In the Beginning was the Woohoo

Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.
Max Beckmann

My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, then in your imagination God is supposed to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.
John Henrik Clarke

All of us have mortal bodies, composed of perishable matter, but the soul lives forever: it is a portion of the Deity housed in our bodies 
Flavius Josephus

 Well, you dirty angels you, how did it feel after reading my last blog entry and finding out that you are a god?  You didn't get up on top of the roof and jump off with a tablecloth around your neck thinking you could fly did you?  Good.  Now lissen.  When I start talking "nonsense" like I did last time, the most important thing is not what I am saying but what I'm not saying.  I used to love Mad Magazine when I was younger.  Yes, you can blame Mad Magazine along with W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx and Mark Twain among others for how I am today.  Mr Fields, Marx and Twain or currently unavailable to receive your feedback.  Please press nine if you want to hear a raspberry.  Sorry all operators are busy, your negative feedback is important to us, please hold for a couple decades.

But back to Mad Magazine.  The wonderful Sergio Aragones would do these little cartoons in the margins of the pages.  Just little small cartoon strips a half-inch high or so without dialogue.  Reading between the lines of Mad Magazine was for some issues the funniest stuff in there.  And when you're reading a sacred text, or sometimes reading this blog, that's what you'll need to do, read between the lines, to stop being so literal minded and let Truth sneak up on you side-wise.

When the bible says Adam and Eve were in a perfect state of bliss and that they were evicted by eating the forbidden fruit, an event that Terence McKenna has referred to as "the world's first drug bust," that didn't actually happen.  It's not important if it actually  happened or not...what is the most important thing, is what it means.  It's a story trying to express a Truth, not trying to document tru fax.  The people who wrote that stuff were keyed into the larger picture, which is why the bible still captivates us because there is a lot of Truth in there amongst all the fiddle-faddle.  Those ancient writers are rolling their eyes at all the folks still suggesting the earth is only 6000 years old in terms of human activity...and it's so hard to do that today when we now know that, f'rinstance, the Sumerians were already building little pink houses and grilling in their backyard and reminding each other not to wear white shoes after Labor Day at least that far back.


But that's what happens when ideology is more important than facts and reason and otherwise using your gray matter.  Spirituality isn't supposed to be the province of flakes.  Oh yes, there's plenty of bubble-headed folks out there for whom every day seems like a Renaissance Festival and they create for themselves silly, desperate religions because Dungeons and Dragons wasn't realistic enough for them.  I don't want to offend someone here, but if you go around calling yourself a witch or a druid, I'd like to see your diploma and a few references.  The ancient Druids spent a dozen years or more learning all their mystic knowledge and memorizing oral histories and had their own secret coded language, etc...putting on a white bedsheet and wearing exciting jewelry is playing dress up.  Yes, I know you've read a few books, but please.  It's like when Dr Howard and Dr. Fine and Dr Howard put on surgical smocks and administered anesthetic by rapping someone in the noggin with a wooden mallet.  I don't think they finished med school.  Call me crazy, porcupine, but if you claim to be something that you're not, it's not helping some of us folks who are trying to un-educate and dis-inform.  You're scaring the straight people.

My wife slipped one day and called me a "shaman" which I denied immediately and I could technically be called a "mystic" but I shun such labels and categories.  I'm just a loser from Middle Tennessee who is trying to kick it old school while trying to reconcile 21st Century science and knowledge into a Theory of Everything.  Or the Theory of Woohoo.  I don't see that there is anything special about this, just like the Ancient Egyptians didn't think themselves weird for practicing what we would today call "magic" if they wrote a spell on a piece of papyrus then dunked the papyrus in a dish of water, allowing the vegetable-based ink to dissolve into the water, then would drink the water, and the magic spell, because they woke up with a headache, or wanted to catch a lot of fish that day, or wanted to shag that chick down in Memphis that they know, the one with the awesome wig and perfect almond eyes.  Tapping into the mysteries of the universe is something folks used to take for granted, somewhere along the way a significant population of humans lost their contentment for that and I'll be examining that when I do my "let's all go back and live in wig-wams again" blog entries.  And yes...modern religion gets the credit and blame for modern civilization.


Now of course fundamentalists like atheists and Xians and such people who are likewise mesmerized by the 24/7 brightly-lit and spasmodic carnival that the superficial material universe is write myth and such off as being created because people didn't know any better before SCIENCE.  Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of myth.  When you read about the Cherokees and that they thought that the earth floated on a big ocean and that it was suspended by four cords at the cardinal points and that the sky was the underside of a big dome of rock and that the sun didn't go into the sea, but slipped over the sky vault at night and then traveled behind that rock arch to reappear in the morning, that was their unique interpretation.  This story meant something to them.  It didn't matter, the sun rose and set, just the same.  And the same go for gods.  The idea that people created gods because they wanted to explain where thunder comes from, for example, because they didn't know the science behind it is just plain wrong and that is making the mistake of applying our modern sensibilities onto ancient and aboriginal peoples.  No, the Ancient Egyptians or aboriginal Australians didn't/don't share your same modern concerns.  The Rainbow Snake wasn't created because they didn't know any better.  The ancient Aussies shifted their consciousness so that they went to where the Rainbow Snake lives and discovered him/her/it.  Science serves sometimes to take the wonder out of life, not to really enhance it where it counts.  This is why many atheists are also mean, arrogant, hard-core people who will call you ignorant and closed-minded at the drop of a hat if you disagree with them.  They are lost and deny their own humanity if they claim science can explain all phenomena.  That's why they're so grumpy.

Which comes to the point of this here blog.  I know you were wondering about that.  I want to try to define what gods, spirits, fairies, elves, boogey-men, rainbow snakes, etc are.  Yes, we meet the definition of being a god as we are spirits.  The principle of spirit/soul/mind/consciousness are all the same thing.  You are your own invisible friend.  You are a mind, currently linked (and in linked I mean by a chain, the "mortal coil") to a physical body composed of perishable matter.  And by shifting your consciousness via meditation or other methods, some including magical mushrooms (which I have never taken) you can also send your mind to places other than your local latitude and longitude.  Ancient peoples, when their nervous systems were developed enough to receive consciousness and also transmit it, realized that not only were they more than just an another animal, that they were also not alone in being self-aware and repositories of consciousness.

Let me take a moment and show you a passage from the New and Improved Testament:


And when he was come nigh, even now at the descent at the mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise (Yahweh) with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen; saying, "Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of (Yahweh): peace in heaven, and glory in the highest."  And some of the Pharisees (boo hiss) from among the multitude said unto him, "Master, rebuke thy disciples for verily they are noisy waterheads."  And Jesus answered and said unto them, "Get off their backs, you jerks.  I be droppin' some knowledge 'ere that if they should stifle it, why even these rocks around here would immediately shout and holler."


Luke 19: 37-40  New Woohoo Version


Consider the stones:  taking into account the previous  miracles that Jesus was said to have performed, seeing stones crying out and singing Amazing Grace might be impressive, but not necessarily unexpected.  The implication here is that if the people weren't going to praise Jesus, seeing as how the multitude of disciples (and you thought there were only 12) are better equipped to speak, then the stones would not be able to contain themselves and they would then speak up.  The implication here is that the stones were aware of the importance of Jesus' arrival into Jerusalem.   I won't even mention the talking ass from the Old and Outdated Testament.  Talking asses in this day and age are a dime a dozen, anyway.  You can't throw a talking rock without hitting one.


The ancient (and present-day) shamans, medicine-men, witch doctors, by modifying their perceptional apparatus and expanding/altering their consciousness experienced (and experience) other layers of reality and other expressions of consciousness.  They met entities, we believe mostly totemic animal spirits to begin with, then as humans evolved and became more sophisticated, the types of beings they encountered also became more sophisticated...consciousness in general was evolving and growing up.  Revealed to them was a cosmos alive with energy and sentience and that man, as highly evolved as we are, was just the tip of the iceberg.  Yes, we qualify as gods and maybe even the gravel in your driveway has a limited understanding of the universe.

I didn't say we were doing a very good job of being gods, did I?  We're more like gods who are currently in kindergarten with attention deficit disorder.  We spend most of our lives being told that *G*O*D* is this and that and being taught how to read and write and therefore having reality pinned down with labels and strict definitions.  Language both allows us to express the wonder of reality and at the same time limits our understanding of it.  We build ourselves and others build for us what Robert Anton Wilson called a "reality tunnel."  And "tunnel vision" is the idea here.  It may be safe to live in a well-provisioned bomb-shelter of ideologies, but you don't get to go fishing that way.  In the Western World, in a Capitalistic society concerned with wealth and stuff, we are taught that reality is the material world and stuff can make you happy.  Jeep currently has an ad campaign with the slogan, "What we make, makes us."  Bull biscuits.  Yes, you probably have some religion in there, but Xian offspring are taught as early as possible that you are forsaken by your deity and that you have to go to where he is and obey his rules to even have a taste of what it means to be a child of god, not that you, as an expression of consciousness, not only are custom-built with a connection to divinity, you yourself are part of that same program.


There a system of control at foot and the policy by the "elite" is to keep the multitudes under the boots of the rather small minority of folks who are actually keyed into spirituality and then pervert it in a quest to accumulate power and wealth for themselves.  Both George Bushes weren't memorizing the Psalms when they were members of Skull and Bones in college, they were learning the stuff mother warned you about.  Make no mistake, Glenn Beck is not an idiot, he is a spiritualist of the first order and may very well be currently shopping around for just the right black goat to sacrifice to whatever god he's hitched his wagon to on All Hallow's Eve, while giving lip service to Xianity because he knows so many people are, as Flannery O'Conner termed it, "Christ-drunk."

Many successful people in the Western World wear the official uniform of Christendom but when you're not looking are doing things that would offend even Marilyn Manson.  Because, as I have previously pointed out, Yahweh is not the king of the mountain and regularly has sand kicked in his face by other deities.  And don't get me started with all the rock stars, actors and other celebrities who are also keyed into these higher energies.  When you see Robert Downey Jr appear on Craig Ferguson and he makes an off-the-cuff remark about sexual "serpent energy" while CraigyFerg drinks from a mug shaped like a rattlesnake, try not to notice.  Oh, the Rolling Stones never have hid the fact that they were and may still be using the occult, they just don't necessarily advertise the fact.  You may think Madonna is a great artist and may think her belief in Jewish mysticism is indicative of a celebrity being eccentric but has no bearing on her continuing success...and hey, Madonna wouldn't mind you continuing to think that way.  She doesn't want any more competition.

We because of how complex and advanced our nervous systems are, can tap into the larger picture of consciousness and thereby expand ourselves and our relationship with nature, with reality on all it's levels.  You don't have to be a star to do this, because you are a star already.  We are however, like most sentient life, cursed with a collection of dodgy and imperfect sensory apparatus which does not allow us to experience reality directly.  And the human senses are by no means the gold standard.  Far from it.  We see through a windowpane that is smeared by the limitations of our senses.  Grass is not green, we only perceive it to be green.  True Reality is something else altogether.

I just caught our male tuxedo cat Pippin staring up at the ceiling.  There's nothing up there except a light that is always there.  He was seeing something.  I joked that it was a muse hovering overhead to my left.  This cat has a different experience of reality than I do because of how he can see, hear, smell, etc.  Some of his senses are better than mine, some are just different.  Because his vocabulary and therefore also his language, the size of his dictionary, is small, and because his nervous system is not as sophisticated as mine...he could very well be seeing something that would cause me to have a religious experience...but to him, it's just part of his unique perception of reality.  No big deal.  He is probably just wondering when breakfast will next be served, when he had it just two hours ago.  Cats are intelligent, sure, there's a whole range of intelligence from rocks and Sarah Palin to Stephen Hawking (who is so smart he even outsmarts himself)...but cats are also are not wise and have a tendency to favor curiosity over self-preservation.  But that's not to say they don't have a religious life and maybe they're not always sleeping, sometimes they're actually meditating.  I wonder who rocks worship?  And if they're supposed to make a pilgrimage to Devil's Tower in Wyoming in their life time.


Here's part of my Theory of Woohoo, so strap in:  In the Beginning all energy and matter were compressed into an impossibly dense, impossibly small point.  (Sound familiar?)  When we have energy and at least the potential for matter we also have consciousness.  The idea is that energy/matter/self-awareness are part of each other and are not separated and we can call this original pure unification of all energy *G*O*D*.  Since this perfect point of energy was also all the consciousness there was, it was self-aware, but in a very limited way.  Because who we are is defined by our environment.  We are stimulated by stimuli and our response builds us, brick by brick.  Conflict builds character.  This entity was all alone, there was nothing besides itself.  It had no experiences, no personality, no name, no hobbies.  It was a blank slate, like someone in the mental ward who has to be tied to his wheelchair because his brain doesn't function enough to remind him to sit up.  So this perfect, pure consolidation of energy was also staring blankly out into space much like Goldie Hawn does and just saying "DUHHHHHH."  This culmination of all energy wanted to BE, even if it didn't realize what it was wanting.  It wanted to have experiences.  Nature abhors a vacuum and wants to go running through tall grass in its bare feet.

So, then *G*O*D*...well...ahem...it commits suicide, sorta.  It stops being what it is and destroys itself, tears itself apart at the seams, knowing however that consciousness will continue, it knows that much, it will just be dispersed over infinite space.  So all matter and mind explodes out, and I don't want to get icky here...but this small point of matter, by ejaculating out into space, which is the womb, then is able to create little versions of itself in an infinite number of manifestations.  Instead of being nowhere...now...*G*O*D* is everywhere and also everything.  The Godhead sacrifices itself in order to share what it is with an entire universe and we along with all matter are also the cells of *G*O*D*.  Catholics believe when they take communion they are actually eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus, who they believe is *G*O*D*.  We are actually the body and the blood already.  We are pieces of this entity and *G*O*D* may one day be looking to unite and put itself together again, a being that now has all the experiences of all the atoms of matter that it cast out like break upon the waters, and that...maybe...we'll also be self-aware even at that point, as part of that perfect being.  Or maybe this will never stop and *G*O*D* is already fulfilled and stills looks forward to the rest of eternity to learn more about itself by creating new paradigms.  It's hard to satisfy such a being, contentment is not a virtue, which I believe is why humans were not content to live in caves and hunt and gather and communicate by a limited series of grunts and gestures.  We wanted to learn because we were part of a system that was all about growing and learning.

Your understanding that there is a *G*O*D* is because you are part of that, we all give our consciousness to this ultimate being and that is reflected back to us, yes even you atheists who really don't realize what you're saying when you deny the existence of anything you can't see/hear/taste/smell/touch or reproduce over and over in a laboratory.

As both physicists and students of the kabbalah believe, matter and energy has slowly coagulated and condensed over time.  The further down the kabbalistic Tree of Life you go, the more the spheres become grounded in material reality, until you get to the bottom, which is the material universe that is the mixture of dust and deity, the sacred and the profane, the spirit made flesh.  Now the Tree of Life doesn't exist.  No one is going to look into a telescope and see a technicolor windchime hanging somewhere in the Milky Way, or the Lactose-Intolerant Way for that matter.  It's a metaphor, an allegory, but it overlays very well with the Big Bang Theory, which is also a pretty good teevee show.

The metaphor of the Garden of Eden is like the metaphor that *G*O*D* was in a state of bliss, but had no knowledge.  You see, when you do not know good and evil, you know nothing.  *G*O*D* had to "fall" from that state of grace in order to be anything meaningful, and Adam and Eve had to "fall" from grace in order for there to be a human race.  Because just as there was no death in the Garden, there was also no Sex, there was a fixed, static reality of Man, Woman, the garden and the animals.  Animals didn't eat other animals, everyone was a herbivore.  The matter of the universe had to leave perfection in order to be something greater, even if it meant a lot of suffering along the way.  There is nothing evil or dirty about death or sex, it's all part of the plan, the matter of the universe gets recycled over and over so there can be more experiences, consciousness gathering knowledge to itself the way a lint roller picks up kitty-cat hairs off your sofa.  There has to be suffering, loss, death, disaster and other manifestations of change.  You can't make an omelet with breaking some eggs.


Basically, the divine perfection shattered itself, sending its essence out into space and I believe has been slowing putting itself back together again so it could share that with everything else and be bigger and better than before.  It's taken a long time, and may still take a long time, because when you're that high an order of consciousness Time is experienced in a much different way that we mortals understand it.  A few billions years seems like a long time to us, not so much to *G*O*D*  So now, the collective unconsciousness is not stuck as it used to be in a very very very very very small egg, it's found in all matter.  It's a kid in a candy store the size of the universe and it can have all it want.   And the more sophisticated the nervous system of an organic being is, the better you can experience this principle.  Gods, spirits, fairies, etc...are also expressions of consciousness and saying that consciousness can only reside in a person is like saying water can only be found in a bottle.


If consciousness is only a side-effect of our nervous system and certain bio-chemical processes, then we don't actually exist.  We would have no more importance that algae growing on top of a pond, or the fuzzy mold growing on those hamburger buns you forgot about in the pantry.  But no...we are part of nature and when we look out the window on a beautiful, sunny Autumn afternoon, we realize it is beautiful because we are part of it, we're not programmed to think it is pretty, we cannot and no one does, look dispassionately and coldly on the universe as merely the result of convenient accidents.


Even the scientists who are also atheists who go to conventions and preach their gospel admit wonder when they gaze on the universe.  They speak about how we are made of stardust and get cold chills talking about it.  They are far closer to Truth than a fundamentalist Xian is.  They are just human-centric, which is also them realizing how important people are...since we're gods.  The ability to reason is a big, big deal, but atheism has naugahyde to do with reason and critical-thinking.  This is why atheists frustrate me so much and why I pity them.  They are so close, so very close but are hamstrung by materialism and the testimony of failed religions.  They see Xianity as false and bad for you, but then they throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater.

No...we are not organic robots that have just been programmed to think we are individuals and unique persons.  We are more than that, so much more than just meat-puppets.  This is what atheists don't understand, blinded as they are by superficial reality and made spiritually incompetent by "religions" like Judaism, Xianity and Islam that are really just political systems meant to control people while the Secret Chiefs of the world accumulate wealth and power unto themselves because they have read the old grimores and understand some of the old mysteries and take advantage of them, while keeping their underlings in the dark and at the same time, via Hollywood and the Inquisition and other means of propaganda and oppression warn them against anything that might expand their consciousness, like Yoga, having your palm read, horoscopes, etc...the "gate way drugs" to being able to later take a long walk one afternoon with a deity or two other than Yahweh and Jesus and having your mind re-calibrated and realizing that you're a part of *G*O*D* and it is your birthright by simply being alive of being part of something not only bigger than you...that you are a part of that bigger thing.

Yes, we are gods, but we are imperfect and not very good at the job right now, we're slackers, gold-brickers, not even fit to do the landscaping around or clean the windows of the mansions of glory.  We do things like leave the oven on and eat too much and watch bad teevee and write run-on sentences.  We've got a long way to go before we can slip off the overcoats of our mortality and soar on the wings of our higher selves.  And as soon as we take off the concrete overshoes of our small, petty ideologies and leave behind narrow-mindedness, as soon as you dig your way out of your cramped reality tunnel, you'll be able to see the sky...and you'll see someone looking back.


Selah