Dear Friends,

When after due diligence our consciousness begins to expand, and we eventually learn to listen to it, what we encounter often stuns us into silence, like “…stout Cortez when with eagle eyes…He star’d at the Pacific Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.

What opens before us is the infinite source of Wisdom and Art of all kinds. It is the “Fountain of Youth” because we will forever be children in these domains. It is the door way into Freedom, freedom from the prison of identification with any form and, therefore, the freedom to be messengers, Light Bringers, to those who are still caught in Plato’s Cave. We become in our own environments tiny participants in the Divine Dance of Infinity.

There exists many tomes of ancient Sanskrit such as the Mahabharata, and relatively modern literature such as Alice Bailey’s work whose purpose was and is to alert Human Beings to the Realities if the Infinite Universe, and to Teach us how to access and deal with it. Even the most modern of these teachings are presented in language and metaphor that does not resonate that well with Sisters and Brothers who are younger than 50. The overlay of religious and “esoteric” metaphor and language is frequently a turn off for them.

However, the essentials of the Ageless Wisdom are way beyond any form or metaphorization, and in the Thoughtlines I produce, I look for language and metaphor that may have a chance of being read by these folks…thus this issue of Thoughtline.

lots of love

-tom

The Reality Upload

It is a dense physical, measurable, seeable “fact” that our dense physical bodies exist. It is also a not so dense fact that the large majority of the 7+ billion human beings on the planet are unconsciously consciously identified with our bodies and the dense material world in which we are functioning.

This is the same condition Plato was talking about when, 2500 years ago, he wrote the Allegory of the Cave. Most of us, for example, still simply assume, without a single thought at all, that we are our meat, our dense physical bodies. When we say I am going or doing, we mean I, our body. When we say I, we mean Me.

And we say this–in spite of the dense physical, measurable, seeable fact, that everyone does–that we realize we will die. We, of course do not really face this fact until it faces us. In the good-time, the time between birth and death, we run around on the very thin skin of the planet and do a lot of really dumb things and a few really wonderful things.

The dumb things are most often the products of those who are unconsciously identified with their bodies. The wonders are the products of those who at least act as if there is more to Life than the dense physical plane and the bodies which we inhabit.

It was kind of mind blowing the other day when I suddenly became conscious of the amounts of energy and time we devote to the maintenance of this illusion, this mindless assumption that we are our personal dense physical apparatus. The amounts of just the dense physical stuff like time, emotional, and mental energy we spend on separative personal “image identity” development and maintenance is amazing.

We know that what is called money is simply a densified form of energy. We also know that, consciously or, mostly unconsciously, it is our mental and emotional impulses that drive our expenditures of this energy.

Here is an example of one of those image identity manifestation expenditures. The United States cosmetics market revenue are expected to exceed $62 billion in 2016.

And, here are some global figures concerning the energy we put into our image maintenance:
The women’s wear industry is valued at $621 billion.
The men’s wear industry is valued at $402 billion.
The retail value of the luxury goods market is $339.4 billion.
Children’s wear had a global retail value of $186 billion.
Sports footwear is valued at $90.4 billion.
The bridal wear industry is valued at $57 billion dollars.
https://fashionunited.com/global-fashion industry-statistics.

This is just the dense physical part. Think about the time we spend day-dreaming, wool-gathering, fantasizing about what we want, who we like, and criticizing who and what we do not like and want to “get even with”.

So, what’s my point in this?

The point is that time is getting short. We desperately need to become conscious of being alive and of what we are doing with our energy. So much of what we do every day is being unconsciously driven by this problem.

How to do this? Well a good starter would be for us to make a deliberate, conscious effort to think, at least daily and as often as possible, “good thoughts”.

What are good thoughts? They would be thoughts that support the Common Good, encourage compassion, and understanding that most of us are trapped in this other situation of personal identification. We need to think of others as ourselves and to try to grasp the Fact that there is in Reality only One Humanity.

Daily thinking along these lines tends to tap into the energy to the heart. Once the heart energy starts to impact the consciousness it will via the mind, replace, without one even being aware of it, many of the energy wasting and damaging auto programs–things we call “habits” that run unconsciously in our equipment–with new programs that will automatically support the Common Good.

This is what is known as Wisdom or Straight Knowledge or Intuition. It is the normal function of the Heart. It is actually what it means to be a Human Being rather than the animal body we use to get around.

The major inhibiting programs that run below the threshold of our consciousness are fear and its ever present mate, doubt. These two programs were written ages ago and are supported by the habit of our separative identification to intellectually question every suggestion that does not seem to benefit that separated image of ourselves. There is no way that one can intellectually combat this issue, for intellect ever deals with form, not Ideas or Principles.

To be open to the impact of the energy of Ideas and Principles one has to choose to act for what one thinks is the Common Good. We need to bring our free will to bear, to consciously and freely choose the Good.

In the beginning, when we attempt to make these choices for the good, the Dark Whisperers of fear and doubt are triggered by old separative programs. They will engage the separative auto-programs of the intellect to doubt one’s compassionate or selfless thought. Thus the discipline of consciously thinking and acting on those thoughts regardless of the efforts from the Dark Doubters, gradually opens the channel to the intuition.

The intuition, by the way, is never concerned with the agenda of the separative self. If our sudden insight concerns the agenda of the separated self, we can be certain that it is not an intuition. To learn to use our free will to choose the Middle Way, the Path of the Heart, is the entire point of evolution.

Humans are the Fourth Kingdom. Their role in the Grand Design is to be the doorway through which Beauty and Truth flow into the lower three kingdoms and through which Human Beings flow into the

Fifth Kingdom, the dimension we call the Kingdom of the Soul. Rather than just saying it, it is Time to Be the Great Invocation.

Tom Carney
Taurus, 2017

A Natural Selection

Beady black, the eyes
Of the baby,
Soft gray, downy dove,
Down on the red brick,
Winter brown, leaf strewn patio,
Looked, I humanly presume –
Not being Dove conscious –
Apprehensively about.

I knew, if it did not,
That life tenure for downed doves
On this red brick patio –
Given the juggernaut of Darwinian Natural Selection,
And the furry five (neighborhood house cats)
Frequenting it –
Was, at best, short.

Brain driven Darwinian natural selection,
However, never took human heart or love
Into its dead life expectancy calculations.
Like saving grace
I scooped the downy downed dove
From the jaws of natural selection,
And nested it out of harm’s way,
At least for that day.

tom