What is life if nothing but a bunch of memories?  The joyful surprises and the unexpected tragedies.  The enthusiasm and the tedium.  The creativity and the monotony.  The love and the loneliness.  All the highs and the lows that imprint us for eternity.

At the end of one’s life (especially if one knows it is coming) it is common for one to reflect on the life one has led.  Perhaps the soul wants to review it all and see if it has led a good and happy life, if it achieved all that it wanted, if it released the useless, and achieved balance before the great Equalizer Death forces a the balance, and takes the soul back home.

If one can honestly say that one has done all that one could do with the gifts they possessed while ensconced in their environment (favorable or not) and given the circumstances that the met along the way…then one may rest assured knowing that life was well lived and there is no need to feel unfinished, no reason to be ashamed, guilty, or saddened for any reason whatsoever—period.

This is liberation from the rounds of life and death.  This is true peace.  Eternal rest.

This is the eventual fate of all souls.

Gravity is love.  Love is not dependant on mass (matter).  Love exists as just one expression of consciousness.  Consciousness is not limited to mass.  Consciousness creates mass.  The more creation, the more love, for there must be the interaction of love born out of consciousness in order to manifest mass.  The more love, the more gravity, for gravity is a subtle force born of the love present in consciousness.  Without love, there would be no matter, no mass for us to experience…and to fool us into thinking that a large planetary body is the origin of gravity.  The cause is always more subtle.

When consciousness extends itself to the limits of the universe, then the soul is in fact encompassing all of the love-created matter that exists as mass across the entire universe.

During enlightenment, the soul realizes it is consciousness and extends to encompass all of creation, in effect increasing its mass to infinity.  This makes sense because the soul itself is extending its flexible dimensions to infinity.  This incidentally, is how teleportation is achieved.  In other words, any existing physical thing must extend its consciousness beyond its own limited little body (the physical body is not truly real) and stretch itself to encompass all of creation, in essence ‘forgetting’ its body in favor of the subtle consciousness that created the body in the first place.

Once done, using concentration, and imagining where it would like to travel in the universe, the soul can travel beyond the speed of light since it has transcended everything in existence including the speed of light, so therefore it is one with all of creation, one with the speed of light, and one with the transcendental consciousness from which it all emanated.

This state of mind allows one to move thru space-time with ease.  This is teleportation.  The process is limited only by the ability of the soul to utilize focus and visualization, and the physical borders of the manifested universe (if it exists).

A Nautical Parable

There was once a fleet of ships lost at sea.  The fleet had been lost at sea for a long time.  The ships had been lost at sea for so long that the people on board told wild mythical stories of distant times, for no one knew how they even got to be lost at sea.  All they knew was that at some point the first voyagers on this ancient fleet, both the crew and passengers, ended up creating families on board ship because it became apparent that they were not going to find land anytime before they died.

One day a ship helmed by a daring and compassionate captain decided that in order to save the families onboard his vessel, he would have to break with the rest of the fleet and steer off into the unknown in an attempt to find land.  He reasoned to himself that such land had to exist, else where did all the people come from?

And so one day he broke with the fleet, much to the chagrin of the other ship captains.  They chased his ship for a while but soon gave up when they saw they were getting too far away from the apparent safety of the fleet, which was all they had ever known.

The rogue captain soon faced more troubles than he could have imagined.  He made his way thru rough seas and violent storms that threatened to sink his ship.  He faced dangerous ocean serpents no one had ever seen before that nearly tore his ship apart, and was even attacked by whales at one point.  His crew was beyond being upset with him, almost constantly complaining about his unwise decision to leave the fleet.  Each day it seemed they grew more and more indignant, even threatening mutiny.  The families of passengers were always gossiping about the captain, complaining to him, shouting at him from below decks, ridiculing him behind his back.  Everyone was afraid they would drown in the angry sea.  No one was truly with the captain.  Though everyone respected his position (just barely) as captain, he was for all intents and purposes…alone.

Each day the situation grew more foreboding, but still the captain remained at the helm, convinced only by an innate Intuition that he just had to be correct in his reasoning—land must exist somewhere.  Home must be somewhere.

Then just when even the captain was about to give up hope for the last time, something odd appeared on the horizon…

One evening while sailing thru strong winds and thick fog, he spots a light in the distance and heads for it.  The closer he got to the light the smaller the waves became and the wind slacked to a steady helpful breeze.  Closer and closer he got to the light only to see more lights next to it.  His ship was no longer battered by waves, the sails were no longer ripping in the fierce winds and the fog lifted bit by bit until he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

There in the distance was a glimmering city seemingly made of light!  And closer to his weather beaten ship he saw what was only a legend told among his people for eons—a harbor.  Somehow…someway…the captain had had steered his bruised ship into the safety of an enclosed harbor jutting out into the ocean.

The ship’s families began coming out of their quarters below deck wondering what had happened to the waves they had always been accustomed to since birth.  Some even disregarded the ships rules and entered the pilothouse where the captain stood at the helm with his hands at the wheel, too amazed and bewildered to reprimand anyone for the intrusion.  The scene outside the windows had taken away his breath and his speech along with it.  He was trancelike in appearance, unable to think or feel anything.  As if guided by some unseen force, as if he had always known how, he steered his ship to the port that lay just beyond the bow.  He carefully and slowly maneuvered his ship next to a berth and gave the order that no captain in his people’s history had ever given to his crew.

“Cast the mooring lines!”

Ancient ropes that had long remained unused lying on the deck at both the bow and stern were heaved onto shore by the crew and secured around equally ancient and unused moorings, all the while as the families held each other in anticipation of feeling beneath their feet a thing mentioned only in their stories—dry land.

Then all at once, the families of the ships gathered on the crowded deck began to cheer with uncontrollable joy at the miracle that had occurred.

Their tear-filled eyes now beheld a luminous city of unequaled splendor; a reality they had previously only assumed was a crazy myth that existed only in the mind of an equally crazy captain.  But he was not crazy after all.  He had been correct from the moment he broke with the fleet so long ago.

He had done what no other captain had done, what no other captain dared to do, what no other had even tried to do, what no other had thought was possible.

This captain had finally found home.

Light is irresistibly drawn to a black hole by gravity.  Once light gets close enough to the black hole, it cannot escape the black hole’s gravitational pull.  This is generally presented to the public as some kind of scientific tragedy on a colossal scale.  It certainly sounds strange to say this, but scientists never seem to think for even a nanosecond that maybe the light doesn’t want to escape.  That maybe it is the very purpose and function of light’s existence to illuminate everything, even the scientifically and mathematically fascinating and terrifying Black Hole.  All of creation wants light, even the darkness…especially the darkness.

It looks like what we are seeing on a cosmic scale with light and the black hole is what is happening on every smaller level as well.

Light’s very function is to illuminate the darkness.  This is the nature of light—to dispel darkness.  For the Biblically inclined, there is a verse which states “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness can do nothing against it.”  Stated another way, the purpose of darkness is to try and snuff out the light, to destroy it.  But it is doomed to fail.  Even the famed black hole does not totally destroy the light that gets sucked into it—some radiation escapes.

But so what if the darkness attempts to destroy the light?!?  It will never work.  I use the word ‘attempts’ because no matter how hard the darkness tries, it can do nothing against the light.  That is just elementary physics.  Light expands endlessly and seemingly effortlessly.  It is impossible to destroy light once it has left its source.  Like sunlight, it just spreads out evenly in all directions.

On the more mundane plane of life, it seems that the darkness of human ignorance and selfishness is doing everything it can to eliminate the light of knowledge and wisdom wherever it is found.  In recent years, the darkness has even gone so far as to destroy some isolated monasteries and convents around the world.  Even spirituality is under attack.

A question—is it really so big a leap of consciousness to think of the darkness in humans as a black hole that is attempting to destroy the light of knowledge and wisdom found in the more enlightened members of the population?

The thing that the darkness never seems to understand is that even if it manages to destroy an enlightened group and their home, the truth is that somehow or other their light of knowledge and wisdom inevitably gets spread out to other places.  Therefore the darkness unwittingly helps distribute the very light it attempted to eliminate—stupid.

In our generation it was proven mathematically and scientifically that not everything is doomed when it falls prey to a black hole.  As it turns out, only the negatively charged particles get sucked in—the positively charged particles escape as energy called Hawking radiation (named after Stephen Hawking).

So even on the cosmic stage we find a replication of what happens when an enclave of light is attacked by darkness.  Only that which is expendable gets destroyed while that which is precious escapes to take root somewhere else.  This is exactly what is happening with the attacks on spiritual groups around the world these days.  They may lose a building or two, perhaps some of the members of the group and even a large portion of their more superfluous knowledge and technology, but somehow and someway the essential light they have safeguarded inevitably spreads out somewhere else.

The ever-increasingly vicious actions of the darkness these days is like a destructive child who thinks he can destroy a dandelion by plucking it and blowing on its delicate structure until all of its little white hair-like seeds disperse.  But then what happens?  Those seeds just grow into more dandelions somewhere else!

The dumbest thing the darkness can ever do is to try to destroy the light.  How can you destroy something whose very nature is to expand endlessly without fail?  IMPOSSIBLE!

So go ahead darkness…give it your best shot.  The more you try, the more you fail.  The more you try to break it, the more the little pieces spread out and become harder to maintain.

But what can else can you expect of darkness?  Something intelligent?

I think not!

This be the Tao of stupid.