The body is the prison house of the spirit, but only in appearance, for one's spirit is infinite. What is born must also die, life is neither born nor does it die The body just mirrors the infinite SELF and reflects the grandeur of God in all things around it, through the mechanism of the body's 5 senses. To a man with a sensitiveness of spirit, that is naked to every wind that blows from heaven, and feels that life stirring in the earth......that naked spirit that knows the joy and also sorrow of that infinite Truth as it flows immutable, like the pageant of the autumn leaves blowing in the wind, or take a walk beside the green valleys of springtime, how mysterious this force of life blowing over the fields of time.
Such is the beauty our bodies made of stardust behold, like glittering stardust along highways of unutterable beauty and at other times crimson battlefields and market places full of people bombed to resemble a fiendish nightmare that only religion could conjure up in its fanaticism to be right!
Such sights we behold as Christ was once taken to the Top of a very high Mountain, to behold all the kingdoms of this earth under the power of religion whose dark God is Satan...."The God of this world". My friends, you too have been offered much by the God of Religion, who has taken you to the very highest peak of his kingdom. Such as the Jewish God Jehovah, that sacrificed and persecuted Yeshua/Jesus through his chosen race priesthood that rebelled against him and his cruel ways...."The Father judgeth no man" Yeshua/Jesus John 5:22 and again: "Love your enemies," "Do good unto those who treat you evilly."
Have not all fallen like Adam, listening to the snake oil salesman of religion? Preaching a God of hate, judgment and hellfire?
Yes, there are heavenly stream flowing down to man, caught in the quagmire of religion poisoned by it's brackish water of stagnant dogma, bright and rippling in sunlight, crystal clear under the softness of the summer rain, that flows out of eternity, out of God's throne, bringing life everywhere it goes. Making all your sorrows dissolve in it's living stream, making joy alive, flowing immutably NOW.
Man's condition is hopeless, he is a tragic figure in an even stranger theatre of life whose end is death and futility....."all is vanity of vanities" said Solomon the Preacher. "We burn," said Pascal, "to find some firm foundation, some unshakeable basis on which we may build the tower which reaches up to infinity." Yes man desires to think nobly of himself, but man is in a small skiff on the vast sea of life, tides and storms may not go his way, for he is entirely at the mercy of the Will of God.
Nor does mother nature freely give to man without some considerable effort on his part. How small a part of earth's surface is suitable for cultivation, droughts and floods come and go, pests and noxious diseases are all around us. Some are born with mental and physical handicaps. Nature has not given mankind a free lunch. He has to earn a living by the sweat of his brow, and by the keenness of the body's wits. Even the bravest and smartest of men are often defeated, he lives even amongst his own in petty scandals, absurd pursuits, outrageous injustices. It seems this human race was born under an unlucky star, in his quest to reach the unreachable star.
Unless something extraordinary and outside of the closed system of the Universe, can be discovered man's state is hopeless, the situation is beyond repair and it's palliative and idle dream. And like in Homer's Illiad the battle rages most fiercely around the soul rather than the body. It is there that the issues of mankind are to be determined. So what is the soul of man? That which is a mediator between spirit and body, except it, be man's mind the little "i", the old nature of the flesh....ego.
What is this individual self that punches the keyboard of his computer? It is the question philosophers have asked down the ages but never answered, for many it was a denial of a soul. In part that is the truth, man's soul is illusory it has no eternal existence of itself, it is dependent on God's breath for it has none of its own. "The soul that sins shall die."
Yet the destiny of this little "i" is also the destiny of all. For nature looks no more kindly upon a whole society than an individual. They stand and fall together. In the great balances of nature, they are equal. Though a society may survive the individual, it is only but a season in time. Nature's sea will sweep it far out to sea, and eventually it's ship will sink, nor will a ripple remain on it's surface to tell where and when it went down. Who knows where Atlantis went even? Let alone the many civilisations before that. Perhaps I am over shooting the target here that I am not a body, but I am describing the predicament the body is in. To talk of what I am is premature until we discover what we are not.
So can we be sure this self can exist, or is it some reflex action of matter a phantasmagoria? Perhaps one can employ a figure of metaphor of a French philosopher, in a different setting, can you suppose: "that a ship might be constructed of such a kind that entirely by itself, without captain or crew, it could sail from place to place for years on end, accommodating itself to varying winds, avoiding shoals, casting and weighing anchor, seeking a haven when necessary, and doing all that a normally crewed ship can?" Yes in the human body we have precisely such a ship, which handles itself brilliantly without a captain or navigator.
This is a theory developed by philosophers like Hume, the sceptic. He was unable to discover the nexus between cause and effect, so with the best intentions in the world, he was unable to locate the self. Introspection he also said failed to find such a thing. He found perceptions and events in a man, but no unifying connection between them.
That which so often is imagined as the driver of one's life never presents itself. All that can be seen or found is the body, the body can see and feel itself but not this mysterious self. Hume could find no evidence for his existence outside of his body. That his self was just imagined. Even William James went down the path of saying:"The passing thought is the only thinker that the facts require."
There is not much common sense in all this, it is cold logic that defies the experience of almost all. So do the great authorities in psychology deny and dispose of us, and also themselves. They reduce all imagined "i" or selves down to fleeting impressions, sensations and fancies, each succeeding the other with a rapidity, but without any factual basis. Bodies we have but they are robotic.
Ah what a clever and amazing imposter the ego or self is, that has so deceived our great philosophers. It has become an interesting and peculiar illusion, but it finally snares itself in death. But it's illusions continue in others, from generation to generation it passes on its box of tricks of a Master Magician of illusion. It is the great Satan "that has gone out into all the world to deceive it."
Like light which is invisible which is the reason we can see the stars at night, it makes all visible. So does the Supreme SELF of all of us make this world visible. To be like Hume we would be like a man looking at himself at both ends of the telescope. They are like the absent-minded scholar in search of their glasses with their glasses still on the end of their nose. Or like in the Spanish proverb out in search of the mule, while riding it.This is like trying to find the self while it is idle when it was at rest. The self is unfortunately never at rest, it never has any time to have an interview, to be photographed, it is continually dancing, performing. Is this self an 'orchestra without a conductor?'
Yet the polemic of these great philosophers should not be set aside, there is truth in what they say. But they have left out the ONE SELF of the many the real liver and doer of all of us. WE are God having a human experience. WE are eternal and invisible to the senses of the body, but we are the DOER AS GOD, as little self we are just a puppets at a Masquerade... a will- o'- the wisps that lure and elude in that awful trinity of past, present and future that contain all things in its house of dreams.
