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Article Specs

Article ID: 9214

VoxAcct: 150030

Section: words

Age Group: Adult

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The Guru Of My Religion

Author: Lord Ansur
Posted: May 15th. 2005
Times Viewed: 3,026

"In the Beginning was the VOID
Teeming with Infinite Possibilities
Of which You
ARE ONE…"

- What the Bleep Do We Know!?


There are some of us who are satisfied with our lives and our beliefs, and go through life only examining the limited reality presented to us by our religions, political systems, or societal mores. Not only that but parents, schools, political parties and religious leaders tend to work together to place each and every person in an organized, comfortable, small and well labeled box called “ordinary citizen.” In such a tidy society of well-mannered robots, control is achieved with little effort and the leaders are able to enforce their rules and more easily achieve their personal aims — good or bad.

It can be very comfortable being one of the many little souls imprisoned in tidy little well labeled boxes. You do not have to think for yourself but can give up that responsibility to “your superiors” who are advanced souls as evidenced by their great minds, wealth, and ideas — no matter where they may lead you, to victory or destruction. Also, if your country, religion, or society fails and chaos reigns, you can then shirk any responsibility for whatever horrors may come — after all, it wasn’t you who caused it, it was your leaders’ fault.

It too is comforting to be a member of a group that preaches Absolute Truth. If you believe in Absolute Truth, you can understand what is currently happening and what will happen in the future. Unfortunately, Absolute Truth and perfect predictions of the future leave no room for free will — since the future is already set and inflexible. Contrary to this idea, according to some, you still have the free will to follow - or not - your deity’s or deities’ rules. The problem with this is those rules are seldom set by the deities but by the deities’ officials — who usually interpret theses rules for you — as backed up by some holy writing such as the Talmud or Nostradamus’ Quatrains...

Let us examine the complexities and paradoxes of major religion’s descriptions of typical deities:

The idea of a supreme being who is omniscient, and yet allows her/his creatures the free will to damn themselves needs to be questioned. If he or she is omniscient (all-knowing) then she or he knows all events past and future, including how people will behave, and their ultimate fate before they are even born. Therefore, she or he must deliberately create people who are destined from before birth to be condemned to the abyss, reincarnate in the form of a worm, or perhaps endure some kind of eternal damnation. Is this the action of a merciful and compassionate loving deity?

If a deity is not omniscient, in that he or she allows people to make their own choices about being damned or saved, then she or he cannot be omnipotent. If she or he cannot simultaneously see all times, past and future, all laid out like the frames from a movie, then the deity exists within time. So she or he OR IT is a creature of time and is then subject to the uncertainties of time just like the rest of us. Then Time must be ultimately more powerful than any defined deity.

On the other hand, if It is omniscient, It can never make a decision or choose a course of action, because It knows in advance exactly what Its future actions will be for all eternity. It cannot decide to change Its mind because It will know in advance when and how It will decide to change Its mind, so Its mind will already be made up. Such a deity would be totally paralyzed by Its own pre-ordained future.

If the deity is omnipotent, can It produce a truly indestructible object? If It can't then It is not omnipotent. If It can then It is not omnipotent either because now there's one thing It cannot do - destroy the truly indestructible.

In other words, the whole human concept of the traditional God or Goddess is contradictory! We are not conscious enough to truly understand the concept of deity. Our deities are too often the ideas of primitive, arrogant people who created deities in their own image—and such created deities are, much too often, angry, savage, jealous beings. Some people have better ideas about what a deity is but no one understands the total concept even if they experience the real presence of the thing called God or Goddess.

Existing among the flocks of pre-programmed robotic sheep, each in its own small box, there exist thinkers — idealists that have been disillusioned for one reason or another by the simple and archaic concepts of their societies. Many of these consider themselves superior to the unthinking masses. But they are often suckers that end up following some Guru-like promoter of new ideas.

The disillusioned idealist is usually capable of grasping some of the greater reality that exists outside the tidy boxed-in person’s simple awareness. Yet they often have “half-formed” and “incomplete” ideas that they have not completely formulated. Many a Guru started out as a true enlightened teacher that formulated answers which attracted idealists. When a person finds a religious leader who can fill in their incomplete and half-formed ideas, they often deify that leader and abandon everything else to live exactly as that person tells them to. Unfortunately, too often the power to control or the monetary and ego rewards corrupt the teacher. Additionally, since the teacher also has half-formed, uncertain ideas of their own, when pressed for answers they cannot come up with, they may react defensibly by giving answers that they think the listeners want to hear — but that are not based on introspection or the quest for truth.

Occasionally, a god-like Guru reaches a point where they begin to loose power and control. In the throes of their error, they may even begin to believe their own imperfect answers and their belief system may just fall apart or worse, the entire cult may be forced into willingly committing suicide.

Looking at one’s Guru is often like looking at a reflection of one’s own self. Some Gurus are humble and wise enough to keep their personal needs separate from the teachings they provide for their followers. But those that don’t or can’t separate themselves from the message can be dangerous. Gurus, no matter how enlightened, are in the end just human, like you and me!

All of my life I have been formulating a personal theology. Parts of my theology were firm and developed but many of my ideas were lost in the fog of incomplete theories, half-realized ideas, and partially guessed thoughts. The one saving advantage that I had is found in the Chaos Magic saying: “Nothing is True.” I never followed anyone because I knew there was no ultimate truth. Yet, I finally met my Guru — but my Guru is not a person — it is a movie: What the Bleep do We Know!?. I know that the movie is not a media of absolute truth and some of it is flawed, and I know that someday its concepts will be replaced by better truths. But in the meantime it filled in my half-realized thoughts and blew the fog out of my thinking.

It is not often that one finds a movie that stamps one’s personal philosophy with a big APPROVAL, and fills in one’s vague thoughts and any theories which were not yet fully formulated.

My Guru relates science, philosophy, religion, and medicine as a whole. And it confirms what holy people, wise mystics, Witches and Pagans have been saying for thousands of years — and then quotes science to prove it.

We all have a habit of thinking that everything around us is already a thing, existing without our input, without our choices, and that we have no control over it. But my Guru says that the material world around us, the chairs, the room, and the carpet - all of these are nothing but possible movements of consciousness. And we choose moment to moment out of those movements to bring our actual experience into manifestation. This is difficult because our tendency is to believe that the world is already out there independent of our experience.

The world out there is not independent of our experiences. Quantum Physics has been very clear about that. Heisenberg himself, co-discoverer of Quantum Physics, said atoms are not things, they’re only tendencies. So, instead of thinking of things, we need to think of possibilities. There are many possibilities of consciousness. We build up models of how we see the world outside us. The more information we have, the more we refine our model one way or another. Our ultimate act is to tell ourselves a story about what the outside world is. Our consciousness influences others around us. It influences material properties. It influences our future. And we co-create our future based on the limitation of our thoughts.

We have to formulate what we want, be so concentrated on it, so focused on it, and so aware of it that we lose track of ourselves, we lose track of time, and we lose track of our very identity. At that magical moment, we observe a picture of the greater reality, and it manifests. We call this Magic.

The Druids said that a person is three things: What they think they are, what others think they are, and what they really are. That is why one of the great rules of magic is “to know thyself.” But we can go beyond this and become someone else to look upon ourselves to see greater truth. Or we can be initiated into the mysteries by looking at ourselves through the eyes of the Ultimate Observer.

Most magic users don’t affect Reality in a consistently substantial way, because they don’t believe they can. They do a spell and then doubt its outcome because they think they are being silly. So, on an average, there is only a little effect. It really comes down to the fact that they don’t believe in themselves.

We can affect not only ourselves but the reality around us. In Quantum Mechanics, the Observer, of which we are one, affects the outcome of the experience. An example of this kind of thing is when we use a voltmeter to measure a voltage. The meter, when placed in the circuit, draws some energy to power its readings. Therefore, the voltage it is reading is always modified by the act of observing it. In OLD THOUGHT, we cannot change anything because we have no role in Reality. Reality is already out there. It is material objects moving in their own way, from deterministic Laws, and mathematics will determine what they will do in a given situation. In such a universe, we can have no role at all.

In NEW THOUGHT, mathematics can give us valuable information since it gives us the possibilities that all this movement can assume. But it cannot give us the actual experience that we will be having in our consciousness. We choose the experience, and therefore we literally create our own Reality. And that is what Quantum Physics tells us!

My Guru hints that no one knows any ultimate truth. In science, Newton’s laws for falling objects were based on the concept of gravitational attraction. Einstein proved that gravitational attraction did not exist — objects “roll” toward each other due to material warping the space-time-continuum. Now, Quantum Physics is finding that Einstein was not always right and in turn, String Theory is now questioning Quantum Physics. Each concept is “more true” than the one before it but none are the ultimate, final theory. Perhaps most interesting of all, each new, “truer” discovery is stranger than the one before it. And that is why my Guru asks the question: “How far down the rabbit hole of Mysteriousness do you want to go?”

To acknowledge the quantum self is to acknowledge the place where you really have a choice. And to acknowledge the mind when a shift of perspective takes place is to be enlightened. For in the end, my Guru confirms what wise people though the ages have been saying: You create your own reality, you have the power to change it by using magic, and that reality is much grander than our leaders would like to have us understand.

And as long as I realize that my Guru teaches only better truths instead of absolute truths, then my Guru is superior to others, since it is not subject to changes brought about by the needs of ego.




Footnotes:
What the Bleep Do We Know!?; Captured Light Distribution; 2004

The Little Book of Bleeps: Excerpts from the Award-Winning Movie What the (#$%&) Bleep Do We Know; Captured Light Distribution; 2004



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