I wrote the poem below as a nonet, a poem having nine lines with 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 syllables.

“Empyrean, from the Medieval Latin empyreus, is an adaptation of the Ancient Greek, ‘in or on the fire (pyr)’, properly Empyrean Heaven. It is the place in the highest heaven, which in ancient cosmologies was supposed to be occupied by the element of fire (or aether in Aristotle’s natural philosophy). It was thus used as a name for the firmament, and in Christian literature, notably the Divine Comedy, for the dwelling-place of God and the blessed, and as the source of light.” - from Wikipedia

My belief is that heaven and hell are descriptions of the same place. We are standing in the suburbs of that place right now. And where we stand–and how we describe where we stand–depends on whether we focus on the fire or the light.

Image: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven (The Empyrean); from Gustave Dore’s illustrations to the Divine Comedy, Paradiso Canto 31

Someone asked if I thought God’s light blinds or guides. Hmmm.

I shoveled compost onto a piece of wire mesh on top of a bucket to filter out the clumps. It was time to do more planting in my garden, and I needed another fine layer of rich dirt. When the bucket was full, I looked around my property here in north Texas, and started to filter out the clumps in my thoughts to find an answer to whether God’s light blinds or guides.
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Life on planet Earth can be challenging, and sometimes we feel “burned” by people and circumstances. Today, I came across some notes I had written about a couple of men who passed briefly through my life some years ago. Remembering them again today gave me a needed perspective on some recent challenges that had me feeling burned.

The man walked up to me, and asked a question. I opened my mouth to speak, but had to pause a few moments as I struggled to answer him without vomiting. I had never seen a human so grotesquely disfigured. His ears, nose, and lips had been burned away. All the skin on his head, neck, and hands looked like melted plastic. His eyes peered through slits in his plastic-looking–and only slightly human-looking–face.
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I started using the Internet in earnest in 1994 when I partnered with several friends to connect a New Orleans coffee house’s customers to the world through email and Usenet groups. That same year, I discovered the World Wide Web. WOW! At the time, the Web only had an estimated 10,000 web pages worldwide, but I caught the vision of a huge, global phenomenon. The Internet has been an important part of my global identity since.

When my DSL connection went down last week…I had an identity crisis. Well, a crisis may be an exaggeration, but my not being connected emphasized just how plugged-in I am to a global consciousness. When I got unplugged for several days, I felt adrift on my tiny two acres near a tiny town in the tiny state of Texas. Everything seemed smaller, because the earth had steadily seemed smaller and smaller to me as I routinely communicated with people from all around our planet.

There is a conscious global consciousness in a way that there has never been in recorded history. While I was aware of that fact before last week, the pervasiveness of it really hit home in a way that hadn’t…since January 17, 1991. On that day, CNN correspondents John Holliman and Peter Arnett and CNN anchor Bernard Shaw broadcast live coverage from the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad as air strikes began in the first Gulf War. As I watched the anti-aircraft tracers floating skyward, I became aware of it being a defining moment in global consciousness. I was glued to CNN…simultaneously with kings, world leaders, statesmen, and countless citizens of the world from different countries in different time zones. We were connected to a degree that humans had arguably never been connected before (I’ll write about our unconscious Schumann Resonances connections in the coming days).

Perhaps some future catastrophe will unplug me from the matrix long term. But I certainly don’t intend to unplug intentionally. My identity has expanded to a global scale. I don’t intend to go back. However, I’ve decided to pick a day each week when I unplug. Each week I want to experience–for a full day–a perspective on the world expressed in the title of a book I once read: “Small is Beautiful.” So I’m determined to unplug for one day each week…but, ummm, just not today.

When asked if she had seen The Secret, a new friend said, “Yes, it sounds so simple.” I found her reply profound…in its simplicity. The message of that movie and book is so simple. But what can seem so complicated is getting past the web of beliefs–that each of us have woven–so that we can get to the simple truth.

If the Law of Attraction is simple, then I wanted to find one or two words that made it simple for me. What came to me is “make-believe.” What the Law says is that we make our life turn out according to what we believe. So, whether we are aware of it or not, our personal world is make-believe.

As a child I certainly lived in a make-believe world. I sat for hours straddled on the low limb of a big tree, and rode that horse on many adventures. Living in a make-believe world came naturally to us as children, but we seem to have lost awareness as we deteriorated into adults. The Law of Attraction, however, suggests that nothing was lost except our joy. We never stopped living in a make-believe world; we just stopped believing that it was make-believe.

What is the difference between the make-believe world of my childhood and the make-believe world now that I’m a grownup, I wondered as I watered the tomato plants in my garden. One tomato plant looked a bit weather-weary, with some yellow and brown leaves. But several of that plant’s good looking fruit would soon be in my salad. I had raised that plant from a seed in my greenhouse, and every leaf was brilliant green when I transplanted it to my garden. Now it was a grownup, and it was weathered but bearing fruit. That, I understood, is the difference in make-believe for grownups: we start to bear fruit.

A Hindu text, the Advaita Vedanta, tells us that the phenomenal world is Maya, illusion. I think that viewing the phenomenal world as make-believe is a little softer, a little more optimistic. If our world is make-believe, then all we need to do is change what we believe to change our experience of our world. And the Law of Attraction says that we can bear the fruit of our choosing. Yes, Gayla, it does sound so simple. I think it’s as simple as choosing to plant tomatoes in your garden.

One of the most important books for me in the early years on my spiritual path was Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda. I recently found it online in its entirety. One person that I vividly remembered from the book was someone who Yogananda met in 1935, a Catholic stigmatist, Therese Neumann. By the time of their meeting, she had lived “on light” for twelve years. During those years, the only “food” she ate was a “…consecrated rice-flour wafer, once every morning at six o’clock” during communion.

There is a great deal of recent scientific interest about organisms that “live on light.” Some, with high levels of melanin, have been found to be growing in the highly radioactive Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Melanin, a pigment also found in our skin, “…drinks in ultraviolet rays” according to a May 22nd Scientific American article. Some scientists see the potential for melanin-rich fungi to produce solar electricity more efficiently than the solar cells in use today.

There’s no scientific evidence that high levels of melanin enabled Therese Neumann to live on light, but according to physics, all those atoms in a little rice-flour wafer do contain an AWESOME amount of energy. To be sure, something awesome was going on with her.

I’ve included a portion of Yogananda’s interview with Therese Neumann if you would like to keep reading….
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Mary, in South Elgin, Illinois, posted a website link that I found today. The link took me to a Conversations with God tape on YouTube.

In that tape, I heard an answer for how to know the difference between messages from God and from data coming from other sources. In Neale Donald Walsch’s conversation, God said:

Discrimination is a simple matter with the application of a basic rule. Mine is always your highest thought, your clearest word, your grandest feeling.

One of those “highest thoughts” came to me as a revelation about 12 years ago while stuck in traffic. I was on the verge of road rage because of the #&!# inconsiderate woman driver right in front of me! I’m an easy-going guy, and my anger that day shocked me. At that moment I had the revelation, although it didn’t come in the form of words, but rather as a flash of insight as if from outside of me. I then translated it into words:

There is an optimum interpretation for any circumstance that you find yourself in. You will know that you have found the optimum interpretation when you feel love or joy. If your interpretation falls short of that, then keep looking. What you’re looking for will seem like a pearl of great price once you find it.

I found my first such pearl that day while still stuck in traffic behind the same woman…who had suddenly become the perfect teacher.

I’m not deeply into politics. I’m not deeply into religion either. I am deeply into spirituality, and the mixture of politics and religion troubles me deeply. But can politics and spirituality mix?

I was sent an excerpt from a book written by Rabbi Michael Lerner, and I thought I’d share it here. This sounds more like mixing politics and spirituality. See what you think. Ponder this excerpt from the excerpt:

The unholy alliance of the political Right and Religious Right threatens to destroy the America we love. It also threatens to generate a popular revulsion against God and religion by identifying them with militarism, ecological irresponsibility, fundamentalist antagonism to science and rational thought, and insensitivity to the needs of the poor and the powerless.

By addressing the real spiritual and moral crisis in the daily lives of most Americans, a movement with a progressive spiritual vision would provide an alternate solution to both the intolerant and militarist politics of the Right and the current misguided, visionless, and often spiritually empty politics of the Left.

Click to read the entire excerpt of The Left Hand of God

One of the most basic principles of what is called the Law of Attraction, from my perspective at least, is that all things that exist are connected through consciousness. In the continuum of consciousness, we can attract what we focus on. We can “call” it to us, whether it is a thing, a person, or a creature we share the planet with. I came to know quite a few years ago that all things that exist were “my relations,” to use a native American phrase.

I am very thankful that I’ve been able to connect with and “call” wild animals to me on a number of occasions. To put it simply, it is two beings communing through Being, and all creatures have Being in common. One of those communions was on the morning of November 20, 2006. I happened to have a digital camera this time to record my communion with a wild deer.
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The Law of Attraction is presented as a way to “get what you want.” But is getting what you want always what you need? If we listen to our lower self, then maybe not. We may get all the material trappings of life, and still not have what we need.

Personally, I’m not always clearly in touch with my Higher Self, call it what you will. That is where the Law of Grace comes in.

I invite you to read a true story, On the Road to Graceland. This story was written by anonymous author p703.

I found a web site that offers a free online audio course featuring 8 stars from the movie The Secret. What appealed to me is that these teachers are giving away their knowledge and wisdom in significant measure. Only the first two interviews are published as of today’s date, but each of them is over an hour long. You can listen online, download MP3 files to listen to at your leisure, or download a text transcript of the interviews.

Featured teachers:

Joe Vitale
Lisa Nichols
Hale Dwoskin
James Ray
John Assaraf
Jack Canfield
Michael Beckwith
Bill Harris

You can go to www.themastersofthesecret.com to register for this course, and I have included this link on my blogroll of links for future reference. Enjoy.

I started considering my belief about love a some time back after a brief conversation with someone about romance. I came to the conclusion that I don’t believe love and romance are the same thing, and I think the two are often confused with each other.

I believe that romance is a form that love can take, but it isn’t necessarily love. Love is formless. And while contemplating formless love, I saw the image of a pond. Romance is a lotus flower that can rise to the surface of the pond. With that image in mind, I believe romance must be grounded in love for it to survive. Without roots, it withers and even rots.
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