I've been doing a lot of work on the blog infrastructure lately, including augmenting the tag system and updating my links page. Most of my blogroll and links from the old Wordpress site got lost, so I'm trying to put together something that represents all my interests and the blogs and sites I read and support. I rediscovered lawofone.info which is an awesome web application my friend Tobey Wheelock put together to make the Law of One material indexable, searchable, and categorized. He's also used it to compile his work on relistening to the original sessions and he's picking up some interesting corrections to the original text. It's really cool to see the material go from one guarded by a few people to a crowd-sourced collaborative rediscovery of the source.
Anyway, Tobey also has a page of interesting quotes and I found one of my favorites. One of the things that really appeals to me about this way of looking at the human condition is that it reconciles waking life with a greater reality in a way that doesn't require you to really believe in any concrete metaphysics or afterlife or anything fancy. The focus is not on heaven or hell but on making the best use of the tool of human incarnation. Getting new agey people to appreciate their mundane human experience -- not in contradiction to but as itself the spiritual teleology they seek -- prioritizes self-knowledge over system- or doctrine-knowledge. Spirituality should be something you engage in to satisfy your own needs, not to conform to a system that will fill in the blanks for you.
So why is our human condition the way it is, if we are all genuinely one? Why do we have these short lives trapped in finite bodies with limited senses if we are, indeed, infinite in reality? Because there is a utility in our ignorance, something we can learn in this constrained experience that we can't learn in any other way:
Let us give the example of the man who sees all the poker hands. He then knows the game. It is but child's play to gamble, for it is no risk. The other hands are known. The possibilities are known and the hand will be played correctly but with no interest.
In time/space and in the true-color green density (in other words, beyond our incarnate reality - JPW), the hands of all are open to the eye. The thoughts, the feelings, the troubles, all these may be seen. There is no deception and no desire for deception. Thus much may be accomplished in harmony but the mind/body/spirit gains little polarity from this interaction.
Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine, a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt and re-dealt and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin -- and we stress begin -- to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves' cards is to look into the eyes.
You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love; can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: "All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you." This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love. This cannot be done without the forgetting, for it would carry no weight in the life of the mind/body/spirit beingness totality.
Much of what I advocate politically is but the prerequisites for a society in which such transparency and utter vulnerability could thrive. But I'm also reminded that this is not a political matter, in the final analysis. Rather, it is a matter of the self making a very fundamental choice about what to be and what to manifest. That choice is more important than all the revolutions I could want, and I must keep in mind that I should never let the political overshadow the true transformative power of the will and of love.
