Number Forty Six

Consciousness -- both of the individual self and the collective whole -- constantly evolves.  Because it must.  If your are awake, you learn.  You grow.

Consciousness uses what it gains.  To make things.  One definition of god is the ability to make something from nothing.  The collective whole -- the sum of all awareness, the combined light of all souls -- has already made this universe.  And perhaps others.  As it evolves, it will make new, unimaginable places with which to interact and grow.

When you shine a light -- the brilliant white beam of collective consciousness -- through truth, it refracts.  Into a new, suddenly visible spectrum.  So what is impossible at one level of truth becomes commonplace at another.  As consciousness evolves, it takes, for example, the truth of how a planet is made and turns it into unknown molecules with new laws of relationship. A new physics.

Consciousness is never complete.  It can only keep learning.  Growing.  Becoming.

Number Forty Five

The perfect day ends with a thought: will I have this tomorrow?  And the thought tears what the day was made of.  The fabric of the perfect day is made from the sounds of the outer and inner life -- like two notes of a chord.  And the chord exists not one moment before or one moment after.  When the mind enters before and after, it no longer hears the chord.

The chord is the source of joy.

Number Forty Four

Memory anchors our identity.  The garden with the straight, white paths; the rumbling streetcars that descend -- between dark storefronts -- to the sea: By those scenes I know my loneliness.

Memories make us.  And we return again and again to each familiar image, hoping it will reveal the truth of ourselves.

But we are amnesiacs, captive to the scenes of a single life.  The rest of us, felt in the movement of sun and shadow, known in the chill preceding dark, heard in wind and birdsong and falling water, dwells in a hundred forgotten lives.

Number Forty Three

Identity is to self as a cover is to a book.  It is the face of self.  We learn to recognize ourselves by our cover, by familiar patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.  Identity is built on a sentence that starts, "I am a person who..."

Identity includes the emotions by which we know ourselves.  "I am a person who is...(angry, afraid, sad)."  And characteristic ways we cope.  "I am a person who...(shouts, avoids, gives up, drinks)."  Identity born of reacting to life is left behind when we leave the body.

Identity that grows from what we've learned becomes part of self.  Of soul.  It is an enduring core wisdom that evolves with each life.  "I am a person who has realized..." is the place where self and identity merge, and the reason we are here.

Number Forty Two

To understand what self is, we must first know the purpose of self.  Why are there seven billion "selves" on this planet?  They are all here for one reason: to learn.  To gather experience and wisdom for the whole.  The whole can only evolve and grow as each self observes, remembers, acts, and learns.

Just as bees have mandibles, wings, and legs for the sole purpose of gathering pollen, all the properties of self derive from its purpose.  To learn, each self must observe experience, remember experience, organize experience (into categories and higher order conclusions called wisdom), and choose mental and physical actions (focusing awareness and deciding what to do).

No learning can happen without engaging each property of the self.  No wisdom tradition can find truth through a single aspect of self.  As each self learns, the whole becomes god.

Number Forty One

The storms roll down, washing away what holds us.  What protects us.  Taking the walls and rooms of a world we counted on.  As clouds obscure the sky, storms of the spirit obscure the truth.  Hiding the knowledge that nothing is lost; that the self is constant, never broken.

Damage is an illusion.  The idea of safety or protection is an illusion.  There is nothing to be safe from.  Nothing we need to protect.  It is all safe -- everything we love.

The storm is mere forgetting.  A momentary blindness.  The truth waits, eternal and untouched, until we remember it again.

Number Forty

Everything outside seems dangerous.  The rooms where we feel safe are defined by the familiar, the faces we know.

The people we don't know could do anything, say anything.  We protect ourselves by deciding they are evil.

But the mere thought that there is good and evil creates evil.  Because it is the means by which we separate ourselves from the other.  Reject the other.  Dehumanize the other. Separation -- the delusion that we are not all one -- is what evil is made of.

There is no them.  The room that seemed so small it contained just a single life holds everyone.