spiritual realm, prior to our emergence, were the predators that stand atop the biological food chain. These would have been the dinosaurs (which appear as the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the dragon in Revelation) and the bear and great cats (the mammalian predators) that appear in Revelation and Daniel’s Dream of the Four Beasts.

Revelation is best understood as the history of the unseating of predation as the driver of evolution in favor of intelligent engineering that is informed by unconditional love. This is not a clean and simple process, and is made more difficult because humanity has only a dim perception of the spiritual dynamics. What transpires in Revelation 13:11-15 is that the dragon dresses up as the lamb and empowers the mammalian predators to religious dominance. As it is written: “All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast – all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world”, that lamb being Christ. Clearly, those that follow the beast do not follow Christ.

The beast continues to promulgate teaching that “anyone that does not worship the idol must die.” The beast famously bears the number “666.” While John points out that this is the number of man (who was created on the sixth “day”), six is also the number of the “day” of mammals that attained evolutionary dominance after the fall of the dinosaurs.

So what is directly written in the Bible is that the use of death threats is false teaching, and actually anti-Christ.

That this teaching is particularly strong in the military, which is an institution organized to harness the forces of predation, is not at all surprising. As I see it, those that resist this process, such as Mr. Weinstein and his colleagues, are agents of truth and life, and regardless of their profession of faith, are held in the heart of Christ with the most tender concern and honored regard.