Struggle Between Spirit and Matter

Within man is the feeling that he exists as something more than the body and the encompassing reality the body resides in.  Glimpses of this "other" self appear at times of increased stress such as near death experiences or intense hallucinogenic episodes.  The enlightened men of the ages were people who could sustain contact with this alien, spiritual, and infinite self.  The contact with this other self inside oneself leads man to rebel against his nature or the current energy waveform we find ourselves in.  Man senses he is more than he perceives and exists as, so, he tries to escape what he feels is a prison of his true being.  This feeling led man away from his hunter-gatherer origins into agriculture and civilization.  As capitalist ego-driven global society breaks down we are beginning to see that we were wrong to deny our origins and that we'd be better off embracing our current state of being and all that it entails while still serving the outside perspective of witnessing buried deep within our being.  Organized religion has always suppressed the body and nature in favor of a moral, ego-driven, and abstracted service to what it believes is the only source of our being, our contact with the transcendent.  What the major organized religions missed was the fact that our nature exists to act in tandem with our spiritual connection so we may spiritualize the matter outside us while materializing the spiritual within us.  Our transcendent spiritual connection to infinity and our limited bodies are both divine in origin and operate best in tandem.

Humanity's Teen Angst

The greatest is within the smallest.
-Lao Tzu
Mankind's history seems to mirror the personal development of one single man.  When we were hunter gatherers we existed with vast potentiality and a love for all that surrounded us in nature.  The heavily engrained ego self-images of man we call religion and philosophy still paled in comparison to the vast raw spiritual experience man found himself taking part in.  In these early years man was close to his mother(the earth) and tried his best to act in accordance with her wishes.  As time went on man began to feel that he was more important than the earth he sprang from and cities, agriculture, and organized religion arrived to place man in a state of  circuitous self-reference that excluded his relationship with nature and the earth.  Much like the young child who has just learned how to speak and believes he knows everything.  Recently, just like a rebellious teen gravitates to beer and cigarettes humans have begun to poison their collective body, the earth, in an effort to reach some unforeseen future.  We have even made a prodigal journey to the moon believing that our mission was to leave the earth.  Like a teen who leaves home only to sadly trod back in the door days later.  More and more, we are feeling that all these self-driven strivings for dominance and independence from the natural matrix are ill-begotten.  Humans are beginning to see that our destiny originates from the past as much as it echoes from the future.  We cannot escape our origins, we must rather, build a new foundation upon what we always were with what we have learned in the millennia of civilization.

Prodigal Journey

I just returned from a one month journey in the US from Philly to Southern Cal and back and phew was that enlightening.  People differed immensely from state to state while still retaining a distinct American flavoring. I met lots of great people throughout all the locales.  One common thread throughout all the areas and peoples I met was their dissatisfaction with the current system and their strong hope that something better was coming along soon.  I usually echoed the people's sentiments right back towards them as my research on myself and others had yielded a similar state of mind within myself for a time.  People's complaints went from anything as above them as the banker's blatant disregard for other people to just a general sense of disappointment with how their own life had turned out.  Many of these downtrodden folk related how they were imprisoned in their current sad state of affairs by someone outside themselves, be it the bankers, the government, Big China, or their neighbors.  No one seemed to be able to hold their-self in anyway accountable for their current place in life.  It seemed as if many of these people were waiting for some kind of savior from outside themselves to pull them out of their misery.  It began to feel to me if everyone pulled themselves up by their own shoelaces while sharing what they have of themselves to give with others the world would be able to attain a more self-actualized existence than the present collapse and the circular blame game that trails closely behind it.  Whose going to save us from our problems but ourselves? We can't help anyone else unless we first help ourselves.