Number Seventy Four

We learn by doing.  And failing.  The angels whisper to us, but in the end every soul is a scientist -- learning by seeing how things turn out.  Failure is completely acceptable because -- as with every experiment -- failure reveals what isn't true and what doesn't work.

We learn from failure. Our lives are rightly full of it. There is no other teacher whose lessons are so dear, so convincing. The guides and the masters are interpreters -- showing what happened and why.  But we are here for one reason: to learn to be the architects of the next universe.

Number Seventy Three

In the end, as each universe goes dark, all that has been learned turns into the next big bang. And at each inception, a little more of what was unconscious and hidden -- implicit knowledge that can only be felt but not seen -- becomes light.

Number Seventy Two

We are guided by light. The light comes in the form of a thought, a sentence spoken by passing angels.  The light ceaselessly bathes us, but we see it only in rare moments.  Our path, hidden usually by fear or desire, becomes at those times suddenly clear, as if seen in a full moon. But soon the words are gone; the thought disappears. And though the light still shines, we step blindly, knowing only the shadow of pleasure and pain.

Number Seventy One

Every conversation is driven by two things: the desire to be seen and the fear of being seen; the desire to connect against the fear of judgment.

In the life between lives, judgment is just recognition of whether something works.  What we do is either effective, or not; it achieves its purpose, or not.  There is no good/bad, no hierarchy of worth.  Here, judgment is dangerous, dismembering the self; tearing off parts that are called bad and get disowned.

So we are funny or polite.  We hide.  And what's judged in us is thrown away -- the rejected self.  In the quiet between bursts of laughter, between the small remarks, the disease of not belonging grows.

Number Seventy

The alarm sounds and we are afraid.  The alarm says, "run, protect yourself, stay alive."  The alarm rings in the body and the mind to make us zig-zag away from danger.  Avoiding danger is the work of the body.  Seeing danger is the work of the mind.

None of this has anything to do with us.  It is a place we live.  It is a house that will one day not survive the wind and weight of snow.  We are visitors, caught up and amazed by the customs, the way things work here.

This place runs on fear.  Fear creates the illusion of evil.  Fear makes invisible the strands that join us.  And it makes us forget why we came to visit in the first place.

The air raid and the fire alarm, the raised voice before a rejection, the darkness falling on an unfamiliar street  -- it is merely content obscuring meaning.

Number Sixty Nine

In the great emptiness before anything, before consciousness, there was only hunger, the craving a vacuum has to be filled.  Nothingness demanded something.  And in that hunger, in that demand, was the flint spark, the source of first energy.

Energy comes from nothing; energy is the inevitable outcome of absolute emptiness.

Inherent in energy is the drive to see, to observe.  Energy evolves toward thought, toward consciousness.  Consciousness is the inevitable outcome, the necessary consequence of energy.

Consciousness creates matter.  Just as there is no consciousness without energy, there is no matter without thought.  Thought is the portal through which energy becomes a cosmos.

The thought that creates is a thing called god.

Number Sixty Eight

Trees rise into the darkness, branches disappearing into night.  What was apparent by day now becomes hidden.  What we knew in the light is lost.

And this loss is the source of fear, where we begin to feel alone.  So to live this long night, the lightless time from birth to death, we rut paths for the blind.  Often they lead to cliffs, to last shouts before the fall.

The trees rise into darkness.  The purpose we arrived with, so clear in the moment before we came, is without illumination. The way now is not forward, but to be still.  To listen.  Without light there is only the sound of breath.  Of the heart.