The Message of the Mystics (Celestine)

   But how do you acquire energy when you are feeling low without these tactics? “The Message of the Mystics” describes how the way we are used to competing for energy or power is unnecessary. There is a much more efficient and substantial abundance of energy available. And it's really no big secret how we connect to it. We access this when we love. 

Some people describe love as being blind, but I think there is a way of thinking about love that will leave you feeling like it is only when we look with love, that we really see.

“Love is not an intellectual concept or moral imperative… it is a background emotion that exists when one is connected to the energy available to the universe” - James Redfield. 

 

Love brings happiness which again is truly our responsibility to find. Even if you are a martyr, you’ll pass the Aristotalian check for virtue if you ask yourself are you truly happy doing whatever it is you are doing. If you’re not, you might consider whether your actions are working and therefore truly god-like.  
   In the story (Celestine Prophecy) the narrator is being chased by some enemy (the story is not where the real worth of the book is) and he finds himself on a cliff. This is where he has a profound mystical experience. A couple things come together here to shake him from his usual dramas. In one sense, he loses hope. His friend is shot, he’s in an unfamiliar place and he appears to have just run out of options. The other is that he’s in an extremely beautiful unfamiliar place. He gazes out from the cliff and sees the Andes Mountains. For a moment he is struck in awe and in that way he connects. I’ve experienced similar moments of awe just stepping out of the airport in Maui, or overlooking the Grand Canyon, or looking down from the strut of a Cessna you’re about to exit at 4,000 feet! Others relate from the vantage point of their own vortex if they follow Ester Hicks. The book describes this as a kind of connection with God where the narrator somehow becomes virtually invisible to the enemy hunting him even as they walk right by.
   Growing up, the closest connection I had to a kind of daily, mystical faith was when my grandma and I would watch “Little House of the Prairie.” In those stories God is personified and appears to take an active interest in the adventures of little Laura Ingalls and her family. That was a place where I saw people pray. I saw wisdom behind the ways those prayers were answered even when it resulted in some suffering of the characters. Many of those stories were somewhat based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s real memoirs so there might be a modicum of truth at least to the faithful culture. There is a sentiment amidst those stories that the faithful can be protected in a similar way to the way we see the narrator in Celestine escape this danger on the cliff. It is as if he had God’s cloak wrapped around him.
   The book even goes farther describing this higher vibration as the one a kind of spiritual humanity is destined for. It’s a kind of halfway point between the living and the dead and it’s suggested that Jesus may have been the first to ascend this way on that third day after his death when he rose again. And I mean, in reality we are just mass times the speed of light squared, no?

The Dynamics of Attention (Celestine)

   The fourth insight is called “The Struggle for Power.”  It describes four ways humans vie for this energy (aka power). We seek power in every moment and instinctively learn how to capture and control it generally using one of four ways: intimidation, interrogation, aloofness, and pity or what Redfield calls being a “poor me.”

Now I have divulged that I can sometimes see this energy, but I can't always and I totally understand those who might doubt this. But seeing the energy is not even necessary to understand it and to follow the mechanics.
   My feminist Women Studies background from college inclines me to think of these negotiation efforts as our means to either take power from or lend power to. This is often dichotomized as a more masculinized “take charge” method to control juxtaposed to a more feminine supportive tendency to empower that most of us in the modern Western world are pretty familiar with.
   It’s easy to see these cries for attention in others. The funniest part of dissecting this phenomenon the eventual realization that its as ubiquitous as it is moot. When it comes down to it, you learn about this and you start scrambling for the appropriate way to respond - but remember to consider that when someone is asking for your attention, why not give it to them? The fact of the matter is that attention is free and these days we practically sell it off to algorithms and AI. When we really need it most desperately from each other. What justifiably takes precedence over that?  

After a bit, it becomes easy to see these manipulations in our own behavior. But if you question whether you use these methods, or if you believe that you don’t, I strongly suggest that you ponder each moment a little bit longer. Catch yourself in a moment and evaluate your mood. Are you happy? Are you sad? Are you conscious? If you are not in the present, you are likely unconscious. You are likely in your own head, or feelings, or reacting to some outside stimuli. Are you scared? Are you trusting the universe? Are you still coming from a good place?
   Knowing these four manipulations of power can help you defend yourself from them in that all you usually need to do is identify them. It’s almost like calling out that the spirit of God can compel you! But if a person is vying for pity, maybe you can find a way to help them find a more sustainable path? If they are being aloof, simply tell them. Show them by example that you can put yourself and your needs out there safely and survive. Give them your attention for what they’re doing, but also move on. Interrogators are already interacting so know your boundaries. Make sure you are confident about them and then express them in no uncertain terms so that they are not crossed. And intimidators? Simply ask them why they need you to be subservient to them. “Who hurt you?” - is often a good start. A student blurted this out to me once at a moment I was acting without true presence or love and I never forgot it as a perfectly disarming technique.

Energy (Celestine)

The third insight is called “A Matter of Energy” and for me it took years to really see what it imparts.    
I first read this book as a lost little Lez-teen recovering from Catholicism. I put my fingers together. I thought maybe I saw light or smoke but I couldn’t convince myself it was anything beyond bent light or faulty contact lenses.  
   In hindsight, however, that pretty much reflected my relationship with life at the time. Nothing made real sense. No person, no paradigm ever really worked. I was in Community College after dropping out of high school. I’d fallen in love - hard! I’d fallen really, really hard. And even though she’d been my best friend for years, it was becoming apparent we couldn’t even be friends anymore. (It’s amazing to talk about this from a vantage point of forgiveness). I finally found myself uttering the words “This isn’t worth it to me anymore” and that was just about it. I wasn’t coming from a place of love no matter how much I tried to love her. I was angry, resentful, insecure and unsupported. So the one love of my life no longer even wanted to speak to me. I tried to recoup. I read. I attended health masses. I threw myself into jobs I thought I was destined for but all doors closed in my face one by one.  
   Anyway, at this point in my story, I’m disappointed to say the least, depressed (obvi) but putting one foot in front of the other. Slowly, I started to feel a little potential. There’s something about college. You choose your courses. It’s not the money; it’s the choosing what you’re going to learn that makes college an investment. I had a relatable English teacher who called me a “great student.”  That was all it took for me to get my footing. I shared a laugh here, a thought there... I was exploring. I was alone, but not really. There were friends. I was doing my best. I was thinking - mulling over my situation. I dated, but not seriously. I felt like a moth trying to find my way away from a flame.
   One day I looked up at the teacher of a class called Sociology and this was where Celestine really began to take root inside me. The course sounded good on paper (the study of groups of people). It seemed like Asimov’s Foundation. I’d been curious. Also I could bang the class out on Saturdays so it was easy to schedule. 
   He was going on and on about these facts I’d never been exposed to before.  Other kids were interested, but it all seemed pretty matter-of-fact to him. He was nothing particular to look at (and do not I say this to be mean) - just a guy. He was talking about the difficulty in purchasing deodorant. He explained the dangers of antiperspirant and how our bodies are supposed to sweat. The metals in antiperspirant we are conned into wiping under our arms for a societal construct were actually destructive in a way nobody ever mentioned in my presence before.
Thing is, while he did this, he was glowing!  
   This sweaty middle aged white man droning away in a room full of kids on this Saturday afternoon about the deodorant - was just glowing! The longer I watched the more I realized what I was seeing. I’d read Celestine, but this was the day it really clicked! It wasn’t the deodorant lecture I was enthralled with (although that was intriguing). That was just a truth he was imparting. It was the easy, natural way in which he procured it. This was supposed to happen. I could actually feel the vibration!
   Now, mind you, he wasn’t like lit up. It wasn’t light. It was like energy, but I could see it! And it suddenly fell in with the rest of Celestine for me in that moment because - I will never forget him. He went from whatever/whatever to perfectly beautiful for me to behold! I could see that I was both energized by him and energizing him! I realized at that moment: he was doing exactly what he was meant to do exactly the way he was meant to do it. Even if he was only meant to truly connect to me at that moment. I gave away nothing in class but I held back tears inside. It felt other-worldly.   
   I even researched what he said.  It was true.  I haven’t worn aluminum antiperspirant since.
   The point is, we all have stories. We all have purposes. This realization that we are all part of a greater story or a higher meaning will hit you when it’s time. We really are all right! The difference between a person you look upon with love and a person you look upon with anything else, is you. Are you grounded? Do you feel your own worth? (Nod to the magic mirror gate in Neverending Story). Are you truly present?
   - I will tell you that I mostly notice the auras from afar between people now. I was walking to work one day when I found myself locked on this Spanish couple handing out Jesus leaflets on a corner. The woman was handing them out. The man was I don’t know - manning the shopping cart? But I could clearly see an energy flowing from him and around her. He was there for her, but she was there for something else. And the energy sustaining her was both from him and from something else that was much more powerful. I could see their connections (energy flowing in circles between, under and around them). And I understood that there was an authenticity to what they were doing. The reasons they were there that day, on that street corner, handing out Jesus leaflets, those reasons were altruistic. They weren’t like the angry, hypocritical, insecure, God-fearing control freak “Christians” who come to feel superior at Pride Parades. She felt called to pass on the Good News of Jesus. And he loved and supported her efforts. I could even feel this as she handed me a leaflet and smiled.  
   Now it’s not often I even bother to engage with a Jesus campaigner but we couldn’t even talk. The thing was in Spanish and despite working in the South Bronx and years of effort, I’m still far from fluent. Still, I could see her intention.  And it meant something to me. It even seemed to mean something to him!
   I thought the plant experiment from the third chapter in Celestine was the end all be all, but I can’t grow anything unless it’s from the actual ground. If I lift it from the Earth it will be dead within the year. I try and try, but nothing I do will ever sustain something unconnected.
   My family and I even did Emoto's rice experiment. We had three jars of rice. We were nice to one, ignored the other, and the kids and I laughed insults off daily at the third. I think the ignored one decayed the most. Idk. The results seem so off I don’t even remember them. And I've read his conclusions were thwarted since but I've never read and understood the refutations.
   But do your own experiments. Explore your own stories. There’s a flow illuminating us all here. The fact is that E=mc2 and fundamentally, we are all energy. There are rational explanations for the power of our attention and they are empirical. Pay attention to your own attention - and watch where it leads you.   
  

A Critical Mass and The Longer Now (Celestine)

 This “Critical Mass” is the first chapter and it describes the awakening in human culture.  The book came out in 1993 and at the time I can tell you that any regular talk at least in my experience about the true nature of reality was considered fringe to say the least, but things have changed. Once, in the nineties I saw a psychic who took my palm and smiled describing me as a “survivor.’ She told me there were many twists and turns ahead for humanity but that I and mine would be ok. At the time we were just emerging from The Cold War and the very fact that we have is in no small way a miracle in and of itself. When I really look at all the pitfalls and dangers humanity has escaped in my lifetime, I’m shocked that we are all still here. It would be no surprise to me at all if ever I learned beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were other timelines or realities where that is simply not the case. (More on that later too)!
   2020 was for me the kind of year that traveling through felt like crossing some kind of a great divide. It started for me with a strange fascination that I couldn’t put down about Rick Gervasi’s Oscar hosting (as if I haven’t dropped enough random references thus far, but…).  New Years has always caused me a kind of stress and Trump’s last year in office was no small burden to bear. Something about the mixture of Y2K trauma, the imposing countdown, and the chaos in Times Square, but I’m always a little braced for impact around that time. So when I saw Rick Gervasi cracking up at himself, shaking his head and muttering to people “It’s the last time” - I took it hard again. Beyond instincts that he seemed extra stressed and sad even it just struck me as a strange thing to keep repeating. I mean did “the last time” mean he won’t be in show biz anymore? Or the Oscars won’t survive the evolution of entertainment? Or we won’t all be here together anymore? (Maybe at least not in this capacity?)
   Now, I looked into this. Turns out that mutter supposedly had something to do with Mr. Gervasi’s contention that he would not be hosting the Oscars ever again.  At the same time however, I unearthed a bunch of Internet rumors about Gervasi’s “secret” membership to the Illuminati, and this did not in any way help quell my fears. No, it looked to me like Ricky knew something. And the events that followed seemed to confirm my suspicions. But maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see. The truth is none of this matters. It’s just the way it struck me. In hindsight, it matters simply because it mattered to me at that time. I don’t even care any longer what groups Ricky is a part of.
   The first real fear that came up for me was Trump’s seemingly uninstigated bombing of General Qasem Soleimani. Iran is a nuclear power (at least they almost are) and why on Earth was he just starting with them? I literally cried and slept my entire family in our bed that night praying every second that no further harm would come from this. That morning I heard that bombs from Iran had been launched at a US base. WWI was started over the death of one man, and it seemed like WWIII could be sparked just as easily. My wife had already left for work and it was weighing so heavily on my mind, I decided to be honest with my oldest son and ask him to pray for these innocent soldiers now in harm’s way. (I didn’t reveal the true scope of all my fears) but we prayed together, and this isn’t an everyday routine for us. 20 minutes later cautiously driving my way to work I heard over the radio that the bombs had landed and that there had actually been zero casualties. Zero. I believe people were hurt and no doubt lives were altered.  I don’t mean to trivialize that in any way. It was just that at the time, this seemed like a real miracle to me.
   Soon after Australia was on fire. The virus shut down Wuhan, and a comet was feared to wipe us all out on Valentine’s Day. This unprecedented year quarantined New York City, appeared to unleash Murder Hornets in my Northeast, and swans of locusts in Africa. Equality Protests erupted all over the States as Trump nearly single-handedly disintegrated democracy. Now, there is a valid argument here to be considered about the propensity of people to attract the negative, the inclination of the press to prey upon that opportunity, a possible master plan in play of the dark elite to manipulate the masses as a means to boost or at least sustain their own wealth and greed in a calculated misguided effort to suspend insecurities. But nonetheless, it happened - it was happening. The world appeared to be in fast forward and nobody had the general blanketed assurances that they should be ok any longer.
   Each Apocalypse required attention. And I believe each conveyed big lessons and bigger picture conundrums that need to be sorted out by each one of us individually. 2020 brought me back to honesty and trust. I took my time in quarantine to research and investigate sustainable products that I could use, afford, and get on subscription. I voted, even though I was still apprehensive about even touching anything outside of my house. I read current studies on Covid19 in the early months from primary sources on the Internet until I knew and understood the half life of the virus on different surfaces such as plastic and metal, and then I washed groceries I had delivered and adjusted my diet around the foods I could find. I trusted myself and worked hard with my wife and kids to draw boundaries we would staunchly protect no matter what the social cost. We made schedules for our children that considered the long term - school skill supplements, exercise and social time carved out as daily checklists, and structured independent studies. I drove near BLM protests and honked my horn in support. I talked to my neighbors, family and friends honestly and listened with an open heart about prejudice, privilege and justice. In hindsight I emerged with a tremendous new respect for the New York City Department of Education’s embrace of Critical Race Theory and decided White Fragility by Robin Dianeglo to be a must read for every white person in the “Taker world” (more on that when we discuss Ishmeal by Daniel Quinn).
   In the end, 2020 was a transformative year. We’d collectively faced our fears. I faced my issues. I started writing this. But every single moment felt like a response to the way I’d handled the previous. I don’t feel responsible for all the chaos in 2020, but I feel like one feels after they pass a test. You carry the lessons learned, and the fear is easily forgivable. You emerge with pride. You emerge with empathy. But you never forget the experience.
   So I’ve learned to trust coincidences as evidence that I’m doing the right thing.  Likely in large part due to my upbringing (and despite the clumsiness of that blasé altar boy) that right thing often aligns with what Jesus would do. Jesus claimed to be sharing the “Way” which for me is really starting to look like that tightrope stretched out in front of me. I feel it’s by the grace of God that I’m ever able to recover from my falls, but who is God? What differentiates Jesus from other heroes of the underdogs? Does grace even differ very much from social and secular popularity? I’m aware that I’ve been both on and off this proverbial tightrope. I feel like I know the path now because I feel either on or off sometimes moment to moment, and I believe so can anybody who truly gives these thoughts and ideas a good college try. But perhaps there are other paths, other universes even. (More on that later too).
   To this day these coincidences welcome me daily, hourly, back to my own higher self or my best path forward. It’s no coincidence that coincidences occur. They occur to all of us. A coincidence is an event with an ascribed meaning. Is one ascribing the meaning or deciphering it? Is the manuscript being revealed or manifested? (We’ll get back to that.) Is this statistically probable? Yes. Does that negate its value? Well that depends.
   Do you value your own story? When you think of someone, do you attempt to reach out and let them know? When you chat with someone, are you honestly as present as you can be within yourself in the chat? Do you listen not only to what a person says but to the setting events around you both as they say it?  What exactly moves you to speak? Do you make a concerted effort to communicate, honestly, and truly accept what results from that communication? Because if you do all or some - even one of these things, you may eventually find answers that seem directly correlated to your questions. Doors may begin opening after other doors to less desirable rooms close. It really gets fun when you are able to do this so often you literally come to expect these things. You’ll soon begin to trust the universe. There may be times when you are tested in this trust, but those are the moments of real growth, and opportunity. You may find yourself in situations that earlier seemed entirely hopeless, but now you know - you trust - that you can let go, and that you will be led to the next right thing. Some people appear to have this kind of relationship with their God. As an outsider it’s easy to dismiss that as either some lucky person’s privilege or naivete, but whether you are a God-fearing soul or not, it’s not likely your right to judge. It is somewhere between listening and judging that we find truth, meaning, presence, purpose and love. And that’s coming from a good place!
   “The Longer Now” or the second insight in the book reveals that we are collectively realizing that each of our lives really do have a unique story.  Collectively we have been searching and stepping outside our current paradigm to help us see the bigger picture, and that purpose has always been our collective endeavor.  This perspective eludes many, but not generally for long. It is the story of humanity that is unfolding around us, but like our egos, we often don’t look at it objectively. We don’t often see that we’ve been climbing a kind of “Hierarchy of Needs” like Maslow purported, as we discover fire and invent the wheel. This perspective however, becomes erect upon fear, and insecurity as we control our food supply with agriculture (More on that when we discuss Ishmael by Daniel Quinn later), and attempt to conquer the world.  

Coincidences (Celestine)

Celestine is divided up into chapters, each loosely based on this “ancient manuscript” and the story of the narrator’s discoveries associated with it. This is how the story takes on a kind of extra dimensional quality I associate with my childhood “Neverending Story.” We are afforded the point of view of the narrator’s experience of something, and in that way we are privy to how the story permeates the narrator’s story. The truth however, or the real take a way value is the connections between the narrator and the hero’s experience. When Atreyo looks into the mirror of the second gate at his true self, Atreyo sees the little boy reading about Atreyo’s adventures. The purpose of Atreyo’s quest (albeit his entire existence) is to teach this young reader (and so on).  
   The first chapter of Celestine highlights coincidences and purports them as leading us somewhere. Redfield purports that at the turn of this century we were collectively realizing that life is a series of synchronicities that we each day - indeed each moment - we choose to either value or ignore. These events come in the form of thoughts, feelings, intuitions, or occurrences.  
   Now these coincidences seemed like poppycock when I first read them back in the 1990s, but I was willing to hope. My Uncle Dany had cultivated an impression of spirituality in me via his intelligence, Tarot Cards, and unmatched ability to bullshit. The coincidences Celestine exemplifies can be a chance meeting on the street, a thought about a friend you haven’t seen in a while just as you get a phone call from them, or a dream that somehow delivers some much needed message or appears to come true. These coincidences, it is said in this newly discovered ‘ancient manuscript,’ will begin to happen more and more frequently and affect a majority of the population in the beginning of the 2nd millennium.  The attention paid to them will begin to spread.  The validity of their truth will be more widely experienced and soon there will be widespread understanding and discussion of their existence.
   Now, I can’t tell you how weird that sounded to me as a kid (well, as a teen) but nowadays? It’s hard to meet a person who doesn’t nod their head while discussing the uncanny. We’ve all had them: chance encounters, conversations, thoughts that seemed to just come to us and land so meaningfully in our lives that they appear almost designed. One can always argue that hindsight is 20/20. But to them I say, try it! Live your life attending to your every thought, listening and pondering every sign your world brings you. To do this you really need to not only find love in your heart for those around you, but you also need to find, love and forgive yourself. You need to trust and have enough faith in the universe to just let go, be present and empower anyone and everyone around you. Relax with every person you meet and just try being entirely truthful (we’ll get more into how to really do that). Even if you don’t connect with a person, you can have realizations that propel you to the next awesome realization. If nothing else, it will improve your movement through life. You will at the very least be more present and that will help keep you grounded in that good place from which you can possibly act from.

The Language of your Universe

   It took a while to recover from that shattered faith as a kid. Even before I met the true love of my life, the moment I first fell in love as a young adult I found the matter put entirely back at priority one. There was no doubt about the love. I’d never felt such longing. The all consuming affection for another human was palatable. I’d never loved anyone like this. I think the difference between this and my love for my mother (besides the physical) was that my mother’s love in return was unconditional. I’d like to think the heart my heart chose did love me - even loved me unconditionally in her own way - but her mind just wasn’t ready to kiss in the streets. And the real kicker, is that looking back now if she had - I would have wound up an entirely different, much less desirable, in my opinion, person.  This intense affection I had for her could make me swoon - but the conflicts that increased in complexity after a while morphed us into something so wrong that in time I don’t think she even liked me anymore! I certainly didn’t. My hurt and insecurities got the better of me so that my shadow self had the propulsion of an explosion bursting forward and no longer from any "good" place. I tried to love her in that way of Jesus without expectation but in the end, I just couldn’t. I absolutely had to just let go. Love cannot root unless it is grounded from both sides. It just doesn’t seem to work, at least not love a s a verb.

   Author Caroline Myss, who wrote Energy Anatomy, Advanced Energy Anatomy, and dozens of other books I highly recommend, conveys that we are essentially born into tribes we are meant to leave. It’s beautiful to think that we could all be born into a safe hub without significant issues chipping at our philosophical foundations, but honestly what would we even learn in such a world? How would we evolve? As pretty as that looks fundamentally, it just doesn’t work within the bigger picture. If it does, I guess I just haven’t reached that level picture yet. 

   So what went wrong? All you need is love, right? (Was that the Beatles? or the Bible?) I loved this love but it went against everything normal in the tribe that I knew and at a time when “normal” was all I aspired to. We don’t want to stand out at that age. We just long to fit in. I tried to change but simply couldn’t. Nothing worked. I’d tried to connect that way with guys. I just couldn’t do it. I like guys, but as friends. All attempts at romantic involvement just feels silly or theatrical. Ultimately, there is just no magic. (To be fair, there were women I couldn’t trust either but they still made my knees weak when we kissed so I think in the end it’s all a bit beyond thought - at least mine anyway). Eventually I tried to connect that way with other girls besides the one I’d fallen head over heels for. The magic with girls knocked me for loop after loop - even when I knew I was not in love. Sex is its own magic!

   But, God hated homosexuals.  

   Up until then I wasn’t sure there even was a God. He was starting to bear a remarkable resemblance to Santa Claus. Still, I’d had moments. A quick desperate prayer was answered. A profound thought at the right time that appeared to come from nowhere. After a while, God didn’t seem totally implausible. I even think I may have had an out of body experience once that I later read followed much the same protocol others had experienced such as feeling stuck at a solid object and extreme fatigue upon reentry. This alone was resembling an empirical argument for the infinite.

   But it did appear God was more and more unlikely as I grew older and older. By this point I’d met my share of priests, discussed these issues of consequence at great lengths but never left feeling satisfied that I had received real truth in return. Perhaps I wasn’t truly imparting my own? I was becoming more and more enthralled with the study of philosophy and ethics, if only because it was comforting to know that the same questions I was asking were asked and recorded by so many others and for so many centuries. College opened my eyes to the similarities of my thoughts and some of the most preserved questions that plagued the minds of names I’d heard only vaguely referenced throughout the ages. I explored the stories behind names like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kant, and Voltaire. In college I was able to shed my facades as I found notions that I favored in people such as Plato, Hume, De Beauvoir, Weil, Gilligan, even Cioran. As I grew to discover myself, I started to accept who I was. This was the beginning of finally coming from a good place.   

   One night, I picked up this book. All I knew about it was that it was popular, had gotten that way through word of mouth, and a friend had bought it for me. “A true adventure story” it boasted on the cover. I don’t know what exactly lured me into it but that one evening literally changed my life.

   The hoopla around the Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield coincidentally casted just the right amount of credibility and intrigue to fascinate and inspire me just enough. I somehow wound up giving it the chance to prove itself to me empirically. The book picks up with a rather mundane character lollygagging around his life who passionately and wholeheartedly stumbles into a South American suppression of an ancient manuscript.

   And this is the part of the plot I force myself to tell because it’s a worthy story even as I come off bad in it. I was still as gullible in college as I’d been at six 6 years old. To me, a “true adventure story” translated to “true” as in real, or factual, not as in faithful or pure. I considered it the opposite of “false” or “fiction.” For me, the plot circled around like The Neverending Story leaving the reader with the possibility that it all had - yes indeed - all had actually happened, if you bought the premise of the narrator’s say so at least.

  The difference between these theatrics and the ones encountered in church for me was I think simply my age. In church, I could just about comprehend that we were there to learn to tell the truth and to be good to others. I knew there was this guy Jesus who walked around a lot and inspired a few people to write about him. I knew there were meanings underneath the stories that were expanded upon by the priests and that a bunch of stipulations had somehow been dolled out for congregations to follow in order to be “saved.”

   Celestine was less dusty. Celestine was experimental. In Celestine, there was a “try it and see” aspect that I have now also found in other less local to me and perhaps less conventional religions such as Buddhism or Wiccan. It was empirically based in a way I could just no longer trust the Church to be. (It probably helped that it didn’t supposedly damn me to Hell from the gecko.)  After all, the Bible had this rather unsatisfying ending with way too many spoilers. There were lots of Christians who appeared to be less than authentic.  They were either angry, controlling extremists, or uninvested absentees. I knew enough to see how much of life’s mysteries lead back to explanations one could find in the Bible, but the church had so many obvious atrocities under its belt.  From the Crusades and the Acquisition, to the Western slavery of African Americans, inherent misogyny and mass homophobia; Christianity seemed to be a great story, but either a story gone astray, or a terribly insecure and uncharismatic God parting the seas just to avenge His enemies. Celestine however, for me was a solitary experiment that I could pick up and try for myself.

   I mean after all this there were certain points a priori for me: One, life was fake in the sense that people were all too often wrong or too misled by their own agendas to really be trusted at first. After all, children are inundated with platitudes and assurances that things will be alright. And yet one thing seems almost certain: we will all die. How shitty is that? Two, love was real. At this point I knew love. I was elated around this person. I was in a relationship with her where I was in no way satisfied, but I was close enough to be painfully aware that no matter what happened, I knew I never really could be. Other people seemed to like each other - to endure one another. They found ways to fit. But even though it wasn’t a conventional relationship by any means, I loved this person like no person has ever loved another person. I was absolutely sure of that.

   But there are Bible verses that seem to suggest homosexuality is sinful. It said there were no homosexuals in Heaven and described women who acted on their desires for each other as “unnatural.” Homosexuality at this point was listed in my dictionary as a literal “sickness” or “perversion.” And gay people were not allowed to marry anywhere on the globe.

   I bought these definitions and explanations at surface level. All the hatred and disdain for queers to me appeared to stem from there. If I was queer, and only love (true, mature, reciprocated love) could make me happy, and my only path to it was wrong, then I was already doomed.  

   It’s a terrible conundrum. The cruelty to this day makes me sad. So many are stuck there knowingly or not, and so many more have died never feeling alive as a result of this cruel and manipulative paradigm.  

   I think the people who purport this must have never really felt God. They may have felt love in fleeting glimpses and whimsical moments. They may be highly intelligent and knowledgeable about well sourced material stemming from ancient truths. Maybe they are clear, precise, unmuddied thinkers with focused trajectories and peer reviewed applause. They may even pray. But a paradise sought after from fear, dissatisfaction, insecurity, anger or control - to me now is very suspect. A rule purported and explained away as hard or soft whether punished if broken or painted as the ideal may be a rule, but it is no true law.  A law cannot be broken. There are very few natural laws, but they most certainly have little to do with how “natural” women consensually behave when they are alone together.  

It’s a challenge in my life that is behind my efforts here to convey this notion that as much as we are all right we can also be all wrong, but internalizing this could indeed solve so many secular and spiritual problems. The short of it is that there is wisdom in common sense. The extremes that some go to in order to enact power over another for whatever reason is often coming from the fear and insecurity over the inevitability of death.  

   There are obvious issues that are problematic. The dichotomy that gender purports for example is one.  Boys restricted from sentiment or pause, and excused for aggression and girls ostracized from independence and restricted to being ornament is wrong.  These are archaic mistakes we keep perpetuating unconsciously.  There is no true division between genders or even sex physical or otherwise.  In fact, there are just as many sexually ambiguous babies born with both or even neither sexual organs as there are children born with Down Syndrome.  Doctors make decisions about sexual assignment in the moment they are shown and can sometimes affect the entire trajectory of a child’s life in one fearful or rash moment. In truth, we all make tremendous assumptions about almost every child and there’s almost no way of ever knowing the effects of these thoughtless or easy decisions. It is often deemed a medical “emergency” to do so, but the emergency is social, not physical. And who has ever really felt entirely “boy” or entirely “girl”? Fundamentalism though, is no longer possible.

   This is why the way that Celestine came to me, from the timing of my own gullibility, to my social location and budding sexuality as well as the particular circumstances of my life; all of this combined to make the Celestine coincidence I experienced perfect! I gave it enough of a chance to experience its validity. And, I’m telling you now from that experience, it is truth!

   What follows is a spoiler alert. If you haven’t read the book, put this away for now and go read it! Seriously. It’s worth every moment and it’s honestly a quick read. If you have already read it (and about half the people I meet in life somehow have) then welcome back to your quick refresher! It shocks me how many people I meet have read the book in an age when most of us don’t read. We watch and even that is a commitment (especially post 2020). I’m honestly not sure if it’s a tribute to the popularity of that novel, or the circles with which I bring myself. In any case, if you aren’t going to read it, and never have, the following posts are going to be a crash course at least on how the book affected me.

Come from a Good Place

   Life is an adventure. It’s rigorous, exciting, interesting and prolific. It’s also solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Hobbes, Leviathan). We “grow up” and start thinking that we are living in some harsh, objective, dismissive reality, but are we? Faulty narratives, ethical relativism, privilege, diplomatic sovereignty and quantum uncertainty aside, as a species, we’ve basically been growing recently only too aware of what we’re not really aware of.  And, Like I've said, we’re likely on this platform of life for one real purpose and one purpose only: to connect, regardless of what’s real.

If you can really internalize and remember this, you won’t ever lose sight of what’s important. But maybe you don’t buy into that yet. Maybe you're hurt and not really ready yet to connect. How difficult is it for us all to trust each other? How basic is the search for truth? Whether this is a result of willful misdirection, ineptitude, or inadequacy - it doesn’t matter. We are all guilty victims, and we need to get over it. We should have learned to be careful though, as searching for what’s right will almost always deteriorate into control by design. Control is an illusion. None of us are omnificent. We all stem from a singular perspective which must by definition be inherently incomplete and therefore is fundamentally flawed. Even when we feel 100% certain that we are 100% correct, we just can’t be. Instead of vain attempts to impart power over our situation, try doing your best to habitually infuse it. How? First try remembering that empowering yourself and others can only stem from your own happiness. We see this happen naturally when we notice that we happen to be ok. There are moments when we’re not thinking about much. Even if it seems less and less these moments can happen and furthermore, can happen by design. When you are deeply “ok” it’s easier to infuse power to anyone who is not. And if you’re not, value yourself enough to fix that. Ask for help. Reflect on the comparison between decisions you made while happy, and the decisions you made in moments of anger or frustration. There’s a big difference in most outcomes, right? Try making it a kind of rule to always be coming from a good place before you act for a while and just see if it works out. Where that place actually is however, is ultimately up to you.

   I grew up in a small, Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Queens, New York.  We’d go to church every Sunday, and for a while every week my faith was both tested and confirmed. This occurred with the kind of amazing regularity only befitting a 1st grader. During one particular part of the mass, our priest would lift the Eucharist up to God to ask for it to be blessed. Thing is, every single time he did that (and this is the crux of the plot) - I heard bells! It was a tingly but wildly ubiquitous sound you might expect of an Almighty, but it was unmistakably there. It was consistent.  

   And this was real life! As a kid, this baffled me. It seemed otherworldly but also here, real, actual. I don’t really remember when it started but it became my one church draw. This was the thought that kept me from groaning too much as I was dragged out of bed on Sunday mornings. I would wait for this moment every mass, and it would happen in every mass, every week, and in every church we ever wound up in.

  I remember looking around (and up) marveling at this forest of grown-ups who would take this miracle in such a collectively mature stride. No wonder they acted like they knew everything all the time! This was such a gift because during this brief part of my life, things made sense. I understood every “good” person completely and I truly, authentically pitied every “bad."  (Maybe they didn’t hear it?) Things - all things - were either good or bad; there were directions we all moved in: up and down, back and forth, left and right. There was no doubt in my mind that I would spend every waking moment of my entire adult life devoted to this God everybody was talking about. And I would for sure read that giant book of rules he sent down because hey - what’s one lifetime in the blink of eternity? (Even to a six year old!) I figured I’d grow up to be a priest. (It hadn’t dawned on me yet that a woman priest might be an unlikely possibility. Truth be known it had hardly even really dawned on me that I would eventually grow up to be a woman!)  What other possible profession besides priest could be as noble? Who cares if you had to wear all those dresses and perform rituals in front of people all the time. I’d deal. I was in. I would be 100% pious!

   One Summer Sunday we arrived a little late and had to all sit right up front. I was a little excited and sort of wondered why we’d never even tried to get front row seats before. I never did ask because I always forgot the thoughts I had in church by the time I got out of church. It was such a long stretch without direct conversation that by the time we emerged and the music was far enough behind us my mind was usually on to the relief of freedom and all the activities now available to me. At least, that’s the way it had always been before, until that day. I waited and waited and this time it seemed to come quickly. There were the usual songs, and talking, movements and dances. We’d all shook hands, and now the church snack was being prepared. That was the day I watched in simple stark stupid casual horror as obviously, callously and right in front of me, a hopelessly blasé Altar Boy with a totally vacant facial expression and an arm deliberately readied underneath an indecently short altar skirt, did something that shook my little world to its naive core. I can still remember my eyes following that arm until - I watched that hand with total heart pounding existential dread thoughtlessly, forcefully, almost unconsciously, but all in all very simply ring freakin’ bells!  

   The clanging that ricocheted off the dome ceilings mocked my spiritually-pained ears. It was deafening. I remember vividly seeing my heartbeat in white painful peripheral pulses that seemed to close my entire visual field. I know this sounds dramatic but my faith plunged in that moment. I could feel it seeping out my feet leaving my knees so weak I actually wanted to kneel. I felt real doubt for the first time in years - I mean since I was like four! I remember feeling so hot I started sweating. People were already lining up for their refreshments or whatever when I looked at that book dagger-eyed and decided right then and there that when I grew up, I was going to read every word of that thing and every other word like it of all these so-called “Gods.” I’d figure out for myself exactly what I should be doing before eternity. But I no longer trusted anything or anyone else to show me the way. It had all been a show. What cruelty!  

   In truth, however, that time had been a gift. My memory of it is sealed in like a garden in my heart. Things reversed, though. I now understood the fallen and deeply and truly pitied the “saved.”

   Fundamentalism isn’t really possible. We don’t know what started everything or even if there ever was some kind of start. And we long to know that - why? So we can figure out what went wrong? So we can judge? So we can blame?

   Here’s what we can know. Nothing. Facing that is the burden of youth. I was there for years, and truthfully, I go back and visit often. Now, here’s what we can see. There are laws in life - there is a law of gravity, there are laws of aerodynamics… and there‘s a law we broke long ago that we are only truly realizing now. Please stay tuned. But until we return, work off where you’re from. Tell me in the comments. If you need a jumping off place - tell me what it's been like for you to face your own mortality. That's always an uplifting start!

(And yes, I do often crack myself up!)

Choosing Thoughts

    We live in a time where we see so much that it’s difficult to keep the extremes from swallowing us whole. There is so much information available that it’s difficult to decipher any truth as contradictions are just as easily procured. In philosophy we've been eyeing this issue for centuries. We dub it epistemology (because that's what we do when we can't solve things yet. We label them and give them a place at the table until we do.) Yet there have been so many centuries where status and geography so completely dictated belief that it affected our evolution as well as our very constitution. This abundance of knowledge mixes with that loss and erodes confidence as we enter the adolescence of our species’ development. It's scary to change. But it's inevitable. It's time to choose my friends. It's time to choose our thoughts. It's time to choose our pursuits. It's time to choose our destinies.     

   We probably could choose to implode. We can set boundaries, cut toxicity off, regroup, relax, find our bliss, chill. But I believe we are fundamentally growers. We generally aim to be bigger, stretch further, connect more. It's only natural that we tire in battle, lose energy and fumble when we stagnate, pool and drain. A lack of motivation can fog our glasses. It mixes with the isolation and sometimes intense feelings of melancholy or loneliness and loss of support. Faith becomes fear. Pride becomes ignorance. Before we know it, everywhere we go, there we are.

   What if there were a small bundle of awesome thoughts you could really get to know, reflect upon, use and then carry with you to take out and fix things when it all starts to feel rough? What if we wrestled around with our little monstrous thoughts and egos and made them really work for us like the tools they are or at least could be? What if life could feel like an ongoing exploratory conversation with the universe? What if you knew honestly deep down that you and everybody around you, really were absolutely and incredibly - always right, alright, and ok?

   The following will be just that. Consider some of these new blogs to be a knapsack-like collection of particular thoughts and anecdotes that have come to me enough times and through enough mediums that I can now consciously reconnect with them whenever necessary. Together, they have made me the happiest I’ve ever been, and I’d just love the opportunity to really share them with as many people as I possibly can. I’d also like to include as much as I can about where they came from and some better reflections and interactions with them, as well as the influences and experiences that really brought them to enrich my life and psyche.

This will still be "Family Life Through Rainbow Windows" because I will always have mostly my own experience to communicate from. But I am longing to share these thoughts and anecdotes as ubiquitously as possible. Please feel free to comment as I believe I have made clear that connection is almost always the point. And if you like and can think of another who might also like - please share. This isn't the most trafficked medium and I could use any help I can get. Love & Thanks!

WE ARE ALL RIGHT

  We are! Isn’t that great? It’s just about the best thought I ever had. It’s so great that it has changed my life. And here’s the kicker - it’s absolutely positively true.

   I’m in a great space and because of that, I know it’s time to act. I just have to share what got me here - what keeps me here. In today’s world, a premise like this could change everything, and yet we think it’s not true. We think it can’t be true. We act as though it just isn’t true.  

   You’re wondering how I can say it. Maybe I’m a crackpot. Maybe my reasoning is faulty. Maybe I’m from some cult you’re not from and we’re not coming from the same space.

   But this thought doesn’t stand on its own. (Nothing actually does!) It’s built on other equally wonderful thoughts I hope to share here. I’ve been evolving as have you and now I plan to try and keep this blog teasing so that I can perfect and build upon your thoughts as well. I’m posting this on a free platform that won’t get a lot of traffic. If you think at any point that you’ve read something worthy, thought provoking or something that just put you in a better space, would you please please share and if you are in any way moved, could you please comment?  

   See I have been writing this for a while. I have a vision of a book in mind that I would love to see published. I am realizing that if I have something to say, then I should just say it. So let me begin by telling you this: we are all right. We are alright. And we can all be ok. I’ll prove this to you eventually but there are other fundamental thoughts this is built upon. And I’m going to start posting a little about each. For now, see if you can try to trust me. There will be thoughts conveyed here that will help us all even as we all face what seems like insurmountable odds. I’m aware of how dire things often feel, and all I can say as we begin is trust me, it’ll be alright.