The DX versus Bad Religion

The phrase, "You are no longer God," will resonant with anger and sadness within you for the simple reason that all of us can easily imagine what it would be like if we were God. Well, we were once were God and so we naturally now feel deprived and impotent. The people who forget they were once God are in a state of distress, and, spiritmatter religions have superimposed various interpretations upon this distress. The basic interpretation is that sin separates us from God and that if we would but repent and obey we would enjoy oneness with God. Yet the DX teaches that our felt sense of separation is not due to a Fall into sin, but is instead purposeful. Does the DX then negate the need for salvation? Well that depends on how you define salvation altogether. But we are getting too far ahead of ourselves.  The Third Option allows a new understanding of what true religion and spirituality is within the context of the DX. Having said this, the individual is central to the sub-infinite universes. The fact is that you can't have a universe without people, and so we, the descendents of LELA's Dream Tribe, have been sent here.  

If spiritual seekers wish to become one with the Awakened One, then they will surely be annihilated. There can be no other God in  Infinity except the One God, and so Infinity must always act to maintain its sovereignty as the One who says, "I Am and there is no other."  For a devotee or worshipper to believe that the Infinite God would dote on them as they sat at his feet in Infinity betrays a spiritual ignorance of Infinity. There are no worshippers, thrones, angels, or anything else in Infinity except God. This is not to say that thrones, angels, seraphim and such do not exist. Rather, it is to say that they do not exist within Infinity.  So who is the divine "I" with whom spiritual seekers wish to become one?  That question will be reserved for our later chapter on religion.  

This duality of "I's" poses an interesting challenge, for the stated goal in many enlightenment groups and religions is to obtain, or realize, Unity, or Oneness, with God. Yet what does it mean to become One with God?  The conventional understanding is that the "I" one speaks of and experiences as being one's true self, will, when enlightened, be subsumed into God.  The egoic "I" of the human self will be transformed by God's love and essentially vanish into God. This model of enlightenment refers back to the belief that we are not God and must seek to become One with God by purging ourselves of our selfish "I-centered" sins and desires. In this case, spiritual work requires that we align ourselves to God's will to the extent that our will becomes an expression of God's will: "Not my will, by thy will be done."  This spiritual paradigm argues that if we can become One with God, then all of our sufferings will cease and we will reside forever in a condition of peace, love, and equanimity, which qualities are associated with God by many religions.     

But is the Infinite God, the Awakened God, only  peace, love, and equanimity?  

Of course not, for to be Infinite is to contain good and evil, love and hate, and all other contradictions and paradoxes. If God did not contain literally everything, including contradictions, opposites, and paradoxes, then that One could not logically be Infinite. Therefore, we must understand anew the potency of what it means when God says, "I".  God is Infinite and so when the Awakened God says "I", the divine pronoun refers to everything within that One's Infinite nature.  Paradoxically, the Awakened God in Infinity has only one form of expression available and that form is absolute Unity, for in a state of absolute Unity, only the One "I" who is Awake as God can be expressed.  

If spiritual seekers wish to become one with the Awakened One, then they will surely be annihilated. There can be no other one in  Infinity except the One, and so Infinity must always act to maintain its sovereignty as the One who says, "I Am and there is no other."  The principle of Unity prohibits the expression of any separate form, process, or being within Infinity. For a devotee or worshipper to believe that the Infinite God would dote on them as they sat in praise at his feet in Infinity betrays a spiritual ignorance of Infinity. There are no worshippers, thrones, angels, or anything else in Infinity except God. This is not to say that thrones, angels, seraphim and such do not exist. Rather, it is to say that they do not exist within Infinity.  So who is the divine "I" with whom spiritual seekers wish to become one?  That question will be reserved for our later chapter on religion. 

Their God even has to live with knowing that he must witness, attend to, and forgive their small and insipid lives -- some of which are secretly criminal -- both now and for all of eternity. Break out the harps.

In the early Universe, when we existed in a different form,  we were closer to the beginning and sensed the DX and Infinity. We sensed it because we all had collectively participated in the DX Dream when we were unified as LELA.  My job as a messenger is to bring to your remembrance the DX so that you can awaken to its truth. In doing so, you will see that freedom and an intelligent morality (as opposed to religious and political ideologies  which deny humans their freedom) are the most valuable and optimal conditions for human life.   This book comes at a time when Islam and Judeo-Christianity are again arrayed against each other for dominance in the world, even if it means destroying freedom and peace in order to gain dominance.  One of my purposes is to offer an alternative to this madness by challenging the absolutist claims of both of these religious systems.  I propose to show you why both of these religious systems are sub-Infinite and therefore cannot be the absolute truth as they claim. Neither religion can withstand the full force of a confrontation with the Infinite.  Both will be swallowed up by Infinity and be revealed to be less than Infinite, and therefore less than absolute. Being rendered sub-Infinite removes their basis to make absolute claims upon people and frees humanity from the worst of their tyrannical demands. 

Does the knowledge of the DX render religious systems obsolete? 

Not at all, for both Christianity and Islam exceptionally potent and can offer, when at their best, great spiritual purity. Yet they also possess great institutional power, which power can be wielded by corrupt men who are not true to the true spiritual essence of their faith. DX teaching attempts to differentiate good religion from bad. Insofar as any religion can contain elements of good and bad, we do not condemn the religion but rather differentiate between its positive and negative expressions. However, to the extent that any religion claims that it alone is the truth, the DX will seek to deny  these monotheistic and/or absolutist religions the checkmate they seek upon all other religions and every person in the world.  That we have made an analogy between spiritmatter religions and  concrete is an attempt to show that absolutist religions are ideological constructs made from the idea of spirit and matter and so are not absolute truths. 

By understanding the core idea upon which religion is built, namely spiritmatter, one can see that this core idea is common to all religions. Given that the idea of spiritmatter is the common platform, or chassis, upon which all religions are built, one can see that absolutist religions share the same platform as all other religions and are therefore not unique or absolute as they claim. Instead, all religions are a variation upon the idea of spiritmatter.  Absolutist religions simply claim that their version of spiritmatter the absolute truth and is binding upon all humans under the penalty and threat of hell for disbelief.  But let's face it, religion is like software: There are a lot of programs out there and they all have inherent strengths and weaknesses. Being religious offers you Heaven, but in the meantime you are substantially deprived of self-expression by an oppressive morality. When you are dead, you don't get to come back to recover what religion took from you. The years are all lost. Maybe a new, freedom-based program of belief would be better for you. 

There is an old saying which states that, "The Devil only has as much power as you give him." And so the DX suggests that bad religion, like the Devil, only as has much power as you give it. The fear of Hell and damnation that bad religion seeks to instill in people's minds is only as powerful as people's imagination. Once the spell of fear is broken and a person realizes that they are free and that God does not want to send them to Hell, then they will walk away from bad religion and find a better and more humane religion. One has to wonder about people who have a significant emotional commitment to the idea that the unsaved will be consciously tortured forever in Hell for not believing. What kind of God tortures people forever in Hell, and what kind of person worships the Supreme Torturer? 

Bad religions want to use their spiritmatter doctrines to checkmate you, to force you into surrendering your life, time, talents, and money to them. Because the DX opens the door to Infinity, the DX will challenge the oppressive spiritmatter theologies used by bad religions. The DX allows people to see beyond the sub-Infinite boundaries of human religion and into the heart of Infinity. The DX is a new level of human thought and it offers freedom from religious tyranny. In this sense, this book is about exposing bad religion as much as it is providing a Third Option.  It is necessary to deconstruct the absolutism of bad religions because they seek to block the door to the deeper reality of Infinity. They do this by positing that the absolute upper limit and boundary of existence is their God, which limit and boundary  we will easily exceed in our journey. Infinity is not challenged by sub-Infinite religions for the simple reason that it is Infinite and so is not bound in anyway to the religious claims of sub-Infinite persons, be they Gods, popes, or prophetesses. All of these sub-Infinite magnificoes can make no claims against the Infinite.  

What is a bad religion? 

A bad religion is any religion that does not affirm human freedom, protect the dignity of the individual, seek to heal the hurting, perform acts of charity, and promote world peace, among other ideals. Bad religions consider the world and non-believers to be their enemies.  Some bad religions even believe that God has authorized them to use intimidation, threats, violence, crimes, and even murder against their enemies. Yet for a religion, especially one that teaches inner peace, sanity, or love, to use violence and criminal acts against non-believers renders it no more than a criminal syndicate using God as a cover for its crimes against humanity.  Further, the doctrines of bad religion are usually nothing more than self-serving tautologies: they claim that their "Bible" is the Word of God because their Bible says it is. This is absurd.  What is to prevent anyone from writing the following statement in any book:

This book is the Word of God. Because this book says it is the Word of God, it is the Word of God.

Bad religions make such claims and then threaten Hell and other punishments when we do not obey. Yet you are in no way bound to obey the tautologies of bad religions. The DX teaches that there are many roads to God -- and the DX will show you why this is a true statement.  The DX will not lock you into a belief system, for it is rather a meta-religion, a way of thinking that is open to all religions, save those that are bad. Religion can be a very good and positive force in human life, and so what we seek is that which is good and wholesome in religion while rejecting that which is bad. Each of us is free to make up our own minds.  The DX asks you to believe nothing unless it is makes sense to you. Ultimately, you must decide what is true and what truth means to you. A religion can force its "truth" on you, but if you do not really believe it, then why accept it?  

While the DX will reveal the reason why you were born into this Universe with a profound need to find unity with God, it will also explain why this 

primal urge has misunderstood, corrupted, and wholly perverted by bad religions. The DX gives you a way to think beyond their gilded cages of 

scripture, pews, altars, hymnals, and sermons. The DX will free you from the demand of bad religion that you think and act only in certain ways, that

you give money for the privilege of being told how to think and act even while the leaders of bad religions break all the rules they enforce with such a

 heavy hand. Of such leaders, Jesus said:

"They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them... You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.  Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. (Matthew 23:4, 23-28)

The DX seeks to liberate people from bad religion and authoritarian religious leaders by offering them a different way to think about how the Universe began. Once you shift the basis of your origins, you can shift your entire outlook about what religion is and what it should do. The DX is a way to recalibrate the way you think about life and your relationship to God. Because the DX affirms the primacy of human freedom, it carries no penalties if you do not believe it, for it is but one way of thinking. Conversely, a bad religion is one that puts a figurative or literal gun to your head and then tells you it will pull the trigger if you do not believe and obey. The DX has no such power and makes no such claims. It is a system of thought whose cornerstones are the freedom of thought, religion, expression, conscience, and a call for people to adopt an intelligent personal morality.

Once you understand the internal logic of the DX, you will experience its transforming power in many liberating ways, the most evident of which is the realization that bad religion and extremist political views have no inherent power over you. You may have to oppose their temporal strength, perhaps even in radical ways, but they ultimately have no power over you. If the worst tyrants can do is kill you, then it is better to die than to be their slave. The refusal to be a slave has always been the heroic determination of free peoples of all ages. 

Paradoxically, the realization that bad religion has no power over you will allow you to enjoy a  good religion far more than you might otherwise, for the DX will show you that good religion can be a very positive force when it embraces Infinity rather than bowing to a rigid set of scriptures enforced by angry old men, power-hungry religious bureaucrats, and narcissistic, violent young people, all of whom hate those who do not believe as they do or bow to their religious tyranny.  Worse, bad religious leaders interpret their megalomania, paranoia, and hatred as being messianic or prophetic. They are indeed blind as Jesus said.

The DX represents some aspect of truth that will have resonance with a certain audience. Some people will find the DX compelling while others will deem it bad, evil, false, or wrong. DX thinking recognizes the inevitability of disagreement, for whenever one assumes a position, opposition will naturally arise. The DX, then, embraces diversity, not as a naive form of political correctness, but rather because diversity is, as I will argue, a structural component engineered into the Universe by LELA. Diversity, however, is a two-edged sword, for we can embrace it in our attempt to evolve and peacefully co-exist, or we can deny diversity and fight for causes that we arbitrarily declare to patriotic, nationalistic, or racially superior, when in fact some ulterior motive such as greed underlies our flag-waving. The denial of diversity in favor of the absolutism of bad religion or extreme politics is insane and has produced untold human suffering. Given the large human population of the earth and its global nature, we must embrace diversity, peace, and engage in the constant negotiations and put forth the rigor required to maintain peace and stability. Peace and stability are the best outcomes of the DX, and yet neither is a given, for life is always a struggle against tyranny. 

To this point, however, Watts was right in the sense that God needs to hide from himself if for no other reason than to forget about the non-stop onslaught of Infinity. Something similar obtains in human life, for we too need to escape from all of life's madness, the non-stop 24/7 media onslaught, and the sameness of work and routine. We too need to forget ourselves and find refuge and sanctuary that we might delve quietly into mystery and drink from the grandeur that is life.  

Life's innate grandeur, when fully appreciated, shines forth with a purity that is Divine. This grandeur not does mean that life is free of suffering, rather it indicates that even in the midst of suffering human grandeur can and does exist. In fact, suffering sometimes brings out the nobility of the human race in a way that prosperity simply cannot;  this is not to praise suffering, for suffering can be aberrating as well as ennobling.  Rather, it points to the fact that the grandeur of true human dignity is possible in any circumstance. Grandeur is not the antithesis of absurdity, for grandeur itself has the innate power to recognize and include its own absurdities and failings as part of the human condition. This grandeur is part of the power of true Humanism, as is the ability to recognize and participate in the power of dreams. As we will see, such things as grandeur, absurdities, and the power of dreams have been handed down to us from the Infinite.

Zen as opting out of the dream by understaning the nothing of the DXsphere.

LELA as the Dreamer is somewhat akin to the Christian belief that while God the Father stayed in Heaven,  his earthly incarnation Jesus walked about and suffered all of the limitations being human.  One important difference between Christianity and the Disunification is that, following the DX, LELA dA Maya went into a reduced state of consciousness. The reduced state of consciousness, which we will call disunified Awareness, or dA, became the malleable, psychic substrate upon which is built the psyches of all beings in our Universe.  Conversely, Christianity asserts that Jesus was conscious of himself as God at all times and embodied the entire self-knowledge of God.  This implies that his human brain could store the complete self-knowledge of God in addition to serving as the neural platform that would allow for the exercise of all the attributes ascribed to YHWH. Jesus was a man, and yet if one is to believe that he was also God, then one must be able to reconcile the finite capacity limits of the human brain with a human that allegedly was God in the flesh. The human brain has finite memory storage and synaptic processing capabilities, and so how could Jesus' brain have contained the sum total Infinite knowledge of God? Furthermore, Jesus could not have been God insofar as he was localized in a human body and so could not have been omnipresent at all points in the Universe simultaneously as omnipresence demands. Using logical definitions, Jesus could not have been God in the flesh. In fact, no one can be "God in the flesh," and even the terms "flesh" and "God" are mutually contradictory. No human body can contain or localize that which is Infinite. 

Christianity of course circumvents the logical contradictions of a God-man by resort to the notion of the Trinity. While Jesus' human brain could not possibly contain the entire data set of God nor exercise the attributes of God such as omnipresence, Jesus could, through spiritual means, have access to the full potentials of God. The physical brain of Jesus, then, would have to be conceptualized as a node in a larger trinity array which array is proposed by Christian theologians.   One could further argue the unproven belief that the human brain has the potential to store, via holographic principles, the entire contents of the Universe. The holographic model forgets that holograms are static and lifeless whereas the brain is a dynamic system. The holographic model also conveniently forgets that holograms are etched by lasers onto non-living recording surfaces, whereas the brain is a living biological wonder.  

Magnificent as the human brain is, it cannot contain the entire essence of God for the simple reason that the brain is finite and God is Infinite. Much is often made of the fact that we only use some small percentage of our brains. I rather prefer to think the so-called "unused" part of the human brain is an essential part of the neural ecosystem akin to the "unused" space of the oceans, deserts, and poles of the earth.  Vast empty spaces seem as necessary in our brains as they are on earth or in outer space. Whenever an intense concentration appears -- a star, a city, or a human brain -- it needs a large adjacent empty space to counterbalance its intensity and concentration. Empty space adds the depth dimension to existence itself. Empty space is not "unused." That is too utilitarian a view and one which presumes that all of one's neural landscape must be excavated, graded, and developed with structures of knowledge stored as memory.  Given the mediocre content of much in the mass media and its banal advertising, one's brain, if it were capable of recalling everything, would be littered with billions of neurons-cum-strip-malls. It is far better to disregard much of what you see and hear so as to allow your "unused" neurons to remain unspoiled and swept by the winds of imagination. 

The world's oldest and most simple idea will make the the Disunification and religion very easy to understand. If you accept this idea, then you will understand far more about God than billions who belong to Godmatic religions. The simple idea is this:

There are many paths to God.

There are about two billion people who belong to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The central belief in each of these religions is that there is only one true way to God and that all other religions are false. These two billion Godmatists have made the world a miserable place because they deny everyone the freedom of religion. I do not deny them their freedom of religion. LELA does not deny them their freedom of religion. Yet these two billion make it their job to kill human freedom everyday when the say that their religion is the one and only way to find God.  

By analogy, the Roman Catholic Church wanted to be the only Religious Operating System in a Universe where open platforms abound. The architecture of the human mind is wide open. It is creative, flexible, adaptable, and operates best in an environment of freedom.  Yet Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam and so many other religions want you to install only their Operating Systems in your soul.  They want to 

Because the Dreamer operates from a reduced state of Awareness, she watches the Universe and all therein as One who sleeps in a luminous Dream. At times, her Dream is lucid and she seems to participate very directly and magically while at other times the Dream is a nightmare from which she seems utterly absent. For the most part, however, we live our lives in the daily grind with the Dreamer passively watching while we pay her scant attention. We are her Dream Tribe, and yet we do not know this just as we do not know that others in life are also part of that same Tribe. In this sense, we are not God hiding himself so much as we are actual people forgetting the ultimate source

we do not feel or see the Dreamer unless we pay attention and commune with her. The people in your dreams speak very directly to you, yet do they know you? Do they ever ask you to awaken them beyond the dream and not forget them? Do they ever ask you to tell them the truth so that their consciousness may be expanded beyond the level of reality in which they are arising? No, they do not. In fact, the people in your dreams are often perverse, for they may arrest or threaten you. Likewise, they may also be very friendly and generous. In any case, they do not tacitly recognize you, the observer, as the One who is the witness and source of the dream.  They are your dream tribe and work in ways you do not know, and yet they do communicate to you in ways you must seek to understand. Your dream tribe will seldom work on your level. Instead, they insist that you work on theirs. 

The theological land grab made by Judeo-Christianity on the Universe is so complete as to claim, without any evidence whatsoever apart from faith in its human-written Bible, that the Universe literally rolled off the tongue of its God. Forget the big bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background, or any or scientific data which suggests a high-energy density and photon decoupling in our early Universe; the religious will have none of it, for their God spoke the Universe into existence. Yet there are problems with the Judeo-Christian doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo, the most basic being that it can simply and only be based on faith. Any physics that are employed to defend Genesis are speculative in nature and have to be superimposed onto Genesis, a book that was written thousands of years before the scientific age. In terms of Genesis, one also has to defy the findings of contemporary geology in order to defend the idea that God created the Universe in six literal days and that the Earth is only six to eight thousand years old. One further has to defend Genesis' implicit claim that starlight from stars millions of light years away has reached our Earth which is only supposed to be six thousand years old.  What is most odd is that certain Creation Scientist call secular human science demonic while at the same time employing demonic physics to explain how faraway starlight could have reached a young earth.   

The essence of Creation Ex Nihilo and IDT is that requires that one make a leap of utter faith in believing that the God of the Bible is the Creator of our Universe, and therefore the Bible is the moral law of our Universe. Again, this is a theological land grab, pure and simple. Judeo-Christianity has no actual title deed to the Universe, nor does Islam, nor does any other sub-infinite religion. They may think they possess the title deed, but this is wishful on thinking on their part to which none of us are bound. That they would enforce their claims with the psychological violence of Hell  or actual violence of torture and murder only proves that they are religious thugs who would build God's Kingdom with bullets, threats of Hell, imprisonment, and draconian laws. Violence only proves their powerlessness, for if their Gods were true and real, they would not need to use violence, coercion, or threats -- especially to prop up a religion devoted to a God of Love, to sanity, brotherhood, or whatever other shams they use to conceal their agenda of religious and political terrorism.

ecause sub-infinite dxverses lack the monolithic construction of Infinity, they can only be built based upon probabilities. Therefore, we will see that evolution and chance play a role in the operation of our intelligently designed Universe. While the design of our Universe was Pre-Configured, the outcomes of our Universe were not pre-determined by LELA. The outcomes are left to chance, accident, free will, and the physical processes of our Universe.  Likewise, we will see that thermodynamics and death are inherent of Disunification, for death and the loss of energy in closed systems will prevail in our Universe. In essence, LELA has only an inexact foreknowledge of a nU based upon the probabilities she sees in her dream. She cannot know which probabilities will be realized until she takes the universe back at the end of its time during the Reunification.

Of course, there is nothing preventing LELA from configuring Universes of either pure good or pure evil. Our Universe is alloyed of good and evil. We know this for a fact because both plainly exist. That religions superimpose an interpretation upon the configuration of our Universe is to be expected because, as I will show, the base construction of the human psyche is pure disunified Awareness, or element number 1, and this element's key psychic property  is its ability to define, or interpret, itself in endless ways. Element number 1 is a "non-self" base that needs another group of elements with which to identify itself. It is the ultimate shape-shifter and chameleon. Element #1 is the most paradoxical and powerful of The Elementals because it has no core identity, it being what can be described as "uncommitted attention seeking an identity." This lack of a core identity, save for the exceptional power of naked and undistracted attention, allows it to consider all things impartially -- this unlike the other Elementals who can only consider things in terms of their specific bent of elemental personality.  

While we are again getting ahead of ourselves, we can say that Zen is a way to "opt-out" of the path whereby one embodies within the platform of conventional personality. Zen allows a person to uncouple from the binding power of conventional, identity-based personality and instead inhere in pure Element #1, where one may exist in a detached, impartial bliss. The caveat is that naked #1 can be easily moved by the suffering of the World and so the Buddha world-Spirit in which #1 participates often moves the enlightened ones to return to the phenomenal world that they make help liberate other beings, which beings in turn will also return to help liberate beings.  

That dA, or Element #1 it rooted in "forgetting" reminds us that is pure attention that seeks to embody itself so that it might have a core personality, or identity, in order to know itself that it may participate creatively in the phenomenal worlds.  The manner in which dA interprets a given event or idea is modified by the particular body and personality in which it finds itself. That is why two people can experience the exact same event and yet have two diametrically opposed interpretations of it. Case in point: America used nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most Americans see these actions as  just whereas the Japanese view them as evil. Historians, scholars, ethicists, and ordinary people are deeply divided on this issue and both sides have very valid reasons for their respective positions. Disagreement is inherent in Disunification, as is conflict, diversity, struggle, and everything else which comprises the human condition.  

Being human means to be in a constant struggle with the our own nature and with the conflicting views of others. This is how LELA apparently configured humanity. We have been made to wrestle with our demons and no religious formula can easily change our inherent struggle or contradictory nature. LELA gave us our nature for a reason and the best I can tell is that our struggle to achieve nobility and honor in the face of adversity is something highly prized by LELA and so we are naturally inspired by such noble struggle.  In terms of my own personal destiny and struggle, I could no more quit writing this book than I could quit breathing.  I will write other books about the Disunification to elaborate upon this one, and I will write until I die. I have few other desires than to be the means by which the knowledge of the Disunification appears in this world. 

Deconstruction as  Double Edged Sword 

The Misunderstood Quest for Unity with God

(From, Chap. 7: And as I have said, I will later tell you the reason why people in the sub-infinite universes seek union with God, contrary to the stated intentions of the Dream Tribe to incarnate. This reason accounts for the deep frustration, anger, and sense of betrayal we experience over our ultimate powerlessness, human frailty, and mortality. This reason accounts for our vast and hostile differences concerning religion, politics, human sexuality, ethnicity, and so many other aspects of life.  The concise phrase, "You are no longer God," will resonant with anger within people for the simple reason that all of us can easily imagine what it would be like if we God. We once were God and we now feel deprived and impotent. The people who forget they were once God are in a state of distress, and, spiritmatter religions have superimposed various interpretations upon this distress. The basic interpretation is that sin separates us from God and that if we would but repent and obey we would enjoy oneness with God. Yet the DX scriptures teach that the separation was not due to a Fall into sin, but was purposeful. Does the DX then negate the need for salvation? Well, that depends on how you define salvation. But we are getting too far ahead of ourselves. 

Religion as a Modulation of dA

Control, modulation, etc.

Elementsin: 1) the use of physical and psychic elements for immoral purposes; 2) Crimes against the environment. 

Christianity and Disunification

The crucifixion reveals a "Christian disunification" of sorts as God turned his back on the suffering Christ as he hung upon the Cross. The Bible tells us that sin cannot dwell in God's presence because God is holy. At some point prior to Jesus' death, God looked upon Jesus as the sin offering for the world. Accordingly, God had to "turn his back on Jesus" and separate himself from Jesus momentarily in order pour out his wrath upon Jesus.  This is why Jesus cried out, "Eloi, Eloi, la'ma sabach'thani?" which from the Aramic is translated as, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" 

For a fraction of a second then, the Christian Godhead was disunified as God the Father and God the Holy Ghost utterly separated, or disunified, themselves from Jesus.  What the Christian doctrine indicates is that the omnipresent God was not omnipresent in that moment of separation during the "sin-offering phase" of the Crucifixion. Thus, the Christian God ceased to be God altogether for that moment. My teaching of the Disunification of Infinity -- which I also consider to have been LELA's self-sacrifice -- therefore has a precedent in the religious literature of Christians. The difference in one of time. Whereas the Christians disunify God only for a moment at the Crucifixion, my secret vision -- now made public -- understands LELA Agape da Maya de Omni to be separated, or disunified, from Infinity for the duration of our Universe. This duration is eternity, for I define eternity as the lifetime of a universe. Moreover, because the vision of the DX teaches that there are other universes, LELA Agape da Maya de Omni has also disunified into innumerable other universes.   

Before a step was taken in the dark, before the sky fused with the morning colors and the day was born, before the Pharaoh's sat over Egypt, there was LELA. This One moved over the face of the deep and brought forth the immensity of what is.

LELA is the One who sat on the circle of the earth in the ancient days when glaciers carved out valleys and the oceans ran amok with fury. LELA is the One whose vision saw the beautiful range of light and the sun-kissed brown women dancing in the night. LELA is the One who evoked the Norsemen and their terrible dragon boats from the well of Infinity.

LELA is the One who dreams while "I" sleep, who listens while "I" speak, and who dies when "I" leave. Breath of my soul, and sight of my eyes, this One, this One, this One is "I". Learn the mystery of LELA, the light who exists before day, the very essence of dream, and waking, and this mortal play. Run out my days and nights to a hundred years and I still shall not know this One who walks the earth in shadow and bright sunlight.

Disunification: An Infinite Perspective

The power of Disunification thinking is that it begins with an infinite perspective and therefore is able to transcend lesser perspectives, perhaps especially sub-infinite religious beliefs. DX thinking also recognizes and embraces diversity as a natural and expected outcome of a split Infinity. Disunification thinking embraces the rainbow a multicultural and pluralistic society and rejects the monochromaticity of godmatism, racism, and nationalism as being "inbred" and therefore dysfunctional.  

The religions of spiritmatter do not reflect Infinity. Rather, they are sub-infinite expressions of dA working through the mystery and perplexity of its existence. dA, you see, is born ignorant and seldom realizes its true nature, for in the DX, dA lost its identity as God. Thus, when dA awakens in the form of a separate individual it doesn't know its pre-DX identity. Religion is a reflexive movement away from recognizing Infinity. Religion contracts Infinity and seeks to reduce the Universe to a series of beliefs that are proposed to be the absolute truth. Yet as we have seen, such sub-infinite propositions are not, to use Da Free John's term,  ultimately binding upon us as free humans. 

No longer the One Divine consciousness of Infinity, LELA -- as dA-- has become the multitude of identities in the Universe, and each of these identities is seeking to know itself and to discover its origins. Hence, while the desire to find God is universal, the Gods of conventional religion are, ironically, not themselves universal. These Gods are not universal because they are in perpetual conflict with each other and with those who do not believe in or serve them. The only universal quality of the sub-infinite Gods is their absolutist refusal to recognize their infinite source. Hence, they declare themselves Gods over that which they did not create. They hijack the Universe and try to subvert humanity to their totalitarian views that are designed only to enslave humans. The dAgods are jealous because they are insecure and mortal.  

So what is religion in the ultimate sense of the DX? 

It is many things. 

It is a response to the mystery of existence; it is a reaction to the horror of life and death; it is a hope for a better life; it is the will for political and moral dominance under the guise of doing good; it is a search for forgiveness, vindication, and justification; it is the sense of awe one feels when looking into the night sky; it is an expression of love for; it is a brutally repressive tool used to rape and control people; it is an excuse to steal, kill, and destroy; in summary, conventional religion is broad-based effort to explain and control life by using an archetypal view of God and the cosmos that is rooted in spirit and matter.

However, far from being a reverent admission of ignorance and awe in the face of the mystery in which we are arising, conventional religion has become the institutionalized, politicized, scandal ridden, donation-centered, and socially polarizing entity that we see today. While religion may be doing its adherents some good, it seldom benefits the rest of the world. The religious community emphasizes only itself, its needs, its beliefs and political agenda, while viewing the rest of the world as an adversary that will hopefully go up in apocalyptic smoke sooner than later.

As much as religion would like us to believe that it precedes life, and should therefore inform and control life, the truth is that dA creates both its Gods and its religions and then unwittingly becomes the prisoner of these creations.  Religion, when it is fundamentalist and absolutist, is a form of mass-hysteria committed to compressing human life down to a totalitarian sphere smaller than the one at the end of this sentence.

Freedom From the Gods of Spiritmatter

Spiritmatter is the temple in which the Gods of conventional religion dwell. To undo the knot of spiritmatter is to destroy the temple, for the hard fact is that these Gods can live only within the confines of spiritmatter: Jesus and Krishna, Allah and Jehovah, and all of the lesser Gods of conventional religion have no life or power outside of the Pantheon of Spiritmatter in that they utterly depend on the duality of matter and spirit for their existence to somehow make sense with the realm of disunified Energy and Awareness in which they arise.

Once spiritmatter is transcended, these dAgods are seen to dwell in a reality that is dependent upon human participation. Even as the Universe would not exist if it were not perceived, the dAgods would not exist as such unless they too were perceived.  The dAgods know this and so become absolutists to ensure obedience. They threaten Hell in the afterlife to keep people from straying or seeking other Gods. The true picture of the dAsphere is far different than that presented within conventional religion. Conventional religion would have us believe that only God and Satan inhabit the spiritual atmosphere and that we are in a war in which we must choose God and good or we will fall into Satan's clutches. If we are good, we will die and live some place beyond the sky. If we are bad, a hoofed man in a red suit will snatch us into Hell where he will torture us forever.

The DX: A Return to the Elemental God and Goddesses

Relate this to the dAtable, eg. Love is a pure psychic "element" (thus an "elemental") which has a masculine and a feminine expression.  Masculine forms of love are different than feminine forms, but both are love.  Love is mediated in the physical human body via the psyche (dA) and chromosomes (dE as XX or XY)

expresses itself in . 

It is fashionable in New Age circles to speak of an individual's godhood or inherent divinity. But the limitations of human experience argues against any imagined divinity. Affirmation, world meditation days for peace, and other collective efforts on behalf of the New Age gods have not significantly altered the planet. Yet many people continue to feel that they possess divinity.

Why do you suppose that this feeling arises?

Who hasn't said in a moment of anger, "Why, if I were God things would be different!" It is quite easy to imagine one's self as God. It is a simple thing to think about what you would do if you were God, because prior to the DX you were God. Of course, in Infinity there was no "you", but your root consciousness of dA can still recollect trace images and sensations of Godhood. Your almost infinite imagination contains fragments of the countless images, thoughts, and feelings of Infinity.

Yet when dA awoke into this universe, it had no certain memory of what had happened, for the DX was quite a shock. Imagine being involved in a horrible explosion and awakening amidst the swirling, choking rubble of stellar and psychic debris. You neither recognize the place nor your own body. You have no idea who you are, all you know is that you are fearful, uncertain, and need to survive. In order to survive you must make certain assumptions. In the absence of knowledge about anything, the primary assumption you would make is to take everything at face value: If you're afraid of something, you'll run from it; if it fulfills a need, you'll cling to it. Thus, you would quickly make a series of assumptions about yourself and your world.

This is exactly what dA does when it awakens into each new body that is born into the DX, for each time that dA opens its eyes as a baby, the possibility for a new universe occurs. Based on the born ignorance of dA, we can see why the fundamental characteristic of dA is that it identifies itself with whatever arises to its consciousness. This identification manifests itself early in life as the simple trust that children are born with.

To say that, "humans are adaptable," is to intuit the magical nature of dA. When incarnate as an individual human, dA can be born into any of several racial forms -- either as a male or female, arise in any culture, speak any language, and believe any religion -- and because it identifies itself with these things, it believes them to be truth. The basis of truth, then, as far as individual humans are concerned, is rooted in that which they identify themselves as, and with. It is terribly difficult to transcend your born familial, ethnic, cultural, national, religious, and gender identifications.

If truth arises from identification, then truth exists only in the realm of the individual, or in groups of individuals who share a collective identification. That no one agrees on truth and that everyone is different confirms the possibility of what I am saying about truth. To ask, "Who am I?" is therefore synonymous with asking, "What is truth?"

The notion that truth resides within identification should suggest to you that enlightenment has to do with transcending those identifications which limit you. While this is certainly part of enlightenment, the DX is not that easily mastered. Let's look at another potent source of your identity and truth.

Human behavior derives from a complex interplay of dE and dA. Just as atoms combine with other atoms to form increasingly elaborate atomic structures, so too do the discrete forms of dA combine and recombine with dE to form the complicated arrangements of consciousness called personality.

And just as natural forces such as gravity and thermodynamics limit and define the behavior of dE, there are forces at work that limit and define the behavior of dA. On this part of our journey we will study the nature of dA, its relationship to dE, and those forces which limit and define the expression of both.

The nature of dA is to inhabit and give life to dE forms. This is part of the secret to understanding why we can look at something and imbue it with being. What has wrongly been called "fetishism" is actually a reflection of our innate power, as dA, to imbue dE objects with life and significance -- and this goes for the very bodies we inhabit and so identify with!  As we begin to understand the power of enclosed spaces, we will begin to understand Zen from a different perspective.

Within the Disunification there is no unity; there is only relationship. While people confuse the two, the fact is that unity can only occur in Infinity and relationship can only occur in the Disunification. Unity is neither love nor a common agreement about principles, for love and agreement can only happen between separate beings, and in unity there are no separate beings. Among separate beings, love exists in contrast to hate, and such contrasts serve to distinguish relative degrees of relationship in the Disunification.

The Problems of Unrecognized Godmatgism

The Garden of Eden myth, or the notion that humanity was once innocent until it embraced evil and Fell, is based on the refusal of a Godmatist to fully accept the implications of Infinity. A "holy" God is thus postulated in order to dissociate good from evil. -- Develop this thought a al Moore, Shadow, and Godmatism

Diversity and Disunification 

The principle of Infinity is unity; the principle of the Disunification is relationship, for the Disunification is based upon an elaborate series of relationships. These relationships involve forms and forms are based upon the repetition of smaller atomic and subatomic forms.   The earth's ecosystem, the human psyche, the heartbeat of all creatures, the orbit of the planets, and the fusion of the stars are all dependent upon relationships between the disunified forms of Energy and Awareness.  To the degree that we lose our ability to foster relationships with other people and our environment, we lose our ability to survive. Therefore, the primary recognition that a traveler must make in this realm of the DX is that of the necessity of relationship. 

LELA in Infinity Exists as Uncreated Energy

Selective Reincarnation Vs. Mechanical, Karmic Reincarnation

Bodies are incredible opportunities. If you fail to understand the privilege and opportunity you will become fat, indifferent, and waste the opportunity that is your life. If you do not honor your incarnation, you may not be given an another life on this plane. DX teaching holds that reincarnation is selective in the same way dE evolution is selective: Physic evolution selects only certain people for a better reincarnation based upon their fitness as sentient beings. Nature is purposeful. Not everyone reincarnates. Some opt out of embodiment while others are passed over for promotion. The only way to get back into the process is start over at a lower evolutionary rung until you love life enough to be given a good human form. 

Karmic, or mechanical reincarnation is the wheel of birth and death.

 Adoption, Not Abortion

Given my views on incarnation, people often ask me how I feel about abortion. I do not think abortion is a good choice because it harms women psychologically and it harms the unborn.  I argue that birth control is always better than abortion. If they are not ready to have children, people should use birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies. 

Once a pregnancy occurs, I think it is far better for a woman to carry the baby and then give it up for adoption. Feminists will scream at me and say that I, as a man, have no right to tell them what they should or must do with their bodies -- and they are right. For this reason, I do not favor outlawing abortion and recognize that it is sometimes a dark necessity of life.  I support abortion in cases of rape, incest, danger to the mother's health, or abortion in a time of war or other great distress such that the likelihood is that the child will suffer and die as, for example, in a famine or genocide.  

I support the idea that no government or religion should be able to compel a woman to carry  a baby to term. There is also no way we should tell a woman to throw away her future and work at a minimum wage job because we think she should have the baby and raise it. This is a way of punishing women for having had sex. It is using the child to beat the mother down into submission to a religious ethic. That most teen-age mothers simply cannot handle the pressures does not justify abortion in my mind. Rather it affirms my belief that the baby should be given up for adoption. 

I denounce the terror tactics born again Christians, Catholics, Conservative Jews, and other religious fanatics use in fighting abortion. Christian fundamentalist and Evangelicals are offensive in so many ways, but perhaps especially in terms of abortion.  I have seldom seen such pure and unadulterated hatred in the name of God as that shown by born again Christians when it comes to abortion. I think that many Christians use abortion as an excuse to justify their complete refusal to surrender their hatred to God. These people do not love their enemies as Jesus commanded, instead they, for example, celebrate the ambush murder of abortion providers and the bombing of clinics. I use the term "ambush murder" because YHWH in the Old Testament explicitly condemned those who lie in wait to shed innocent blood. As abortion is not illegal, abortion providers are innocent blood. However, the Christian murderers ignore this scripture and say that God's law is higher than man's and so allows them to kill abortion providers. There is no higher degree of homicidal self-righteousness than that which allows one person to kill another in the name of God.  

Cases of rape, incest, or a danger to the mother's health aside, the decision to have an abortion must be made very carefully as abortion is psychologically harmful. Abortion carries within it post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes the trauma will not appear for years, but I am in absolute agreement with the view that virtually every woman who has ever had an abortion will go through life remembering how old her child would have been. 

On a personal level, I exist only because my father's biological mother gave him up for adoption. It was 1936. She was sixteen years old, pregnant, and single. An older man, a really heartless bastard, had impregnated her, denied it, and ran away.  My father's adoptive, and therefore true parents, were older people who could not have children. Beulah Augustine (nee Clark) was 42, having been born in 1894. Roland William Augustine was 38, having been born in 1898. Beulah was a nurse. She worked with the mentally ill at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Paramount, California. Roland was a pumper and worked for thirty-five years in the oil fields of Wilmington, Long Beach, and San Pedro, California, for Socony Mobil Oil.  

Beulah heard through a friend of a young woman who was pregnant and an adoption was arranged. My father, William Allen Augustine, was born on June 4, 1936 in Wilmington, California. I am eternally in debt to my true grandparents Roland and Beulah for the life of my father and my own life. I am also grateful to that young woman named Ruth who gave her baby to a nice, older childless couple who wanted a baby and could not have one. Although Ruth is my genetic grandmother I never met her. She met my dad once and then declined to meet his wife or children for reasons my father never understood. 

My father once met the man whom Ruth positively knew to be my father's father because, at age sixteen, she had not had sex with anyone else. True to his nature, this man denied it. My dad later told me that this man said that he had no money to give. My father had not come looking for money; he had come looking for his real father.  I obviously disavow this selfish, lying bastard who abandoned, denied, and hurt my father. He was a depraved spiritual criminal as is any man who abandons, denies, hurts, or refuses to financially and emotionally support his child or children.  Deadbeat dads will burn in the Hell of the Bardos according to the depth of their sin against their own flesh and blood. Repentance by making up all back payments and becoming current on your child support payments -- and staying current -- are your only recourse. The scales always balance.  

The child you give up for adoption would mean so much to a family who wants a child. The child you give up for adoption will call you blessed when he or she gets older and understands your sacrifice and why you had to do what you did. Although I never knew her, I love Ruth because she chose to give my father up for adoption. But far more than Ruth, I love Roland and Buelah Augustine, my true grandparents, who had so much love and generosity that they adopted a baby when they were 41 and 45 respectively. 

My Grandmother Buelah Augustine

Buelah died in 1959. As I was born in 1957, I do not remember her. But I do have a spiritual connection with her. My maternal grandparents, James and Lois Mackin,  were younger than my paternal grandparents.  They were fabulous, loving grandparents. I use to think their backyard was the Garden of Eden when I was growing up.

But enough about my family. My point is that If you are a woman and give up your child for adoption, even their children and children's children will call you blessed. Consider this: I am writing in 2002 and have expressed my love for my Grandma Buelah who was born in 1894. That was 108 years ago. I have also expressed my love for Ruth, and she was born in 1920. Likewise I express my love for my Grandma Mackin who was born in 1919 and for my own mother who was born in 1937. If you abort, there will be no one to remember you or to call you blessed. To allow the incarnation of your child, to allow it the power and opportunity of the sacred space of a human body, honors your child's future as well as your own.  

Buelah and Ruth are tremendous examples of how women can work together, for if you give up your baby for adoption you can be assured that there will be a loving woman somewhere out there who will love it and raise it as her own.  

Do not deny your child life.   

Judaism, Christianity, and other Blood Sacrifice Religions

Ancient Judaism teaches that because of the sin of Adam and Eve, man is separated from God, and, the only way to remedy that separation is with the blood of a sacrificed animal. The basic tenet of Judeo-Christianity is that to be human is to be a sinner in need of redemption. Judeo-Christianity argues that only the God who created you can provide such redemption; the reason being that created beings cannot redeem themselves, redemption being the sole province of the Creator-God. Redemption, as taught in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, is based on blood sacrifice. Therefore, to be a human in either the Jewish or Christian tradition is to be intimately tied to a history of blood sacrifice. In Judaism, animals were sacrificed and their blood given at the altar to propitiate God' s demand for justice. In Christianity, the redemptive blood comes from the lone human sacrifice of Jesus.  

In the Old Testament we read of the Jewish priests slitting the throats of bulls, sheep, calves, pigeons and other animals so as to drain the blood from these animals. The blood was then collected in a bowl and offered to God upon the altar. YHWH had told the Jews, through the writings of Moses, that sin required punishment and that the ultimate punishment for  sin was death. In order to spare the Jews -- who have always believed, and still do, that they alone are God's chosen people -- from their deserved punishment for sin, YHWH allowed them to substitute the blood of ritualistically sacrificed animals.

Blood sacrifice was not unique to Judaism, for many other ancient races and religions, such as the Aztecs, practiced blood sacrifice. Blood sacrifice is still performed today in some parts of the world, this although the practice is now widely regarded as barbaric and primitive . In the early days of man, however, sacrifices to the gods were a common practice. The idea of sacrifice is based on the premise of an exchange with a god that is reciprocal. Sacrifice has many dynamics: 

    1. Sacrifice is an attempt to appease a god to withhold his wrath. We see this appeasement with Jewish blood sacrifices, where YHWH withholds his judgment against sin in exchange for the blood of animals. 

        2. Persuade a god to perform some favor. This is common with rain dances and other ceremonies designed to elicit a needed favor from a supernatural being. Humans cannot produce rain or good weather for planting, and so the favor of the gods, who could control the weather, was sought by offering various sacrifices.

        3.  Convince a god to end an ongoing disaster such as a draught or a plague. In the case of severe disasters, tribes would offer human sacrifices in the belief that a human sacrifice was the ultimate way of acknowledging God's power. To offer up a fellow human was considered to make the ultimate statement to God, for nothing humans have is greater than life itself. Human sacrifice is quizzical, especially if one believes that God gives life in the first place. The natural order of things is for God to give life and then take it back in death. The interruption of the natural order, of giving God back a human life before God takes it in death, is contrary to the process of birth and death. However, human sacrifice made sense in the religious calculus of those who offered up humans, for they believed they were offering the penultimate sacrifice to God. That the victim was not able to consent in most cases made no difference to the tribal elders offering the sacrifice, for the good of the tribe -- rather than of the individual -- was at stake.   

The human mind bends naturally towards deal-making with God, especially when death, disaster, or trouble looms: "God, I promise you that if you save me from this disaster at hand I will serve you all the days of my life." A lesser version of this negotiation offers God the following deal: "God, I will quit X if you give me Y. This naive moral equation is that of a spoiled child who assumes that a distressed parental God will gladly give them whatever they want if they will but quit doing whatever it is that upsets God. In the strict Pentecostal tradition in which I was raised, God made no deals: You either obeyed or you were sent, not to your room, but rather to Hell where the fire is not quenched and the worm dieth not. The worm here refers to a Hell-image in the Bible which describes a worm which crawls and chews its way through your viscera for all eternity. This is, "the worm that dieth not." The unquenchable fire is the essence of Hell. The image was originally inspired by the burning trash pits outside of the gates of ancient Jerusalem. The fires never stopped burning day or night.  Jewish writers took the thought of a soul being entombed in a desolate, burning garbage heap for all of eternity and superimposed it onto the afterlife. Said another way, they made up the story of Hell and called it Scripture in order to scare people into obedience. It is for reasons such as this that religion can be so evil, especially when it terrifies children. Religious fundamentalists detest the violence of Hollywood on ostensibly moral grounds. I sometimes think they secretly hate Hollywood for having broken up their monopoly on spiritual fear.  One only need recall The Exorcist to understand that Hollywood can do anything as scary as the Bible. Of course, we can walk out in the middle of a movie with no consequences. Religious fundamentalism, however, threatens you with eternal Hell if you leave its bad movie called The Church.  

The Jews claim that they are God's chosen people. They also claim that God communicated the Law to them through Moses, the man who is thought to be the primary author of the Pentateuch, which is comprised of the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures. The Law obliged the Jews to offer up sacrifices to their God. These sacrifices were ceremonial in nature and required financial tithes, crop offerings, burnt offerings, and blood offerings to God. Deuteronomy 9:7-23 gives us a description of a Jewish blood sacrifice that involved slaughtering animals. The passage is taken from the New Living Translation (© 1984 by the International Bible Society):

⁷ Moses said to Aaron, "Come to the altar and sacrifice your sin offering and your burnt offering and make atonement for yourself and the people; sacrifice the offering that is for the people and make atonement for them, as the LORD has commanded." ⁸ So Aaron came to the altar and slaughtered the calf as a sin offering for himself. ⁹ His sons brought the blood to him, and he dipped his finger into the blood and put it on the horns of the altar; the rest of the blood he poured out at the base of the altar. ¹⁰ On the altar he burned the fat, the kidneys and the covering of the liver from the sin offering, as the LORD commanded Moses; ¹¹ the flesh and the hide he burned up outside the camp. ¹² Then he slaughtered the burnt offering. His sons handed him the blood, and he sprinkled it against the altar on all sides. ¹³ They handed him the burnt offering piece by piece, including the head, and he burned them on the altar. ¹⁴ He washed the inner parts and the legs and burned them on top of the burnt offering on the altar. ¹⁵ Aaron then brought the offering that was for the people. He took the goat for the people's sin offering and slaughtered it and offered it for a sin offering as he did with the first one. ¹⁶ He brought the burnt offering and offered it in the prescribed way. ¹⁷ He also brought the grain offering, took a handful of it and burned it on the altar in addition to the morning's burnt offering. ¹⁸ He slaughtered the ox and the ram as the fellowship offering for the people. His sons handed him the blood, and he sprinkled it against the altar on all sides. ¹⁹ But the fat portions of the ox and the ram-the fat tail, the layer of fat, the kidneys and the covering of the liver- ²⁰ these they laid on the breasts, and then Aaron burned the fat on the altar. ²¹ Aaron waved the breasts and the right thigh before the LORD as a wave offering, as Moses commanded. ²² Then Aaron lifted his hands toward the people and blessed them. And having sacrificed the sin offering, the burnt offering and the fellowship offering, he stepped down.
²³ Moses and Aaron then went into the Tent of Meeting. When they came out, they blessed the people; and the glory of the LORD appeared to all the people. ²⁴ Fire came out from the presence of the LORD and consumed the burnt offering and the fat portions on the altar. And when all the people saw it, they shouted for joy and fell face down.

In this passage we read of five animals being slaughtered and a grain offering being given. To give the passage a vivid reality, it is useful to remember the scene in Apocalypse Now in which the water buffalo was sacrificed. People who have not had to slaughter or dress their own meat, or who have never visited a slaughterhouse, have no reality on what it is like to see animals killed. All we moderns know of animals is a family pet and the meat we buy at the store. If we actually had to kill an animal and watch it convulse and twitch as its life blood flowed from it, we would more fully appreciate the powerful impact sacrificing animals to God had on ancient peoples. 

Following the sacrifice of the animals, we read that the Lord consumed the burnt offering, the burnt offering being parts of the charred carcasses of the animals.  How this was done is unexplained. Apparently, God consumed the animal with fire. These sorts of unexplained passages have led some to believe that YHWH was a space alien using advanced technology as deus ex machina to accomplish his "miracles." Whatever the mechanism of consumption, the scripture relates that God consumed the burned flesh of the sacrificed animals. It was traditional for the Levites, or priests, to eat the remaining parts of the sacrificed animal. 

It is worth noting that the term "scapegoat" derives from the Old Testament and refers to a goat upon whom the sin and guilt of the Jews was imputed. The goat stood in the place of the guilty parties and was sacrificed in the place of the deservedly guilty. In our modern lexicon, a scapegoat is the person who is blamed and punished accordingly for the negative results of a group. The scapegoat usually loses his or her job and/or reputation. In this vein, what is completely overlooked by Judeo-Christianity in its current war with Islam is that the faithlessness of Abraham, he who would kill his son for God, is completely responsible for the Arab-Jew conflict.

Many ancient peoples sacrificed animals to appease their gods. Some ancient tribes, such as the Aztecs, believed humans were the ultimate sacrifice and so sacrificed humans to appease their gods .  In Genesis 22:1-13, we read of God requiring Abraham to sacrifice his son (The Amplified Bible, © The Lockman Foundation): 

¹After these events, God tested and proved Abraham and said to him, Abraham! And he said, Here I am.
²[God] said, Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah; and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I will tell you.
³So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac; and he split the wood for the burnt offering, and then began the trip to the place of which God had told him.
⁴On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance.
⁵And Abraham said to his servants, Settle down and stay here with the donkey, and I and the young man will go yonder and worship and come again to you.
⁶Then Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and laid it on [the shoulders of ] Isaac his son, and he took the fire (the firepot) in his own hand, and a knife; and the two of them went on together.
⁷And Isaac said to Abraham, My father! And he said, Here I am, my son. [Isaac] said, See, here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt sacrifice?
⁸Abraham said, My son, God Himself will provide a lamb for the burnt offering. So the two went on together.
⁹When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there; then he laid the wood in order and  bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar on the wood.
¹⁰And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took hold of the knife to slay his son.
¹¹But the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham! He answered, Here I am.
¹²And He said, Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear and revere God, since you have not held back from Me or begrudged giving Me your son, your only son.
¹³Then Abraham looked up and glanced around, and behold, behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up for a burnt offering and an ascending sacrifice instead of his son!

In a bizarre test of faith which would land Abraham in the psychiatric ward of a prison for felony child abuse nowadays, YHWH of the Old Testament actually allowed Abraham to raise a deadly-sharp knife above his son's chest before ordering him to halt. What this psychotic test of faith says about both YHWH and Abraham aside, it  does again point to the fact that human sacrifice was considered to be the penultimate sacrifice. Strangely, while he tested braham in this manner, YHWH later condemned human sacrifice. In Deuteronomy 12: 9-12, we read YHWH's words (New International Version, © International Bible Society):

⁹ When you enter the land the LORD your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there. ¹⁰ Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, ¹¹ or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. ¹² Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD , and because of these detestable practices the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you. ¹³ You must be blameless before the LORD your God."

So while YHWH had Abraham draw the knife above his head, ready to kill his son Issac, the angel of the Lord stopped him at the last second. YHWH then specifically ordered the Jews not to perform human sacrifice as we read above, for YHWH considered it a pagan practice. However, YHWH still demanded that animals be sacrificed to him if he were to forgive the sins of the Jews. 

Conversely, Christianity is built upon a human sacrifice, specifically the human sacrifice of Jesus. While YHWH specifically condemned the practice, one human sacrifice is the basis of Christianity.  The Apostle Paul claimed that the sacrifice of Jesus made obsolete the entire system of Old Testament sacrifices. Christianity also radically modified the Jewish view of God as One, for Christianity teaches that God is actually three persons in One: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The New Testament makes the claim that Jesus was God incarnate as the Son, or second member of the Holy Trinity. Although the term "Trinity" appears nowhere in the New Testament, Christianity nevertheless considers the doctrine of the Trinity to be an absolute cornerstone of their faith. Accordingly, Evangelicals condemn as heretical Mormonism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and other Christian groups who do not embrace the doctrine of the Trinity.

 Christians believe that the purpose of Jesus' life was to serve as the ultimate sacrifice for sin.  This is consonant with the Old Testament God who requires blood to appease his wrath against human sin. The blood of Jesus is the Christian basis of God's forgiveness, for God made Jesus the ultimate scapegoat for every human sin. Thus, when Jesus was murdered on the Cross by the Jewish Pharisees with the cooperation of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, God was in effect sacrificing his own incarnation for human sin. That God needed to murder his own incarnation in order to forgive is rooted in the Old Testament idea of justice: An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The penalty for sin is death, and, someone has to pay that penalty. YHWH demands blood, and not just blood, but also the death that is required to obtain the blood. Rather than making humans pay with their own blood, the New Testament teaches that YHWH allowed animal sacrifices to be used as substitutes until, in the fullness of  time, he sacrificed -- by way of a gruesome murder -- his own human incarnation for our sins. In this sense, Abraham's would-be sacrifice of his son  prefigured, or modeled, YHWH sacrificing his Son.

Despite the sacrifice of Jesus, humans still die. The Bible teaches that we still die because we are born into sin and death is the penalty for sin. So while we can be spiritually forgiven and saved by faith in Jesus, we must still die physically. The difference is that believers will go to Heaven while the unforgiven will go to Hell. In this sense, Christian salvation is primarily spiritual in that even a believer's body must die. Of course, Christianity addressed the problem of physical death, for the final component of Christian salvation is the resurrection of the corrupted physical body into a glorious resurrection body that will never suffer or die.

The inevitability and finality of physical death is not eliminated in the case of Christian salvation. What Christianity offers, therefore, is Heaven after death. It cannot, as it claims, conquer death. It can only attempt to make death more palatable for those who are saved. It can do so only by making death the ultimate terror for those who are not saved, for Hell begins the minute the unsaved die.  The Germans have a term which is translated as "sugar and the whip." The term suggests that there must be sugar to induce a person to behave in a certain manner. The whip comes in when the sugar fails to persuade. Heaven is the sugar of Christianity and Hell the whip. It is, as E. W. Potter once observed, "salvation with a gun to your head."

Within the Christian scheme of salvation, the individual is viewed as being separated from God by sin. The only remedy is to believe that Jesus suffered and died for one's sins and to accept Jesus into one's heart as Lord and Savior. The blood of Jesus bridges the gap between man and God. Yet even when an individual human is saved, they will always only remain human and will always sin and require ongoing forgiveness. They can never be God. They may become one with God, but only in the sense that their will and outlook will conform to God's after they are living in the resurrected, glorified bodies and are free from any taint of sin. 

Christians, no matter how close they become to God, will never be God. And God, within the Christian way of thought, no matter how close he comes to being human, will never be human. If we believe that Jesus was God in the flesh, then Jesus was the closest God ever came to being human. Yet Jesus was never fully human because he never sinned and sin is an essential aspect of the human condition. Christians may protest this by arguing that God dumped the sins of humanity upon Jesus, and so Jesus experienced sin, but the fact is that Jesus could only have experienced the vicarious of others and never his own. Therefore, Jesus never sinned and so was never fully human. The Catholic doctrine developed long ago asserts that Jesus was fully God and fully man, yet a sinless human would not be fully human because the essence of the human condition is sin, this according to the Bible itself.  Moreover, Jesus could not be fully God because to be God requires omnipresent, and Jesus was utterly localized in a discrete human body. Jesus could not physically be in two places at once, and, omnipresence requires God to be present at all points in space simultaneously in every moment of time. 

The Bible also teaches us that sin cannot exist in the presence of God and yet Jesus is God. Therefore Jesus has no sin in the ultimate sense, otherwise he could not be God or abide eternally at the right hand of the Throne of God as he is said to do. The Apostle Paul never addressed, acknowledged, or  otherwise attempted to harmonize this inherent contradiction.  Instead, central to Pauline theology is that recurring argument that God,  "Hath made him (Jesus) to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." (2 Cor. 5:21)
In other words, there was an exchange in which Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world and gave back his righteousness.  Unlike energy,  which can never be created or destroyed, sin can be both created and destroyed. It is created when man, Satan, or any other being violates God's Law by an act of their free will. Likewise, sin is destroyed by the shedding of blood. What is interesting to note here  is that while blood is a physical substance, it has power to destroy sin, and sin is a spiritual property. That blood can change the spiritual world, i.e. that God will accept it as an offering for sin, shows that blood, at least according to the Bible, is the long sought after touchstone between flesh and spirit.  

How is it that physical blood can remove spiritual sin? 

According to the Bible, it is a matter of equilibrium. Sin causes an imbalance in God's moral universe because God's holiness cannot allow sin to co-exist in God's presence.  The Bible says that the life of the flesh is in the blood. Thus,  a ritualistic blood sacrifice which ends in death brings about a equilibrium in God's moral universe. The God described in the Bible can allow you into his presence only if you are sinless. Since humans are born into sin, they cannot make themselves sinless, for A cannot be non-A. Thus, the biblical formula says that only way to become sinless is to accept the substitutionary death of Jesus. If you do not do this, you cannot exist in God's presence and so will be sent to Hell, which is described as a place of eternal torment wherein you are separated from God for all eternity. However, biblical theology argues that God is omnipresent, and so God would have to be in Hell in order not to violate the condition required for omnipresence, i.e. existing at all points in space simultaneously in every moment of time.  If God evacuated his immanent Spirit from Hell, God would cease to be God insofar as his omnipresence is concerned. The Bible never explains this contradiction, nor does it explain a very compelling question: Why God can't simply forgive based on Divine fiat? 

If God is God, then such a One has the power to set all of the rules, for who would be able to gainsay him? God could forgive based on sheer mercy and not require the ritualistic shedding of blood. But the God of the Bible requires blood. He also requires his Christians to remember the sacrifice of Jesus through an act of symbolic cannibalism called Communion, an act in which the bread and wine are used to symbolize the flesh and blood of Jesus. Christians symbolically eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood as a way to remember his sacrificial death. There are profound and ancient mysteries at work in Communion, and they point far beyond the exoteric, or public, meaning of the Sacrament. The esoteric meaning of Communion will be discussed later as will the esoteric meaning of the Crucifixion. 

Despite some contradictions, Christianity, like the other great religions of the world, does embody deep truths. Unfortunately, the Religious Right in America has bastardized Christianity and made it the slave of the Republican Party. How long the  Gospel will remain a tool of Republican politics is a anyone's guess, for the Gospel is, without a doubt, a big vote-getter.  To put a finer point on my criticisms, what I am criticizing is the organizational forms of Christianity, i.e. the churches, and the politicization of the Gospel. Jesus did not die for the Republican Party, nor did Jesus die in order that he might found American 1776 years after his death. In the current climate of America, the Republican Party and its members have claimed that God is the Pater Republican and this is simply ridiculous at best and evil at worst.  A similar criticism obtains with Islam, for Islamic radicals have conflated church and state into despotic regimes bent on violence. Like the other great religions, Islam is an ennobling religion that has been corrupted by those who desire wealth and political and military power far more than they desire truth.  This criticism holds true of any religion. Indeed, that religion can be perverted to become a social control mechanism led to Karl Marx' s famous observation that religion is the opiate of the masses. Within the work we are doing, religion has a very important place and so we must be careful to distinguish between the many religious abuses that can and do occur and the transcendent power of religion to transform people's lives.  

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To summarize, the Bible superimposes three interpretations upon human life:

1. We are born in sin.

2. Blood  sacrifice must occur  in order to propitiate God that he might forgive this sin.

3. Once we are saved, we must attempt to demonstrate our repentance by holy living, which can only come about by God's grace and power.  Holy living requires submitting all of our thoughts, actions, and rights to God for review and approval. While the Bible gives guidelines for living, it does not address many gray areas and so the need to cultivate a life of prayer arises. 

 Despite our attempts to live lives of holiness, sin always intrudes. Thus, the saved person must always pray for forgiveness because, frankly, Christian salvation never frees anyone from sin. It does so conceptually, but the reality is quite different. The history of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, provides ample argument for the ineffectiveness of religion. God does not seem to be present, nor do the religious seem to be any happier or saner than the unsaved. In America, no less an authority than Dr. James Dobson has publicly admitted that a study proved that the divorce rate is higher amongst Christians than non-Christian.   Despite their cry for family values, Christians fare worse at marriage than the unsaved. 

Where is God? Where is the spiritual power that is supposed to help believers, these people who claim to be one with God? 

The fact is that there is, and will forever be, a gap between God and humans in terms of Judaism and Christianity, for God can never be fully human and humans can never be fully God. Each can seek to incarnate or embody aspects of the other, but neither can ever fully experience what it is like to be the other. The best that is available within the respective theologies of Judaism and Christianity is reconciliation with God via sacrificial surrogates. These surrogates pay the blood-debt to God to atone for sin because, as Judeo-Christianity teaches, there is nothing one can pay to God to atone for sin except blood.

To be a human in the Judeo-Christian tradition is to be rooted psychically in the ancient practice of blood sacrifice. It is to see yourself as a sinful being before God. While blood sacrifice is not generally practiced by modern Jews, the idea of sacrifice remains a cornerstone of Jewish teaching. Modern Jews have transmuted blood sacrifice into a practice of personal sacrifice, or the surrender of one's selfish needs, for the good of family, society, and their faith. Christianity had its singular human sacrifice 2,000 years ago and remembers this sacrifice in Communion. The deep spiritual substrate of Christianity is the blood of Jesus. Thus, to be a Christian is to have been purchased by God with the blood of Christ. It is to be the love-slave of God and to serve him alone, denying one's self and the world.  The mystery of how the violent death of Jesus and his shed blood connects believers to God is not fathomable to non-Christians. Modern non-Christians do not live from a point of view that the shed blood of Jesus justifies their entire existence and re-connects them to God. 

The need for blood-based personal salvation does not generally occur to moderners raised with a knowledge of neuroses, psychology, psychiatric medications, enlightenment weekends, New Age encounters, and the myriad of other remedies available for psychic distress. Yet when guilt overwhelms or crises arise, the appeal of a loving God who will save you if you but avail yourself of the blood of Jesus becomes attractive to many people and so they accept Jesus into their hearts as their personal Lord and Savior. If you ask them to explain the theological mechanism whereby the blood of Jesus erases sin, most cannot offer more than a rudimentary story of Calvary. What they can relate with thoroughness, however, is their personal testimony of how they were saved by Jesus and how much better they feel and how their lives have improved. 

The emotional connection between the blood of Jesus and human feeling is the remarkably intense and personal experience that forgiveness brings. The feeling that one has been utterly forgiven by God is incredible, powerful, and transforming. At least initially. Then the feeling fades and one is left with the obligations of religious life in the face of the usual struggles of life. This is why ministers teach that believers are to rely on what the Book says and not what they feel. Yet ministers know that emotional dryness and deadness is to be avoided in religious life, and so the experience of worship becomes the next emotionally-charged aspect of religion. Even worship can become perfunctory and ritualized and so the minister will bring in the revivalist to energize the church emotionally. The job of the revivalist is to revive a dead or lethargic church by creating an intensely emotional experience that evokes the majesty and emotional grandeur of the initial encounter with God that first brought people into the faith. Their hearts revived, believers become energized and the emotional quality of a church improves. There is a cycle of emotion experienced within religion and, in some sense, religion is about the defining emotional moments of one's faith when one feels the  "touch of God." 

Because salvation and religious life can be so emotionally charged, it has a sense of reality to the Christian that is unshakeable. Yet if you were to attempt to equate their salvation experience to that of a believer in a non-Christian faith, the Christian would tell you that the non-Christian had experienced a false salvation based on feelings at best, or, at worst was a deception of Satan. It never occurs to the Christian that their personal experience could be faulty because the Bible affirms their salvation. This tautology is never considered because The Book is never doubted. However, once doubt arises, the tautology becomes glaring and a crisis of faith ensues. The crisis of faith is part and parcel of the religious life. Those who survive it remain religious, those who don't, don't. 

The Problem of the Ego 

Like the Jews,  The ancient Hindus also believed that God was One, yet they did not conceive of the One God, or Brahman, in the same way as the Jews conceptualized YHWH. The descriptions of Braham in the Upanishads far more cosmic than those given in the Old Testament for YHWH. Furthermore,  Braham is not understood as an individual male God who is qualitatively and eternally separated from everyone else by virtue of his Godhood. The Hindu Website ( http://www.hinduwebsite.com/brahman.htm ) provides us with a most excellent description of the mysterious Brahman and The Upanishads, which are The Books which described the mystery of him:

Brahman is the central theme of almost all the Upanishads. Brahman is the indescribable, inexhaustible, omniscient, omnipresent, original, first, eternal and absolute principle who is without a beginning, without an end , who is hidden in all and who is the cause, source, material and effect of all creation known, unknown and yet to happen in the entire universe.

He is the incomprehensible, unapproachable radiant being whom the ordinary senses and ordinary intellect cannot fathom grasp or able to describe even with partial success. He is the mysterious Being totally out of the reach of all sensory activity, rationale effort and mere intellectual, decorative and pompous endeavor.

The Upanishads describe Him as the One and indivisible, eternal universal self, who is present in all and in whom all are present. Generally unknown and mysterious to the ordinary masses, Brahman of the Upanishads remained mostly confined to the meditative minds of the ancient seers who considered Him to be too sacred and esoteric to be brought out and dissected amidst public glare."

What is of interest to us here is the description of Braham as, "the One and indivisible, eternal universal self, who is present in all and in whom all are present." Braham is thus the complete opposite of YHWH, for YHWH is said to be the Creator to whom all of his creations are separate, distinct, and of a lower magnitude. YHWH is not present in all and all are not present in YHWH.  YHWH only selectively indwells those who are redeemed, and even then they do not become one with YHWH, i.e. they do not become God. The oneness the redeemed have with YHWH refers to an act of complete identification they make with YHWH's will so that their collective will, thoughts, and actions are in complete alignment with YHWH's will, thoughts, and actions. While they behave exactly like God, the redeemed will always only be human. Even in their glorious human bodies, the redeemed will remain only glorious humans for all of eternity. On the other hand Hinduism, and any New Age view of God,  understands Braham, or God, as pervading and existing as the undeniable psychic substrate of everything and everyone in the Universe: Braham is not separated from humans nor anything else; humans and all of nature are always already a part of God and this has always been the case. It is not possible to be other than God. This has staggering implications when we consider human conduct, and The Third Option will soon plunge itself directly into the heart of these implications.  

In the Eastern traditions, it is the human ego, rather than sin,  which is seen as that which  stands between humans and  the realization of their native identity as God.  In both East and West, then, there is a gap or chasm between man and God. The pervasive theme throughout all of religious history is that humanity is separated from God. The purpose of religious is to bridge that gap or chasm.  In Judeo-Christianity we saw that blood is used to bridge the chasm. In the major religions of the East, and here we are primarily contemplating Hinduism and Buddhism, sacrifice and death are also involved, but they do not pertain to blood. Rather, the sacrifices called for are the systematic sacrifices of one's ideas, illusions, thoughts, and all other psychic components that comprise the ego. 

Through meditation, the devotee is to transcend their identification with the ego and rather identify with that Consciousness which exists prior to thought or anything else that arises to the mind. When the devotee understands that they are the Supreme Consciousness which exists prior to their flawed sense of self, then they can begin to systematically release the false ideas, thought patterns, habits, and everything else that keeps them bound to the illusion that they are a separate self or ego. Said another way, one is not their body, mind, thoughts, or conventional self. The conventional self is an illusion kept in place by the ego. The ego is irrational and seeks the survival of itself and whatever it considers itself to be altogether. So if one considered themselves to be their body, their money, their neuroses, their marriage and children, or whatever else, Eastern enlightenment would counter by arguing that while one can and must participate profoundly and responsibly in life, nothing lasts except Consciousness itself.  Everything, including one's conventional personality, is lost at death and so the East argues for detachment from the objects and conventional relationships of life. 

True relationship is the recognition that all are ultimately the One. This recognition dignifies relationship. Five hundred years before Jesus said it, the Buddha said that we should treat others as we want to be treated. The secret of this teaching is that others are you.  One key to understanding Eastern religion is to understand the word "recognition."  Recognition means to "re-cognize." To re-cognize requires that one take apart their conventional cognitive structure, or what is called the ego,  by the systematic discipline of meditation and transcendence. Mediation allows one to watch from a detached point of view as objects arise to Consciousness. Rather than identifying with these objects -- which objects can include thoughts, feelings, embedded neuroses, childhood traumas, scars from bad parenting, or addictions -- one sees them as part of a flawed system of cognition.  The devotee then transcends these objects by releasing their attachment to them. In practical terms, this means letting go of one's attachment to the dramas, hurts, and ambitions that keep one tied to the belief that one's ego and conventional self are real and eternal, when in fact they are temporal, based on illusions, and will die. 

Recognition, rather than salvation, is what Eastern religion is about. Recognition of one's true identity as the Self, or Supreme Consciousness, causes the cognitive structure of the ego to weaken.  The more the ego collapses, the more one enjoys Consciousness itself, the more one can directly experience life without life being mediated by the deceptive set of cognitive illusions which comprise the ego and give it such great strength. Post-Freud, we can understand the ego as the neurotic complex that is rooted in  subconscious conflicts, the Oedipal and Electra conflicts relative to one's parents,  the libido, and so forth. Freud's great achievement was to re-cognize the enlightenment secrets hidden in the mythologies of the ancient world and restate them in the language of modern therapy, or what he called the, "talking cure."  Psychology therapy can accomplish some of the same results as Eastern religion because therapy is an attempt to take apart neuroses and allow the patient to re-cognize their life in healthier terms. However, to the extent that Western psychology is based on the model of a "healthy ego" it cannot be ultimately liberating, for in the East any trace of ego results in slavery to illusion. 

Hence, that which is sought in the East is called "ego death. " Ego death is the singular defining event in which the ego itself dies. This is said to happen as the culmination of a heroic effort in which the devotee, under the guidance of the Master, has systematically identified, struggled with, and transcended all of the contents of the ego. Once the egoic illusions are gone, the devotee can see the actual structure of the ego itself. At this juncture, a Christian might be tempted to say that the ego is man's "fallen nature" we read of in the Bible, for both the ego and the fallen nature share the common traits of pride, selfishness, and the driving need for self-survival at the expense of others. Egoic self-survival does not mean the attempt to survive physically, for the body is already hardwired to do that. Rather, egoic self-survival refers to the need to survive as an ego. Thus, the main purpose of ego-survival is the defense of one's own sense of self, which self is an hallucination generated by the ego. The ego cannot be seen because it hides itself behind the hallucination. In order to see one's ego, one must systematically, even heroically, deconstruct their own ego via the meditative discipline of self-surrender of all that which is false. That which is false is, by definition, that which is of the ego. The key to understanding the ego is to inquire deeply into one's motivations. Once one' s motivations are understood, the automatic patterns which control a person emerge in the clarity of meditation. These underlying patterns are then broken down by systematically observing their presence in everyday life and not surrendering to their power or identifying one's self as these patterns.  

Book-Based Religion

Many Jews and Christians, especially in America, have never seen an actual person killed or an animal butchered and dressed. All they know of blood is from menstruation,  or from what the doctor draws out of their arm, or what little plasma remains on the packaged meats they buy at the grocery store. The most tangible link to God for these Jews and Christians is not blood so much as it is their respective sets of scriptures, which we will call the "Bible" for convenience. We must remember that Jews do not consider their scriptures to be the "Old Testament." The Jews also do not recognize the New Testament nor the messianic status of Jesus. While Jews and Christians are worlds apart theologically concerning the person of Jesus, the share the common moral platform of the Ten Commandments. In America, they also have a political alliance as concerns the nation of Israel. Although the Jews know that Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians consider them to be unsaved and hell-bound, the Jews nevertheless need to powerful political muscle of American Christendom to help support Israel. Christian Evangelicals consider that the Plains of Megiddo in Israel will be the stage where the forces of YHWH and the Antichrist meet to battle it out in the final war -- Armageddon - that will conclude world history and climax with the return of Jesus as he steps foot onto Mount Olivet.  While Jews and Evangelical Christians have significant differences, their mutual interests, including a shared abhorrence of Islam, are compelling enough for them to seek consensus on moral and political issues.

The Afterlife: Paradise and Perdition

While there are temporal hells in the Bardos, and heavens in other glorified dimensions, the fact is that the dAsphere is much bigger than the conventional God/Satan picture. It is much larger and far more complex. The dAsphere can be like a wild movie or a video game. It is  intense and it is real. The reason we do not see it so much is that our brains stabilize us within our reality system. To access the dAsphere requires the disciplines and techniques the great spiritual teachers have given us. In the future, I predict that electronics will allow us to access the dAshpere. I nuance this prediction to exclude the present use of lie detector circuits as tools of spiritual investigation. 

To this point, I, like so many other writers, assert the inevitable union of mysticism and science. I also invoke the standard caveat which states that many things which now seem to be supernatural, such an telekinesis or invisibility, will ultimately be found to have a technological basis.  Further, it can safely be said that one outcome of technology will be the union of the human brain with electronic implants that will conceivably allow us to, for example, attain the powers of invisibility or the ability to scan the thoughts of others. The continuum of consciousness, then, spans the gamut from the purely mystical to the computer-enhanced. That human consciousness can so easily interact with technology speaks to the ways in which LELA designed human consciousness to be processed even from a neural perspective. The automated processing of human consciousness will prove to be both the boon and the bane of our existence, for we will greatly expand our minds but at the price of our privacy: In the future, there will even be lurkers when you are on the holodeck!

Drugs also allow us access to the dAsphere, but drug-access to the dAsphere can be wild and unpredictable. Moreover, drugs can kill you. They can cause heart attacks and suicide because they cause instabilities of all sorts. I recommend avoiding drugs and doing your work at "room temperature" which, inside of the human skull in 98.6 degrees. That is the temperature nature has assigned and it has done do for a reason. 

The concept of spiritmatter approaches the dAsphere, it approaches the DX. However, the conventional religions lacks the power to intuit the dAsphere or the DX. Religion lacks the power because it plays to God-concepts that cannot cope with the full implications of Infinity. The conventional religious ideas of heaven and earth, good and evil, and divine creation are based on the archetype of spirit and matter. To undo the archetypal knot is to undo the tyranny of fixed religious ideas concerning cosmology, morality, and human origins. In the knowledge of the DX, we are suddenly free to look at life in a powerful new way. We are free of holy ghosts, angry creator Gods, the conflict of creation-versus-evolution. The knowledge of the DX allows us to wrest from religious dogmatism the threat of Hell it has pointed at us -- albeit religion will not let go easy. Indeed, it will call our truth a lie. 

In the intuition of the DX there is freedom from the Gods of spiritmatter. There is freedom from the arrogance of those religions which hold life captive to their restrictive ideas about morality and self-expression. There is liberation for the soul who would worship God but has always been hampered by the mean-spirited religious demand to conform to arbitrary theologies such as utterly apologizing for one's self, or kneeling at the altar of guilt to drink down the cup of moral shame we have been served by religions eager to enslave us with guilt. 

This is not freedom, this idea that we must debase ourselves and admit that we have mightily offended an invented moral God before that One would deign to accept us. Certainly there are times we need to repent, but isn't more honest to ask the person you've offended for forgiveness, rather than God? Isn't it more cleansing to make restitution to those you've wronged rather than to evade your debts by escaping into an invisible God? The Christian idea that one is forgiven by unloading their sins onto Jesus is a way of declaring spiritual bankruptcy so as to avoid paying what one owes to others. It is a credit card mentality which says that one's moral obligations, personal wickedness, and even personal criminality do not ultimately mean anything insofar as they can be run up and then discharged without penalty by the Cosmic Bankruptcy Court chaired by Judge Jesus.  

In the DX, the people-hating Gods of conventional religion are seen as the logical creations of self-hating people. Such Gods are the embodiment of the sub-infinite thunderstorms of religion that roll across the Plain of the Psyche and set freedom on fire. The knowledge of the DX, on the other hand, represents freedom from the guilt and failings of religion by advocating personal responsibility and an honest acknowledgement of ignorance, and the immense difficulty and fear the human situation. Disunified existence is lonely and ends in death. All that matters is what you do between sun-up and sunset.  At the end of the day you go into the night to sleep a dream and await another sun-up as someone else somewhere else.

Connection With the Hierarchy

Initiation

The truth is that LELA, because she is Infinite, allowed many dangerous people and things into our particular Universe.  Why did LELA allow evil, suffering, and death in our Universe when it is conceivable that she did not in others?  For whatever reasons she had, the fact is that humanity has been configured to be the way that it is. Human nature is distinctively human and so we can only surmise that LELA wanted a distinctively human race for the reasons of enlarging her experiential, sub-infinite understanding. The enlightened understand that we are all, at a transcendent level, God, or the One. However, this understanding does not diminish suffering, but it does make possible the realization that we, as LELA, are involved in a drama that is far greater than any individual. 

The whole of the Universe is greater than the sum of its parts. Evil in this context, however,  is no less evil and so we must seek to understand and limit that evil,  for it obvious that the placing of limitations and restrictions upon life is part of being human.  The art of limitation involves avoiding totalitarianism while at the same time promoting peace and order. The completely evil Islamic terrorists of 911 challenged the US to do this exact thing, to avoid totalitarianism while promoting peace and order.  Certainly the terrorists considered themselves to be God's righteous warriors, but what else would they think given their Godmatism and evil? Hitler also believed he had been called by God to re-order the world. 

The religious mindset would never accept the possibility that God is evil, malevolent, or dark, and so they split all of this off from God and attribute it to Satan. To do this reduces awareness, for it does not allow us to look into our own hearts and see the structural evil therein and consciously acknowledge our violent potential as humans and choose to limit that potential to legitimate acts of self-defense.  While evil is structural within humanity, it need not be inevitable.  We can avail ourselves of our famous free will, and this is certainly better than defaulting to our infamous stupidity,  greed, and arrogance.   

Do we really need Satan any longer? As a race, do we really need an ultimate Devil figure? To be sure, there are devils galore that exist within the subtle realms, but what are they capable of doing to us that we cannot do to ourselves? Carl Jung remarked that the gods have become diseases and there has in fact been a psychiatric transmutation of the devils into pathologies. This transmutation has occurred because we can describe and prove genetic and behavioral pathologies that were once thought to be devils. That the Devil-cum-pathology can be appeased by psychopharmacology, by the "talking treatment" of therapy, and even by exercising and diet,  reveals that we our are own hope and cure.  

Yet religious leaders would not ban Satan even if they had the power, for they know that  Satan can be variously used as a fund-raising tool; a bogeyman to scare people into obedience;  the explanation for all the failings and evil in a given religion; as the explanation for all that is wrong in the world that a given religion cannot cure; and most importantly, as the Liar who is keeping everyone in the world from seeing the absolute truth of a given religion.  Although the secular  world manages to get along fine without Satan, religion insists on clutching him like a favorite old filthy rag doll whom they shove into our faces along with pictures of aborted fetuses. What kind of people are these?

As long as religion remains committed to Satan it will not see the true nature of the evil within LELA and humanity.  It will instead look at human evil and superimpose a salvific remedy on top of it. Yet getting saved will not change the fact of evil. Only our choice to avoid evil will do. We do need to resist evil, and it is generally in our nature to resist to evil. Whether or not we choose to call our own evil "Satan" is personal and religious choice.  As far as I am concerned, Carl Jung's conception of the shadow is frightening enough for me, as are the Tibetan images of the Bardos.

I interpret Jung's conception of shadow within my system to mean that there is pure, elemental evil in the Universe. The supreme beings within our Universe have been called "elementals" and the dATable presents them as pure and potent psychic elements. Pure love would oppose pure evil in terms of the "chemistry of the psyche." In their pure elemental forms in which the two are manifest as various Gods and Goddesses, Love and Eveil war with one another. Theirs is one of the many Wars in Heaven whose psychic "collateral damage" sometimes injures humanity or otherwise embroils us in a representation of a higher echelon conflict as Love and Evil can and do use human surrogates in their war. 

Evil is alive and sometimes concentrates itself in a particular human for the purposes of violence and death. I understand evil as generally requiring physicality -- a person or an object -- in order to manifest on earth.  The term " the power of enclosed spaces" speaks to incarnation, and that includes the need of Evil to incarnate. 

, but for now I will say that a physical body or place is needed for evil to appear. Evil can also be summoned as we have learned. I do not call evil the Devil because this presupposes that the Christian myth is true. Instead, I call evil evil. It is not unique to the Devil. Perhaps the Devil could be thought of as a concentrated form of evil, but even such concentrations require human participation. The Nazis or Al Qaeda argue for the case that a human leader with human followers is that which potentiates evil and allows it to express itself. One of the best things I ever heard in a church was the saying, "The Devil only has as much power as you give him." My thinking is that human choice is always the operative element in evil and that stupidity, ignorance, and bigotry are the best friends of evil.

The Zero Point

In terms of enlightenment and the DX, people often ask me if they can attain Infinity. The answer is no. The farthest one can regress is to the Zero Point. The Zero Point is the state of nothingness between our Universe and Infinity. TheZero Point is the Infinity Surround, it is that boundary layer between our Universe and Infinity. Because the psychic and physical noise levels are minimal in the Infinity Surround, one can intuit and access the nothingness that we call the Buddha nature.  Buddha was the first to discover and discuss this nothingness. He is honored for that because his discovery was a monumental gift to humanity.  

The Buddha nature is the realization that there is a non-necessity for worlds and beings. One may realize a Great Compassion for worlds and beings in the Zero Point and so is the place where the dA saviors originate.   There is no necessity for this Compassion except that it exists as a reason for great beings to incarnate.  The is the motive of the little people who became glorified in the DX for the compassion to incarnate and bless the sub-infinite realms. 

The physics of enlightenment involves great heat, fear, and infrequent, though enormous, realization. Mostly though it is hard work and there are many different schools that produce results. You have to find the sub-infinite school of enlightenment that is appropriate for you and that you feel called to. You also have to be prepared to leave an enlightenment school when you have either outgrown it or it begins to enslave you. You are in charge of yourself, and so you will know when it is best to join and best to leave. My advice is this: Never let them scare you into staying. If they use fear to keep people, they have ceased to be enlightened and have become slave-owners who see you as a way for them to gain power and make a lot of money.

On a related note, a fascinating, and often problematic, aspect of humans is that we are so programmable. A person can be born and learn to speak any language, live within any culture, and believe any religion. Our programmability is an evolutionary characteristic that allows for survival within families, groups, religions, nations and other collective structures that require a common set of beliefs. 

The evidence shows that the default settings of birth -- the negative programming inputted by family, church, and school -- can be changed by education and enlightenment, the general principle being to cling to that which is good in your programming and to change that which negatively affects you.  

The dynamic principle of change is that one must recognize that they are not that which they want to change. By making a distinction between one's self and a behavior, it is possible to change the behavior. Buddhism teaches us that it is possible to distinguish everything from one's self to the point at which one realizes that one is nothingness. DX teaching confirms this via the Zero Point.

Another question that arises is how the DX and the paranormal relate. My answer is that while spacetime and the dAsphere (St/dA)are generally  synchronized, there are times they become out of sync -- whether by accident, technology, or the acts of the dAgods -- and this is when strange effects occur. UFO sightings, teleportation, ESP, and that which we call the paranormal can and does occur as a result of the St/dA asynchronicity.  DX theory considers the paranormal to be a logical outcome of both the Many Worlds Interpretation and asynchronicity.

My view is that as our electronic technology increases, we will be able to detect the paranormal and understand it in terms of its dE effects. However, until we can detect and understand dA as such, we will resort to beliefs, religion, politics, and other interpretations that may or may not be true to explain the dA effects we see in the paranormal. 

I said earlier that evil generally requires a human agency and I believe that the paranormal also requires a human agency if it is to be perceived. However, as we do not know the motives or intent of paranormal beings or happenings, we must remain skeptical. First, we must be skeptical of ordinary human fraud. Second, we must be skeptical of the paranormal tself. Simply because a spirit says something through a human channeler does not mean it is true. A 26,000,000 year old being could merely be a windbag to whom nobody listens on his side of things. 

Humans are gullible and the spirits know this. 

Humans are overly-impressed with spirits,  aliens, and apparitions, and most reports of such are fraudulent, easily disproved, or can be attributed to an overactive imagination. This having been said, there are serious investigators of the paranormal with what appear to be genuine accounts of the paranormal. While these are interesting, they have never changed human history as far as the public knows. If the US Government has contact with the aliens and has used alien technology, we do not know about it and yet it has changed history. Maybe they will have an open house at Area 51 after the Mother Ship lands at the White House. Until then, I remain skeptical of most reports. In any event, I have been configured to be a human and so my main interest remains in my own human life, my family, and in humanity. 

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