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As the above words of seigneur
de Montaigne imply, there is nothing here that you don't already
know. But if you are anything like I am, indeed like most
of my friends, then you seldom find time, or take the trouble,
to reach within deep enough to become aware of your knowledge.
I hope this book will help you to know yourself better.
What follows is not intended
as a scientific dissertation. Nor is it an attempt to impose
my views, nor influence your thinking in any way. What I am offering
is a compendium of my observations which may motivate you to
begin observing the world through your own eyes a little more
diligently. You might call it my vision of the world I live in.
To protect myself from an egocentric viewpoint, I took great
pains to share with you also the visions of many men throughout
history, many men and women who are making history today, and
some lesser visionaries whose views I find particularly attractive.
Your vision, the program that controls your views and therefore
your life, will forever remain your own. I wish to stress, however,
that you must have a vision or else remain no more than an effect
of your subconscious.
I am not concerned with the
visible universe.
Once the universe becomes
detectable to our senses, it is too late to change it. The book
will show that we have our being within a continuous process
of creating the reality we live in.
I am fascinated by the process
itself. There are excellent popular books on the subject of how
to procure results. Here, we shall concentrate on the cause.
Although we shall not ignore the results, neither physics nor
astrophysics need concern us here other than to broaden our perspective.
What we shall discus principally is the "Visual Universe".
The universe which we do or can visualize and, in the process
of doing so, we shall give it reality. The tangible universe
thus becomes the result of our quest, not the quest itself. What
we are after is the process. The Creative Process. The methods
which empower us to be as gods.
From the hoary days of history
in which we, humans, became aware of ourselves, of our distinctiveness,
we have been engaged in doing just that. Every single one of
us has been creating his or her subjective realities. We made
our beds and we must sleep in them. We created our heavens and
our hells. We did it all unwittingly. We had no idea that it
had been up to us what world we chose to live in. We became adept
at blaming the stars, the governments, schools and educational
systems, and finally our parents. It may be that all these elements
had some peripheral influence on the universes we live in. But
the degree to which we permit external conditions, or the environment,
to influence us has always been up to us. Up to our free will.
Up to our ability to lead a Conscious Life.
It is time to stop being a
result. It is time to stop bobbing up and down like a cork cast
by some whimsical deity on the vast oceans of life. We are the
architects of our destiny. We are gods.
continued in
the book...
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Chapter 1 (part)
Visions
All visions are subjective.
Subjective religious visions
are called Revelations. Subjective non-religious visions (unless
held by famous people) are often referred to as Hallucinations.
Hallucinations can be subdivided into artistic, political, social,
idealistic, and a whole array of inspired non-religious fantasies,
delusions or insights. Revelations fall essentially into two
categories, the pragmatic (aimed at organizing people) and the
prophetic (aimed at scaring people). Both deal with influencing
others directly. There has never been a prophecy of a carrot
that was not accompanied by a stick. The prophetic visions are
usually symbolic in nature, i.e. misunderstood by all that attempt
to give them a fundamentalist interpretation. There is a very
basic characteristic of all visions. They can never really be
shared. People who claim allegiance to a vision of another human
being become followers, never those who implement the original
vision.
They follow what they think
the vision was, never what it was de facto. The same is
true of all visions.
No more can the vision of
a mystic be fully shared with another person than an artist's
vision with his audience. The artist and the mystic attempt to
convey their singular, subjective insights, which we then receive
and examine at our own subjective level. Each one of us receives
or experiences differently the very same Beethoven's symphony,
the same Mendelssohn's violin concerto or Pablo Picasso's Guernica.
In spite of copious examples, we each have a different interpretation
of Jesus' Kingdom of Heaven. No two people agree precisely on
Buddha's vision of the middle path, fewer still will fall in
step on Lao Tse's Tao. Not even "interpretations" are
alike. We can only wonder at what the artist or mystic really
had in mind. The original visions remain subjective and inimitable.
Other peoples' visions can be aspired to, even exceeded, but
never equaled.
I recall an elderly lady asking
Picasso who was attending his first exhibition in London, England,
what a particular painting of his represented. The inscrutable
master took it off the wall, turned it sideways, upside-down,
pondered it for a while and replaced it on the wall. "To
you, Madame, this painting can represent anything you want,"
he said, "to me, it represents £10,000."
To repeat, all visions are
by definition subjective.
The prophet and the crank
both respond to energies beyond their intellectual or mental
understanding. To protect his sanity, the prophet escapes into
the realm of the "divine". He (or she) blames or praises
God for his (or her) visitation. Today, unless the non-religious
visionary can channel his vision into an artistic or pragmatic
application, they are compelled, and often do, escape to the
psychiatrist. Few do justice to their experience. All deal with
the unknown. The degree of their sanity is directly proportional
to their ability to recognize the process of visualization.
There is a byproduct of the
visionary process, which must be recognized but never confused
with the vision itself. When an astrophysicist translates his
or her vision into a theorem, backs it up with adequate equations
for the vision to be "testable", it is then called
a prediction. Yet what we test is not the vision, but an interpretation
of a vision; rather like a painting is a two-dimensional representation
of artist's holistic or gestält vision, or a religion
an interpretation of an avatar's vision. Predictions ensue from
visions, but they are initiated at the consciousness level.
Visions have their origin
in the Ocean of Infinite Possibilities. In the absolute unknown.
To understand Picasso's painting
we must enter his studio, insinuate ourselves into his thoughts,
with luck into his heart, soul, examine his stream of consciousness
and then perhaps, just perhaps... we might share in his vision.
The same is true about the products of all artists, composers,
visionaries. Asking an artist what does his or her painting,
or sculpture, or a musical composition represent is equivalent
to an open admission of total inability to understand the answer.
Unless the visionary is a writer or a gifted orator, that which
he or she conveys is not meant to be conveyed with words. It
must be felt, appreciated or even understood at a higher level.
The greatest offenders in
this field are the, so-called, experts or critics. They are like
Pharisees who do not enter the Kingdom yet bar others from doing
so themselves. They build walls between the visionary and the
recipient. They insinuate their own version of the interpretation
in lieu of the original experience. Whether a vision is religious
or not, it must be experienced, never interpreted unless
the interpretation is made by the experiencer himself for himself.
Then, and only then, the interpretation remains subjective and
thus true at the personal level. At best, a subjective interpretation
may be offered, never imposed. It may be offered as an illustration
attesting to the richness of the original vision, never as a
substitute of the vision itself.
The same is true of all "hallucinations"
and of all "revelations". There are no exceptions.
continued in
the book...
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