God's Love For Animals

image by 123*chris*

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?

Yet not one of them will fall to the ground

outside your Father's care."

~Matthew 10:29

Many times I support the things I say in this blog on the basis of evidence in the Bible. I am not going to do that much here because the evidence could be taken in so many ways. And honestly I believe the evidence of the Spirit of God upon me is much stronger evidence than any other evidence could be. So I am just going to tell you what I know.

Not what I believe, what I know. And you can choose to believe me or not. For most people, they won't believe me because the hearts of this people are hard. They will not listen to anything good or holy, they are selfish and self-absorbed. What I know is that to kill a living animal for any reason other than true need or self-defense is impure and offensive to God. In other words, if you CAN avoid killing animals, you MUST avoid killing animals. This also means that if you CAN avoid buying meat, you MUST avoid buying meat. If you CAN avoid hunting, you MUST avoid hunting. If you CAN avoid fishing, you MUST avoid fishing. If on the other hand you must buy or hunt or fish meat or otherwise go hungry, then it is permissible. There are people like this even in the modern world, but not many.

It will be difficult for the hard-hearted to understand this, but imagine you are a person who was raised in the country and killed chickens and other animals as a matter of course. Or maybe you went fishing with your dad and cleaned and gutted fish. If this really was you, did you kill your first animal as a child? I want you to think back on what that was like, what you felt. I can tell you what it was like for me, I felt a sense of terrible transgression. I had transgressed, I had sinned, because I had killed without true need. I was going to eat anyway, it's not like I would be going hungry if my fishing had been unsuccessful. If I WERE going hungry otherwise, then it would not be a transgression.

Back in the days of the Exodus when the system of Jewish animal sacrifice was originally instituted, why was it instituted? God wanted people to correct their behavior, to live in the right way, and so there had to be punishments for failing to do so and a means of setting the guilty back on the right track. Really, our own penal institutions ought to take example from it in the sense that it gave not only a method of punishment but a means to re-integrate into society.

Anyway, back to animal sacrifice. Back then the Israelites lived in tents and were constantly on the move, and the only things they really had of value were their flocks. And people were money grubbing and materialistic then just as they are today, except to them their flocks WERE their money. They had no wealth to speak of besides that. So when people transgressed, how do you hit them where it hurts? Take away from their flocks. And so when people sinned, they had to sacrifice from their livestock to atone for it.

Complicating matters further was the fact that most Israelites were obligate pastoralists. They lived in the desert, you can't grow vegetables or grain in the desert. You raise sheep. That means that the only things you can eat are milk and milk products, and meat. That's pretty much it. Theoretically, as some African tribesmen do, you could also drink blood without killing the animal but Jewish law prohibits that. Even if you sell the sheep to buy grain, the sheep is probably going to be eaten anyway, particularly rams. What are you going to do with the male lambs? You can't milk them. I am in no way saying that you can't eat meat if your circumstances do require it. How many people is that true of today? Very few.

However, in their favor, these ancient Jews raised their flocks in a natural way which means that until the slaughter came the animals lived naturally and under better conditions really than they would know in the wild. They lived in the open, but protected by their keepers. Compare that with animal raising today: it is a hell. It is a Dachau for animals, who live and die in boxes and warehouses without a touch of grace or happiness ever entering their lives. They are packed in cages, packed on trucks, treated like they aren't even alive. They are alive and their lives matter.

Humans are special in a way, but in another way they are not special. They are just like any other animal except for their heightened intellects and tool-using capacities and their capacity for spiritual realization. Other than that, they are not different. God cares for animals. But any animal MAY kill if they won't survive any other way. Cats for instance are obligate carnivores, they must kill to live. I don't feed my cat vegetables because that is not what cats eat, they eat meat. And I care about my cat continuing to be alive.

How did Jesus feel about the sacrifices which were constant in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem? Well, first lets look at John the Baptist. Jewish ritual had prescribed water washing for all kinds of things, many Jews practiced ritual immersion, so John the Baptist was not innovative about that. This washing was to remove ritual impurity, not sin. For instance, when a pious Jew touched a dead body, he had to wash himself. He had not actually sinned in touching that dead body or in having the shadow of a leper fall on him or whatever it was, what he was was ritually unclean. In other words, he was not supposed to enter the Temple or the company of other pious Jews until he cleaned himself and removed the "taint of decay" that was upon him. This was because nothing physically impure could stand in the presence of God. The Essenes, who may have been connected to John and Jesus (though the evidence is circumstantial,) washed themselves daily or even more often.

John's baptism was not like that. John's baptism was not for the removal of ritual impurity, it was a symbol of the repentance of moral impurity. This means that John was overtly challenging the animal sacrifice in the Temple, which was also for the repentance of moral impurity. Animal sacrifice was the ONLY means traditionally of atoning for sin. John was saying that the Temple sacrifices were invalid, which the Essenes also believed. This means that John was far more of a rebel than he is commonly conceived of being today. These days people might think, "poor scruffy little dude in the desert wasn't hurting anyone, why did Herod Antipas kill him?" Well, that scruffy little dude in the desert was challenging the entire Temple system and the existence of the Temple itself. He was pointing a loaded gun at all the fat cats in the Temple system and its source of money which was the sale of animals for sacrifice, and he was winning. So for John, the murder of animals in the Temple was not required, not desirable, and possibly not even moral.

So along comes Jesus. On the surface Jesus appears to be the poster boy for nomming on dead fish and getting drunk on wine, because the Gospels depict both activities. However the Gospels must be understood in the light of what happened immediately after Jesus' death, which was an insurrection in Christianity. People who never met Jesus and weren't even Jews were defining what Christianity was. Very often this was directly in contradiction to what Jewish Christians who actually knew Jesus or received teaching from those who knew Jesus believed. This Gentile Christianity exploded like a virus, spreading wildly, while Jewish Christians were killed or scattered by the Roman-Jewish war and the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 ad. The oldest Gospel we have, the Gospel of Mark, was written in Greek by a Gentile Christian. The Jewish Christians were so disrupted that when they finally got around to writing a Gospel, which eventually got absorbed into the Gospel of Matthew, they had to mostly go by Mark which was written by a Gentile. Paul, who never met the living Jesus, wound up writing the future of Christianity, and to all evidence one of Paul's favorite activities was fighting with Jewish Christians. He even at one point takes a left-handed swipe at vegetarianism. Why? Likely because people like James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem, were advocating it.

Whenever you read the Gospels, you must understand them through the lens of a Gentile Christianity which was very eager to denounce everything Jewish about what Jesus taught. They were against circumcision, they were against dietary laws, and they were against vegetarianism. Why? Because such restrictions limited their ability to recruit new believers. And you can kind of understand why Paul did this, I am not saying that Paul was an evil man. Here was a whole Gentile world that didn't know anything about the One God. He was not willing that any obstacle should stand in their way on that. And without Paul we probably wouldn't know anything about Jesus at all, so completely was the Jewish Church destroyed. So in this sense we must thank him, but in so doing he grossly distorted real Christianity and so today we only see the real Jesus and the real Christianity as if through a dark lens, in Paul's own words.

When you read the Gospels, read every part of this through the understanding that the Gentiles who wrote them were against circumcision, against dietary laws, against vegetarianism, against alcohol abstinence, against every part of Jewish tradition that would represent an obstacle to Gentile conversion. The Christianity that was handed down to us was in truth Paulianity, not necessarily what Jesus taught.

Getting back to Jesus, how did Jesus show himself to be continuing the actions of John the Baptist? By the "Cleansing of the Temple." Nowadays this event is interpreted as a rebellion against money grubbing and materialism in the temple, with the focus being on the money changers. Why were the money changers there at all though? So people could buy sacrificial animals in the approved currency, shekels. You couldn't buy sacrificial animals with Roman money. So it was actually the whole commerce in animals that Jesus was protesting, as the Gospel of John makes clear:

In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves,

and the money changers seated at their tables.

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple,
both the sheep and the cattle.
He also poured out the coins of the money changers
and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves,
“Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

~John 2:14-16 (emphasis mine.)

He didn't rob the money changers of their money, he just dumped their cash boxes over. The money was still there in the Temple, on the floor. What did he drive out? The animals.  And so Jesus continued John the Baptist's revolt against the Jewish system of animal sacrifice.

In Mark it says he didn't allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple. This is the same man who supposedly told people to carry their mats on the Sabbath, so it wasn't for any Mosaic ritual reasons that he prevented it. What were they carrying? Their lambs, to be killed. You have to understand that the Temple was actually a slaughterhouse on an epic scale, with animals being butchered and sacrificed continually. It was not some sort of serene holy place with quiet monks silently praying. It was an abattoir, with the screams of the slaughtered constantly in the air, the smell of blood and burning fat. The chief priests of the Temple got filthy rich off the system of animal sacrifice, not to mention the monetary requirements to tithe. Who got control of all that money? You guessed it, the chief priests who ran the Temple system.

Why did Jesus rebel against the Temple system aside from the fact that it made a few people rich at the expense of the many? Remember, this was a system established by Moses supposedly at the command of God. What standing did Jesus have to challenge or change it? A good Jew does not go about questioning Moses, but Jesus did and not only on this. Any sensitive soul attuned to the will of God would have been revolted by the scene at the Temple and know that this was no part of what God wanted.

Complete understanding of Jesus' life is impossible at this point, so it is not possible to know whether Jesus was himself a vegetarian. But just as Jesus would have immediately understood that the slaughterhouse of the Temple would have been an abomination, and as he didn't require Moses or anyone else to tell him this but only God's spirit in him alone, in exactly the same way I know that killing animals apart from true need is sinful. The way we treat animals as an industrial product is shameful and disgusting, and there will be a reckoning. I don't need to quote the Bible on that, I have God's spirit on me. I know it's wrong, as much as I know I am drawing breath and typing on a computer keyboard. How about you justify to ME how such a horror should be allowed to exist?

You cannot. It's inexcusable. I don't have to quote the Bible on it, I tell you directly: it is evil.

Poem?

image by Giorgio Galeotti

I genuinely do not know what this is. It came to me, I give it to you.

I think there is a parallel between the idea of the impossibility of understanding God in human terms, and the idea of transformation and rebirth in the New Testament. The transformation I mean is, that once there was this man who was an entirely natural man and pursued all the things that men and other animals want. Food, sex, intoxication, distraction. And then this natural man becomes an unnatural man, a spiritual man. For Paul this is a man transformed into the image of Christ, who have become in some sense Christ or that they (natural man) died and Christ lives in them instead.

So the Word for the transformed man is not a word that the other man understands, because they are not the same kind of being anymore. Christians have all this in their bibles but they don't typically take it quite as seriously as perhaps they ought: that the new man is not really a man anymore. He has become something else.

There is something else here as well. The statement in Matthew 16 that the kingdom will come while some standing there are still alive has always been a troublesome one, since according to conventional understanding we are all still here 2000 years later and the Kingdom has not arrived. The Kingdom arriving means the death of the world we know. I give the example of a chicken running with its head cut off, dead but still acting alive. Something that impressed me in my vision, meditation, call it whatever, is this idea that our entire world, the world we know as human beings, having been so long ago ashes that the ashes have turned to stone and the stone has turned to mountains.

Make of it all what you will.

NOT-MAN

There is a new word

This is a word no man has heard

we have not heard it

we are not of it

there is a new word

no man has heard it

if you wish to hear it

you must become a not-man

It is all already over

It is all ashes

and the ashes have become soil

and the soil has become rock

and the rock has become mountain

Kingdom come already came

This is the vision I had

That I was sitting alone in a tower

Amidst a great emptiness

dotted by spires of rock

and the rock was the ashes

of the world we know

having compressed for millions of years 

having uplifted

having eroded

And we men are in a sort of half-life

ticking down like a radioactive element

waiting to turn to lead

but everything is already lead. 

The world HAS ended

we are just too dumb to know it

like a headless chicken running

The world is end, IS death, is past.

Hear a new word

One no man can hear

You must become something else to hear it

You must metamorphosis from the ashes

life from death

from man to something else

What does the not-man do?

The not-man cries out

cries out in a great emptiness

but his cry has no emotion

It is only energy filling the emptiness with its waves. 

It cries out because it is energy

and because the emptiness longs to be filled

Polarity responding to polarity

Who can wait until it is all emptiness and stillness?

Who can cry out from his not-man self 

when the emptiness and stillness appears?

This is the word no man has heard. 

 

Forgiveness

Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him,

“See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse
may happen to you.”

-John 5:14

Christians today place entirely too great an emphasis on forgiveness. In a great number of Jesus' healings, he followed up by saying, "stop sinning." Of course back then physical handicaps were regarded as the consequence of sin, whereas if that were actually the case hardly any of us would be standing. Regardless, In Jesus' case the forgiveness of the sin (the actual healing) was very often followed up by an admonition to stop sinning. Someone's request for forgiveness carries very little weight if they keep doing the thing they need forgiveness for. If someone were to slap you and then ask your forgiveness, you would kind of expect them to stop slapping you, wouldn't you?

Does forgiveness matter? Sure it does. But God always responds to a sincere request for forgiveness. What determines whether it is sincere? Whether your behavior changes, or at least whether you put forward an earnest effort to change it. So what really matters here is changing yourself, isn't it? It's not like God is hoarding up forgiveness and only spends it like a miser spends coins. He is more than ready: the question is, are you?

Back in the day, if an Israelite sinned he would have to sacrifice an animal to atone for it. Not sure what the animal thought of this substitution, but I doubt he was keen on it. This was a simple and crude mechanism for a simple and crude and materialistic people (which means most people, now as then.) To most ancient Hebrews, the flocks were everything: they were wealth and status and food and clothing and shelter. So if you have to pay out a bull every time you oogle your neighbor's wife or con the old widow out of her retirement money, that is a significant disincentive to ever doing it again. But even there, the target of the action is not primarily forgiveness, it is getting you to change your ways.

Christians today though get to cash in on the forgiveness without actually having to repent of the sin! I am reminded of a late friend of mine who was genuinely a devout Baptist but also pretty much committed every sin in the book. He would argue that Jesus covered his debt completely, so while his behavior was not pleasing to God he wouldn't go to hell for it, whereas a good person who did not believe in Jesus' atoning sacrifice absolutely would. This same individual met his end being bludgeoned to death in a crack house, supposedly after making unwelcome sexual advances on a drug dealer.

Truly this is a deep perversion of Jesus' teaching, and clearly contrary to the New Testament, even though the New Testament was primarily composed by gentile Pauline Christians. The apostle Paul was the man who invented the idea of "grace not works," the doctrine from which Christianity suffers today. The Gospel of John spells out the need for repentance to be met with actions in the beautiful Vineyard passage:

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you,

you will bear much fruit (deeds, behavior;) apart from me you can do nothing.

If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers;

such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.

-John 15:5

Or this passage in Matthew 7:

By their fruit (deeds, actions) you will recognize them.

Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?

Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.

-Matthew 7:16-17

Fruit in the New Testament always means deeds, actions, behavior. The idea that you are somehow no longer responsible for your misdeeds because of the blood of Jesus is an absolute abomination and contrary to Jesus' own teaching. Supposedly we need Jesus' death to purge us of original sin and the sins we inevitably accumulate in life. Well, God was forgiving people their sins from the get-go! Was Jesus already crucified when David said this?

Blessed is the one

whose transgressions are forgiven,

whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the one

whose sin the Lord does not count against them

and in whose spirit is no deceit.

-Psalm 32:1-2

David had been dead a thousand years before Jesus was even born! How did he get his sins forgiven with no crucifixion? Same way as always, God forgave him directly. Clearly, obviously, God had been forgiving sins from the beginning. Nor has there ever been any reluctance on God's part to forgive sins: 

the reluctance is on Man's part to repent of committing them! 

God isn't the roadblock to forgiveness, people themselves are. What the Christians have done to the teachings of Jesus are an abomination to God and would have been an abomination to Jesus as well.

If you sincerely want forgiveness, you will repent of doing wrong. If your repentance is sincere, you'll act to stop doing it in future. If you do all of that, you don't have to worry about your forgiveness, it is granted before you asked. There is no reluctance on God's part. The reluctance is on our part to do what is right.

By their fruits you will know them.

Seek

Image by Maxdrobot

"Ask and it will be given to you;

seek and you will find;

knock and the door will be opened to you."

-Matthew 7:7

What could possibly be of more worth than seeking God? Seeking where you came from, where you are going, and why and what you are doing on the way? How could anything be more important than that? Those who seek will find.

What is it though that you are actually seeking? The thing you actually seek you will find, so if you seek God but really seek yourself, that is what you will find. If you seek God but really seek a church, you will find a church. If you seek God but really seek a religion, you will find a religion. If you seek God but really seek your own ego, that is what you will find. If you seek God but really seek to control others, you won't get God but something else. We must shake off all worldliness to seek God purely, otherwise we are not really seeking Him.

Be not misled. The love of God must be an all consuming fire, or it is not at all. It cannot come second place to anything else. You must be willing to sacrifice all else but that. Before that, the desire for wealth, for security, for the good opinion of others, for pleasure, indeed the world itself and your own life must be seen as mere kindling for this fire. You see the goodness and holiness of God and want only that. You are single-minded, single-sighted, single-hearted.

At a certain point, you are seeking God so sincerely that you become aware that He seeks you back. He grabs you with talons of steel and won't let you go. If you stumble, you will be so horrified that you will do anything rather than sin again, and so you will be lifted ever upwards. God wants to lift us from our condition, He just requires that we desire it enough. He needs for us to understand that only this matters.

ONLY this matters. Let that sink in for a minute.

Who am I? In this world, I am nobody. What do I own? In this world, I own nothing. What is my position, what is my status, what is my title, my occupation, what flag do I fly, what are my politics? I don't have any. Who is my master? God. What is my home? The Kingdom of Heaven. What am I? God's child.

Self-Evident

I do not believe that what I am about to say requires any particular religious belief.

I hold these truths to be pretty well

self-evident:

1. That the world is a place of evil and suffering and enslavement.

2. That this evil and suffering is intentional. In other words

it was planned and implemented by some intelligence, however

difficult such an intelligence may be to imagine.

Now, you can call these statements religion or you can call them plain reason or whatever you like, but I believe both these truths are fully accessible to any sufficiently aware mind. And once you fully accept the first truth, you will more readily understand the second: that it isn't accidental. That it is too complete to occur by happenstance. To me, any religious truth is subject to re-evaluation except these two, and I believe they are fully understandable by people who aren't religious.

Now, the big stumbling block for most people is the first proposition, because given the selfish nature of human beings, people believe that if things are tolerable for them or they are finding life enjoyable, then life is pretty okay generally speaking. The vast inconceivable ocean of human suffering and enslavement and degradation is not on their radar screens, so for them it does not exist until they get cancer or some other horrible disease and understand that this torture is what life is for numberless millions of people. For first-worlders, their relative wealth insulates them from such things as seeing people dying on the sidewalks from curable diseases and old men and women breathing out their last in a wet ditch covered in their own waste, as is a not uncommon sight in some corners of the world. It insulates them from the special horror of child labor, little children pressed into service in the name of industry and commerce. It insulates them from the prisoner living out his time in a special man-made hell on Earth.

However, even aside from all this, cruelty and pain is an integral part of the operating system of life on Earth. Even plants thrive on death though they don't always cause it (sometimes they do) and all animal life depends on the destruction of other organisms. Animals do feel pain and humans cause imprisonment and torment to billions of sensate beings in the name of food or industry.

In my mind's eye I can see you turning a blind eye to these truths, turning away from them, rationalizing them. I can hear you thinking "there is pleasure in life, there is joy in life, it is not as dark as you say." And thus pleasure performs its prime function in this world for human beings: keeping you participating in the process. The perfect hell is not all torment, there is enough reward to keep you chasing after it and keeping the wheels of this world moving. This world would not serve its purpose if all beings simply said "fuck it" and stopped eating and died. No, you have to be involved, you have to love it, which is part of the intentionality I mentioned. The perfect prison has no walls, except in the prisoner's mind. The pleasure in life is part of the trap. And most forms of pleasure involve perpetuating the suffering of other beings.

Enjoy a fine meal? I bet whatever you are eating didn't like the process of getting it to you.

Sex? Pair-bonding is necessary to keep the species going and emotional love and the drama of romance is useful as a distraction from what the world really is.

Like to go for a car trip? Enjoy a nice roller coaster ride? Want to visit foreign lands? The energy needed to power these things is usually ripped from the Earth, with the attendant habitat disruption and suffering of living creatures.

Virtually every sort of pleasure involves suffering for something else. Even if you enjoyed relatively ethically "clean" pleasures that don't directly involve the suffering of some creature, these pleasures serve to distract you from what is really going on. They serve the master of this world, whatever inconceivable existant that might be. Satan, call him what you want, doesn't matter.

The previous comments should make clear that I believe the possibility of a good and benevolent God creating the world as it now is, is unthinkable. Whether it was created by an intelligent malevolent being (lets call him Satan) or co-opted by such a being, is not in my province. It is not mine to know. I am restricting myself to those truths which are most clear, most irrefutable to me and can be readily understood by anyone who actually wants to see the truth. What is clear to me is that a God of peace, of truth and of goodness would hate such a world and desire to see it ended and the poor creatures in it freed. This would also mean that the action of God if He exists is either limited or self-limited, that He would do away with this torment but for some unknown reason cannot. Or that his mode of action is humanly inconceivable.

Now, assuming that you agree with the first proposition, what about the second? What makes me think that such a carefully crafted system of torment and enslavement is intended to exist? Well, first our existence as sensate beings. A naturally formed accidental world would have no use for interior experience or the experience of pain as we know it. This is a fundamental aspect of our existence, that we have an interior world that is markedly different from the nature of the exterior world, that we can feel. You can't have torture without someone to be tortured, a creature for whom torture is real. You can't torture a machine, nor would there be any point in trying. It is our humanity, our consciousness, which is indispensable to torture. It is in fact that which is most "godlike" in us that makes us susceptible to torment. Evolution doesn't need that, but a torturer does.

Secondly, the system of torment and enslavement is comprehensive. It is a complete system from which few if any can ever escape. It is self-perpetuating via pleasure and instinct. Think about it, what instincts do virtually all animals have? Breathe, drink, eat, excrete, reproduce, fight or flight. While we are the subjects of this captivity we are also the engine to keep the captivity operating as intended. Kill, consume, breed, repeat. It is brilliant and insidious. Whatever name you wish to call the master of this world, he's a genius. And there is enough pleasure to be found in the system to keep the slaves walking the treadmill as intended. Like I said, the perfect prison has no walls.

The world is a system designed to keep what might be called "sparks of God" (our sensate and conscious selves) imprisoned, tortured, and deluded as to their actual condition. It doesn't want them to escape from the reach of its torment. Logically, this would mean that this evil master doesn't want death to be the end of their captivity and torment, so you couldn't simply die to escape it. So he would grab that spark and shove it back into a body and repeat the torture all over again. Satan torturing the offspring of God, forever. It's a bleak picture, but I believe it is a truthful one. You, dear reader, may find this exceedingly difficult to accept. You were intended not to accept it. He or It doesn't want you to. One person out of perhaps hundreds will accept it. I believe however that every person who does accept it becomes a thorn in Satan's side. He torments the torturer. Every free man or woman is a torment to him.

Now, if you accept that the aforementioned is the case, that the world is a place of suffering and enslavement and is meant to be, what can we do about it? Can we free ourselves with religion? You must surely know if you have gotten this far and understood it, that the evil one would never allow a true religion to exist on this Earth, not one with any sizable number of adherents. ALL religions with any sizable number of practitioners has been corrupted to do his bidding, to keep you here. You must surely know this, if you have agreed with what I said so far. With great difficulty can the true signal be read from all the noise, but it exists. Snippets have gotten past the censors because the evil one understands that people will say they believe in a religion and not even think closely about its texts. Like all the people who say they are Christians but clearly don't understand the simplest thing about what Jesus actually said. They are living a religion of human invention.

The only thing I know to do right now is to renounce the world and everything in it (except the sensate beings themselves.) In both word and deed to hate the world and its master with every single fiber of my being. To become a fire that burns the World, a fire of purity and goodness like my Father is, so that Satan will spit me out. To become enlightened, unconquerable by him. To resist the flesh at every turn.

That's a tall order, and I am not there yet. I do believe I am entering a phase in my life where that becomes not only possible but compulsory. Whoever joins me in this quest would be closer to me than the pupil of my eye, and we are one.

Do not love the world or anything in the world. 

If anyone loves the world, love for the Father

is not in them.

~1 John 2:15