Riffin' On Life Begetting Life Like Woah

10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

11 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”- John 10:10-11

Do you come in service of life?

Often times, joyously, accidentally… and at others intentionally (with masterful execution, of course), but when not, for whatever reason…we are thieves.

Plunderers of some sort of persistent bliss (salvation; eternity manifest in the material; spirit embodied) equated with the throes of the innocence of childhood…legitimately only here, ultimately (as in… not intentionally, but nonetheless…) to “kill” and “destroy” (which are fallacies at some level as consciousness is the root of the experience of being alive, and consciousness, it is understood, truly can not die or be reshaped from its inevitable form/destiny…the trick is figuring out how such a weirdo assertion is actually a big part of one’s proper emotional hygiene day in and day out as they live in modern society…how to integrate our immortality as well as the utter bondage that ultimately comes to define the very vehicle of our freedom, our “identity”, effectively into the processes that shape how we live our lives as individuals, day in and day out).

There’s always a reason (should we find that we are thieves). It manifests often times as methodical, the mere capacity for suffering/vice/ignorance… as in its always a result of our doing or being, somehow. In the very subtext of the spontaneous framings of it all is that…we are responsible for our own suffering in this world entirely, that it’s a choice at some level whether or not we realize it.

But that beat is familiar and outside of the naivety of one’s early 20’s…is seemingly rendered irrelevant by the very real socioeconomic bondage of this age of corporate-tech monoliths that we were born into. We inherit struggles, and we get busy to rise above the coming flood, lest we actually go down a path in our personal lives which could lead to significant risk of premature death/goiders/general unpleasantries/etc.

The world is a vampire. Sent to drain. Secret destroyers…hold you up to the flame.

You see, those sunshiney new agey kindness heals trees and trees make air and air allows us to enjoy the sunshine and… beats all pounce on the individual and really try to sell the individual on the notion that their expectations frame their experiences of reality and so within, so without, seek love and you’ll find it, approach with cynicism and you’ll watch so many puppies burn, etc.

You are the world.

Unfortunately, these frill sorts of matters of rationale rarely are coupled with effective framings of spiritual warriorship as a means of surviving the inherent conditions of the human condition. They try to present a simple view of the universe in which a person can choose love and instantly receive it in their life in an appropriate way… so really there’s no need for any more trouble any more!

And yet I’ve yet to meet an auspicious Yogi who hasn’t per se, woken up mid-sentence at 4 am on their feet in a location different than that which they fell asleep in, gyrating wildly as they throat chant, emulating the sound of a frog, an activity they have never attempted in their life in a waking state, or really even thought about…

Or who haven’t outright told stories of abductions…whether it be by humanoid or non-humanoid entities.

Yeah man, so within so without… yell that at the tractor beam sucking you in!

At the court packed to strip your rights in some sort of dance meant to stoke a revolution at the cost of the placidity of the lives of men.

Not to sow wild oats but to instead express how deep of a mystery life really is. It’s the knowable part of God, his personality, that we focus our intellect on, but to think that doing as much will whiddle down the sheer weirdness of this thing we call life is an absurd notion. We do reduce our capacity for suffering, and can potentially shut it down entirely, but to think that this state occurs side by side with us being in control of the situations in our lives as a matter of personal will may be the perennial absurdity in the subtext of the philosopher’s optimism. It may just be that the synchronicity stacks more and more often as this great society more often births these unseemly McKenna types…

Anyways, in regards to today’s passage, and where it intersects an individual’s life at any given moment…as you’re approaching the situations at hand in your life, you could maybe really focus on being in service to life itself in any situation at hand. If you believe in the spontaneous emergence of order from chaos…or if you believe in God and that at any moment there is a way to engage Him which would light up the room and the players at hand in such a fashion as their lives have become genuinely “enriched” on the spot…you could focus on surrendering your personal will in any given situation to either universal will/God’s will/or simply whatever satisfies the tenants of genuine utilitarianism (just don’t let value in your equations be socially defined…it has to be based on universal truths to be commenting on legitimate…universal truth…).

The simple age old conventional religious teaching on this one is sublimate your will to God…like always…like way way way way way way way more than you were initially thinking, and just trust in the process because it does come together, and that this is how one gives their life to God…

In due, you give life to those you engage as you live your life, filling yourself up with joy all the while. You become a fountainhead for the primary effect of God: life, in abundance.

That’s the notion of “I am the good shepherd…the good shepherd lays his life down for his sheep.” This doesn’t just reference Jesus specifically and his death on the cross… it’s referencing you. You could frame it in terms of Jesus (which Christians are supposed to do, I think). You can be the “good shepherd” by laying your life down for his sheep…by being considerate. Don’t like die. Just be really good to people/the shepherd’s flock, of which you are.

In Jesus’ example is an example that anybody can easily follow in their day to day life. Too often, constant out of place references to that time they strung him up like a damn Christmas bird have caused people to sort of view him in more enigmatic/the singular mystery terms than the “set a perfect human example by being a human and doing normal things other humans are capable of doing” terms. Here the teaching is framed as much not to reference the time Jesus died on the cross so much as to simply convey that if you want to make it in life, you better hand your life over to God. It’s dramatic, it’s considered tacky by society somehow but… we all do it in the secrecy of our personal lives, like some sort of terse secret between us and our maker.

Jesus had done it too. And that should be a point of focus as a teaching moreso than even more stuff about how he went willingly into his passion and resurrection. They called it his passion for a reason, as brutal as it was. He had already handed his entire life over, and that’s the example every member of the Church is truly asked to hone in on. Taking up the cross was just an aspect of that.

It should be said that the idea that one needs to sublimate their will to God’s will at all moments is the same thing as when either the Hindu or Buddhist teachers claim that one needs to rid themselves of false ego. Or when Freud says something similar. Something has gone mysteriously wrong somewhere in spiritual life for their to exist the idea that there is competition amongst religions, or between religion and the material sciences. If religions serve God and are of God, miracles made material, then to have an abundance of them saturating the world is a very positive thing.

And yet, there is some idea here in the West within a lot of Catholics that there are legitimate and non-legitimate religions. I was taught it in Catholic grade school. And I remember specific days, specific text books, the visual image miraculously burned into my hilariously pot-addled brain, in which they taught us about the Hindu religion. They said very little of it, and even then in their framing/defining of it, there were things about the Hindu religion which flagrantly aren’t true (it’s a Monotheistic tradition ultimately with a plethora of emanations of the one God; in religion class at Catholic Grade School how it was taught to us, actually, was that they are a polytheistic tradition and that this means that they are wrong, and it’s actually sinful for them to practice it).

They taught us it’s a sin to be Hindu. I presume they’re still teaching it with the shit the pope gets away with (nonetheless, he’s still a saint or will be one, but still…).

That is the only brainwashing I’ve noticed experiencing in my life. It was crude, and it was real, and it was also obviously scandalous, and the kids were spontaneously seeing through it in live time a bit even and were “causing problems” in class about some of it. It’s hilarious how much the adults were subverted by the elephant in the room.

I guess there are perks to be being born in an America on the precipice of the 21st century.

The short-hand of being an effective Catholic?

Look to that glory be prayer… “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.”

In the beginning there was the word, and it was good. The word was made flesh… in the beginning, from the vast unseeable, inconceivable, unknowable depths of the vastness of God came existence. It didn’t arise from anti-existence…it arose from God. Existence is not all there is to God.

But all there is to existence is God. Existence, every material bit of it, every happening of it…comments upon God in a meaningful way. Life communicates to us…an empirical study of the universe even… universal truths pertaining to the personality/heart of God. This is the point of the senses.

Somewhere along the way as we were cultured…we lost the innocence of youth, and didn’t have cultivated wisdom to replace it. We lost a sense that every bit of material is the word made flesh, that it’s under the directives of a God who is all-loving and all-powerful…we lost the conviction that life is good and that bliss should be expected/abundant, or simply just never had it. Religion is meant to instill it in us.

The march to salvation is a personal journey within our psyche. In fact, the apocalypse alluded to in Revelations is a metaphor for the state of the uncommuned psyche. It’s inevitable that suffering gets brough into the frame…it’s there to express a meaningful lack with God that is somehow persistent at all moments despite his presence being just as persistent. The second coming of Christ is the moment of grace/salvation which occurs when going through the motions brings a person back into meaningful spiritual communion with God…with Christ.

To break the cycle and simply stay communed is the point of devotional practice, from a practical standpoint. From a different vantage point, it’s a joyous thing done to express love. It works on multiple levels at once. The Buddhists call it the end of Samsara. Christ calls it Salvation.

What needs to be stressed, and what is fundamentally misunderstood in Catholicism in this day and age, as a matter of honoring an incorrect catechism, is that the natural cycles of life deliver you entirely into salvation periodically…in addition to sweeping you away from it and back into suffering. The individual’s lot is to break the cycle when you’re fixed in the appropriate position.

Anyways, it’s when one surrenders their will effectively to that of God and achieves Christ consciousness or communion with source or enlightenment… that salvation has occurred. Or perhaps it’s when they really integrate that communion into their Being in such a way that their life really transforms, with action across time… I will say that the latter takes you to unbelievable heights…

When you do as much, really integrate into your being that the seat of consciousness should be filtered through the diamond lens that is the accurate rendering of the very Heart of God at each and every moment the conscious processes are capable of doing as much… you truly live in a land of milk and honey. Natural resources are as manna, and flow forth reliably from Infinity despite what all of the know-it-alls most definitely know and say after the fact… you exist above real and serious issues that still henpeck men.

And it’s because those phenomena are ultimately a means to an end, and that end is a dependence on Source that you’ve already deeply, deeply cultivated and satiated. After that, consensual reality simply doesn’t intersect your personal reality the way it does for others, and we are fools when we try to say elsewise. People get freed. This isn’t a concept game, these notions were predicated on realities.

People escape suffering, entirely.

When they do as much it is no normal act. Lightning strikes the mountaintop and time grows fond, as if the mere passing of seconds is the showering of unwarranted affections. Across the world an artist has a breakthrough; a judge in Idaho really gets it right; a butterfly dances with a tiki torch flame, and David Spade's ads with that camping retailer somehow hit harder than the He Gets Us campaign...

An impossibly fat man child in Iowa smokes a heady bong and rips into a blistering cover of War Pigs at an empty college bar on a Monday night....and it's there a million times over in so many ways, the secret of secrets...

It took me a while to realize that he's insinuating that his dick is, in fact, untaxable.