Number Twenty

We didn't come here for happiness or unhappiness.  We came to overcome what's compensatory and automatic: the habitual, corrosive solutions to our pain. We came to lean how to love while every impulse sends us back to the familiar ways.  Back to the flaw, the separation, the breakdown where we began to lose each other.

Number Nineteen

We don't want knowledge; we want confirmation of what we already know.  We want belief, fixed and immutable.

Belief constructs reality to satisfy our needs and fears.  Belief is the selective process of seeing and not seeing, of ignoring what is frightening and uncomfortable in favor of what is comforting and validating.  Hope and fear supercharge belief to make it absolute.

Knowledge is not absolute.  It forever expands, assimilates, changes.  It is the truth right now -- in this place, from this vantage, under this sky, between these souls.

Number Eighteen

The violence goes on.  Taking our children.  All over the world.  For profit, for revenge, for a rite of passage.  For belief, or in the name of god.  It is made from the myth of belonging and not belonging.  Of family vs. strangers; of the good people and the different ones.  The different ones are specters of evil.  The different ones can be killed.  Driven.  Used.  They die invisibly.  They make up the nightly body count, each demise a measure of success.

The violence goes on -- as if we were not all part of "the whole."  As if we were not here learning to love.  As if killers would not have to learn to be victims.  It is passed on, our violence merely deepening the amnesia.  Helping to forget what's all around: The sound, like a constant wind, of souls trying to be heard.

Number Seventeen

The act of judgment makes us dense, breakable.  The soul can only sustain damage by hardening, by inventing good and bad, by separating what is seen and felt and done into the great lie of right and wrong.  The act of judgment compresses love into a thin approval.  Ready to be torn, taken.  Ready to be withheld or returned again for a ransome.

Judgment collapses us with the weight of fragments, the breaking of experience into what is accepted or not accepted.  Loved or thrown away.  The walls of the self fall inward because judgment always descends there.  Scavenging.  Pressing.  Digging into our last protected place.

Number Sixteen

We say "the die is cast" or "it's god's will" as if Fate were certain.  As if we were helpless at the intersecting lines of cause and effect. And then we build religions on assumptions of will and sin and earned redemption.  As if choice were absolute and the events of our lives were our own creation.  We believe in belief, as if something held strongly will manifest itself -- in this reality or (in Quantum Physics) a parallel one.

Morality depends on will.  Justice depends on will.  Without will there is no right and wrong. There is no right and wrong because will depends on awareness and the strength to resist pain.  Which varies from moment to moment, from soul to soul, from situation to situation.

There is no right and wrong because the matrices of cause stack up -- like waves -- from ripple to tsunami.  And the strength of will that can surmount the lapping tide falters before the rushing mountain.

We come here to face choices.  We have a ticket to learn.  Free will flickers -- here for a moment and then gone.  The lens of awareness goes from clarity to utter blindness.  Yet we keep on: responding, failing, moving.  What lessons are made of.

Number Fifteen

We speak of spending time as if time were a bag of coins.  A kind of wealth that someday will be lost.  Death makes time look finite, something we run out of.

Time is change.  Without change there is no way to mark time -- whether measured by the drifting of continents or the moving hands of a clock.  In the physical world, time is the movement or breaking down and recombining of molecules. For souls, time is measured by what is learned -- the transformation from empty slate to a holder of knowledge.

Death can't stop time for the soul.  Souls collectively hold all of experience, gathering everything that is or will be known.  Souls are the books in a library that is god.  Each book continually grows, changes.  It never stops, and time goes on.

Number Fourteen

Desire and detachment live next to each other.  Both beautiful and necessary.  The required dialectic for a complete life.  Desire without detachment is a runaway train, allowing no acceptance of loss, no love for a world that can refuse our deepest hope.  Detachment without desire creates the eternal observer -- appreciating, accepting, forever letting go.  But never holding, seeking, wanting.

So it is at the intersection of detachment and desire that the beautiful uncertainty lives.  Daring to seek while accepting Fate's unknowable plan.  Wanting to hold the beloved while sensing all around the forces of separation.  A desire to shape the future with a letting go to what the future brings.  Embracing what is held and what is lost; taking what arrives at each moment, however sadly and beautifully different from what we sought.