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.

Embrace of Comfort

 Copyright 2025 Don Ray.  Please share.

EMBRACE OF COMFORT

Comfort, comfort….from whom?....or from what?

Who and what awaits us,

that who and what that so resolutely hides itself from us now.

 

Comfort, comfort,

don't look for sense in it,

yet it is not deniable.

The very thought and awareness

testifies to its presence.

Comfort.

Comfort.

All is not lost,

and will never be lost.

 

Most dare not look for that Source of comfort

for the prospect of its nonexistence is too terrifying.

It is too abstract,

too irrelevant to this materialistic world,

and too unneeded in this age of screens, entertainment, and distraction.

Comfort is something in a bottle or a download.

But a day comes, inexorably approaching,

when yes, comfort, 

irrational, inexplicable

comfort,

will unavoidably and desperately be needed.

Soon enough, soon enough,

making no sense,

from Source indistinct and incomprehensible,

comfort, comfort

will be needed,

    and will softly embrace.

 

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.

Stream of Consciousness

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

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

There is of course only consciousness.  Our individual consciousness, this ensemble of experiences and choices, seamlessly flows through the temporal reality that provides the opportunities for contact and interaction with other individual elements of consciousness.

This material world accommodatingly provides some nominally rational continuity to facilitate that contact and interaction among we elements of consciousness.

It is all only consciousness, nothing but consciousness, though the material reality that serves as connective tissue binding together the elements of consciousness would seem to have the flexibility of concrete.

All our attention to the material world at the exclusion of prioritizing the Unity bond with other elements of consciousness misses the point, neglecting the opportunity for connection provided by that material world.  

We have only consciousness, incarcerated and blinded as it may be in this carnal existence, and that consciousness attains instantiation only to the degree it experiences interaction and Unity with Consciousness as a Whole (succinctly captured in the appellation “Christos”).  The opportunity for that interaction arises in no small part through the opportunities for interaction with other individual elements of consciousness (i.e. people).

The actual structure of Reality?:

• The foundation Word, the Source, that preceded this particular version of time in which we reside, 

• The individual elements of consciousness (us) that in the matrix of their interactions form the structure of the Whole Consciousness

• The continuity of flow of each of those elements as they segway through the ages  that we perceive as our lives, 

• The transition that we call death, though it is the antithesis of ending, 

This is the structure of Reality, a Reality necessarily flowing through the girders of this temporal/ physical framework , but a Reality not to be mistaken for being just this temporal/physical framework.

Don't be enslaved, deluded, and deceived by the temporal and physical and carnal.  Use the temporal to create the eternal, apply the physical to touch the spiritual, accept this carnal as opportunity to embrace each others’ souls.

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

Trust Your Robot

TRUST YOUR ROBOT

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

On the question of whether robots and machines that listen and sympathize will prove adequate to comfort the human soul.  The following builds on previously published concepts of the ontological nature of consciousness, Unity, and Reality.  For readers lacking the earlier explanations, the first three paragraphs may be a bit perplexing.  Not to worry.  By paragraph four we’re independent of previous material and back to practical considerations.

In the absence of Choice there is no real consciousness.

In the absence of consciousness there is no Deep Unity.  In the absence of Deep Unity there is no Deep Reality Interaction and hence no eternal Love.

Nothing substantial is projected into eternity by interface with a machine that has no Choice in its interaction.  The machine’s words and responses may be the exact ones desired, but that exact perfection and accommodation will be as empty and meaningless as any lying sycophantic person seeking to ingratiate.  

I recently read of a robot that is selling well, a robot that seems to listen.  That such a device would become popular testifies to our desperation to communicate and be heard and be accepted.

The robot poses no threat of rejection or criticism or correction.  Lordy, wouldn’t that be wonderful?  I wonder if that is why writing appeals to me?  I have long known my writing would be at risk of totally changing if I expected that anyone would read it in my lifetime.  Do I treat the keyboard the way people treat their comforting empathy robot?  No doubt my writing is driven to some degree by the need to express and communicate.  

How desperately we all want to be heard!  How desperately we want to make ourselves, our thoughts and ideas and feelings and experiences, a part of something bigger, a part of someone else’s thoughts and experiences.  

So we talk to people who are not really listening and we pay people to listen to us and now we can buy robots programmed to trick us into believing they are listening.

All the while we just need to listen to each other.

To what degree can we or should we go to get people to listen?  Isn’t what we have to say the most important thing in the universe?  It certainly is the most important thing our youniverse.  

So people buy listening robots and I type.  The response from the machine is far more affirming and encouraging than most human responses, or lack thereof.

Desperate to be heard, we prattle on to the exclusion of ever listening, rendering mutually mute our efforts at communication.  Left with bored friends, coworkers, family, and spouses, we can soon add bored robots to the list.  Loathe to listen, we know our stories must be better than theirs.  So the talk goes on, and robot sales go up, and tweets and blogs and Facebook pages profligately propagate.

Never has so much been said and so little heard.  

We talk and type and text to everyone and everything within reach….

……..except God.

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