Trandscending self the journey

What if I was able to transcend myself and my own life experience. By doing this, by transcending my own experiences, I am supernaturally then able to live in another's shoes and to reorient myself with that other human life elsewhere in the world. There in their shoes I’m able to not merely eat with that other person, or commune in the same village with them, but to more completely really and fully get to know what it is like to be them.  

If I’m able to really have that persons parents, to be of the same race, nationality, and to have the same friendships and same cultural persuasions. If I’m able to come to know what that person is naturally drawn to in the world.  

An evangelist from abroad might ask or demand that person to step out of their own native experiences to receive something alien to them but I’d be refraining from any demands like this to accept ideological correctness. 

I’d instead now have a full awareness of the native persuasions shaping other people. My awareness of those persuasions now are as near to me as the persuasions I’ve experienced here in my country that have shaped me until now. I wonder if that awareness would then allow me to truly empathize with that other person elsewhere. I predict I would then see the fog lift and see another simple mind possessing dignity and vulnerability and confused by the world. Possibly I’d see them in a fairer way with far greater understanding now with empathy. I might abandon any form of judgmental condemnation or religious, racial, ideological, or national suspicion. 

I’ve come to see with schizophrenia that not only am I confused about things but we are all confused in life, all of us, wherever we are. By making this kind of journey I’d desire to shed my selfishness that’s worried me about my future security. I’d temporarily shelf my own “get out of jail” free card or “go to Heaven with God” free card in order to get to better know another human being in our shared human experience. It might take considerable courage to do this of course. I’d not seek to merely find the comfort and reassurances in like thinking circles. I’d not go to that familiar place where I’d be repetitively reminded of being right about the world. Instead I’d willfully venture into a larger earthly struggle facing everyone who lives with an open heart and with an open-mindedness. 

The journey of being uprooted from self and from that interest to truly see another person might mean leaving behind ideological security. It's implications might demand I truly see other people more fairly. The ideology I had held unto had sized up the human drama and secured my place in the minority of all human beings in the order of existence across time sparing only a few from damnation. I had found familiarity through this belief with a community believing in a narrow road to life. By a preachers words I had been taught that I was given survival through eternal life from anything that could befall on me forever.  

Now I might be testing the possibility that I really need for God’s love and mercy to extend far past those boundaries I and people like me have felt reasonable with. I however still trust in the same crucified Jesus dying for the sin of the world. 

So temporarily now I leave my own beliefs for a time behind transplanted thousands of miles away into the midst of another culture. Here I meet that other person and here I become like them in every way. I end up feeling their struggle, knowing their reasoning, dealing with the very same uncertainty that’s universal in all of us.

 

Here too I find are the same teachers and shapers of minds. Here, like everywhere, this other logic is entrenched in understandings following lineages of traditions. These ideas are shared through inherited family beliefs and through that culture. The religions differ here but yet nonetheless I get to know the aspirations of the person in my new familiar home. I find here among other people that they are not only worth finding compassion for but are worthy of an equally shared humanity as well. They are worthy of God’s love as everyone is.   

Love as a force had lead me here I realize. I fought by coming here for the trust that there believably could be hope in this life across the planet for everyone. I desirably asked what if there is a fairer ordering of earth then the different traditions of belief have been able to organize life fully into so far. Can there be a wiser knowledge that transcends even all the good things exceeding them and what we currently now know. Surely God is greater then everything we human beings know. Of course He is greater then how we think about Him.  

Compassion came over me in thought as I listened to the sound of waters. These mighty rivers that make glad the city of God. Here was the Holy place where the most high dwells.

The possibilities of the unknown

In the deep, amid the unknown, in the depth of space, is where we mysteriously are sitting now on this lonely planet. We are amid this vast expanse of mysterious terrain around us here somewhere that we don’t now know or fathom the possibilities for with any adequacy.  

We do not begin to understand exactly the terms of this arrangement we’re eerily a part of. We wonder about it often though. I did, I just wondered about it just now listening to the eerie sound of a train whistle that went passing through my small village in the middle of the night here. I stood in the dark out back looking up into the far reaches of stars and space. Here amid these lonely coordinates, here part of earth, I wondered about it while not understanding how it all came to be as it is. I was confounded by this great unknown.  

We may be far, where we now are, from what are the truly more fantastical cities out there. We may be far from real civilization, places much more impressive then the limitations of what a mortal imaginations can predict about other places. Our predictions then therefore are limited to a natural wonderment because we exist on Earth. Others out there however may know a greater, larger inventiveness one that salvages natures beauty for meditation in a far superior way to what we can now fathom. We may not be mature enough really to know such things or to predict or understand nature or God’s endless possibilities. 

It may be real that there is much to be encountered far out in the cosmos past the quiet interstellar limits with it’s icy commits and métiers. Out there amid dark matter maybe there are worlds and realities transcending earthly imaginations offering many possibilities. The sky out there is not just a dark dry empty canvass of deep empty space but the home of actual truth, of real phenomena, of real experience. We now presently exist in a place of real possibility.

Meanwhile as we live life here on earth life has great uncertainty as to our futures. Everyone alive knows this as we all are confounded and perplexed by a chaos we presently experience here. We have the uncertainty of death and what becomes of us after that to ponder. This chaos involves growing minds interrelating with people using information and ideas to personally predict its outcome. Billions of us in this way claim to have the chaos of ideas all sorted out adequately enough in the numerous belief convictions we all have. We have beliefs too many to count, beliefs with too many variations, often enough, to find close similarity between them.

The world never does solve this chaos problem for us in this way. People say some people have it right and then say to those people who do not have it right, they suppose, they have perhaps lost at this eternal game by its heavy-handed rules. These people then who think these rules divide up the hope humanity has or doesn’t have in this severe way openly admit that the rules they follow instruct them that the majority of humanity are doomed.

The escape clause for finding eternity happily is an old formula. Attached to these written arguments are some alarming words about human fate and the hope of all human kind. According to this form of teaching you best get your minds ideas right amid this fearful thought struggle.

Even though we should all be able to see that the mind, across time, from place to place, and experience to experience, gets easily contaminated by different reasoned arguments. Nonetheless you best not allow your judgment to get stunted by error in this way in your course of thought people tell you. Life and its pains and therefore it’s ideological confusion must not rob you of your only hope. Some people would suggest to you that this is God’s plan in very strong and compelling language. There is nothing fair about this if it’s true.

Isn’t error and confusion in life, though, normal as a thinking person exists in community, whatever community, as this confusing process plays out across humanity. Does God love those people who merely by human, environmental, and cultural weaknesses come to see the truth or its relevancy differently as a belief.

 The journey to finding the supposed absolute of how things really work, in the grand scheme of things, after all, has many teachers of many beliefs. Many of the different teachers probably aren’t as wise as many of the other such teachers. Nonetheless, inevitably millions of teachers have a different account of truth then and they are persuading billions of listeners who are just people looking for “the truth.” Is it right that we hold those audiences of those teachers, and all mankind in general as well who struggle in exactly the same way, accountable to this ideological correctness demand some of us think is correct. So they must get the truth right no matter how impossible and improbable that is in life or else they are determined to be doomed.

We are saying to the world at large to know this particular truth that we confess to know or else find yourself not only denied hope but now forever in pain, forever amid fear, evil, and eternal torture and torment itself.

This antiquated old overly certain and narrow road to hope then seems to spit out Gods children on many shores of the world. This view that goes about spitting humanity into a fiery satanic pit to suffocate among sulfur and ash. This is a kind of belief as opposed to a belief, hope and faith in a God which I think is more real. A fair God, a merciful Jesus, finding us wherever on earth we are, whatever shape we’re in now, or after our life is over, and loving and forgiving us all by His death on the cross. Blessed are the merciful.

How does God feel about other countries, other religions, and the dignity of people of other cultures?

On this planet earth that we inhabit there are numerous outlooks, attitudes, values, morals, goals, and customs that are a part of all that we know and experience here. Whatever form of persuasiveness these persuasions have on us they will undoubtedly lead, inspire, and unfailingly win the loyalty of each single mind to some perspective. We are individually standing alone in the world and standing here now we will unavoidably adapt to these influences knowingly or not. As a lone person we now stand mysteriously before uncertainty standing here before the utter unknown.

 

For anyone hungry for truth, or at least relevancy in how one chooses to live or care about what matters, that persons journey then, as a mind being fed perspective, is a journey busy acquiring some form of knowledge and truth perspective. What that person will be confronted by in life is different for each person everywhere too.

 

Despite any hesitation that person has, or resistance in allowing change, inevitably and unavoidable that person will be persuaded and changed in the world somehow by the worlds ideas. Whatever continent or culture one is from  ideas are being experienced there. The person will encounter human arguments by preachers, teachers, advisers, friends, political leaders, media etc. These persuasions will then form what that person normalizes and sees as their truth. It can be observed naturally enough by reason that ideas then shape human beings everywhere right?

 

If our imperfect minds are being adapted imperfectly to different influences, and I’m being shaped in this way, as is everyone else, then our experiences cannot be anything other then unique and different then. The persuasion these ideas have on people must be better for some, worst for others, from Iran to Moscow to Bangkok to Brazil and to the entire world beyond. The effects that different influences of thought has on people are these not influences falling on the perceptions then of innocent people.

 

 I believe we can suspect and look at people when they have different political objectives in a way where they aren’t like us exactly. How do we view people when they are militant or their nationalism and position in the world isn’t in harmony with ours. How do we view foreigners when their religion is foreign to us. With Christians when other people far away from us deny our claim of salvation and deny who God is supposed to be how do we see them really. Can these other people, after their different ideology is accounted for in their different thinking,  be seen as the same blank slate, as innocent, vulnerable, susceptible people. Isn’t that what we all really are in this world as we struggle to understand. 

 

Do some of us approach the people of other nations like they were predestined by God to be inherently evil people.

 

From birth we see no child anywhere in the world as inherently evil.  Why then does it seem in the same breath as we say that no child in the world is evil do so many of us, of course not all of us, then lose sight of the intrinsic value of entire populations of the men and women there. Just twenty years later now the once children, now young men and women, have become so different. They have supposedly in our eyes perhaps reached the age of accountability. It is like they were faced with such a fair chance to think like we think. Now it is like for many of us like they exist somewhere God is not.

 

As adults how did these people stop sharing our humanity. True many informed people love their enemy and wish well on everyone but many don’t. True these others might hate us and have an agenda that rivals us. They may even want to hurt us. Yet why do they not appear to us as innocent victims of doctrine that has shaped their minds. These people were after all won over by a dictator or preached to by a different religious influence in that state. These people were shaped by breezes of ideas often naively and innocently enough. They were persuaded by persuasions that we all adapt to, if confronted by the same kind in the same way. It is true that these ideologies can come in a truly ugly form but the human person is vulnerable to indoctrination, is drawn to group dynamics and to causes to live and die for like every human being.

 

In our defensiveness of the threat posed by other people lost to evil influences out of self preservation and our defense of our values we will of course be guarded and prepared to fight for those values. Yet should other people ever lose their human dignity. Do they ever lose their value as children of God. Why must we hold so many human beings with such suspect in our eyes for what is unavoidable. What is unavoidable is that ideas are harnessed and spread and effect masses of humanity through indoctrinations that they can’t foresee. Shouldn't we therefore have compassion on our fellow human beings like us everywhere. What we instinctively seem to do is judge others and categorize them according to ideological correctness but is this really fair.

 

As a human person we have dignity and a great potential for good. The evil in the world doesn’t have to come with clarity for us and probably never has when it affected us across history. Evil just effects minds everywhere who don’t understand a better way confusing a person and harming them and others.

 

There is no guaranteed way to avoid evils persuasion on the innocent person. Evil effects a persons reasoning, judgment and behavior. Evil inspires deviousness, hatred, it justifies war and does indignities to human life while robbing peace.  Evil steals family members to death, leaves people alone, and forsakes the poor and needy.

Evil wishes to humiliate people. There is no guarantee that others effected by evil won’t intrude into your life or mine. Its effect on us is very possible as we try and live a good life.

 

We all have minds that are struggling for peace. We want to be loved and naturally enough to be treated well.  The human person, wherever that person is in this world, is fallible, and being fallible a person is universally  ill-equipped and ill-suited to be ideologically lead in one “specific” direction. We are not able, all of us at once,  everywhere we are, to be able to hold one specific belief of what is supposed to be the “truth.” We cannot know that specific belief all of the time and in all of the places. Everyone cannot know the truth now even if part of the truth is really attainable in this world. People by nature, simply by the the laws of opportunity and chance, will choose differently when faced with ideas. Naturally people see the world differently. The arguments around those people will be different which means a belief for them on their individual journey through the world is different.

 

Do we choose to love people everywhere and  spare them our ideological condemnations. Is it right instead to hold the position that if people don’t think like me, and those I’m familiar with, they are not on the right side of God and His mercy and His hope. Do we determine therefore, “That those other people over in another part of the world do not see the truth as I see the truth.” Do we reason then that, “They have not accepted the truth and therefore those other people have no future with God.”

 

Is there any compassion or fairness in this view as we consider it at this time in history. In modern times now, in the way we now presently know the world to work, does this even make sense. Is this the position that God would take on this.

 

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father's care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”

Karma

In a discussion with a friend on Facebook, who’s name I won’t say here, I was just recently asked the following question. 

“I wanted to pick your brain too. I've been having this conversation online with Christians. They use the bible to explain everything. I'm not a bible person, so I see things a little differently. I know you are well versed on the bible, but you are open minded and also able to see things rationally. So, here is my question. Do you believe in "Karma"?”

After writing my friend a personal note I replied to her question here, for her to read this way, because I like to post things in my blog.

The question Do I believe in karma and your observation that I am well versed in the Bible and also an open minded person I thank you for suggesting. I find your question very interesting material for thought. I don’t think I have a great amount of knowledge to share so whatever I say of course I don’t believe is law. I simply like to weigh in on these subjects and try and understand these subjective questions. I know I answer like an authority, which I’m not, it’s how I approach philosophical questions.

The way I understand karma is that if you do something wrong, if you hurt someone, cause someone pain, the pain you cause to someone else will come back to you again. Maybe this is true somehow, maybe it isn’t.

I think everyone is prone to experience error in their judgment and behavior. A judgment that is made however I don’t think is always made thinking with total clarity. Even most of the time the thoughts involved in people making a decision are thoughts they don’t see the complete facts entirely or accurately for or the full implications of what acting on them will do with total insight. People don’t always see their thoughts or actions accurately. That resulting judgment and course of action is rarely made with 100% clarity. The way the human mind seems to work is ones clarity of mind and moral responsibility can be as low as 33% or even less where some minds live obliviously in a total fog. 

When we get angry we expect and demand that those who do the wrong we now judge should have seen right and wrong in their minds. Through our anger at them we think they should have known at that particular deciding moment in life, however much they were surrounded by negative influences, that they should have known how to make the right moral judgment in that situation.

Our anger in judging human error is often high-minded and unfair however. We delight through that judgment in our exceptional status. There on our moral high ground we rage with self-righteousness judging what we see elsewhere in the human condition. Our judgment adds fuels to our feel good about ourselves gossip circle. There in our contagious gossip networks we feel good about ourselves while resenting others outside of the pack. For the person that’s being judged, I think, often enough for them, that that particular experience at that particular time was a choice for that person that seemed logical enough given their percentage of moral insight that they had at the time.

In that course of wrong action, through the fog of immorality, probably because of subcultural role models shaping their norm, there they act. Likely they have no ethical direction, no conditioning of their thoughts in a healthy way. They simply have thoughts that are left to wonder off course while having no way to counter evil itself. They have no direction where right is even to be found. They are in a dark place where they don’t believe right is even relevant. The right path forward Is totally unrecognizable for them where they are.

I think there are literally billions of people on earth who are victims of evil. It’s human nature to despise other groups of human beings who really have no clear way to reason or understand how to reach thinking that is fairer and more inclusive. They have no perspective that loves all of the human condition. There is not a councilor nearby them to hear or to help them through their struggles.

Jesus speaks in the New Testament through several parables about forgiveness. I don’t read the Bible much anymore but one parable from vague memory that Jesus taught I think was basically about a judge. I think the judge is meant to be God. The judge forgives a man with an enormous debt everything he owes. The man in return was asked to forgive other people the little debt they owed him. Owed then a small debt by someone else the man who was forgiven by the judge then refused to forgive that debt even after God forgave him so much more. So the man was sentenced to prison by the judge.

I should read the story again to know if I have it right. It makes sense to me that God forgives like this however. Some of us have bigger debts then others but God says that He is the one who really substantially forgives everything. He is really forgiving so much more then what we are. Through our anger and resentments we are not willing to do for others the things God does for us even when it’s very important to God that we learn to do this. I think that we are asked to forgive because forgiveness is real with God.

What I know of Karma is it is about doing something wrong and then being repaid the unkindness down the road. I think it’s also how people wish the injustice they feel and direct their anger toward should to be handled. Its that we wish the wrong doer to suffer for those wrongs.

I think that there is a God however and that He is forgiving. I think if we do something wrong, and know God, that the more we know Him better the more He will have us revisit those errors from our past in our minds. We will revisit those wrongs many times as we grow in compassion and in love. Going over those pains we have caused I think gradually will lead us to greater spiritual maturity. Injustice, cruelty, hurtfulness, violence, and all wrongs like these will be things we oppose happening to anyone. So we will be deeply sorry for those wrongs thinking much about them a thousand times in a year. I think eventually that our minds will grow clearer, our moral judgment will become sharper, while we come out of the fog the closer to God we get.

I think what I believe is that I don’t think we will be punished forever but that Gods nature is ultimately one of forgiveness. However Karma I think may happen in our journey with God. You can’t draw near to love without evaluating yourself. As you grow yourself you reflect on your past and the person you are. You draw nearer to love and you can’t help have deep regrets about who you’ve hurt. Drawing near to God then I think is like experiencing karma because you do have to come to terms with your wrongs and you do experience things in your growing conscience which is a kind of pay back.

The struggle of how to look at the world

In a chat room I was in recently I was listening to a debate between an Islamic Sunni and Shia defender. I was not of a critical mindset listening to their discussion or in the reaction I gave toward either chatter. There is a reason I wasn’t critical or hostile toward them. I have an evolving perspective of life, the world, and the human condition that has lead me to where I am.

 

My perspective has been growing and changing a lot lately. There is a reason I find no justification for the condemnation of either person in this chat room and a reason that I refuse to condemn anyone anywhere of whatever religion, nation, or culture. There is a reason I won’t condemn and a reason why I now have universal compassion.

 

I’ve been increasingly made more aware and empathetic to what we’re all up against in thought. Clearly there is a great vulnerability experienced by the human person in the world up against the existence and persuasion of thought and it’s systems of all kinds.

 

Anyone who study’s history and uses philosophical inquiry to try and appreciate life the more they must see the human person is an impressionable, vulnerable, susceptible, easily persuaded, often naively manipulated, very gullible victim in a planet of ideas, ideology, religion and tribalism.

 

Consider the person as a blank piece of paper. As the person goes through life all arguments effect the person on the page of the paper. The person isn’t capable of a great discernment merely by existing in nature because whatever culture, whatever personal experience the person has, it can and does effect any person anywhere they happen to be in the world. A person is susceptible to any kind of system or persuasion of thought. No one is truly immune to catching the bug of whatever ideas overwhelm their experience, location, nation, or because of whatever religion happens to dominate their environment there etc..

 

A person may think they have this great will that they can use anywhere to sift through all human experiences.They may naively think that they could have lived in any other persons shoes everywhere at all and still arrived at the same version of the truth as they presently profess to know but they are greatly mistaken.

 

Thinking oneself able to guarantee to personally know all worthwhile thought is a conviction you may hold but it is like a delusion or a kind of very grandiose false belief. I routinely experience such false beliefs with schizophrenia only these false beliefs are held by you and by most of humanity in some form.

 

Maybe your solidarity and who you accept and who you don’t accept is nationalistic or religious or racial. Maybe you lose favor for non Canadians, non Americans, other races, other cultures, other religions which teach people a tradition you find morally corrupt, ideologically flawed. Maybe you think God is on your side and has decided to favor you over billions of other people.

 

I wanted to say to the Sunni that despised the Shia, and vice versa, why can't you have an understanding for the human condition. I wanted to say to them in a clear way why do you think God favors you and hates the other group. Isn't such thinking confused, angry, a kind of trap that our vague, foggy, unclear minds fall into. Isn’t it a perspective that people constantly arrive at while agitated by what we clearly don’t fully perceive and because of what we misinterpret. These judgments are ones we make far to easily of one another, where often there is no forgiveness, no understanding, just a rivalry and a form of dislike that is often venomous.

 

Aren't the Muslims themselves, with their great philosophers, insightful enough to know that Sunni and Shia converts are simply innocent human minds who have become persuaded by different teachers. Shouldn’t they find understanding then by realizing that vulnerable listeners should retain their same humanity despite the version of Islam they adopt, despite it’s “authenticity,” despite what they hear and get drawn into and follow. Isn’t it really true that people do more commonly then uncommonly get blindly persuaded by teachers of different kinds. These articulate and persuasive teachers have different ways of looking at the world and their sermons and lectures are very compelling to minds looking for guidance. These different ideas suggest what, God, or Allah, as Muslims call God, desires.

 

Then there is Christianity to consider as well. There was the Thirty Year War fought primarily in Central Europe between 1618-1648. Initially it was a war between Catholic and Protestant states. Christians for a long time have fought each other over doctrine and those arguments over theology continue today. There were the religious wars the crusades. There was the Inquisition a Christian version of the same kind of struggles Muslims have faced with Christians killing Christians.

 

I started off by saying I find no reason to condemn anyone anywhere. I love Canada, it’s a great country, and persuasively it can be argued to be the greatest country anywhere on Earth. There is a freedom to love all of humanity from these shores. There is a freedom from here to love and to be compassionate and to hope for all men and women and children everywhere. It is my right to believe in something fairer then what I often hear. That fairness is reachable only by transcending the voices of the supposed knowledge and wisdom around me. It is a freedom to hope in a purpose that doesn’t exclude 3.4th of the world to eternal damnation. It is belief in clearer thought that is reasonable and really understands the ideological struggles humanity faces with different ideas. This outlook sincerely empathizes with the people in all the billions of personal experiences lived in life. It is a search for compassion that empathizes even with those minds trapped under the sway of the rottenness forms of thought who live under the most unfortunate of circumstances.

 

I have my answer how to live with God. I will try to love fearlessly in the face of all evil. I will love beyond the confusion ideas can mobilize themselves in. 

 

 

The love of God

Anger, fear, sadness, and uncertainty at times are working through people’s thoughts, creating worry, despair, and doubt. Effecting this process as well, thoughts are being organized and arranged through our thinking forming into various perspectives. There are other emotions too effecting other perspectives. There are no doubt many thoughts in many forms that are complicating the perspective that human judgment arrives at. Dare I guess at how many combinations of negative emotions and negative thought processes there are. I wouldn’t know the answer to that.

 

Suppose that this negative emotion: anger, fear, sadness, combines with an unaided reasoning producing through a downward spiral of thoughts views which eventually delve into dark places. The negative emotion then must be effecting people poorly combined with this random thought that we generate.  Naively our mistaken behaviors then come about from misjudgments brought on by errors we don’t recognize. We are therefore mislead in our frame of mind caused by things like the impact of negative roll modeling, ugly aspects of culture effecting us, an imagination acting under its own volition void of guidance, and evil itself attacking our thoughts. Can it be that we really aren’t in possession of a will free or a will strong enough to choose wisely the path in front of us. Well it seems obvious that we don’t always recognize where are own judgment is leading us to at all.

 

Alternatively I would suggest that what can be found and discovered for us, if we look in the right place, is a realization that in life there is a power of love and it really does exist. This love is as real a thing to some of us as are the negative states we can also find ourselves in. When we look for peace and then discover that we can even find real clues of peace's potential size, then this too, we may discover, is part of many of people’s lived experiences.

 

When we realize that ultimately what could be waiting for us in our future, beyond the cemetery, could really be a place of peace this curiously is also a part of things as they are and for good reasons. To those who have insight into this peace it is reached experientially eventually in a total fulfillment of ecstasy and unending joy. This is the peace that is not death itself but a better state of existence beyond death.

 

When we pursue hope and discover it is here to be found too it is eye opening. When we pursue meaning in life and find through that search for meaning a resulting awareness that there might really be purpose to our lives it is inspiring. The meaning of life we can discover is discovered through a friendship with God.

 

When we experience the call to forgive,  being deeply challenged by this struggle, and we are able to finally let go of our pride and conquer hatred we realize an important lesson in life. Despite the former determination of our mind to repay insult for insult we are freed to be able to let go of our contempt and bitterness. This too is a real experience many of us have.

 

Maybe If we became wise enough to know and realize that these struggles we face are real and important we may then reconsider how we need to respond to them. As we see this struggle then as part of our true state of existence then we might even want to win the struggle we’re now living through. We might want to understand how to live better and to figure things out right. All of these struggles are human with every one of us struggling through them. No one in this world goes through this life without experiencing stages of experiencing such challenges. The only problem is is that evil is obsessed with ruining your life and mine. Right now evil is at work ruining many lives. Many of these individuals are completely unaware of evils influence on them and they are both naïve and defiant about making a personal change.

 

Can we even rid ourselves of fear, uncertainty, and anger and replace them with peace, hope and confidence in the future. Can it even be done this change. Can we rid ourselves once and for all of fear, from moments of uncertainty, from feelings of anger. I don’t think we can overcome our human emotional limitations entirely while here no. I may be wrong but unfortunately I’ve been unable to do it. I have been able to reach a great deal of peace, find hope in life and know an unshakable confidence in the future while struggling with mental illness. 

 

I think faith and reliance on God’s friendship does accomplish a lot in life. I trust that with faith we really do get assistance from a good God. The assistance may simply be a redirecting of a negative thought unto a loving passage of scripture. The help may be a huge idea that figures out better personal circumstances giving them a healthier perspective. The help may come in a peaceful solution through a sudden epiphany. Who knows maybe God will even give a miracle we won’t even recognize as a miracle.

 

The war for good ideas can be fought on other fronts I’m sure. I’ve seen people of conscience with ethics and commonsense that exhibited a strong nonreligious love that exceeded many religious people’s capacity to think with kindness and compassion.

 

Could what we’re a part of here in life be a titanic struggle for what are important reasons we don’t adequately recognize. Are we meant by God to meaningfully confront and to struggle through these challenges even when many people around us fail to recognize the battle. Are there good reasons for this struggle that we haven’t recognized yet.

 

As we struggle through life people are living and dying unexpectedly, often prematurely. As people die, sometimes, some of us, they die in cruel, accidental or violent ways. As we struggle as people, despite living and dying in the ways we do, will God cause what appears not to make sense in our lives to then ultimately develop into a plan of love that He will inevitably finally reveal to us.

 

For instance consider a life of hardship and calamity relieved from it’s trials by an untimely end. When looked at from this side of life the grief is looked at as being the greatest kind of meaningless tragedy. The death of a child of starvation, for instance, examined by us is a loss we can’t make sense of as people. If an all loving, all knowing force does govern the universe and beyond  then will these lives that are so cut short so cruelly reach new places now, see greener pastures, live free by gentler sun lit shores. The hundreds of millions who have died through history by the most unfortunate ends will they now know a gentler experience in eternity. Will they live now in a place where they have been truly welcomed and where is fairness is permanent. Will we get to see them again and see them smile and laugh I truly believe we will. They also will be the greeter every friend and relative of their own generation who enter Heaven. We will all pass soon enough life is short.

 

It won’t take as long as we fear to see the people we love again. Are they living now under immeasurably better circumstances or is that a fairytale? I personally don’t believe in fairytales. I’m here. I’m alive. I’m thinking. I’m wondering, and that’s not by accident. I have questions. I am looking at the greater unknown. I am looking honestly at life and death. I am writing feeling love through faith and I have a friend who speaks through me. 

 

There really can be reassurance for us that we are loved and that we have a friendship with God. The love I offer, or that most people offer others, is not emotionally mature or wise enough to understand how to love adequately enough to approach the heights love really can reach. Can we trust in this kind of transcending love that is consistent with it's concern for us and doesn’t pull the rug out from under our feet when we least expect it. Can we know a love that never wonders away, never fails, is always there, and that loves us despite anything we can do wrong. How can we find the peace and security of this kind of love, one that is unfailing, unending, infinite in it's reach, beyond what we'll ever fully comprehend no matter how long we have been traveling through the ages beyond us after this world is over.

 

Where is this kind of love then found if it truly does exist. Can love be who God really is? Can God be the one who really abides near all of us now whether we know He’s there or not? Does God travel with us through all of our entangled missteps and experiences lived in the world. Can He be the one who will never leave us? Personally I believe God is right here and now not an inch away from any of us. He will be fair and He will see us through everything and anything. We need to keep our eyes on love...

Life in a box

Suppose we were to imagine that presently, instead of being on Earth surrounded by space, that we are instead in a cardboard box. In that box we are consumed with examining knowledge but only knowledge of the boxes interior since we can’t penetrate it’s burrier. If therefore we have only spent time within the boxes interior and have been therefore unable to see past the cardboard surrounding us then how much might we trust in unseen things beyond and outside of where we currently are existing. 

 If we were to try and estimate beyond it's walls, only having cardboard to imagine now, we would be forced to reluctantly retreat within a belief that finding anything out outside of ourselves seemed impossible.  Yet outside the cardboard box, we people now know this because we live outside that particular kind of box, here there are trees, ponds, rivers, streams, flowers, architecture, rainbows, sunsets, while other thinking creatures wait to engage in dialogue. There are sights and sounds that would take many life times to experience here. A further unknown here too is that there is deep space all around us.  

Now think of where we really are ourselves therefore. We presently are in that same kind of cardboard box like existence here too then. Yet beyond us, beyond everything we can’t see now, there might be more then common sounds; there might be even greater sights more mind-bogglingly large; there may be strange and unusual sunsets; distinct unheard of worlds; truths hidden and found existing far out beyond us.

This is commonsense but what is it really like out there? What significant something else might there be? Should we trust that whatever we don’t know about out there that in that unknown place something does exist and is larger then our imaginations can presently grasp.

Alien life contacting earth

Outer space is defined as the area outside the atmosphere of earth. All of us here are somewhere deep in space as the earths lonely inhabitants. Being deep in space assumes that this deepness is far away from somewhere but what is it far away from. Here where we live in the deepness of space, while looking out from our distant perspective at the universe, are we far away from some greater spiritual or physically existent truth out there yet to be found.

 

Could there come a time where we were about to make a discovery of something grand. The deepness of space implies that we are somewhere isolated. We are in a desolate reality and conditioned here by surroundings of emptiness and remoteness. Out here we are on the farthest outer corridor of anywhere impossible to fathom perhaps. Perhaps we are even placed here in this quiet realm being observed here now by watchful but invisible eyes. Such eyes might exceed our intelligence and ethical qualities and maybe even transcend our physicality. Maybe we’re influenced by unseen hands moving our world, influencing the events here through those kind of forces, deciding our destiny, perhaps this is so, or perhaps it’s not. 

We are surrounded by a great gulf of emptiness that is most mysteries if we think about it. What a weird, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible, state of order this is. Yet despite the open-ended nature of the possible of this experience and those grand unknowns we nonetheless as thinking people seem conditioned by our own worldly narrative. Our responses to other possible worlds reveal a limitation of our outward ability for speculation and suggests that we fail to meet a true test of our capacity to stare reality honestly in the eyes. As it now stands we are already in the land of the impossible that’s honestly the case. We here and now are not in the impossible however but the possible itself and we can see plainly now that life does exist. When we look beyond us why is there this stubbornness to embrace the universal probability of this much greater reality out there.

We easily and gullibly trust prematurely in the worlds dabblers in ideas too, some hucksters, others merely proud people being men of too much certainty in their ideas. Natural conveyers of antidotal answers into life’s meaning men use sequences of ideas to explain our predicament to us according to religion or other theories that have gone too far too fast.

In our day to day lives we look out at the impenetrable curtain around us and then shrug our shoulders because it’s buriers seem unanswerable. We settle for the idea there is nothing more we can ascertain about any of the unknowns and then go about our lives. We acknowledge by our thinking that the outward going path of our eyes vision could approach somewhere new perhaps. We may fathom that potentially, possibly, (some may think it true, others would doubt it true) that out there somewhere in that distance, where inevitably distance must actually really go, there is perhaps a new reality, an undiscovered and eye opening clue shedding insight and novelty on everything we now know.

Perhaps appearing out there is somewhere new itself, somewhere very real. Possibly knowledge, by discovery and organization, shaped by a greater intelligence there is a kind of knowledge intensified in it’s scope. Larger maps of the universe have been drawn there, a more thorough telling of history cultivated. It all presenting a clue to truth  satisfying some men/women’s yearnings for answers while devastating others belief systems turning those beliefs on their heads. Maybe aliens believe in Jesus Christ that would be most interesting.

What we presently know is that life is possible. Is the potentiality of greater life impeded by our incapacity for reflection. Do the buriers created by our doubts unnecessarily impose on that ability to hope a shackled state of existence. Also does religion impede us from questioning the cosmos and what secrets it might hold when men of faith anticipate instead a spiritual reward and might therefore not want to hope for such discoveries.

If you ask people if they think there could be alien life many would say yes they think there could be alien life. Are we doubtful still the same ourselves.  Would we be willing and ready to meet the unknown head on as fearful as that may be if any of us were contacted from beyond. Would we prefer to remain unburdened by those challenges. What should one of us do if we were to start communicating with life far from our planet.

The darkness of distant space is yet immeasurable and impenetrable though it holds our moon, which cascades its faint light on the ocean waters, and it also holds our earth, our home, as well as the great unknowns beyond us. Our capacity to anticipate something otherworldly and to imagine within it’s depths a kind of greater life meets a burier we can’t easily overcome but we should try to.

What is Heaven like?

Imagine in Heaven, finally, if the skeptical are wrong in distrusting this rumored future paradise, that discovery is now finally being made. Previously ordinary fear and ordinary doubt had dulled, dimmed, and caused only the second guessing of Heavens promise. Transparent now, finally at last, flawlessly visible, love, now, in an utter peace, showers us in a trust that offers this goodness in a triumphant, freeing, perfect joy.

 

Now there appears a future for us, secure, and not subject to change, a place that cares beyond the world which often hadn't cared or hadn’t cared enough. Mercy and beauty combine now as infinite knowledge and unlimited creativity merge in an ephemeral glow of a sight beyond and without comparison. In this grand design where natures genius is superseded by acts of immeasurable possibility here outward reality expands revealing before it now endless vistas and unstoppable goodness.

 

Here before us are the streams of the ages too, old, archaic, sublimely beautiful flowing waters amid the shores satisfying for our sight what we once had only suspected might actually be.

 

Once we had stared at our own world and when we had observed the world it sometimes  seemed like it had immeasurable potential and yet we were left doubting. In seeing the creativity and marveling reflectively on what we saw we tried to fathom natures observation's on those days. We had been left wondering however, sometimes for some of us too even glimpsing, what we felt was an unseen author, a master designer, a being who creates and loves His making.

 

Today however here in Heaven we stand in awe as we see destroyed forever now is death, gone finally is it’s decay. We jaunt rushing ahead enthusiastically leaving the world behind us now. We move joyfully into the bosom love of a more perfect friendship, to meet real companions, to love fully all who are there including all people, unreservedly, unconditionally. We step now into real compassion, where only real untainted peace prevails forever.

 

Now we reunite finally with the loved ones we miss so much. We realize a plan had always been in the works. We are freed from disease and hatred. We are freed from the contamination of our thoughts from their emotional distress and that resulting confusion. We stand now before the ages, before the eternal one Himself. We meet God and Christ on the sacred shores amid the Holy water streams of Heaven itself.

God's love

Would it be common for people to doubt seriously that there is any hope for the future beyond life in this world. It seems that the way life is that we go about only partially seeing any hope if we have any hope at all. Are we realists through what’s observed about our reality in this way or are we unnecessarily discouraged in our approach to a future.

 

Even people of belief in God and His plan and of eternal life are repetitively reminded by natures terms of ones mortality. Observing natures processes like death and the resulting grief the other ideas supposedly offering us a future come on very scary terms. Self-admittedly many acknowledge this fear that they have with these “scary ideas” offering for us the only foreseeable solution. One reason the answers appear scary it seems is because the religious story’s are very fantastical in nature. Old Testament myths, for instance, don’t appear valid as real actual history. People naturally therefore are distrustful and skeptical about them and because of this kind of natural logic they are fearful.

 

Life being a place of much fearfulness and uncertainty do many people surrender to religion as their only hope because they are desperate and other options of hope aren’t as persuasive or predominate in their community.

Are we merely fearful and desperate and so we conform to those old story’s.

 

The claims of the New Testament such as the raising of the dead by Jesus through His miracles. The implications of Jesus own resurrection after His execution on the cross are story’s that effect this desperation we have. Many of us trust and have faith Jesus exists and take it by faith the claims that He was resurrected from the dead. The gift of His Holy Spirit being given to us we think bares witness very personally and experientially to Him being present with us by supporting us through this life. Is a desperation  prevalent in all of us nonetheless in believers as well as nonbelievers.

 

It seems some of us must want desperately for Jesus to be real even if we have faith in a desperate way. Can it not be a faith we have that wavers and occasionally doubts, that worries, even fears it’s own conviction of what the truth is. For us who love God so much is dependent on Jesus story being actual history; of Jesus actually being who the story claims He is; of His miracles really happening as they did; of God really preparing a place for us in Heaven etc.  

 

This persuasiveness repeated to us might have the effect that diminishes and obscures doubt and skepticism. In this predicament we’re in in life are we not therefore compelled to try and drown out any doubts that occur if we want a hope in the future. This an atheist might argue is merely wishful thinking. To us who find great conviction and comfort it’s not merely a fairytail.

 

 Then there is the business that out of all the ideas in the world only one version of ideas can save, at least according to those who know that one particular set of ideas. The rest of humanity are on rout to Hell, if Hell exists, I personally don’t believe it does. According to this the narrow road to future happiness, for those in possession of the supposedly right way of thinking, will reluctantly then allow the  rest of humanity to fall out of focus as they say goodbye to them and greet each other in love in Heaven. By small outreaches attempting to convert others in the larger world in life this justifies Gods uneven plan for the fate of the earth’s total population.

 

I don’t think love or God can be obliterated from offering hope to anyone despite this way of accessing reality. In my opinion God must just have a love more far reaching then this. Jesus would speak to the world if He returned I’m sure. He would no doubt be more inclusive then these scary terms that offer hope on such severe terms. 

 

This isn’t the world of ancient Rome where ideas of God by an emperors conversion can reach the entire Roman world by decree. This is the larger more modern world where we understand diversity and the too numerous to count cultures and arguments beyond count. This is a world where truth and knowledge and reality are looked at coming at the claims of truth from many different perspectives. In such a world as this the authoritarian command of total acceptance of any perspective asks something totally unfair of every person in such an environment. We naturally because of this will therefore form different sets of arguments and it is natural, not unnatural, to do so.

 

Can’t Gods mercy reach us where a certainty has not reached the human condition. The need for ideological certainty and for us to know absolutely “the only way of looking at things as being our only hope” is an outdated, ancient, arbitrary demand on people. I love God and I believe God inclusively and fairly loves humanity and will eventually show it more completely.