Why Should Anyone Hear Me?

A being of light takes a vessel
  To enter this world of forms
And starts out on a life journey
  To face the inevitable storms

Nestled away in these cocoons
  To our true glory fast asleep
We wander in this land of darkness
  Like wayward, lost, helpless sheep

In that darkness where children are crying
  And their parents look so forlorn
In that darkness where innocents are dying
 In the areas that are war torn

Where some are so persecuted
  For things they do, think or say
Where the poor huddled masses are cheated
 By those more privileged than they

A place filled with terrible visions
  Of the fear, unfairness, and pain
We all try to understand it
  But no one can seem to explain

I too was asleep in my vessel
  To the glory before my birth
Thinking I was just flesh and bone
  Not knowing my true worth

I was raised in a western tradition
  And have self-studied eastern thought
Mathematics and the sciences are
  Subjects that I was formally taught

But all these studies in comparison
  Pales to when I found my light
A power we have within us all
  That can set these dark things aright

Those who hear, rise up with me
  Reclaim what you used to be
Discover the Truth that lies within
  The Truth that can set you free.
 
I was just lying here sleeping,
  What difference can my voice make?
Why should anyone hear me?
  Because now I stand here awake.

AddendumUniversalTruth

 

Homegrown

Enlightenment

Universal Truth

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Copyright

Copyright © 2021

Registration Number: TXu 2-289-244

Publishing All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Publishing: 2021

Independent Publisher

PO Box 310

Flint Hill, Virginia 22627

 

 

 

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Pursuing Enlightenment

​ Section 1.1: What Is Enlightenment?

​ Section 1.2: When East Met West

​ Section 1.3: Homegrown Enlightenment

​Chapter 2: Doctrine of the Two Truths

​ Section 2.1: Two Distinct Lines of Query

​ Section 2.2: Personal Truth of ‘I Perceive’

​ Section 2.3: Universal Truth of ‘I Am’

​Chapter 3: Things We Simply Believe

​ Section 3.1 Our Reliance on Things Believed

​ Section 3.2: That Which Leads Us Astray

​ Section 3.3: Practicing Due Diligence

​Chapter 4: Our Custom Crafted Cages

​ Section 4.1: Physical Human Bondage

​ Section 4.2: Psychological Human Bondage

​ Section 4.3: A Dangerous Assumption

​ Chapter 5:Institutionalized Belief

​ Section 5.1: Our Inclination to Be Religious

​ Section 5.2: Our Inherent Need for Science

​ Section 5.3: Pros and Cons

​Chapter 6: What is Wrong with Religion?

​ Section 6.1: Dissecting a Faith-Based Example

​ Section 6.2: Intellectual Rebellion

​ Section 6.3: Only by Seeking Shall Ye Find

​Chapter 7: What Is Wrong with Science?

​ Section 7.1: Notable Achievements

​ Section 7.2: Fundamental Obstacles

​ Section 7.4: Compromised Moral Compass

​ Section 7.5: Science vs Religion

​Chapter 8: The Path of Self-Discovery

​ Section 8.1: The Science of Being Alive

​ Section 8.2: The Art of Living Correctly

​ Section 8.3: Pursuing Liberation

​Chapter 9: I Am That

​ Section 9.1: Foundation of Counterpoint Pairs

​ Section 9.2: Evolving Spiritual Perspective

​Chapter 10: Whereto from Here?

​Section 10.1: Tempering Conscious Steel

Section 10.2: Key Take-Away Points

​Section 10.3: Elaborating this Universal Truth

​Section 10.4: Closing Thoughts

​ Epilogue

Tables and Figures

Table 2-1

A descriptive aid of contrast and comparison might help shed a little light on this lessor known of the two truths. This esoteric Universal Truth stands in stark contrast to the personal truth in many ways, and highlighting these differences helps to bring this Universal Truth into better focus. The key elements of these contrasting differences are listed in the table below.

From this table, it is clear that the Personal Truth is very dutifully focused on providing specific life solutions to the types of real-world problem that we face everyday. It is detail oriented in focus, and it is also complicated by the presence of the many things that we individually believe to be true without complete confidence making it an ever-changing, relative truth that we are literally just making up as we progress through the experience of our life.

Table 3-1:

Table 3-2:

Table 8-1:

Some common examples of these opposite pairs are listed in the table below:

Table 8-2:

Some of these specific behavior opposite pairs are listed in the table below:

In the context of these groups of people, selfishness is the root cause of an egotistic behavior in these social matters while the selfless inclinations lead to behaviors that are more altruistic. Also emerging as a generalization from these opposite extremes is the generalized concept of right and wrong.

Figure 8-1:

This never-ending cycle occurs in the three step process illustrated in the figure below.

 

This cyclical goal oriented process is initially driven by our will to survive. In that regard, a considerable portion of the personal truth is reserved for the things that support that survival as a matter of high priority.

False Prophets: Science

Science is the systematic approach using reasoned speculation, structured observation, and rational analysis to build knowledge about a complex subject in the natural world. It has been credited with saving lives and being instrumental in making possible the complex infrastructures that make our present day, comfortable standard of living possible. It is the savior that many today believe will further ease man’s suffering and possibly even make men immortal.

Today, many look to science to provide answers to difficult and previously unanswerable questions instead of the traditional approach of looking to religion. Science has been adopted as a belief system by some who want what they consider to be a rational alternative to religion. This ascension of science to a belief support institution has not necessarily been good for science. 

 

As a belief system, science attracts the trust of non-scientist followers. Non-scientist followers are very much like religious believers. They don’t really understand science, but they have come to trust it in some cases with an almost blind faith. This trust has market value, and this market values has a very corrupting tendency. Now that science has been elevated to a belief system it faces many of the same challenges that have already corrupted religion.

Today, there are many indications that large numbers of people are not as ardent believers in science as there used to be. These people are not just the religious who feel disenfranchised by science attacks on their religions. They are regular people who don’t believe in vaccinations, climate change, pharmaceutical industry integrity, dietary recommendations, and many other things where scientific opinion had previously been very respected. Some of the respect that had been earned by centuries of diligent and rigidly quality controlled work has been fritted away by shameless profiteering and twisting of facts for other selfish or misguided motives.

A lot of these people have stopped blind faith believing in science quite frankly because there are many products delivered in the name of science these day that are no more than worthless marketing dribble and are just not worth believing. The truth is that science is a methodology devoid in itself of any claim to integrity or respect. The working scientists generate this integrity and respect by virtue of the diligence they maintain while applying this methodology in their work. A number of integrity problems exist such as:

The integrity of science is today in question because of the corrupting influence of business and because some researchers have simple lost their personal integrity for petty, selfish reasons.  Oversight, the great purifier of scientific research, is in great peril to the point in some cased it is virtually none existent. Any scientific inquiry without effective oversight is highly questionable, likely even worthless.

Science today is in a never ending marketing mode. Any science that has not figured out how to achieve commercial success is just one funding cycle away from becoming extinct. Sometimes this need for funding supersedes the need to maintain integrity.  Science is frequently misrepresented. For example, 24 hour news likes to promote science stories because of the commercial appeal, and frequently, they misreport with fractious and misleading information for this commercial value.

Some people believe (or at least used to believe) that science is on a constant search for things that will improve our existence, but that archaic notion is wrong today. Typically, big corporation are deciding where science should and should not go as they look for the next big thing to sell or some piece of marketing to help sell things already in place. Certainly, there are individual scientist who care about things, but the corporations that employ most of them care only about profit. As a result, many important issues for humanity are never investigated like the orphan drugs because they would have a low return on investment.  

 

Being a belief system has not been a positive experience for science.  Some scientists relish the thought that some revere them. This reverence equates to a personal prestige and possibly of favorable consideration for funding, but more importantly, it equates to relevance.   In some cases, more time is spent trying to be revered than being right.

 

The history of science is highlighted by its real standout individuals who were only interested in being right.  The obsession with being right is why they ended up being revered many times retrospectively because their insistence on being right was a more difficult path. Real science can only be about getting at the truth, and the only thing that matters in that regard is being right.

Science without the proper oversight, peer review, and independent verification is susceptible to the same corrupting influences that have corrupted religion. Some people will continue to believe in science no matter what, but many will only continue to believe in science if scientists are consistently policing their ranks to purge all bias and demanding the highest quality product that can be achieved. 

 

This purging of bias and emphasis on the highest quality product unfortunately is not happening enough today and so the confidence erodes. Science today cannot be graded as a whole. It has to be taken piece by piece because the integrity of the work is a direct function of the person/group doing the work.

I can say that I do believe that science can be used by scientists of high integrity in a properly controlled environment of peer review and oversight to build complex understanding of observable things and phenomena, but I cannot say that I believe in science. The important distinction here for me is that the first assertion contains the proper, required caveats that the latter does not. The implications of this very subtle distinction are surprisingly far reaching.

Jesus and the Gnostic Tradition

Modern day Christianity is a good example of backsliding from aggressive knowledge acquisition to rigid, structured dogma. During the course of early Christian development, a seismic transition in approach occurred in a blatant attempt to exploit this emotional dependency. This stark transition is clearly apparent in the early history of Christianity's evolution to become a religion.

The central figure in all variations of Christianity is the great teacher Jesus Christ who purportedly traveled around teaching through sermons that promoted doing good deeds and loving each other. He never personally wrote any of these things down, but the things that he said were later recorded by others who had seen him. These second-hand accounts were the only written record of his teachings and even evidence of his existence.

The first organized religion to congeal around this example of Jesus after his death was a variety of forms of Gnosticism. Gnosticism at that time was a thread of spiritual thought running through various iterations in the Mediterranean region espousing a knowledge of the Divine via direct experience. The Gnostics believed that the material world was created by a supreme being, and that a portion of this supreme being was trapped within the human body which could only be liberated by the accumulation of gnosis (aka knowledge).

Gnosticism was a collection of ancient religious ideas and systems that emphasized personal experimentation and practice to acquire knowledge without any reliance on religious dogma. In gnosticism, gnosis is an esoteric mystical knowledge of transcendence that is acquired by way of internal, intuitive means and that salvation is the result of this knowledge of the divine. It was prominent around the Mediterranean basin around 200 CE existing in conjunction with early Christian movements and ideas emerging from the middle stage developments of the Greek philosophy of Plato.

Gnostic writings contain some sayings attributed to Jesus that exhibit similarities with modern Christian canonical sayings. Other of these sayings attributed to Jesus are strikingly different. For example, canonical sayings talk about the coming of an end-time while the Gnostic sayings describe a kingdom of heaven that is already here, not a future event. The Gnostic tradition was a theology of mysticism wherein the kingdom of heaven exists in the here and now. Some believe the Gnostic sayings were recorded nearer to the time of Jesus’s death and are thus closer to the source of the teachings of Jesus.

Perhaps the most dramatic difference between the Gnostic and modern Christians is the perceived path to salvation. The Gnostics believed salvation was earned by diligently seeking knowledge while the modern Christians believe salvation is a reward for dutifully keeping the faith in spite of adversity. Modern Christian scriptures attribute the words ‘seek and ye shall find’ to Jesus. These word seem to more support the Gnostic belief that requires an active process of seeking rather than the passive process of simple believing the things we are told.

This specific change in spiritual approach occurred with the second organized religion based on Jesus when the Roman empire adopted a Christian religion of the own. Constantine was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. He declared religious tolerance for Christianity in the Roman empire and called the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE which was the first of many effort where the modern Christian beliefs were officially defined hundreds of years after the death of Jesus. Some contend that Constantine’s conversion to Christianity was inspired more by political expediency than spiritual revelation. This proclivity for political expediency still exists in modern Christianity.

These decided revelation by the church became the beliefs that the faithful would be forced to believe. In these newly emerging Christian beliefs, the individual focus on peace, love, and knowledge was shifted in a direction more conducive to the accumulation of power, control, and wealth by the church and its administrators. Groups, such as the Gnostics, responsible for the competing lines of thought were aggressively persecuted to near extinction.

The Cathars were a form of Gnostic belief in 1200 - 1400 CE France that were limited in size because they were not proselytizers. The Cathars were wiped out by French royalty and Catholic Church armies during the Albigensian Crusade. The ruthless brutality of this crusade was captured in the words spoken by a crusade commander when asked by his soldiers how to identify Catholics from Cathars in a town known to be home to both. He replied "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" ("Kill them all, the Lord will recognize His own").

What remained of the Cathars after this Catholic Church crusade were absorbed into some of the early Protestant sects who themselves went on to have a contentious relationship with the Catholic Church. Religious involvement in what should be political affairs of state has a very corrupting influence on that religion, and a religion’s proclivity to proselytize new followers and heavy reliance on dogma are symptoms of this corruption. The objective of politicized religion is an effective marketing strategy for the acquisition and management of follower to the benefit of the religious organization. This politicized religion is a low overhead, high-profit margin business that enjoys the benefit of tax shelter.

My Personal Pursuit of Enlightenment

The concepts of meditation  and yoga are commonly understood in a casual way by pretty much everyone in Western Culture today.  This awareness is largely due to the efforts of the three prominent teacher Vivekananda (1893), Yogananda (1920), and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1959).  These spiritual leaders left a lasting impression on the country in the form of many new seekers looking for this eastern vision of enlightenment and a layer of intermediaries to support these many seekers in lieu of directed access to the guru.  

These intermediaries dispensed the knowledge and techniques in the manner of the sowing of seeds onto the ground (i.e. those who aspire to know).  If the ground was fertile, the seeds would germinate, take root, and grow.  Given the right conditions, these seekers would forge ahead and complete the journey of discovery on their own.  In these very rare cases (most simply give up), the fruit of these efforts is the ‘homegrown’ enlightenment of the pioneering seeker who is largely left to their own devices to fill in the gaps of understanding to complete the journey and interpret the results.

I was one of those new seekers.   I never had any direct connection with my guru.  Rather, I dealt with  intermediaries acting remotely on his behalf to a point in time, and after that, I was totally on my own to sort through these experiences and transitions that I now believe were set in motion by these eastern practices of yoga and meditation.  

At first, I was in the company of many others as I plunged headlong into the commitment to the practice of meditation with the conviction of a person obsessed.  The years passed, and while the general quality of my life was on a steady upward trend since starting meditation, the first decade slipped away without my much desired enlightenment.  I added the practice of the Siddhis to my regime, and remained committed to my new/longer routine.  The trend of steady progress continued as I remained steadfast in my practice.  Friends using the same technique came and went as I remained regular and steadfast, but I continued to diligently plod along.

At some point a few decades later, I was all alone in my immediate world in my pursuit of enlightenment.  I had lost contact with everyone else practicing my particular technique, and in fact, I had little contact with anyone on a similar path of any technique.  I continued to relentlessly forge ahead into I knew not what.  I shared my experiences and practices with no one after I had been set adrift by circumstance.  All the while, knowing that I was slowly but steadily growing and changing.

Finally after 40+ years of regular (obsessively regular) meditation, yoga, and siddha practice, I feel that I have experienced a major shift of consciousness.  There was not much to report in the slow steady changes that preceded this most recent major shift.  This major shift was the quantum leap that created something worth discussing. This discovery is part of an ongoing event, but enough materials have been collected at this point to begin a discussion about my experiences and findings. 

Without any direct contact with teachers, guides, or even many fellow seekers, I have arrived somewhere, but I am not exactly sure where this place is.  It seems pretty significant to me now, but it is not exactly what I had imagined when I started this path 40+ years ago.  In the light of this new clarity, so many things that were so confusing before all seem to make perfect sense to me now. 

This transition appears to have happened across the four primary areas of my being; physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.  The changes were working in parallel with staggered starting points and different times of completion.  The physical transition was first followed by the intellectual and emotional.  The spiritual was the last to start, and at the time of this writing, these transitions are still ongoing in the form of a cascading series of revelations and insight and physical changes to my body.

Clearly from my new perspective, a state of consciousness does exist that is very consistent with the descriptions in the ancient texts.  I now live it every day.  Maybe this is how it is for everyone as they advance in age, but as I look around me now, that does not appear to be the case for most everyone else that I see.

This place exists deep inside every one of us.  It is a place where there is no fear, no longing or regret.  A place in which there is sanctuary from all the selfish worldly things that otherwise would disturb our sense of peace.  Where we can take comfort in the truth about who we are without worry about what others might think.  A place where there is a fountainhead from which springs the answers to all our questions. 

There is a degree of freedom that comes with these revelations that is greater than anything I could have imagined.  It is a freedom from all the things inside us that stifles our action before we even attempt them.  This freedom comes from a level of honesty that was not possible for me before the transition.  It is a freedom that can only come from being totally honest with yourself.

Time spent in this place is not burdened by things that happened in the past or a fear of what may happen in the future.  Every moment is lived and enjoyed in that very moment.

These blog posts will provide further and more specific details about my western experience of this very eastern concept.  I hope that relating my experiences can be helpful to others, and comments from others about their personal experience would be most welcome.