Hopeless Opportunity

 

HOPELESS OPPORTUNITY

 Copyright 2026 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

We, these nominally freewill individual elements of consciousness, find ourselves in this world of entropy, inevitable death, need, hunger, suffering, and evil.  We exist in more or less solitary confinement, our experience of life singular and isolated, with no way to share the essence of what it deeply feels like to be you and me.  

This might initially seem discouraging, and then depressing, and then abjectly hopeless.  

But only because we miss the point.  Perceived from a different perspective, a distinct Light becomes evident in the admitted darkness.

We are placed in a form of existence with boundless opportunity to do good and practice Love.  Yet our individual corporeal existence is all about us, all about our birth, all about our growth, all about our eternal destiny.

We are given ample, indeed boundless, opportunity to do good, to help, to alleviate suffering, to rescue, to heal, to comfort.  Anywhere we turn there is need, which is to say, opportunity.

We do not have to save the world.  We cannot save the world.  But we can save someone or something, and in the process accept the gift of our own salvation.

There need be little torment about exactly what to do.  In this world of suffering, the opportunities are boundless.  Raise your children, do a good job, or rescue animals, or shelter the homeless, or serve on church committees, or be politically informed and active.  But for God's sake, for your sake, do something.  There is no single right path.  There is no way for you to save the world.  But there are endless ways to save something and someone.  

That is the nature and Purpose of this world of entropy, to provide opportunity, to provide the Choice.  At its core foundational structure, below the infinite mathematical sequences that can only tease at a pseudo-determinism, resides entropy, the statistically not quite impossible, and hence inevitable, evolution of conscious life, and the inexorable death of that life.  The resulting overall perceived image is a grisly panoply of carnivorous cruelty.  Yet at the pixilated level of the individual elements of isolated consciousness, there we see the Purpose, the beautiful Purpose, the redeeming Purpose, in the opportunity to  choose Love and beauty in whichever direction they turn.  

It is a Universe and Creation of suffering.  It is a Universe and Creator suffering…...all for us, for each of us…..we children being born into what seems darkness because our eyes are still closed, we children of a Light awaiting our Choice to let it shine through us.

Copyright 2026 Don Ray.

Feel free to print and share.

Know

 

KNOW

Beware the lessons of the leaders.

They will make you believe,

and once you believe,

they own you.

Beware what you want to believe,

for it is too easy.

Eschew belief. 

 In its place discover ineffable certainty. 

The worldly projection of that certainty will change with living.

Its forms and practice will evolve.

Its name will routinely don new clothing.

But underneath the trappings and vestments with which your mind must  adorn it,

it remains immutable.

Yes, there is Truth,

disguised in various worldly forms.

There is something to know, 

to know much more deeply than the glare of "belief".

Beliefs have to be dearly held because they can so easily blow away in the next gust of wind.  

But some things, something, can be known, known because it is part of you, because you are an expression of it.  You know it as you know yourself, you dear soul you.  You need not put it into words, for our words are of this world, useful only for communicating worldly concepts.

 Belief deals with details.  Knowing deals with essence.  Know, with each new day, know ever more deeply, perhaps discovering that something you so wanted to believe is indeed true.

Opportunity in the Darkness

 Copyright 2025 Don Ray

Feel free to share.

OPPORTUNITY IN THE DARKNESS

 

We, these nominally freewill individual elements of consciousness, find ourselves in this world of entropy, inevitable death, need, hunger, suffering, and evil.  We exist in more or less solitary confinement, our experience of life singular and isolated, with no way to share the essence of what it deeply feels like to be you and me.  

This might initially seem discouraging, and then depressing, and then abjectly hopeless.  ……but only because we miss the point.  Perceived from a different perspective, a distinct Light becomes evident in the undeniable darkness.

We are placed in a form of existence with boundless opportunity to do good and practice Love.  Yet our individual corporeal existence is all about us, all about our birth, all about our survival, all about our destiny.

We are given ample, indeed boundless, opportunity to do good, to help, to alleviate suffering, to rescue, to heal, to comfort.  Anywhere we turn there is need, which is to say, opportunity.

We do not have to save the world.  We cannot save the world.  But we can save someone or something, and in the process accept the gift of our own salvation.

There need be little torment about exactly what to do.  In this world of suffering the opportunities are boundless.  Raise your children, do a good job, or rescue animals, or shelter the homeless, or serve on church committees, or be politically informed and active.  But for God's sake, for your sake, do something.  There is no single right path.  There is no way for you to save the world.  But there are endless ways to save something and someone.  

That is the nature and Purpose of this world of entropy, to provide opportunity, to provide the Choice.  At its core foundational structure, below the infinite mathematical sequences that can only tease at a pseudo-determinism, resides entropy, the statistically not quite impossible, and hence inevitable, evolution of conscious life, and the inexorable death of that life.  The resulting overall perceived image is a grisly panoply of carnivorous cruelty.  Yet at the pixilated level of the individual elements of isolated consciousness, there we see the Purpose, the beautiful Purpose, the redeeming Purpose, in the opportunity to  choose Love and beauty in whichever direction we turn.  

It is a Universe and Creation of suffering.  It is a Universe and Creator suffering…...all for us, for each of us…..we children being born into what seems darkness because our eyes are still closed, we children of a Light awaiting our Choice to let it shine through us.

Copyright 2025 Don Ray

Please share.

Conflicted Choice

 Copyright 2025 Don Ray

Feel free to print and share.

CONFLICTED CHOICE

Conflicts, between nations and people, inevitable.

Collapse of systems, inevitable.

Conflict internally, inevitable.

Conflict, what to do, the assessment of what is right.  Leaving one’s  children to earn money to feed those children.  Choosing among overlapping demands of friends, family, obligations, God, church, team, patriotism, pets, colleagues.

Conflict and choice…..there is the core nature of this worldly life.  Each moment at work, playing with children, helping a friend, supporting the team, is a moment not given to all the others.

Law and order, compassion, enforcement, acceptance…...each of them right, each justifiable.  Each choice of what to do bringing to light everything not done.

We defer the choice to holy texts, to imams and preachers, to team colors, to authority, blessed authority, anyone, anyone to save us from the torment of choice.

There will be suffering, and we don't want to make it worse, but the lovingly purchased pet food entailed suffering and death of natural resources or confined domesticated livestock.

Conflict and choices, enough choice by one group of people leading to conflict with that other group who made a different choice.

It is all good.  It will all induce suffering.

Some agonize over the choices.  Others don't.

"Just make them" time and mortality demand.  Decide who will suffer, who you will neglect, while trying to love and help the others.  

Every opportunity is from God?.....but the "ruler of this world", satan or coyote or crow, confuses the issue.

Note and observe, record without judgement, then adjust as feels right.  That is a way to avoid taking control.  It is a way to make informed decisions.  

This is a finite world.  It is so in order to promote values and awareness.  It is the big Choice that matters.  

It is a world of mortality.  Only in the limitations of mortality do values and priorities arise.

God does indeed place before us opportunities, but we cannot take advantage of all of them.  The real opportunity is the Choice…..and there is no right answer for that Choice.  Manifold opportunities to rescue mean manifold necessities to neglect.  It is simply so in this world.  It is important,  critically important, to recognize that.

Give up control, but don't think that means escaping terrible choices.  The desire to escape moral choices leads to horrors of ISIS, Taliban, and Baptists.  Make informed decisions.  Be aware of what you are doing.  Accept, and this is critical, what you cannot do as determined by each choice of what to do.  

Yes, each life opportunity, each opportunity to serve and help and heal and rescue is from God, personally delivered to you, demanding your response.  And you cannot do it all.  It is a huge act of faith and spiritual growth to recognize and accept that.  

Mortality demands faith to accept what cannot be.  Eternity assures all good will be.  

Copyright 2025 Don Ray

Feel free to print and share.

Riding Darkness

 

RIDING DARKNESS

Now dark, quickly dark.

Gentle motion reveals the presence of darkly invisible waves just out that window.  

We ride the dark surface, just as our lives ride the boundary between life and death, sensing motion, trying to maintain our balance, something out of our control rippling by our soul, sensed not seen, treading an unseen surface separating life from an utterly unknowable depth into which we will inevitably sink.  The darkness, the unknowable depth, the unseen ripples we sense and dark tsunamis we dread, the darkness, the blankness, the unknowable depths, that is our canvas, the great blank canvas of life without answers on which we decide what matters.

Meaningless Time

 Meaningless Time

Time.  Corporeal existence.  Somehow it is through those that interaction Reality arises.  Through those Deep Love arises.  And horrors arise.  And beauty arises.  

Time.  Matter.  For now what we have to work with.

Yet nothing arising from them has meaning other than in the eternal.  Here and Now is the moment of Creation, we a painful part of that Creation.

The time and vanishing physical forms are illusions.  Yet through them we are empowered by God to create the eternal, eternal bonds and Love.

"Do not be discouraged", whispers Spirit.  Our capacity for control and power seems terribly limited.  Our wishes and will, even when uttered in the name of Jesus, seem pointless and hopeless.  Yet time deceives, making us think that the will of God is not unfolding.  Our entrapment in the Now blocks our view of unfolding Purpose and fulfillment of our hopes.  Our incarceration in the corporeal keeps us apart.  Yet in the usual Paradox, it is that corporeal and temporal nature that facilitate  creation of the real and enduring.

Faith, faith worn and tattered by the interminable delay of prophecy, faith is our source of warmth in the biting cold of the temporal world.  Faith is a capacity to sense and know beyond the body of Now.  

The moment will pass, has already passed.  The physical forms are disappearing before our eyes.  All that passing makes room for fulfillment of our prayers.  All that is real and meaningful takes time.  That is the oft repeated lesson, the lesson of the widow and of the bridesmaids.  Time and the physical, in their fleeting passage, erect the eternal.  Hold fast to the vision of faith, to awareness of Truth.  So much better, a seemingly delayed answer that endures through eternity than an instant gratification that just as promptly disappears along with the rest of the world.  Be glad the answers to your prayers are not immediately evident in the world, for that would mean they would just as quickly disappear along with the world.  

Let it unfold.  Do not be deceived by time.  The needs are known.  The prayers are heard.  Their fulfillment will not be through anything as unreliable as worldly outcomes.  Hold fast to faith as you watch time render the corporeal to dust, thereby making room for answers eternal.

Calling

 CALLING

You would think there would be some profound and wise instruction for how to follow your life's calling, whether you believe that calling comes from God, destiny, universe, or whatever.  There is a calling, or callings.  You can follow it.  But how it will be revealed is acutely individual.  

Of course you have to want a calling before you can discern it.  You have to surrender to something before you can be called by it.  It is a rare and curious thing in an age of materialism for anyone to surrender to a calling.  It is also a rare and curious thing in an age of basic survival to surrender to a calling.  Yet all are called, but few accept it.   You will be alone.  Following a calling is terrifying, fraught with doubt, a glorious madness, indefensible and inexplicable.  Yet once accepting calling, you can never again deny it, at least not for long.  You would have it no other way, the world's tawdry profits rendered banal and tedious by a glimpse, even a fleeting glimpse, of Purpose and meaning and the invitation to be a part of it.  

One Constant

 

ONE CONSTANT 

Last night I watched the spectacular and heavily favored Mikella Shiffrin ski out and disqualify for the second race in a row.  In shock she sat at the edge of the run for twenty-five minutes.

For the vast majority of us, plans and expectations are a momentary solace, an illusion of predictability, a delusion of our own empowerment.  Of course we hear of the Bezos's and Musks who plan, predict,  and control each detail of their obscenely successful lives.  That makes us feel either inadequate about our intelligence and discipline or bitter about our personal persecution by fate.  But the successful planners of their own lives did not raise their grandkids or have the stroke or get trapped in the car wreck or watch incoming artillery fire set their children ablaze.

Consequently rules of sports, Masonic rituals, and religion belief are our desperate attempt to erect some momentary facade of predictability.  Of course fundamentalisms flourish in times of rampant change.  We are frantic for something, anything, to grab onto to stay afloat in the white-water chaos of perfectly normal life.  Political flags or convenient scripture will do as long as it resists personal or societal  changes out of our control.

Death of course is the penultimate insult to our plans.  We are ultimately revealed as powerless.  The future beyond that event is utterly unknowable.  So we avoid thinking about it.  But if we accepted that the maelstrom of unpredictability that is our daily lives was merely a preview of and practice for that ultimate waiting unpredictability so utterly out of our control, to what might we turn for consolation?  When no worldly plan or expectation is reliable, what still abides as real?  Whether experienced or only wished for, what was it that felt real and substantive once every plan and expectation was crushed to dust and burned to ashes? 

Look back, look forward, see the world that so resolutely refused to be predicted or controlled, and sense the one constant that was all you really wanted all along.  All the plans were illusory, deceptions by self and the world.  Only the one hunger, only one essence, one joy, remained constant, then and in this moment.  Accept the chaos and unpredictability and uncertainty.  Accept the one constant hunger.  Discover that through it all, Love was the lesson, Love was the constant, Love was the plan fulfilled through the dissolution, even the penultimate insult,  of our insistent plans.

A Secretive God

 

The obvious problem in trying to follow God's will for our lives is God's recalcitrance about unambiguously communicating that will.  Oh, we will promptly think we know what it is.  We will plan our lives accordingly.  Then when life unceremoniously tosses our holy plans into the dumpster we will stubbornly hold onto those plans because after all they are not our plans but God's plans.  

Our will and God's will quickly become convoluted because God is so danged secretive about whatever plan there is.  Our "willing" morphs into "willful" without our noticing.  

So for the umpteenth time it's back to the drawing board to resketch the priorities God seems to have given us, maybe, unless it's just our wishful thinking.

One is left to keep guessing, and adapt, and incorporate, and compromise.  Somewhere under all the practical considerations still resides that desire to do God's will, were it only clearly expressed.  Somewhere in the passing years, advancing age, and compounding shocks we of course may not "do" God's will, but we may live it.  Out of our control, unforeseen by our eyes, unanticipated in our plans, we somehow live God's will.  In that we can find some solace, some salve for our tattered faith.  

Commit your life to God's path, and promptly get abjectly lost, gloriously lost, in the dense fog of unfolding healing and redemption.

It All Makes Sense

 It All Makes Sense

Copyright 2025 Don Ray (But feel free to copy and quote.  Just give credit.)

Somehow it all kind of make sense, which is profoundly surprising.

All this conflict, the conflicts between people, and even the conflicts within our own minds.

It all seems quite unavoidably necessary if we are to be truly free and individual. 

Were we all the same, even a little more the same, even prone to a slighter degree of similarity, we would not truly be individual. 

The absolutely unfathomable, jaw-dropping, perplexing behaviors of those people a millennia ago, or around the world, or next door, or in the next cubicle, are an inescapable part of our nature as individuals.

The cacophony of voices vying for attention in our heads, the temptations and distractions and loss of attention and lack of discipline, that also necessary if we are to be free, freedom meaning choices, not mere choices of responses to circumstances, but choices regarding the very essence of who and what we want to be.

It is all necessary, and almost kind of begins to make sense.

And one can even imagine that it is all OK.

We must just have patience, patience and faith.

After all, we have all eternity to grow into what we want to be, and to live in that existence modeled around and consistent with what we want to be.

In its role as the incubator for these free and individual beings this world has through recent millennia fulfilled a surprisingly consistent function.  I can see a striking consistency in the Choice faced by ancient Greeks and modern scientists, plains Indians and marketing psychologists…..always the same Choice,….whether to care or not……whether to listen to the whispers of higher callings to Unity or the shrill threats demanding collapse into the self.

And through those millennia occasionally appeared teachings and prophecies and revelations, each of them of course deformed and warped by our insistent demands, but still fulfilling the essential need of providing some glimmer of hope, some relevant incarnation to gently assist us in our attempts to spiritually survive in the peculiar and perverse society of the moment.

Surprisingly it all makes sense, not that it has to.

All the conflicts are the inescapable, perhaps inevitable, consequence of birth into freedom and individuality. 

The conflicts must not endure, for once free and individual we are empowered to choose Unity.

This world must be what it is.

Those who choose to seek Unity must actualize their Choice by trying to heal and love, by accepting and tolerating, all within the clashing madness of the world around and the roiling conflicts of the mind within.

Copyright 2025 Don Ray (But feel free to copy and quote.  Just give credit.)

Lessons of the Mystery

LESSONS OF THE MYSTERY

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

Lessons,

life lessons,

learned and taken so seriously,

lessons for the individual, 

no one else.

Lessons,

life lessons,

never to be shared,

except with others who already learned them.

There is a depth of understanding, a depth of seeing and feeling and experiencing,

that is of little use to and little interest for this world.

Promise mysteries solved and people will listen.

Pronounce that all is mystery and shall so remain,

and watch the faces turn away.

Mystery, wrapped in life.

We love a mystery, but only with solution.

That’s why we dare not look too closely at life,

for then we see just how inscrutable it is.

But the looking, the looking,

is what makes us human.

The looking, that defines us as children of God,

even  of a well hidden, or at least disguised, God.

Hurry, hurry,

it seems so long ago,

surely there is little time left.

This gift, this moment, is too precious,

too ripe with potential,

to let slide.

But there are no answers, at least none that any want to hear,

and none that solve the Mystery.

But they do ease the pain, don’t you think?

Listen!  

Was that a hint?  One has to listen to hear them, you know.

They are always whispered, and never repeated.

Always nebulous, discrete, private,

the answers to the Mysteries.  

They are not to be shared,

not due to some cosmic dictate,

but because no one will listen.

Listen.

Keep listening.

Hear the sounds of speculations rattle to and fro within the Mystery.

All you will hear is the Mystery laughing…..

but it is not a scornful laugh.

It is almost playful, as if we take the Mystery much too seriously.

It is glad we explore it, welcomes our investigations and speculations,

our philosophies and theologies,

like a parent smiling at the crawling infant’s explorations 

about the room.

It is healthy, a part of growth, these explorations,

this crawling and putting things in our mind.

It is serious business, this growing up.

It is playful and joyful, and fraught with dangers.

It seems so long ago, 

we started exploring, started crawling, started asking,

but there is time, and there is beyond time,

so no need to fret or hurry.

The Mystery abides,

welcoming our explorations,

answers awaiting, but only once we begin to crawl.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.