Building Spirituality - Part Four

Greetings from Purgatory! If you're wondering where this fabled place is, just look around. We know it as the world but in spiritual terms it's Purgatory; a little bit of Heaven, a little bit of Hell, and a whole lot of In-between. It seems that the balance of the world is tilted more to Hell than anything, but that's fine; the state of the world is not my concern and it need not be yours. What truly counts is my place in this world, regardless how it may appear, and my willingness to move in the right direction, closer to Heaven. Heaven is where the Spirit of the Universe resides; if God is All Things Everywhere, then Heaven must be everywhere. It is. And it isn't necessary to die to get there, in physical terms; in piritual terms it is necessary. "Blessed are the poor in spirit," said one of the Masters of Life. "Be thou in the world, not of it," he also said.  That's the message! Evil rules the world; it's Realities are frightening, there is much pain and suffering in the world, and the media screeches it's disfunction to anyone who will give ear to it. Turn it off, tune it out, because suffering is not our lot in this life. If it is "the Father's good pleasure to give you the Kingdom" then there has to be something besides the turmoil of the earthly existence to turn to. There is. But first we must face a Truth that many fear to face: that each of us is alone in the world, each a spiritual being in the human condition, dealing with the Realities of the world as best we can. Jesus told us, however, that it is the Father in all of us that is the True Source of Salvation. But, one might ask; salvation from what? We are here for but a short time, and during this journey it is our task to learn the ways of Truth and grow spiritually; that the world and its people count for nothing in the grand scheme of Creation; that the "things that come to pass" actually do come to pass. Each age brings its own troubles to the forefront, fights its own wars, victimizes its own people, kills and maimms, destroys and rebuilds - and then passes on, soon to be forgotten and unlamented. In Revelation there is the reference to the "beast" being locked up for a thousand years, then to be loosed again. Accoring to the same text the Lords tell John that their voyage of 140,000 souls took that long. As they were in the City of Heaven at the time, we might safely assume that this was their vehicle; foursquare (three dimensional), well lighted, and secure behind walls 240 feet thick. and equipped with everything these people needed. Then they arrived here, a beautiful but hostile environment, and the "beast" was loosed "another season." The idea that the earth was visited or settled by beings from another star system is often greeted with ridicule. That they made the journey board a celestial ark is absurd to such as these; but why? The record shows that we started with dugout canoes and rafts, and progressed to present-day ocean-going luxury liners and cruise ships. Our space explorations are the equivalent of the dugout canoe, and we see ourselves, sometime in the future, going to other worlds. We will succeed, we are sure; others haven't? No one in the infinty of Creation, only ourselves can achieve this end? Hardly. Ridicule is the first sign of fear: make fun of it, then maybe you won't have to face the facts. But the Truth always comes to the fore. It is the Fundamentalist Bible-spinners whose Medieval fantasies are coming under closer scrutiny, who are scared. These proclaim that Jesus died for our sins, yet the world teeters on the brink of Hell; that Jesus is coming back to "fix" everything, though there hasn't been a sign of him for over two-thousand years; that God is only where [He] "chooses to be" ( a direct quote from my Evangelical friend ) and allows bad things to happen. Why? "Only God knows." This good friend whom I have quoted admits that much of what he believes doesn't make sense; his "faith" is strong because he believes it anyway! Christmas is when the birth of Jesus is marked, though there have been 125 other dates cited for this event. It's the season when we sing "Joy to the World", give to charities, and voice the empty platitude "Peace on earth, good will toward men." But what good does heartwarming sentiment do when nations still make war, when poverty and hunger still plague 80% of the world's population, when the corrupt power brokers engage in secretive criminal acts to justify unworthy ends? And it all seems so overwhelming!It is. But only when the majority of the people fail to see the Truth: that true strength comes from within, the Secret Place of the Most High, where the Father dwells and awaits the questing spirit. Men of faith have courage; the weak, mean spirited cowards who conspire in secret, run and hide in "undisclosed" places, mouth the empty rhetoric of the ideaologue who cannot be bothered with facts and who, in a fit of pure insanity, invokes the diety: God told me to... Insane? You bet! Rome had an emperor, Caligula, who actually demanded to be worshiped as God while he lived. He had a temple dedicated to himself, the centerpiece of which was a statue of himself, made of pure gold and dressed every morning in the same clothes that the emperor would be wearing that day. Gaius (real name) committed such atrocities, legislated such insanity (he had his favorite horse appointed senator), and demonstrated such erratic behavior (roaming the halls of the palace every night arguing with God), that the Praetorian Guard finally killed him as he was leaving the arena after watching the games one morning. Why did Caligula act the way he did? He chose to. Why did he choose to? Only Caligula knows. Actually the poor fellow must have suffered a brain tumor.When Jesus spoke of bing "poor in spirit" he was referring to the character defects that cause such misery in the world; Hatred, Lust, Greed, Anger, Sloth, and the whole menu of egotistical demonstrations. Surrender these things and inherit the Kingdom. So, we live in Purgatory. And however much it may appear to need changing, or however much we would wish to bring it about, it will probably always be the same. Throughout the infinity of creation there are countless worlds like ours, where the spark of life ignites and tiny creatures begin the process. As these have grown, are still growing, and shall continue to grow forever, they will develop skills for dealing with life. As they encroach upon one another and contend, the strategies they adopt for survival, what we would call wickedness, cast some as predators, others prey. In these circumstances might makes right; strength, speed, and cunning, are mandates for survival. That's just how things were once, but not how they must be any longer.The Lords came here about four-million years ago and promoted an early ancestor species of ours to their own genetic profile. They did this for the same reason: to survive as an alien race in a new environment with no ready supply of new genetic material. Thus the Lords created us in their own image, after their own likeness (meaning that they made us to be like them, not necessarily to look like them), and "man became a living soul."But the wickedness in mankind persisted. Man mistook dominion over the earth to domination of the earth and began to tamper with nature. As a race we turned paradise into a Hell of our own making. We destroyed the habitats of so-called lower animals that we needed to fulfill the Life Presence symbolized by the Great Pyramid and whole species died. Animals, the instruments through which energy organizes itself into the many facets of intelligent life, having no next level to grow into arose to our specie-level - animals became human! Just look around! Are there not people who bear caricature resemblances to lower animals, some cute and cuddly, others mean and predatory. These latter still profess that "might is right"; they are the war-mongers who victimize the weak, who destroy and plunder, and who seek to possess all the material wealth of the world. They are responsible for the six-thousand years of organized violence we call history.So here we are, in Purgatory, and it's the Millennium. We are just beginning the next thousand-year cycle and with 992 years to go who can look to the next ten years without fear and trepidation? The human population of the world is four times what it should be; we are exhausing resources and creating waste at rates that our planet cannot sustain. Eighty percent of the human beings on earth are starving or living in abject poverty; governments presided over by the lowest common denominators of our kind are powerless to affect the vital changes that would see us through. There are no less than twenty-six armen conflicts going on in the world today, and some of these have been fought for years, decades, with no end in sight.When all else fails the only place to turn is inward, to the core of life, the root of being - the Father in all of us that "doeth the works" if we will only listen to the still small voice and follow its gentle leading. It's my experience, it can be yours, to finally come to the Final Judgement and to change course and discover that Paradise isn't lost after all; it's there in the loving hearts of those with whom I share a spiritual kinship: true and lasting friends who are on the same journey as I am, following the True path. I recently heard a new Truth, one that I had never heard before through the course of many years, but it is so precious. Here it is;People may not remember what you do,People may forget what you say,But peole will never forget how you make them feel.