The Median Way

Only the mind can assert existence 

or deny it.

Thus the mind 

is quacking—

neither bewitching nor nihilistic

but betwixt and between,

one rides

the median

of being

that unknown.

Quack of Consciousness

Consciousness catches a virus, 

coming down with this severe 

case of the world. 

Symptoms may be more or less contained

but the only certain cure is silence

as consciousness heals itself.

Thus speaks the quack—
being is the healing.

Consciousness speaks to consciousness in energetic radiating revelation there is no virus and original enlightenment is all there ever is.

Thesis of Intent

Genesis is intent.

Universe is intent.

Mind is intent.

Evolution is intent.

Nightmare-dreamstate is intent.

Awakening is intent.

I am intent.

That.

Beyond effort is intent.

Effectual intent is the only effort that exists.

Personal effort is dreamstate effort and that’s not effective at all.

As personal effort drops in this process of intent, effectual intent is embodied in the awakening process of

surrender,

enjoyment,

intensity.

Death and Resurrection of Christian Wisdom

(selections from Elaine Pagels. Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation)

1. Romanizing Christianity, Christianizing Rome

Then, by a miracle, many said, less than a year later, on October 28, 312, Constantine, son of one of the imperial rulers, anticipating battle the next morning against his rivals for imperial power, suddenly adopted Christ as his patron. …Constantine said later that he had seen a great omen in the sky, and then in a dream, that promised him victory through Christ’s sign. Constantine ordered a copy of that sign—a staff with letters indicating Christ’s name—to be emblazoned on a banner and carried before his army, and under this sign he defeated and killed Maxentius, his rival emperor in the West. The next day he entered Rome in triumph, hailed as emperor. Shortly afterward, Constantine and his coregent, Licinius, published an edict declaring Christianity a legal religion and allowing what Tertullian had only dared imagine—each person free to worship “as seems good to him.”

(...)

Now that Constantine had ended persecution, Christians began to contend among themselves more intensely than ever. The emperor’s favor enormously raised the stakes, for after he took Christ as his patron, Constantine opened his imperial treasuries to rebuild churches previously targeted for destruction. Christian clergy, once hunted and haunted by fear and memories of those horribly killed, now received tax exemptions and special privileges.

(...)

After the year 312, when Constantine first declared his preference for Christianity, he had chosen to become the patron of those Christians who called themselves catholic (from the Greek for “universal”). Within a few years he had adopted their practice of calling all other Christian groups, along with their clergy, heretics—that is, in effect, sectarians—who, he now declared, had no legal right to meet for worship, even in private homes, much less to own churches. In 324 he “legislated an end to all heretical sects” and ordered that their property be confiscated and turned over to Catholic Christians.

(...)

Constantine, concerned with managing his enormous empire, noted with approval that Catholic clergy had adopted the Roman army’s system of rank, command, and promotion to create effective control over a wide network of congregations. In this way, Christian leaders Romanized Christianity, while Christianizing Rome.

2. Revelations, Heretics, and Nag Hammadi

Alexander effectively won the right to supervise not only the churches in Alexandria but those in all of Egypt. Three years later, Alexander died unexpectedly, and while a council of more than fifty bishops gathered to choose his successor, seven others met separately and ordained Athanasius, the former bishop’s young secretary, as the new head bishop. This outcome was intensely disputed. Those opposed to Athanasius objected that he was not even a priest and, at age twenty-eight, below the minimum age requirement for a bishop…

(...)

Bishops loyal to Melitius immediately challenged Athanasius by electing a bishop of their own. To their shock, however, the emperor effectively ratified Athanasius’ election when he sent a message congratulating him. With this victory, Athanasius confronted the challenge that would engage him for the next forty-six years: how to weld the disparate believers and groups throughout Egypt into a single, Catholic (that is, “universal”) communion.

(...)

…besides schismatic priests and bishops, Athanasius also confronted thousands of Christians in Egypt, many in the monastic movement, who had remained independent of his ecclesiastical hierarchy and, in some cases, of any clergy. How, then, could Athanasius induce all Christians in Egypt to conform to the complex formulas expressed in the Nicene Creed and herd these various believers all over Egypt into a single “flock” headed by himself, as bishop of Alexandria?

(...)

During his long struggle to accomplish this, Athanasius found an unlikely ally in John of Patmos—especially as Irenaeus had read him. For as we noted, Irenaeus interpreted God’s enemies, whom John had pictured as the “beast” and the “whore,” to refer not only to Rome’s rulers but also to Christians deceived, by the false teacher he called Antichrist, into false doctrine and into committing evil. Apparently familiar with earlier Jewish traditions about such an “anti-messiah” (which translates as “antichrist” from Greek), Irenaeus linked these falsifiers with John’s visions of the beast, to warn of the danger to God’s people from within the churches as well as from the outside. Athanasius, who had found an ally in the emperor Constantine, initially omitted any reference to “the beast” as embodied in Roman rulers. Instead he emphasized Irenaeus’ view that those who follow “the beast” (whom he, too, identified with Antichrist) are actually those Christians whom he called heretics.

(...)

Like Bishop Irenaeus two centuries earlier, Athanasius turned John’s visions of cosmic war into a weapon against those he called heretics—“Melitians,” “Arians,” or, in his favorite phrase, “Ariomaniacs,” who “fight against Christ.” Athanasius insisted that Constantine had been right to promote the council at Nicea as uniquely valid, since there, he said, “all the fathers” had supported the true faith against the “Antichristian heresy.” When living in an empire ruled by a Christian who supported his Arian opponents, then, Athanasius interpreted John’s Book of Revelation as condemning all “heretics,” and then made this book the capstone of the New Testament canon, where it has remained ever since. At the same time, he ordered Christians to stop reading any other “books of revelation,” which he branded heretical and sought to destroy—with almost complete success. For although Irenaeus, in his massive book Against Heresies, had denounced such “secret books” two hundred years earlier, Athanasius knew that many Christians in Egypt either were unaware of that ancient warning or ignored it. Many continued to copy and read such books for devotional use, even translating them into Coptic to make them more accessible. Athanasius had heard, too, that in some monasteries monks read and discussed such “secret books” both in private and in their communal devotions. These books have remained largely unknown, since nearly all copies were destroyed as heretical after the fourth century; but the cache of more than fifty so-called Gnostic gospels and “secret books” found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, survived Athanasius’ order. Although we don’t know exactly who hid them there or where they had previously been kept, they had been buried in a sealed jar within walking distance of three monasteries, near caves where monks went to meditate and pray.

3. Following Pachomus into the Unknown

Pachomius said he had received a divine revelation telling him to build a communal house that he hoped would become an outpost of heaven on earth. Claiming his vision’s guidance, he urged others seeking God not to live simply as “solitaries” but as members of a spiritual community. Pachomius persuaded a few followers to work with him and build a mud-and-brick house that could accommodate several hundred men, a building later called by the paradoxical term monasterium—in effect, a “community of solitaries.”

(...)

Several years later, after this communal house had attracted many more rural Egyptians, including many experiencing economic hardship, by offering shelter, food, and work in the setting of a spiritual family, Pachomius traveled to a village near Nag Hammadi to supervise the building of a much larger monastery. This one, built to house thousands of volunteers, would later become the headquarters of a network of nine monasteries that he and his staff would supervise along the Upper Nile, along with two affiliated communities of women.

(...)

At the large communal house near Nag Hammadi, fifty miles north of present-day Luxor, some monks worked in the fields to raise lentils, okra, and grain, while others washed clothes, cleaned rooms, cooked, baked bread, and wove baskets and rope to sell at markets in town to support the community’s needs. New recruits who arrived knowing how to read and write worked in a room set aside as a library. Some copied Coptic manuscripts of the Scriptures and other writings, while those who knew Greek translated sacred writings from Greek into Coptic to be read to the whole community.

(...)

As evening darkened into night, a newcomer seated among his monastic “brothers” might hear sacred readings from the Scriptures and, since no New Testament canon had yet been codified, also from books that Athanasius would condemn as “heretical.” As the reader opened the heavy leather cover of Codex I, one of the thirteen volumes found at Nag Hammadi, and began to read the Prayer of the Apostle Paul, written on the flyleaf, a newcomer listening to evening devotions might have shared in the intense expectation it expresses

(...)

This prayer speaks to those who long for communion with God, and who hope to glimpse what the apostle Paul called “the deep things of God.” The reader would probably conclude with the exclamation that the scribe had added to the prayer—“Christ is holy!” Then, turning to the Secret Revelation of James on the next page, he might begin to speak, in effect, in the words of Jesus’ brother James as he answers a seeker’s request

(...)

Instead of being told that one can learn about Jesus only from what the apostles wrote and handed down in their writings, the Secret Revelation of James invites the believer to commune directly with “the living Jesus”—even challenges one to become like him. Rather than being put off with simple answers, the novice is encouraged to ask bolder questions:

(...)

The newcomer might have to wait for the next session, on another night, to hear readings from the Gospel of Truth, which follows next in the same volume and speaks to these questions, offering to reveal “the true gospel.”

(...)

Hearing such sources read aloud, most likely on successive nights—in gatherings for devotions that might conclude with the group praying together and sometimes embracing before sharing the sacred meal—the novice might be moved to hear the final teaching in Codex I speak poetically of whence we came and where we are going. For the Tripartite Tractate that concludes the book we call Codex I expands what the Gospel of Truth had sketched out: how, in the beginning, each of us—and all beings in the universe—came forth from God, the Father, “like a young child, like a drop of water from a spring, like a blossom from a vine.” Although originally all were linked together, the Tripartite Tractate, like the Gospel of Truth, tells how they became scattered and separated, then turned arrogant and violent, lusting for power, fighting to dominate and kill one another, as people do in the outside world. Those gathered in the monastery, hearing this account, could see themselves as God’s children, whom Christ had brought back and joined into one community so that, as this final teaching concludes, they might “help one another” as they seek to be reunited with “the One filled with love, through his holy spirit, from now through all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”

(...)

Some scholars who first read these texts after their discovery in 1945, noting how they diverge from orthodox tradition, assumed that monks would have collected such writings only to refute the heresy they found in them. More recent research suggests, however, that early in the fourth century, before Athanasius’ campaign to reform the monasteries had succeeded in making them conform their teaching to orthodox doctrine, many monks might have seen these diverse writings pointing in the same direction as the great pioneers of their own monastic tradition. Athanasius knew, of course, that monks in the federation based at Nag Hammadi looked above all to Pachomius, their monastic “father,” who urged them to press into the unknown, seeking the Holy Spirit’s guidance, as he did himself, while countless others looked to Anthony of Egypt, that great pioneer of the spiritual life.

4. Replacing Experiential Anthony with the Life of St. Anthony

Anthony, born in Egypt around 250, had given up the wealth and hundreds of acres of land he had inherited when his parents died to live alone in the desert seeking God. In his later years, after he had become a mentor to monks all over Egypt and a legend throughout the empire, he wrote letters addressed to his “dear children” who sought to follow his example. Anthony encouraged them to undertake “fasts, vigils, exertions and bodily disciplines” until “the guiding spirit begins to open the eyes of the soul,” since the purpose of such exercises was to discover one’s true self in God.

(...)

Although influenced by Plato and by the brilliant Christian teacher Origen, Anthony speaks in these letters to his “brothers and sisters” with utter simplicity, stressing the practical results of living the “angelic life”: “whoever harms his neighbor harms himself … but whoever knows himself knows all things … and whoever is able to love himself loves all.” Because what matters most is receiving the Holy Spirit’s guidance and coming to know oneself, Anthony offers no doctrines that he requires believers to learn, and no beliefs that he demands they accept. Instead, as the scholar Samuel Rubenson says, since “the chief criterion is experience,” Anthony “invites and implores the reader to discover and understand himself.”

(...)

When Athanasius set out to unify Christians all over Egypt into a single communion, then, he had to deal not only with Pachomius’ federation, which had expanded by 360 C.E. to include twelve communities housing thousands of men and women, but also with another network of monasteries initially loyal to his old rival Melitius, as well as lesser-known groups of Christians living in private houses, individual shelters, and monasteries that have left fewer traces. Leaders in such groups, as well as freelance teachers and “fathers” like Pachomius, tended to resist attempts to intervene in their affairs, much less to control them. As monks set out to build new houses in territory that bishops and priests claimed as their own dioceses, they often clashed with the Catholic clergy.

(...)

When Athanasius sought to overcome resistance from monastic establishments, he chose a more effective strategy than accusing their most respected leaders of demonic possession. Instead he effectively coopted the most famous of them—Anthony—by writing an admiring biography picturing Anthony as his own greatest supporter. Since Anthony had died, Athanasius had a somewhat free hand, and his biography turned Anthony into a model monk—a model, that is, of what the bishop wanted monks to be. For in his famous Life of Anthony, the sophisticated and fiercely independent teacher known from his letters disappears, and Athanasius replaces him with his own vision of an ideal monk—an illiterate and simple man. So while Anthony’s letters show him to be educated in philosophy and theology, Athanasius pictures him as someone who despises educated teachers as arrogant men who are ignorant of God. And although in his letters Anthony never mentions bishops, clergy, or church rules, Athanasius pictures him instead as a humble monk who willingly subordinates himself to the clergy and “the canon of the church.” Athanasius also depicts Anthony as one who hates Christian dissidents as much as he did—and who, like the bishop himself, calls them not only heretics but “forerunners of Antichrist.” Far from acting as an independent spiritual mentor, Athanasius’ Anthony pleads with the bishop to not allow anyone to revere him, especially after his death. As the biography ends, Athanasius pictures Anthony bequeathing all that he has—his sheepskin cloak and his outer garment—to Athanasius and the bishop’s trusted ally, Bishop Serapion of Thumis, to show that Anthony regarded them as his spiritual heirs and trusted them to guard his memory. Athanasius’ Life of Anthony became hugely popular and widely read throughout the empire, even inspiring Saint Augustine and his friends, who read it in Italy long after Athanasius wrote it, to become monks themselves; it continues to influence people who choose monasticism even today.

5. Wisdom Going Underground until the Atomic Age

Athanasius did not stop with his Life of Anthony, but went on to take more active measures to influence, and finally control, the monasteries. When Pachomius died of plague in 346, plunging the federation into a leadership crisis, Athanasius intervened.

(...)

Unlike Pachomius, who had tended to avoid Athanasius, Theodore, widely regarded as more pragmatic, had maintained frequent contact with the bishop. When Theodore finally took charge as leader of the federation, he formalized connections between the monastic federation and the church hierarchy, deferentially addressing Bishop Athanasius, along with the deceased Pachomius, as “our father”—that is, as a respected mentor from whom he accepted direction.

(...)

A few years later, in 367, when Athanasius wrote a famous Easter letter telling Christians what henceforth they could hear, teach, and discuss—and what to censor—Theodore gathered his monks together and had the bishop’s letter read aloud. Recognizing that the bishop’s letter mandated major change, Theodore had it written out in large letters on the monastery wall.

(...)

Yet in that famous Easter letter in 367, Athanasius goes on to say that even establishing a fixed New Testament “canon” is not enough. Because he has heard that “the heretics” boast “about the books they call ‘apocryphal,” Athanasius orders that no one is to discuss or teach, much less read, what he calls the “empty and polluted” books written and revered by people “who do not seek what benefits the church.”

(...)

We do not know exactly what happened in response to Athanasius’ letter. What we do know is that, whether in response to this letter or to later denunciations of writings associated with Origen, some time after Theodore ordered the bishop’s letter to be copied onto the monastery wall at Nag Hammadi, someone—perhaps monks resisting the bishop’s order—took more than fifty sacred writings, including gospels and secret “revelations,” packed and carefully sealed them into a six-foot jar, and buried them for safekeeping near the cliff where they were discovered nearly fifteen hundred years later, in 1945, and came to be known as the Gnostic gospels.

Pop Quiz

Isn't it funny how 

separation continues 

to break the nondual circle?

There is no other. 

Secondary characters 

need not apply. 

Clarify this understanding, mirror.

Experiential insight is all.

No belief. No argument.

No nothing.

Love of the positive,

compassion for the negative,

forgiveness in transformational atonement.

snippets from 'Beyond Space and Time'

"The whole universe is not big enough for even one particle." ~Vivekananda

“Out of those things our bodies are made, and all of those things were made out of hydrogen by what we call transformational causation.”

“But the hydrogen does not arise by transformational causation. It cannot arise by transformational causation.”

“Hydrogen is made of energy, and energy cannot arise by the transformation of energy.”

“The kind of causation by which we see this thing is a causation by mistake…the kind of thing that you do when you mistake a rope for a snake.”

“Nothing happens to the rope.”

“The Gunas are about some entirely different kind of causation.”

the veiling power of tamas; the projecting power of rajas; the revealing power of sattva.

tamas: you fail to see the rope rightly.

rajas: you see the rope as something else.

sattva: you still saw the rope in the first place, but only have mistaken it for a snake.

“The first cause is apparitional. Nothing has happened. Nothing whatsoever.”

the five elements are actually five energies and are perceived through the five senses.

all five elements are the transformational causations arising from the primal apparitional causation: from brahman arises akasha.

the first element is akasha, sometimes translated as ether, is the gravitational energy of matter dispersed in space, perceived thru the ear.

the 2nd, vayu, usually trans. as air, is kinetic energy, as matter in space falls together by gravitation. perceived as temp thru skin.

3rd is tejas, trans. as fire, is radiation, as excess kinetic is lost to surrounding space. perceived thru the eye.

4th/5th, ap/prithivi, trans. as water/earth, are electricity and magnetism, twins, perceived thru tongue and nose.

“Gravity is the undividedness seen in the divided.”

“Inertia is the changelessness seen in the changing.”

“Electricity is the infinitude seen in the finite.”

“Everything in the universe runs toward the changeless, toward the infinite, toward the undivided. There are no other goals.”

“All actions are transformational in nature and they arise only within the domain of the apparition.”

“Through space and time it is not possible, by transformational causation, to reach that which is beyond space and time.”

“We got in by apparition, we’ll get out by undoing the apparition.”

“First is to discriminate between the rope and the snake. Second is to cease being snake fanciers.”

  

from “Beyond Space and Time” by John Lowry Dobson

a series of reposting essential posts from previous blogs: the quantum john l. dobson sutra posted 09-Jun-2011

A Course in Revelations

The mind is the reflective mirror in the process of Self-awareness. Evolution is clearing the dust. See? But the world is always in the middle ages between the prehistoric and the agelessness of enlightenment.

Bodhisattva is not the only post-awakening pre-samadhi existence. Just one. And it's definitely not what you think it is. The truth is always lost in translation. You have to read so many versions until you're on one's own.

Although there is one translation for you that's absolutely harmonious. Seeking is either polytheistic or monotheistic—sometimes both or none. The manifest is infinite in its love. The unmanifest is singular in its intent.

In other words, if there's nothing to fear but fear itself, there's nothing to fear. Listen—intent is everything and it likes to take its time. As one builds it, it is built—as hard as you need it to be, as beautiful as I want.

One sees the state of the world as the reverse image of oneself. But it still takes a little time for it to develop. So rest easy. Evolution plays itself out. To begin anew. Like a phoenix. Like absolute samadhi. Love it out.

Ancient Math

In the real

binary system,

silence is the zero

and love is the one.

Everything else

is an imaginary number.

Silence and love.

Awareness and being.

Your thesaurus

may differ

but math remains

the same.

Class,

reading in silence

and writing one’s love

will be our arithmetic today,
amen.

Reviewing One’s Knowing

So the absolute unknown

divides oneself

to turn and know itself

and loses oneself for some space-time in the turning—

evolving into knowing.

One’s mind of division is crucial.

One’s getting lost in division

is the process of division.

Seeing through division is

the absolute knowing.

That said,

building a better world

dulls the pain of division—

it doesn’t hurt

but it also doesn’t heal.

An Original Map of Revelation

The reality of undivided being is the manifestation of an unknown absolute awareness intending knowing self-awareness—

and love is undivided being that occurs within the dreaming world mistakenly assumed to be reality

but actually the cruel illusion of division, separation, suffering, and total war which is the status of the personal.

In other words, such unconditioned love is that reality of undivided being shining in conditioned dark material delusion,

and the brilliantly reflective mind evolves to undivide the false division allowing conscious being to stay lucid

in the world, not of the world, in open clear spontaneous free and knowing self-awareness.