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

Fire

Image by Malene Thyssen

"This third I will put into the fire;

I will refine them like silver

and test them like gold.

They will call on my name

and I will answer them;

I will say, ‘They are my people,’

and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God.’ ”

~Zechariah 13:9

The world is a fire. It is however very hard to be objective about a fire when you are burning in it. I am not at all sure I am objective about it myself.

I have tended to agree with the Gnostic idea that the world is inherently evil and dominated by evil. The Gospel of John appears to agree with that appraisal. But this leads inevitably to the question, and it is a question the Gnostics clearly had issues with, of how then it is allowed to be such. For the Gnostics... the world is a mistake. The creation of the world was an error, a malfunction, one having nothing to do with us. For more mainstream Christians it is also a mistake of sorts, but in this case entirely our own. Or rather, our ancestors, and ourselves are allowed to carry the burden of our ancestors mistake down to this day. For some, it is an inevitable consequence of our free will.

I am going out on a limb and say that they are all full of horseshit. As unsatisfying and tacked-on as the Adam and Eve story is as an explanation of evil, the Gnostics are even worse, coming up with the most convoluted explanation of how divine but not supreme or even knowledgeable beings wound up creating the world in a rather bastardized way. To me, what that suggests is that neither the ancient Jews nor the Christians nor the Gnostics - none of them had a clue, and they had to come up with something. Because they didn't know.

To have God create the world when the world is evil is rather problematic. Of course Christians don't agree that the world is evil, despite John telling them pretty point-blank that it is. Not only John either, you can find snippets suggesting the same in other Gospels. I would go so far as to say that the Christians' lack of appropriate revulsion for the satanic nature of worldly power and authority was the cause of many of their excesses and evils in the centuries afterwards. How you could go from "do not love the World" and "the prince of this world (Satan) now stands condemned" to having a ROMAN EMPEROR preside over the consolidation of church dogma is a game of mental Twister that I have a hard time understanding.

Anyway, back on topic, did God create the world? Because if He was in fact the author of a place of evil and suffering, that would challenge the idea of the goodness of God. If like the Gnostics think he didn't create it but doesn't UNcreate it, it matters little. You would either have a God that creates an evil world or a God who doesn't give a whit about it existing. Any way you look at it, unless you have a God who is powerless or a God who is okay with evil, it presents the same problem.

Believers in God, Jew Christian and Muslim alike, have tended to take a pretty hard attitude towards those perceived to be evil. Stone em, burn em, behead em. They have condemned them to their hells, to burn everlastingly. They have not been very tolerant towards them. I approve of their hatred of evil, if that is actually what it is, but say that it is improperly directed. The place where the hatred of evil is appropriately applied is within yourself, not without. Within the believer himself. Not to other people.

I am going to say something that might be kind of hard to wrap your head around. You might accuse me of spinning horseshit about God's theoretical responsibility for the world like the Jews, Christians and Gnostics have done before me. And maybe you are right, I wouldn't be the best judge of that.

The world is evil, yes. Its fundamental processes are evil, human power structures are evil, it's evil.

God willed or allows it to exist, yes. Both those things are true. The omnipotence of God means that the world could not exist if God did not will it to do so.

And though the world is genuinely evil and dominated by evil, and that evil is extremely real to those suffering the consequences of it, that evil in the end will not exist except abstractly and will not have really existed. None who were ever truly alive will be dead or impaired in any way. There will be no adverse consequences of having lived in the world except for how long you have to spend there.

Imagine a future schoolroom. In this future there is no war or injustice, but parents want their children to understand war and injustice. So there are very high-tech equivalents of VR headsets through which these children can experience what it was like to be in the trenches during WWI or in the Holocaust in WWII. And they experience everything exactly as it was, perfectly. But at the end of class, they take off their VR equipment and go home to their loving parents, and aside from a remembrance of what happened (and perhaps a few late-night nightmares) there are no lasting consequences. They felt the bullet enter their heart, but they are whole. They breathed the cyanide and mustard gas, but they still breathe. They murdered their fellow man, but they did not truly sin, because none of it ultimately exists. They did this to understand how precious their current liberty and peace was. This evil of war and death and hate, it still existed abstractly, their society could decline again to such a state, but it will not.

We are in this fire of evil because God wills it, and because God wills it for our good. Yes, many, most in fact, won't get that this go-round, but there are other days in school and other journeys in the VR headsets and other opportunities to learn what we should all know, how terrible evil is, and how good God is. There are no sinners burning in hell, there are only ignorant ones who don't understand and so must stay here in this simulation until they learn. Do not remain in Plato's cave imagining that shadows are reality, come outside with me to the Light.

Evil is terrible. Our proper action expressing our utter revulsion at it should be directed on ourselves, not other people. We don't have the right to judge anyone, this was one of the insightful snippets Jesus told us about. There is more than enough work to do on ourselves. I for one don't want to stay here in school, I want to leave and enter the greater world of God. This being the case, I would hope that I always examine myself for sin, not others.

How great will be our praise to God when we finally understand all that we have been going through and how great has been His care of us! Even in this fire, even here, I say that only God reigns.

No Messiah

Ruins of King David's palace, image by Deror_avi

And the Lord told him (Samuel):

“Listen to all that the people are saying to you;

it is not you they have rejected,

but they have rejected me (God) as their king.

As they have done from the day

I brought them up out of Egypt until this day,

forsaking me and serving other gods,

so they are doing to you. 

~1 Samuel 8:7-8

I am going to say something that is not going to sit well with either Christians or Jews: there is no Messiah. The idea of a Messiah, a godly king, is and always was a terrible mistake.

What is the message that God tells men repeatedly from the Exodus onwards? That men are darkened, wicked, that even the best of them are corruptible. Even the best of them sin. And of course, most are not the best, most of the Israelites were rejecting God repeatedly from the first footstep of the Exodus to the very last book of the Old Testament.

The idea of a messiah began with King David, a man who murdered a man to screw the man's wife, likely in addition to other misdeeds not chronicled. However, the reason Israelites had kings at all began in the days of Samuel. The Israelites wanted to have a king like all the neighboring lands had kings: prior to this they had judges who would wander around deciding matters. Some of the judges were good like Samuel and some were bad, like Samuel's sons. The fact that they even needed judges was a testament to their disunity and rebellion from God's law. So the Israelites came up to Samuel and said basically that Samuel was old and his sons were bad and every other people around them had kings, so they wanted a king too. Samuel took this complaint to God, and as the quote above says, God told them that the people of Israel had rejected Him (God) as their king. In other words, God was their only rightful king, and a human king would be an usurpation of God's proper place in their lives. Which means that David was not the rightful king either.

Just a quick aside - the phrase "kingdom of heaven" or "kingdom of God" has tended to take on a vaguely esoteric air in the centuries that have elapsed since Jesus' time. What it really means is exactly what it says: rule of the world and human beings directly by God. Now, what role would a human king play in such rulership? None at all: in this current epoch no human being could possibly be qualified to rule in place of God (it would be nearly blasphemous to say they could,) and in "the world to come" as religious Jews say, there would be no need of such a human king. Isaiah says, "The knowledge of God would fill the land like water fills the sea." In other words, everyone blessed to live in such a world would know what God wants immediately - no human ruler needed.

This has been what it has all been about from the beginning - the rulership of God. Not men, not "god-men" if such an abomination were ever allowed, just God.

Getting back to David - the Israelites loved David. He brought them victory in battle and did not seem as arrogant as most kings. He listened to the prophets. He was still a really bad guy in absolute terms - murder being a very grievous sin in most people's understanding of the word - but he was not AS bad as most kings of the time and he did bring them victory and glory and a capital city. So of course, being weak humans, they viewed their religion to some degree through that lens. There are Jews today waiting for their new David. Christians think they have already gotten theirs, but he has left the physical scene for a time until the end of days. In truth, there is no messiah: the whole thing was an invention of people who were addicted to worldly glory and national pride.

The quote from Samuel should tell us everything we need to know. We should feel it in our bones, too: I have no king but God. Not a distorted Christ, not a past or future Jewish David, no king but adonai elohim, the Lord our God. The only one possibly qualified to run the world. The only source of sufficient wisdom. The only incorruptible. The only sinless. Why in the world should we look to some human ruler instead of the very One whose knowledge is like the sand on an endless beach, like the stars in the universe? The very idea of a messiah is a confession of ignorance.

Of course, people like messiahs. Messiahs are glamorous. They flatter human vanity and cater to human emotions. But there is no messiah.

No King But God Alone.

Predestination and Gnosis

Image by Sten

"All the days ordained for me 

were written in your book 

before one of them came to be."

~Psalm 139:16

Predestination, the belief that some people were predestined by God to be his people while some people were predestined not to be, and that this was decided before any of them were born or had done anything good or bad. It is a very difficult belief for human beings to like. It's a very thorny and seemingly unpleasant belief. It seems to strike at our views of fairness, and our hope that all people can be brought to the light in the end.

It also strikes at our ideas of freedom and autonomy, that we are free to make of our lives what we wish. Of course any freedom we could have would be very limited by our opportunities in life and by our knowledge. But we like to believe we have such freedom and such autonomy, however limited it must be. Even according to common sense, it must be quite limited.

Such an idea also is offensive to evangelism. Evangelism is based on the idea that you can convince people of God, that God is somehow the sensible choice that they are missing out on. It is like your friend was about to buy an air filter for his car, and you knew that he could get a better air filter for the same price. You simply explain the merits of the other filter in a rational manner and of course he will see that you are right. If God chooses people directly, your evangelism is totally pointless. Also, if godly knowledge is unworldly as John says, your evangelism is futile because you are trying to sell someone on the virtues of something they cannot sense for themselves. It is like you were saying to the guy buying an air filter, "this air filter has more charm and dandiness, and less kerfluffle." They would think you had lost your mind.

However, both the Old Testament and New seem to firmly back predestination, that everything, even your personality and will, are according to the intention of God. If anything, the New Testament seems to back it more emphatically than the Old, but both lend ample support to the idea. If you want some quotes, Romans 9:19-22, John 15:16-19, John 10:3, John 6:65 and there are many more. Romans 9 contains perhaps the most hard-edged, most unsentimental statement of that position. But in many ways it is most eloquently stated in John.

"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. 

As it is, you do not belong to the world, 

but I have chosen you out of the world. 

That is why the world hates you."

~John 15:18-19

On at least one level though, predestination is almost certainly true, and I will explain why.

Most people in the world are worldly people. They think about matters of the world, their hearts are set on matters of the world. This is because this is what makes sense according to our physical senses. We must understand this: being worldly makes sense. Being unworldly does not make sense according to the world we can see and taste and touch. Some things give us pleasure and we want those things, other things give us pain and we avoid these things. And so we occupy ourselves with what is necessary to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Knowledge of God is not one of the things that our senses can ever give us.

In fact, consciousness of God is completely unworldly - the Gnostics called this "gnosis," knowledge that our spirit gives us instead of knowledge that our senses give us. This knowledge comes from one source and can only be received from one source, God. That means that only God can give it to us, and He decides when or if that happens. Not me, not you, nobody else. The Gnostics however believed that this knowledge is intrinsic to human beings, or at least some of us. It isn't. It is intrinsic to God, it is his knowledge, that He shares or not.

Now, many claim knowledge of God who do not have it. They claim this for reasons of the cultural background they have or social milieu or personal ambition. Jesus usually points out the pharisees as being this sort of person, someone who is outwardly religious but whose heart is not actually set on God. Religious leaders almost invariably don't have it, because religious leaders have some degree of worldly power or influence and John tells us that the world will hate us and that the world rejects knowledge that comes from God. If people like what you say, you are probably saying the wrong things. If you are saying the right things, you will either be ignored or hated depending on how forcefully and publicly you are saying them. Because, from the point of view of the world and worldly minds, you are not making sense. Worldliness makes sense. Carnality makes sense, and the only question is how to manage it, not how to resist it.

What about fairness? Is it fair that God shows some of his secrets to some people and not others? We cannot ultimately know the plans of God or why He has done things one way and not another, but generally worldly people get their recompense in this world and do not seek and would not understand other recompense. Its like how some foods humans eat are poisonous to dogs: to humans peanuts and chocolate are food, to dogs they are deadly poison. To a deer, ivy is food, but toxic to humans. Humans in their natural state don't want this holy knowledge, the world is enough for them. If the world was not enough for them, then their condition would be abnormal. Perhaps they are ill, or perhaps they are set apart by God, but abnormal either way.

Predestination also comes into play in an attitude spoken of by some mystics: the idea that whatever happens to you, however bad it may seem, was meant for you personally by God for your betterment. That in other words all the experiences in your life, good or bad, were intended by God for you. This is a radical theology and the mind rebels against it as much as it does against predestination. How could God want someone to get cancer, much less His child?! But according to this point of view, everything, EVERYTHING that happens to a child of God has been dictated to happen directly by God, for his or her betterment. This is a hard saying. What about things you do to yourself? If they are bad, then yeah, you needed to learn not to do that. What if it was a terrible cruel thing that happened to you because of things beyond your power? According to this point of view, it wouldn't be happening to you unless God willed it, because God is not going to give over his Children to random pointless events. This is a very hard saying, hard to accept. I do accept it however.

The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me,

but you do not believe because you are not my sheep.

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.

I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish;

no one will snatch them out of my hand.

My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all ;

no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.

I and the Father are one.

~John 10:25-30

Now, you see me quoting the New Testament despite the fact that I am not technically a Christian. What does it mean to be a Christian in the modern understanding? To be a Christian, you have to believe in a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and I do not believe that. I do not believe that Jesus the man was the same as God. I don't think he believed that.

The word "one" can have two meanings. It has two meanings in the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith:

"Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One."

"Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is Unity."

Unity, not Trinity. So I interpret what Jesus was saying as that he had no will of his own. There was no separation between his will and God's will and that because of this, whatever he said was according to what God wanted him to say. Not that a man was God or ever could be, but that the man in fact had left the stage and the One God was speaking through him.

Because of the corruptions that took place to Christianity, I had tended to want to ignore the New Testament altogether and regard Jesus himself as suspect. While I still hold that no man could be God and that there is no Trinity and that the whole Jewish idea of a messiah is a mistake, the New Testament is still a treasure trove of knowledge. I don't think what happened to Christianity was ever Jesus' will, except in that his words would not have been carried down through the ages without an outer wrapper of worldly religion. Christianity the religion was the sugar coating, the pill casing that allowed the World to propagate the unworldly to those in the future who would be able to piece together what the real message was. If Jesus died on the cross for anything, he died for that. Maybe he knew that, maybe he didn't, but either way that was the real functional purpose of it.

I believe that Christianity was the pill casing as it were to allow unworldly knowledge to be propagated in a worldly world. Christianity itself then is to some degree a worldly vehicle: the knowledge concealed within is not.

The worldly vehicle burned people at the stake and killed and invaded and repressed people and so forth, and produced crazy televangelists who enriched themselves from widows and the poor and elderly. I am saying that this is not a bug of Christianity, it is a feature. Christianity exists for one purpose: to carry the information hidden in plain sight within it to be conveyed across the world. It is a worldly chariot for unworldly information that its own practitioners may be unaware of. It is like a virus carrying its DNA across the body, a container for propagating in the world texts whose real meaning is unworldly and not the same as they believe it to be. What Jesus died for, in actual fact, is this: that his words and that the Old Testament too would be propagated throughout the world, so that those who need it would find it. The vessel is not divine, but it is the only vessel that could achieve the purpose in a worldly world.

Mysticism

It is often stated that the goal of mysticism is "unity with God." This is a somewhat misleading description as it seems to express a state or condition that a human being has, a positive attribute belonging to a person. Moreover, and this has been one argument applied by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages in their persecutions of mystics, it seems to imply that the person has become God, as if such a thing were possible.

Rather I would argue that mysticism is more a matter of the removal of that which is not God, that which interferes with the will of God. It is more a process of self-erasure, but not a self-erasure into nonexistence but a self-erasure into real existence, of which the self-interested Self and the world is but a shadow. Mystics of various religions do speak of such things as "nothingness" and "emptiness," but this is more a negation of the illusory world of concepts than a negation of reality. The mystic in fact embraces real reality and real truth in this "emptiness," and it is human concepts about reality that are in fact empty of reality.

I should first speak of the concept of mysticism itself: the concept of mysticism and the state of being a mystic are not the same thing. They bear the same resemblance as a person to their shadow, a meteor to its impact crater, the soul to the personality, or of God to the World. Mysticism is a concept and therefore unreal, but it is possible that by my crude drawing of stick figures in the sand I might convey something of use, so lets go with that.

Secondly, there are two concepts that go along with the first but are not synonymous or in some cases necessary to the first, which are quietism and asceticism. Quietism is really more a group of associated ideas rather than one idea, a grouping of ideas originally formulated by its opponents, the Catholic Church and its Inquisition. They lumped a number of related and (to them) objectionable ideas under one roof and called it Quietism. As often happens, some thus labeled adopted it too. One form of quietism is simply the idea that silent contemplation is of more real spiritual use than ritual and ceremony or specific prayers like the Hail Mary or the Lord's Prayer. While this is part of the dictionary definition of "quietism," that is not in my opinion a more complete understanding of the word, though certainly very compatible with it.

To understand quietism more completely, you have to understand a recurrent idea either implicit or explicit in much of the Old Testament and in some of the New as well, which is that the ego and will of Man does not serve God. Sometimes God is depicted as using human will, desire and ambition, but the human will is almost invariably described as itself evil. The good man is depicted as he who submits to God's will, not his own. The Gnostics and arguably the Gospel of John took this to its logical conclusion: that the world itself and Man in it is evil or under the dominion of evil, which is to say Man in his natural animal state is such. Man's will, desire, and usually his action in the world. Quietism is one logical response to understanding this truth: Quietism in this form is the abandonment of self-will and the abnegation of the self generally. Many mystics like Marguerite Porete took this to its conclusion and spoke of the annihilation of the Self in God.

Asceticism might seem to be a logical companion to Quietism and mysticism, but it is actually quite separable. Even very mainstream Catholics have practiced asceticism, like Pope Paul VI, members of Opus Dei, and even some Protestants like High Anglicans. Asceticism is to some extent implicit in most monastic orders. The purpose of asceticism to mystics is actually quite different. There are two kinds of asceticism: natural asceticism and unnatural or hard asceticism. In natural asceticism there is no desire to harm the body or not provide it what it needs, but rather to reduce the providing for those needs to the barest simplicity and minimalism while still providing the body what it needs and avoiding undue pain. Hard asceticism would be such practices as sleeping on a bed of nails or wearing a hairshirt or cilice under one's clothes, denial of the body's needs, extreme fasting and so on.

For mystics, the avoidance of undue will or desire or excess interference in the natural functioning of the world is the objective, not the mortification of the body itself or the imitation of the sufferings of Jesus or the uses to which it is put in mainstream Catholicism for instance. That being the case, natural asceticism, simplicity and minimalism is the objective. It should also be remembered that food for instance requires the taking of life or at least injury to living things, and doing so in excess of real need would be an unwarranted imposition of human will upon the world. It is actually the human will itself and not the body that is the target of ascetic principles in mysticism.

Concerning the matter of human self-will, it is an interesting question what this human will even is. In the Gospel of John and in other parts of the New Testament and in parts of the Old Testament, it is stated that nothing whatsoever happens apart from the will of God. Nothing, at all, no exceptions. In the Gospel of John, it is stated that it is not at all your individual choice as to whether you will be saved, but it was decided before you were born and before you did anything good or bad in life. In Exodus 33 God says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion (in other words it is not up to us.) In Isaiah 45 it is said:

Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker,
    those who are nothing but potsherds
    among the potsherds on the ground.
Does the clay say to the potter,
    ‘What are you making?’

Romans 9 is essentially a consolidation of quotes from the Old Testament related to this sovereignty of God. Because of this, some Christian mystics believe that everything that happens to one, everything whatsoever good or bad that happens, is directly due to the will of God and is ultimately meant for our improvement. In this context then, what is human will? It is nothing more or less than our disagreement with God, our disagreement with what God has provided us. Sometimes God allows this inner dissent to manifest in action, and sometimes not, but this is much in keeping with a true understanding of what a human being truly has power over. A human being does not have unrestricted power over the world or his circumstances or anything in the world, or even over his own welfare, but he does have unrestricted power over his own internal will, his assent or disagreement, his yea or nay within himself. So for mystics of this bent, the abnegation of the will is merely to always say "yea" to God, which would mean saying "yea" to whatever circumstances you find yourself in since they are always given to you by God. So fundamentally human will would be then nothing more or less than the decision to turn towards or away from God. You may think you are deciding to eat that hamburger or buy that new car, but that is not fundamentally what you are doing.

The Kingdom

Image by Suvendra.nath

They will neither harm nor destroy on
all my holy mountain,

for the earth will be filled with the
knowledge of the Lord

as the waters cover the sea.

~Isaiah 11:9

People consider the idea of the "Kingdom of God" or the "Kingdom of Heaven" as something very esoteric and unearthly and make-believe. In fact in a sense nothing is easier than the Kingdom of God except for one fact: that humans are adamantly and habitually incapable of it. Nothing is more clear than that power corrupts human beings and they lack the wisdom to govern themselves or anything else.

Imagine that there is a cake on a table, and the table is surrounded by a lot of cranky people who are very hungry and they all want all the cake. Soon they take up fighting and cursing and picking sides, and soon the cake is trampled underfoot and they forget all about it in their pursuit of their anger. That's a lot like what this Earth is like.

A lot of religions, and a lot of forms of Christianity, have a very ethereal view of heaven. We are all sitting around with harps on clouds. In fact Christians often leave off the "Kingdom" part and just talk about heaven. Well the Kingdom part is what makes it heaven. How is the Kingdom different from here and now? Well, God is Lord of all that (reborn) Earth and His spirit reaches all of it. And humans will no longer make war on each other or destroy themselves or destroy other living things or lay waste the Earth because God will be manifestly omnipresent there, as Isaiah says. The knowledge of God will fill the Earth like water fills the sea. Many devout Jews say (and I agree) that the Kingdom will be almost exactly like here and now except that God will be enthroned over it. God's presence will not be a soft whisper that we must struggle to hear over the shouts of the World. Everyone who will be alive to rejoice in that Kingdom will hear it clearly.

Imagine a world where all shortcomings are seen clearly and everyone works to resolve them in a spirit of charity. Everyone has enough and everyone is content, nobody is subservient to another but all bow to God. Lands are not despoiled nor rivers polluted, no bombs or wars or crime. A Sabbath peace rests on the land on the seventh day, and people work in a spirit of joy the rest. That could be this world, but it isn't. What exactly is the difference between that world and this one? The kingship of God. Exactly what Isaiah was saying, that everyone would hear and listen to God. Only God is capable of governing the world wisely and to the general joy and uplift of all creatures.

And while this Kingdom cannot come to fullness now until the proper time (after the human-caused destruction of the Earth most likely,) a little piece of the Kingdom can come anywhere where people love and follow God. Every time that you do what God wills, you are bringing a little shard of paradise into existence. It's the same thing, the Kingship of God is the Kingship of God whether it is here or in that future condition of the righteous. Only then, we will be able to live it more perfectly.

Heaven is not an ethereal realm, it is the rule of God. It exists wherever God informs and oversees life.