Foundation – Purpose – Meaning – Destiny
This physical life is after all merely a parable, a corporeal telling of a tale with meanings disguised, a momentary riddle condensing truths eternal. Thirty-four essays and poems, moving from small scenes in Nature and the shape of a single life, through the structure beneath it — Choice, consciousness, and why this world holds so much madness — toward the place of Light that awaits.
Glimpses in Nature
1At the Ranch
“One of the two big black horses was nuzzling the little pigs this morning, on and on before he knew I was watching, licking and grooming, the two little pigs together.”
2Frantic
“The robin parents frantically cheep and cheep, or should I say cry and cry?”
3Deer and Coyotes
“Deer stand on the trail above the gamboling coyote pups in the valley, a mother and yearling deer maybe.”
4Hillside
“So beautiful, this simple hillside. So beautiful in peace and momentary safety.”
5Seeing Through Our Dreams and Scars
“What would I see? I’m not asking to see anymore. I will see what I’m supposed to see. I see blessings.”
6Small World
“The world looks small this morning, the thinness of the atmosphere somehow evident, the rippling geology only a thin crust, the burgeoning population compressed into an acutely finite area.”
7A Higher Perspective
“The ants flew this morning on their colony’s annual matrimonial breeding flight!”
The shape of a life
8Summary of Life
“What would I tell anyone? What would I tell myself?”
9What's Left After Conforming
“There is a curious purity in being purely one’s self and getting lost in the Purpose.”
10Winning with the Stacked Deck of Life
“Don’t we all wish we were different?”
11Did We Love?
“We each leave our legacy, whether an empty and unnoticed void or a towering chrome and steel corporation.”
The framework: Choice, birth, consciousness
12Our Actions: Coerced; Compelled; Chosen
“The answers are all right before us. The structure of existence, the nature of our being, the summary of purpose and meaning, it is all right before us.”
13Our Ancient Birth
“I call this temporal world the place of our spiritual birth and the time of our Choice.”
14Inexorable Life
“Ultimately, what is Life? Life is the creation of our essence, we the children of God.”
15Stream of Consciousness
“There is of course only consciousness.”
16Impossible Yearning
“Is the deep Unity and Communion to which the human spirit is called fundamentally not realizable on this earth?”
Why this world: the Garden, madness, and Love
17Knowledge of Good and Evil
“To have profound knowledge of good and evil you must be inescapably trapped in a situation out of your control.”
18Would We Miss Death
“What would we do without the immense overhead of our physical maintenance?”
19Terrifying Passage from the Garden to the Kin'dom
“Imagine what existence would be like without fear and pain.”
20The Scrum of Perfection
“Life is a scrum, an unfair – odds stacked – guaranteed to lose – struggle….and from the grime and blood and dung arise the Light of Beauty and glimpses of Love.”
21Beauty in the Madness
“On a recent sunrise contemplative walk, I experienced a most curious peaceful insight.”
22Faith Madness
“Living in faith means of necessity living in contradiction to the world.”
23Fledging
“This world is merely a launching point. To understand the Purpose and Reality of the stew while just looking at the iron pot is impossible.”
24Storm of Creation
“Let the thunder into your life, let its peels of threat shake your soul.”
25Dark Matter and the Light of Love
“Human society is a chaos of suffering and misery and injustice and violence.”
26Forgiving God
“Is it really all our fault?”
27The Inevitable and the Certain
“In this world the balance required to maintain the Choice (necessary for the creation of pure Love) means that that which is holy and pure will inevitably come to disaster.”
28Apprenticed to God
“Oh, to not be productive, to be liberated from the need to be productive!”
Living toward Unity
29Bridges of Sound and Light
“Sound and light, this stuff that serves as the tenuous connection among souls, this flimsy bridge we struggle to refine and craft and carve and polish, then call it “art”.”
30Pray Alone, That You May Love Together
“Each element of consciousness, each individual soul, knows only that to which it gets exposed by its immediate experiences and that which it is told by the other people around it.”
31Currency of the Soul
“Shadows race down the hill toward our lives, making it all the more imperative to soak up the sunshine.”
32Three Principles
“Were we to boil everything down to three principles:”
What awaits
33Shadow Embrace
“The embrace of shadows, welcoming home; mere projections of embrace, offering hints of the depths of connection.”
34Overlapping Projections of Gods
“In that place of Light, each individual conscious being projects a soft reality, strong but flexible, without the cutting, sharp, jagged edges of the clashing, conflicting, colliding individual realities of this world.”