There are times when we listen, respond, and listen again - trying to hear everything that has been said. In the end, it takes a little time for our brain to ruminate and make sense of some of the nonsense. There is a profound amount of nonsense in the world today.
First and foremost, I do not believe in a personal God. And, I am not alone. I have studied religion and spirituality since I was in high school, and I have made my conclusions based on my life's experiences just as I have done in the practice of medicine. Medicine and religion are both rooted in an oral tradition. Many of us have been fed the concept of God just as we received nourishment from our mother's bosoms. The construction of God should not be passed down like old family clothes or scary tales at a campfire. The recognition of God is achieved only through a personal journey that leads us into and out of many strange, depressing, desperate, terrorizing, and unfamiliar places. If you have not traveled to those places yet and been challenged to the very core of your Soul, I suggest you get going on your trip, depending on your life age. Everyone needs to accept the Tower card in the Tarot Deck at least once in a lifetime.
Secondly, we are all alone. It's not an aloneness that is sorrowful or of suffering, it is an aloneness that has been with us since the day we were born. A profound and healthy aloneness that gives us permission to be our authentic self, to be true to our Soul, and live in accord with our personal worldview, not the world views of our parents or so called gurus of the universe, or celebrities who are more confused than anyone when it comes to life issues. At the very least, no one should accept the proclaimed Truth from some religiously ordained, self-proclaimed expert on God, the Cosmology of the Universe, and the appropriate morals and values that society's leaders should adopt.
It is up to each of us to find our unique path, serve others, and most importantly, serve ourselves our own Soul-sustaining nourishment. Those who are meant to be leaders, lead. Serve those you lead without the reservation of selfishness. Those of you who are meant to be followers, serve everyone who needs your particular skill or talent to the greatest of your ability. Invest your talents wisely. Evaluate those who ask for it. Do not enable the dysfunctional.
Do not think we should get so wrapped up in the spiritual side of living that we become unable to differentiate the rituals and wisdom that is in accord with our personal nature. It is bad enough that most of us are confused about judgment and how disturbing it is to judge others. It saddens me that people lose themselves trying to find themselves and end up in some unsettled place because it was easy or convenient to stop there. They tend to stop too soon and in a place which is not in accord with who they really are. Some people have gone over the cliff. They have become fundamentalists in almost every shape, size, and persuasion. Conspiracy rules their world view and they become experts in demonology. They can spot anyone who does not live by their world view and instantly write them off as demons. In their delusionary state of mind, they are expert at revisionism and denial of all things that create unsteadiness in their rock hard emotional and economic foundation. We all know these people. Look around, watch the news, or attend any religious or scientific organization. They are everywhere.
We must clear the air about quantum physics and quantum theory. There is more garbage out there about the new age of human unfoldment and the laws of quantum physics, a field of science that is only pertinent to submolecular particles, not large masses like tennis balls or human beings. Particles such as quarks, muons, pions, hadrons, baryons, and neutrinos behave in a different realm from us because they have an infinitely small mass. They share light and particle properties that large masses do not. I have read writings of all of the quantum gurus who have adopted what happens to the smallest of the small, reformulated the facts, and applied it to a proposed new kind of human behavior. You can not be in two dimensions at one time. It's tricky to convert quantum mechanics and physics to the large human body and cognition. They are not guilty of deceiving us. Worse than that, they are guilty of deceiving themselves. They have spent many painful hours convincing themselves of something that is just not true. Much like the personal God concept, convincing others is easy once you've solely committed yourself to the idea. The idea that we humans are somehow superior to anything on Earth is rooted in the fall from Eden. Quantum cosmology has just taken on a whole new spin to the same old story. The bottom line is that we are mere animals with opposing thumbs, a big neocortex, and a unique Soul.
The revising of the Mayan Calendar, not the revision of the actual calendar, but the interpretation of what is to follow after the calendar ended, is one man's assertion about the future of our Planet. To some, we are doomed to destruction. The end of mankind is coming, and according to a subgroup of these soothsayers, awfully soon. To others, there is going to be a change in our resonant energy, and all men and women will be consumed with peace and harmony: the heaven on earth phenomena. I think these are both possible, but highly improbable, given our past history and what faces us socially at the time of this writing.
We all have emotions and feelings; we are feeling machines that think. We should not attach ourselves to either post-Mayan Calendar scenario. The Mayan Calendar just ran out of time. Perhaps the carved stone was just not big enough to handle everlasting, or perhaps the Mayan Priests could not fathom a time so far in the future since they realized they were becoming extinct as they exhausted the natural resources of the rain forest.
We humans are emergent systems. Our brains function like an ant hill or a flock of flying birds or a school of fish. We have binary systems that respond to stimuli. They are either on or off. The brain is plastic. It can learn and relearn. Our conscious mind is processing the environmental signals and communicating to our individual self and to others. The unconscious mind, or what others call the cognitive unconscious, operates 24/7. Even in sleep, it has stages of hyper-arousal. We use almost all of our brain all the time. We have very little cognitive awareness of its activity and its binary process. Each individual neuron either fires or doesn't in sequential order. Just because a neuron is not firing, does not mean it is not operating. Every light switch in my house is operating all the time. Just because electricity is not flowing through the circuit, doesn't mean the switch is not operating - it is! It is just closed, doing its job to keep the light off. The constellations of neurons that function in synchrony at any given moment are massive and unique and more importantly, unique to each individual themselves.
Fractal patterns are often times an expression of randomness. There are too many to count, trillions and trillions of fractal patterns in nature. If an animal species unfolds to its highest being and stays there without random introduction of new factors that threaten the species, it will not unfold to a greater, higher being. That is the function of emergence: unfoldment. We experience life and life forces us to change. We do not control life forces and probably never will. We do not create our reality. We feel it, label it, and store it in our mind for future reference. Sometimes we see it differently than others see it, like my world view and perhaps yours. We will never control nature. Nature will always find a way to make us change on an individual and collective basis. It is the introduction of random events that seemingly have no connection that changes us. The idea that the Universe is bringing change to us is one world view. But I believe that change is the natural course of human unfoldment on a planet that goes through continuous change.
Unfortunately, pain, sorrow, sadness, illness, abuse, and most anything considered evil is a change agent. Earth survives in spite of change and conflict; divergence is meant to be. The diversity of our planet fuels conflict and we, as mankind, must realize it. Encourage diversity and you will encourage conflict instead of tolerance. I am not a Buddhist, but they may be on to something. The very nature of what it means to be human is to embrace and celebrate change so that we can adapt and be something else. The first rule of Buddhism: Life is suffering. We must transcend suffering.
Our sole purpose on this planet is not to serve others. Iit is to experience life in all its forms and reconcile ourselves to the fact that shit happens. We are supposed to transcend the events of sorrow, abuse, dishonesty, greed, fascism, imperialism, anything considered evil because without it, we would not be able to go to the next step and see how to be something we are not. There are only a few that ever reach this level of consciousness or mindfulness. If the spiritual leaders and gurus of this world would quit trying to make people believe that "they can do what Jesus did," then we as a collective would stop trying to be the Christ and start being who we really are....and that's my message. Be who we are, not what some religion or society wants you to be.
I believe the greater unfoldment of man will never stop evil. Mankind will eventually accept it, know how to use it, and know when to extinguish it when it gets too big. We as a society have not arrived to that level of unfoldment yet. Through every art form, we must embrace beauty, recognize fractal patterns, celebrate emergence, welcome spiritual enlightenment, and find new ways to change the world one person at a time.
Kevin S. "Kiki" Merigian