Truth vs Falsehood (57 page)

Everyone is familiar with resolutions that quickly fail, and changes of behavior turn out to be easier to formulate than to implement. Addictions are far more prevalent than the commonly recognized ones of alcohol, drugs, etc. In fact, almost everyone has multiple intransigent ‘habits’ that are really quite strongly ingrained, as most people ruefully discover when they try to change a mode of conduct or emotional propensity, such as resentments, fearfulness, strong desires, or habitual emotional responses, e.g., shyness or chronic anger.

Unaided, the mind is too weak and ineffective to bring about major change; even “genius” calibrates at only 499. There are many geniuses and remarkably prominent people of great accomplishment whose personal lives are disastrous, and the public cannot understand why celebrities end up as suicides (“She had everything to live for”). Thus, a self-destructive pattern, which is easily recognized by the intellect, in practice can be an insurmountable obstacle that destroys not only happiness and family or career but also physical life itself.

Hopelessness, suffering, and pain, however, may be the final straw that breaks the ego’s back, and in despair, the person invokes the only possible last source of power itself by turning to God, Divinity, and the spiritual domain by whatever name it may be addressed, a “power greater than myself,” and to which surrender accesses a whole new dimension that, by calibration, begins at consciousness level 500.

The ego is very strong and interested only in its own survival. It will willingly sacrifice a person’s physical existence, i.e., it says, “I would rather die than surrender” (give up its sovereignty). Humility is anathema to the ego. Some people even knowingly choose to go to hell rather than surrender to God (e.g., career criminals, Mafia ‘hit men’, and serial murderers). Timothy McVeigh, on his way to execution, declared he knew he was going to hell for willfully killing the innocent. (In the office one day, a hopeless patient begged for help. When told that the only option was joining a faith-based group, he said, “I’d rather die,” and so he did.)

From all the above, as attested to by human experience, the human ego cannot be overcome except by an act of the Will, which alone can choose to open the gates to Divine Power. This is because of the perfect Justice of Divinity by which everyone is the sole determinant of one’s own fate, which also determines possible options.

The key element to the empowerment of the Will is consent. This act of surrender (see Tiebout, 1949) allows for the miraculous, which is a bifurcation of the life process (as described by nonlinear dynamics and the Heisenberg principle). The intention then intensifies the emergence of potentiality into experiential existential reality. This is also the mechanism described at length in the famous
A Course in Miracles
(1975). It is also the critical first step in Alcoholics Anonymous and other faith-based groups that admit, “without God’s help, we were hopeless and helpless”
(Alcoholics Anonymous, 2000).

Note that the linear, limited personal will itself is relatively weak, but it is the decisive turnkey that opens the gates to the nonlinear, infinite power of Grace. Hope and surrender initiate the transformative process, and faith comes later, based on actual experience. Such acts and their consequences are also aligned within the allowances of prior karma. Not every prayer is answered favorably in human time.

Marginal Spiritual/Religious Belief Systems (Ideology)

Many of these represent childlike credulity and the inclusion of positionalities that are at considerable variance from verifiable truth. The “end times” apocalyptic culture and its literature calibrate low because they are based on elaborations from the New Testament Book of Revelation, which itself calibrates at 70, and its author also calibrates at that level, as discussed elsewhere. Its product is fear and the attraction of specialness and exclusivity.

Low calibrations prevail in variants of New Ageism, which push credibility to the limits, with glamorized claims of extraterrestrials, spirit guides, guardian angels, and prophesies of earth disasters. Other sources are claims to discovery of secret codes of God hidden in various disguises such as the stones in the pyramids, the Hebrew alphabet, DNA, famous paintings, and other imaginative obscurities. New Ageism (despite its own erroneous beliefs) is not, technically speaking, ‘spiritual’, but instead it is actually ‘astral’ in its practices and interests.

The attraction of many of these organizations and group beliefs is due to the curiosity and romantic imagination of the inner child that is entranced with any idea of ‘magic’ as is demonstrated by the popularity of the Oz, Harry Potter, and Tolkein books. These popular children’s versions, however, all calibrate above 200 and are integrous in their intention as represented by their fairy-tale themes of the struggles of the proponents of morality and their opponents. They are integrous because they are admittedly fiction, whereas fictional belief systems that are purported to be true calibrate low as they are thereby nonintegrous and represent falsity.

The Raelians made a brief appearance in the media with their much-publicized claim to successful human cloning. Their concepts have to do with guidance from extraterrestrials. The world of pseudospiritual fantasy also produces the imaginings of ‘Indigo’ children, star children, star families, star people, fifth-dimension incoming messengers of the future, etc. Common to all of these is a sense of uniqueness; magic; romanticized, naïve, imaginative fantasy; and the attraction of ‘specialness’ itself.

The common basis to the appeal of many purely imaginative belief systems is the propensity of the childlike human mind to be attracted to the excitingly bizarre and preposterous. It then gains momentum and becomes an exciting and special mystique that attracts followers and enthusiasts, such as “Area 51” secrets, replete with “government cover-up” conspiracy theories that attract a whole subculture. The Jim Jones’ group suicide catastrophe and the Waco standoff disaster, plus numerous other bizarre consequences of exploited gullibility and credulity represent the consequences of naïveté. While society dismisses these extremes as the “lunatic fringe,” the consequences of exploited credulity are quite serious and, as history reveals, often quite grave (e.g., the Hale-Bopp comet associated with cult mass suicide).

Of historical cultural interest are the extremely low calibrations of both the Aztec and the Mayan religions in which the blood sacrifice of children and infants was essential. The god image of Quatzelcoetal is at calibration level 85.

Easter Island statues represent the self-destructiveness of the former inhabitants who apparently destroyed the trees and other vegetation, ending up starving to death, but not before they had regressed to cannibalism. They rose up in wrath against the stone statue gods, turned them around, cast them down, and broke them. Idolatry, like the worshipping of the golden calf, calibrates at only 65. The avoidance of idolatry, or even icons, is represented in both Islam and Judaism in the formal structure of the places of worship. The ego is attracted to the limitation of form, whereas the essence of Divinity is beyond all form, yet innate within it. Thus, in its ultimate significance, icons and statues of divine figures serve primarily as an inspirational function to transport awareness to the ultimate reality that lies beyond all limitation, designation, or specification. Therefore, the icon or the image is not an endpoint but a springboard or a way station to the ultimate destination.

Section 2 Places of Spiritual Interest

Most of these calibrations are self-evident and reflect not only esthetics but also the presentation of beauty as instrumental to devotion and reflective of that spiritual intention. The ‘Heisenberg effect’ is perhaps demonstrated most visibly by the unique example of the Ganges River, which, on the physical level, is the recipient of the sewage of over one hundred villages, towns, and cities along its course. Thousands of Hindus bathe daily in this grossly contaminated water in acts of spiritual purification. Funeral pyres, located along the riverbanks, are still smoldering. By spiritual intention, the holy river calibrates at an amazing 515, reflecting the input of the energy of sanctification by the millions of Hindu devotees over many centuries. We notice the same impact of prayer on the calibrated levels of food that has been blessed, compared to that which has not.

Aranachula Mountain is unfamiliar to most Westerners. It was the home of the famous sage Ramana Maharshi (cal. 720) who never left the site upon which his followers established a famous ashram that has attracted spiritual seekers from all over the world. It still exists today.