It is an insult to the legacy of Jesus to suggest he was other than human.

I suspect many have known Christ in their lifetimes but not all are called to do what Jesus did. It is sad that we have taken the life and actions, of this man, Jesus, and reduced them to a fanciful tale we know is not true. A story we can not believe except by faith. We do not need faith to know God, to know Christ, we only need to ‘be’ and choose their acquaintance. This secret is known by each of us. It is an understanding we can not escape although we are free to ignore it. Mostly that is what we do, creating a fiction we call reality.

The fictional life of Jesus Christ is false and those who repeat it are false prophets. Have confidence and find your strength. Walk the path that Jesus did and you will know Christ.

It is this action of knowing Christ that tells the truth that Jesus knew. It seems there are different degrees, or appointments, in our acquaintance with Christ, ranging from ignorance/denial to full-blown companionship. A state where Christ makes an appearance as a person, a human being that anyone might know. It seems that Jesus was that Christ. Clearly few are called to do this but I believe this is what he did and I am confidant someone else will do the same. That was his message, the lesson, the example of his life.

What of the of the power of faith, of faith in Jesus? The good works done through faith and faiths ability to affect us. Faith is a mask for confidence  It pretends to be confidence but confidence has no need of it. For a healthier mind, and relationship with God, skip the faith and let all of your confidence rest with God. Make no claim on God’s behalf. Allow for naught and then God can present God’s self, as God is, or as God is naught. It is alright. What threat could you be to God and any God worth knowing is no threat to you.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

In considering divinity compassion is the bridge. It binds, as one, the person we are. This one person then forms the central pillar in a temple that presents divinity. It is a space that is created where previously it was naught, in an instant, it appears from naught and it is.

For me the Key of Solomon is the temple. The template for the key is David’s Star. The two triangles represent divinity. The points of the star are particular attributes but the star itself is actually the two bases of interlocking pyramids. The pyramid whose base forms the ceiling, of the temple, is inverted, aligned and fixed in place along the spine or central nervous system. Our soul stands on the ceiling as it is the floor known to our soul and our temporal self, or animal, stands on the floor as it appears in our animal reality. Theses inverted pyramids create something of a prism and we are allowed a singular focus and orientation.

Orientation. The forward most point of the star belongs to the pyramid that seems inverted as we stand in human form, its base is the ceiling of our temple. That forward most point is ascension. The other two points, of the triangular base that is our ceiling, moving clockwise, are presence and being. Directly opposite ascension and behind us in our human presence is humility. As our soul stands, on its floor, the ceiling of our temple, its orientation is such that humility is its forward most point. As we stand on the floor of our temple, as animal, humility is directly behind us. Moving clockwise, from humility, the other two points of the triangular floor of our temple are, intellect and emotion.

This understanding of David’s Star and Solomon’s Key is the product of what I call a mysticism. I did not read about it. It occurred to me that the star was the template for the key. I then considered it at length until I understood it as I do. It also involves the Kundalini. I came to understand the seven primary chakras, how they work and just what the Kundalini is, in the same way, I did a mysticism. In all of this compassion is the key, the singular ingredient that makes all of it work. It has a magical quality, it is an absolute. All absolutes are magical. Absolutes can not be possessed. Any person can find them but ownership is not possible. We have to let go and when we do the magic is released.

The space, created from naught, by the magical appearance of this temple, is an actual place. When I first discovered it I was trying to piece together what I was puzzling with about it, to see how it worked. I was futzing around with different alignments, the Kundalini, the points and structure of the star, rotations and movements, and it suddenly appeared creating a place. A temple. At the time it was a private thing to do. The experience was profound. Today I can no longer be content with privacy and I am having to learn a new lesson about compassion. The magic elixir that makes this work. I have to let compassion extend to the person I have found myself to be. The person I have never liked or wanted to be. The person standing in the open and telling this story. You see, it is easy for me to have this as a private experience, except that I am no longer allowed that pleasure. I have always thought it unreasonable, the notion that I have to be publicly spiritual and so I have a long history of beating myself up over it. It is that public person I am charged to have compassion for. In letting go, of my self-defeating inclinations, compassion creates a new me and a new magic.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

We have a person, a spiritual person, independent of temporal form. In our ignorance, of all things spiritual, we have created a false reality that pretends to be separate. In that it is false, pretend, in many ways it is a separate reality and does separate us from the spiritual world independent of temporal constraints. It does not have to be that way. We can surrender our determination to be ignorant and allow the appearance of our true spiritual identity to be what animates us. Doing that creates a passage and the spiritual community, known to our true spirit, has permission to populate the temporal world. The two worlds become one and the illusion of two worlds fails. Some call this magic, a miracle, but it is not. It is the way all things are, not some magical interruption, as magic is seen to be, but the simple everyday magic of being able to have cognition and awareness. We exist, that is magic and everything is magical.

The only success that motivates me is divinity. The dissolution of the two reality lie.

I believe our spiritual life is as I have described it. That all people have this same experience. When objective is divine living, choosing to allow the appearance of true spirit source to be what animates, that success changes the spiritual matrix of our shared reality. To my ego, this shift in our spiritual matrix, has the feel of conflict and the temptation to choose false spirits as my animation is strong. I find myself in negotiation. Our relationship with our true spirit is very intimate. Personal and private. My ego prefers it that way, perhaps because that is the only way it has known. Relaxing the ego creates the faculty of servitude and the ego becomes the servant of its true spirit. This is the purpose of ego.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

In all of this compassion is the key, forgiveness is the gate and then we are able to see. This is the way the truth and the light. It is the path to spiritual living. It is my path and I have no place to go except to be there. It is easy to be distracted by shadows and give them chase. When we do, we fall from grace and in our concern about how we are, who gets lost. I am not sure if I can bring who I am into full realization but there are stories of people who have. I have been a confusion of reluctance and certainty in this regard. Except for the encouragement of lore there is no guide to do this. Stories of others, just like you or I, who have done it. For some reason I have always felt this is what I have to do. That certainty, historically, has stirred strong emotion and that has never helped. My tendency is to be angry that I should see things, believe as I do. That is a tiresome position that I hope to wear out or just walk away from.

Of course I doubt. That is of little help and as a shadow to give chase. Except for this notion that I have to do this I would have taken a different path long ago and had a very different life. I have never been able to shake this certainty, this sense of what I have to do. It is what drives me. When I am angry about it or otherwise distracted, it never takes me to a good place.

Who are you? What drives you?

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

As a mystic this has always been my guiding principle. As a Catholic, a Christian, it is what drove me from the church. To my mind Jesus was as ordinary a human being as are you or I. That is the whole point of the story. Dogma and doctrine paint him as something much more than that, God incarnate. It is not true. A woman gave him birth, the same as you or I. The story of his deity is the story of power and undue influence wrought by those who tell such stories. It is not hard to believe that in the fourth century, around 326 A.D., when the Constantine ordered the Council of Nicaea, for the purpose of organizing the christian church, that these were the men who founded Christianity as we know it. They assembled the books that would become the New Testament. A small sampling of a larger collection, doctrine and dogma was set in place. Jesus did not do that. Others who claim to be his church did. Or course the books of the New Testament support their position and their claims. They were selected to do just that.

Churches, in particularly large churches, are political institutions. Designed to control people, often the result is violence and oppression. When a person or a group claims to be right, because of their ‘sacred text’, written words, they have undue influence. No words are sacred unless all words are. I do not believe any church. No truth can be written down. We write about it but the truth represents itself. It is its own evidence. Any who seek it can find it. It is important to first let go of what is not true and make no claim of ownership of what is true. Written words for example.

“I am the way the truth and the light. No one comes to the Father except through me”. I can not arrive at a beautiful vista and share it with someone who is not there. To share the view of anyone who has found anything, regardless of its relative value, you have to be there. You are also that way, that truth, and that light.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

In working to find this stillness I have been puzzling with the absolute known as compassion. It is absolute due to its quality of having only one measure. It is inexhaustible, always enough. A being can not withhold compassion and still have any measure of it. It is absolute, indifferent to fickleness. It remains enough. We can take no ownership of it and are only able to accept it without terms. It is the stillness I seek.

During this time, while I have considered compassion and its application, I have not been able to write and my blog has been silent. I am still here. Often my work is to write but not during this time.

Prior to my lesson on compassion I had been working with the spirit of compassion, Love, in order to spark the stillness that is compassion, I thought to use its spirit. I suppose that worked. It worked due to its failure. It made things worse. In working to repair a recurring theme of self-hate, hating not so much myself but my life, I was using the affirmation, “I love my life”. The truth is there were things that happened that I did not love. Painful, difficult and costly. A cost I have yet to pay, a cost I can not pay. I can not love these things. In my effort to tell myself, “I love my life”, the wound only festered and the echo of hate grew louder. I have no love for life’s difficulty and pain, mine or yours, but when I have compassion I allow life’s pain its place. In the boundless absolute of compassion pain gets lost. We can not hold on to our pain and have compassion. This is the lesson I needed to learn, not to love but to give permission. Admit and accept the pain that life has to offer by the only known remedy, compassion.

While writing this I learned that I had lost a loved one to cancer. A brutally fast departure. On February 1st she arrived at the hospital with what she thought was the flu and today, seventy-eight days later, cancer has taken her life. She was a middle-aged woman with all the familiar details, a daughter, a wife, a mother, and as we all do, as we all will, she left life’s details behind.

It is compassion that reminds us of who we are, even if we can not quite grasp it. When compassion rests with me I am that woman. I am her husband, her son, her mother and all of her loved ones. I am all that ever has been and ever will be. Every damnable act, no matter how heinous, I did that. Every act of kindness, all goodness, the miracles of lore, I did that. It is who I am. Who then are you? You are me, we are the same and there is no mystery.

We are not charged to love life’s pain.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

What is true? What claims that rattle around my head are true? How much of what I consider to be external, originating from others, actually is? The spiritual content of experience is its own matrix. Much of the content is imagined and images are real. We respond to our own imagination, obviously, and I think we respond to the imaginings of others as well. How do we differentiate between imagination and spirit? In my experience they are very similar. As recently as two years ago I had not considered the spiritual world we create and share as spiritual. I considered it as image. A place where image is real. Most people consider that reality to be spiritual and I have come to accept that. It makes for an easier use of language when writing about the realm of image I am familiar with. We are as we imagine ourselves to be and when we imagine others to be a particular way that consideration then becomes a structure that we share. Much of this realm of image is not true but it is real.

The part of our shared realm of image that is false is the product of our temporal nature, our animal self. It can be pretend, or make-believe, but nonetheless it has profound influence in our experience. In working to marry spirit with animal, as a shared interpersonal experience, I think it is necessary to distinguish between spirit and imagination. Imagination is as powerful a tool any human being will ever know. It is not to be considered lightly. We create, with our imagination, the world the way we want it to be. It is not done in isolation. We all have the power of imagination and we each craft agreement by which we exist in the shared environment of image. My observation tells me that most are not very concerned, or even interested, in this corner of experience. It plots along under the influence of ignorance. It is a realm that spirit understands. Spirit speaks the language that is image. To know of spirit personally, privately, is not comparable to a public or shared experience of our spiritual presence.

As I try to do this it is easy for the animal to be distracted by our shared realm of imagination and react to it. To meet my spirit in the human community, the animal world, and share that space as the same place, I’m sure is easier than it seems. I expect it is a matter of correcting imagination. Instead of reacting to all that is imagined, by the human community, I can imagine what is true and the passage is revealed. My spirit knows the true path. If my animal self imagines it, we are the same. See, it is very simple.

My animal self is so conditioned to pick up what we all have agreed, imagined, as acceptable and that is the challenge. Not picking all of that stuff up I feel naked but that is the secret. It is that nakedness that reveals the truth and all take notice of what is naked. It’s our nature.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

I am torn between the life I am living and something more fulfilling. I believe my interest in mysticism, the work I invest in it, has a tangible purpose, a net worth that in itself it represents success and I expect that success to manifest in all areas of my life. I await a revelation as to what it looks like. It seems that I could just step into it, as if it were a simple choice. I am confident of this means and yet I find myself at work doing what I imagined would only sustain me, temporarily, while I managed my investment and commitment to a more durable life choice. My spiritual life, our spiritual life. If spirit has value surely it produces results. Where are they? I expect my spirit-walk to find success. I have no inclination to market spirituality. Certainly the world has enough of that and it seems to me a fraud. I can not sell my spirit and have it retain its value. It is its own worth and that value, if it truly exists, must clothe me with the success I seek. That is what makes it true. There is some profound observation that completes my puzzle, something profound only because without it there is no completion. A simple observation, acknowledgement, of what is already obvious.

I am so finished with the work that has filled my time for the purpose of income that I actually hate it, not the work, but that I am still doing it. That is unhealthy. I have worked, and continue to work, to fix that. It seems that I am actually finished with what I have always considered a temporary occupation, I have exhausted its time and purpose. That makes moving on the only way to cure my ill. To end my hate. But how? Everything I have done to repair it leaves the hate intact. That is new territory for me. My efforts to address the issue have only concentrated it. I did set out to do just that, and now that I have, I am left the question of what to do.

All of the goals I set for myself I have reached. Goals preparatory by design. Things I felt I needed to do to ready myself. If I no longer need to prepare myself, if I am prepared, what then to do? It must be obvious. Why am I not doing whatever it is that is this difference, that is no longer temporary but rather what I have prepared myself to do?

I have allowed myself two options as a mystic. To accept my mystical sensibilities as tolerable and pursue life as a mystic, was first, my concession. To stop punishing myself for being mystic. Once I made that choice I was free to explore the possibilities. I rationalized that my life would be enriched by my mystic pursuit in one of two ways. It would prove to be a complete waste of time or it would bear fruit. Well it has been plenty fruitful. Even as I work to understand how to create, or discover, this transition, the obvious passage that can only be where I am, my skills are apparent. The stress is eating me alive, very painful. Feels as if I have a few knives in my neck and upper back, the sites of rather serious injuries I knew some decades past.  If I spend a few minutes considering the cause of my immediate stress I can identify it and in a moment diminish my discomfort by 80%, or more. It keeps coming back but this has long been my method of wellness. I have restored and managed my good health in this manner for decades. I suspect that it is time to take this to a new level, something less private, but how? I feel that if I did that my pain would pass. That the healing is not intended for me and if I let it go it will find its own way. My way will we be revealed. The success that awaits me only asks that I would come along and take a walk with it.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

My concerns are spiritual. I know of no other way to consider anything, even as I am distracted. I am happy to share my view of current social-political concerns. The way I think we ought to behave as a society. I enjoy letting people know where I think we have fallen down and how I think we might best stand ourselves up. These are distractions. It is what I do as filler. Something, anything to do with my mind and the small measure of time apportioned to it for it to spend. There is always something that I might otherwise do. A different way to spend myself. I think we can do a lot to improve the condition of life here on earth and to create a future more to our liking. I also think that we do all of that as spiritual persons. That it is the spiritual part of our being that is power and authority. The bridge that is creation.

My concerns are spiritual and I while my time to bring spiritual living into animal form. I did this first by creating a spiritual place for myself. A place to discover something true about my experience as a spiritual person. That was very powerful. Step two has been to shine a light on that, to let people know of the rich spiritual experience I have known. Step three is a shared experience. To end the mystery of spiritual life by living it in the open, not as an act of  ’faith’ but as a fact of life. To demonstrate our spiritual form, not as a philosophy, not as an interpretation of theology or scripture, but as my life. The purpose of my life can not be to die and go to heaven. To imagine that as the answer to life, as its purpose, is to be dishonest. If I can only know after I am dead and gone, why I am here, I have told myself a lie. This is the place, this is the form, this is the person to know the answer and now is the time or I am lying to myself.

In the Christian tradition we are all waiting for Jesus to return and when he does he will bring a harsh judgement, except of course, for the few. The chosen few. Mind you this is the Jesus who reportedly, in his last agonizing moment, sought the forgiveness of those who humiliated him, tortured him and brutally murdered him. Such a man could have no part of a judgement so harsh that it landed almost all of us in hell. Not just any hell mind you, but a hell so unbearable that it never ends.

The story of  Jesus is meaningless if Jesus is God. Its only possible value is if it is our story. The story of our human nature and of how and who we are. That is the message and it is not a message of how to be after we are dead. It is how we must be now. If you would know Jesus then know yourself. He is the same as you are. The story of his return is your story, it is my story. If Jesus or anyone else could live the life that he did, then surely, someone else will do it as well.

There is no reason to believe that Jesus founded a church. Others did that in his name. They assembled a book and then claimed that the words therein were God’s words. It is not true. You must have faith to believe that. I have no faith, but I do have confidence, all of it rests with God. Fear of God? I have no fear, certainly not of God. I fear those who claim to speak for God, who claim they own God by some book, written words. I fear those who claim to speak for God and threaten me with hell. Forgiveness, that is what it is about. It is the narrow gate. To deal with those who make false claims of God, for and about God, forgive them, by acting out the truth concerning God. Let God be God and make no claim on Gods behalf.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013