The Blueprint of Reality

The Blueprint of Reality

by

Bill Marshall

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012

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Gideon McGee's Dream

The Frog Handled Mug

The Natur of My Game

One Year Short

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: In a Nutshell

Chapter Two: Kid Stuff

Chapter Three: When Leprechauns Were Real

Chapter Four: Energy Fields

Chapter Five: Plants and Animals

Chapter Six: Will The Real God Please Stand Up

Chapter Seven: Probable Selves and The Multiverse

Chapter Eight: Brobdingnab and Lilliput

Chapter Nine: Belief Systems – When a Lemon tastes Sweet

Chapter Ten: Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Wolf?

Chapter Eleven: I Thought That’s What I Wanted

Chapter Twelve: I Thought I Thaw a Puddy Cat

Chapter Thirteen: Optimism & Pessimism: Who Said Science Isn’t a Religion?

Chapter Fourteen: Self-Responsibility: Free Willy

Chapter Fifteen: He Ain’t Heavy. He’s My Murderer

Chapter Sixteen: Guilt was Yesterday. Worry is Tomorrow

Chapter Seventeen: When Hot Feels Cold

Chapter Eighteen: Reincarnation or Bleedthroughs

Chapter Nineteen: You Can’t Teach a New Dog Old New Tricks

Chapter Twenty: Doctor, Doctor, Give Me The News

Chapter Twenty-One: This Ain’t Your Grandma’s Sexuality

Chapter Twenty-Two: I Second That Emotion

Chapter Twenty-Three: Intent: The Rudder Of Our Ship

Chapter Twenty-Four: It’s All In The Family

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Elements of Essence

Appendix

Introduction

So, what is this thing called ‘ life’ all about, anyway? If it's all just an accident, a cosmic hiccup, where in some strange way matter became conscious, then Aristotle and Plato and Hume and Kant and all the great idea makers of humanity were just blowing in the wind. They would have been better off amassing great fortunes, consuming vast quantities of matter and making hordes of babies. If Darwin was right, why didn’t they? Why bother with thinking other than as it pertains to the acquisition of food and the continuation of the species? If matter creates consciousness, then consciousness has no say in where, when, and with whom it will make its entry into this world.

In the Western religious tradition we typically believe we are here once and then either bliss-out or burn-out for eternity. The East tells of many such karmic visits until enlightenment occurs, and then the numberless rounds of Samsara end by the big ‘blow out’, Nirvana. The meaning of life (science postulates no meaning other than survival and propagation of species) has to be very different for the two points of view, but both are religious beliefs that posit a hierarchy with us somewhere at the bottom. Neither the West nor the East, however, believes we have any say regarding where, when, and with whom we enter life. For the West we are given one shot on a random entry. For the East our entry is based on karma, the king of cause and effect, but it is not us that choose. If everything is karmic, as the Hindus say, then when we find a body blocking the entrance to a hospital emergency room should we ignore her and write it off to the person’s karma? Is it their karma to be lying there and to be ignored by me? Is it payback time? Payback for what? Past life transgressions? And what about my preference to help? Do I negate my preferences because of the karmic law, or any law for that matter?

Joseph Campbell seems to think we do have a choice. In Myths to Live By he believes we chose the time of our entry into the world for our own particular reasons, and since we chose our time and circumstances then we should go through with our own game. But, what the game is, Campbell never says. How do we play the game well, if we don't know the rules or the object of the game?

The Buddha’s First Noble Truth is that all life is suffering. James Hillman in his bestseller The Soul’s Code seems to agree. He likens the individual crisis to a hammer and our moral code to an anvil. The clashing of the two forms our personality. Hillman feels the conflicts are necessary, and any morality that endeavors to remove them and the guilt they produce becomes "a theological tranquilizer called love." Hillman goes on to say that our heavy insistence on the ‘good’ allows us to project ‘evil’ onto an outer foe. The result is a relentless insistence on love.

So, is Love the name of the game? Are we here to learn how to love? And if so, why? What about learning to be good? In Aion, CG Jung, the father of Archetypal psychology, says that the idea of good and evil is the foundation for any moral judgment and are always present together. He states that ‘we’, not God, are the creators of our moral value judgments and that the facts submitted for judgment are called by one person good and by another evil.

You say tomato. I say to-mah-to. You say potato. I say po-tah-to. You say pro-life. I say pro-choice. If the facts are called by one person good and by another evil, is the game to find out who is right? Could it be that both positions are right? This, of course, gets back to the issue of separateness. How do we get to this realization of non-separation, for it must be so deeply imbedded in our psyches as to go unrecognized except in times of extreme crisis? And, once we ‘get it’, then what? The clue to what life is all about can be found in two simple words ‘experience’ and ‘creation’; our experience and our creation.

If God is embedded in creation, and experience tells us that creation is a continuing process, then God cannot be perfect. For God to be perfect creation would have to cease. If God is a creator God, as some believe, and separate from his/her creation then we must ask to what purpose would God create an imperfection (as our religious dogma tells us). The word ‘perfect’ sets us up for comparing ourselves to something that does not and cannot exist except within our own beliefs. CG Jung in Psychology and Religion: West End East says if Jesus failed to realize the deepest meaning of his life he would have wound up a respectable carpenter. By imitating Jesus as the perfect man we fail to make real the creative process of our own lives.

We need a different and deeper understanding of our relationship to each other and to God. Without this deeper level of understanding, all we will be doing is repressing our true feelings, like stepping over the person lying before the emergency room door despite our desire to help. We all know Stevenson's story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One of the cornerstones of Archetypal psychology is that what is not made conscious exhibits itself as shadow. If I do not recognize that what I judge in you is in actuality a reflection of what I don’t see in myself then I will continue to create good and evil. As long as I judge, that which I judge will continue to exist in my life.

Morality and love cannot be instilled by decree. What is moral to one is anathema to another. What one person loves, another hates. Morality is culturally determined and so varies from one culture to another. Love is a reality and a truth, however. Maybe it is our definition of the word ‘love’ that needs changing, and the change can only arrive if we come to a different understanding of who we are. Are we an accident? Are we created by the magic wand of God? Or, are we infinitely more than we have heretofore imagined?

Joseph Campbell says go ahead and play your game, but does not say what the game is. Matthew Fox says we are to co-create with God, but does not say how or what it is we are to create. Throughout the rest of this book I’m going to ask you to loosen your grip on your own understanding of reality just long enough to consider that we are here in this one of an infinite number of playgrounds simply for the experience, the experience of soul or spirit if you prefer, cloaked in a physical world. Consciousness is energy and movement, and, as such, it constantly seeks change. We must have a greater understanding of non-separation, of duality, of space and time, of energy, of consciousness and of who we are now.

Has anyone ever stopped worrying because a caring friend said, don't worry? Do you think your child's sadness evaporates like a mist under the glare of a hot sun just because you tell her not to be sad? And can your fear at the prospect of plunging several hundred feet on the Superman roller coaster fade away by having someone who loves the experience tell you it's fun? The answer, of course, is no. Your beliefs establish the framework for what you experience and therefore, the way you will feel. A simple encouraging word is rarely enough to change an emotional response based on a strong belief that is held as an absolute. It takes a makeover, a makeover of our understanding of reality itself. Who are we and what are we doing here and what role do our beliefs play?

We believe that an apple is sweet and a lemon, sour. Yet, a hypnotist with a few well-placed words can make that same lemon taste sweet and make a thin person feel obese. He can make a sober person drunk and a sad person happy. We believe that experience is a’priori to beliefs. That is to say, we believe that our beliefs are based on our experience; that experience forms our beliefs. The truth is that our experience is belief driven and not the other way round. This truth is critical to understanding how we play our game, for the reality is that we have placed the horse before the cart.

Like a city under siege we believe we must defend ourselves from a universe that is nothing more than a well-oiled machine that cares about our well-being about as much as a shoe cares about the ant it steps on. I invite you to explore your beliefs about who you are and what part you play in the cosmos. With that invitation comes a promise that I will not be like the friend that tells you not to worry or the mother that tells her child not to be sad, or even worse like those who tell you it is God’s will. I will construct windows in the closed box of your belief systems, belief systems so complex that we don’t even see most of the beliefs that direct our action. I will construct a bridge that will convey you safely from your current understanding of yourself and reality to a vista beyond your imagining. I will lay the groundwork that will open your minds enough so that the startling information found within the covers of this book will be able to seek its way into your consciousness and change who you are forever.

I will reveal our ten primary belief systems that function to create all of our reality. You will morph from a creature who is a helpless victim of genetics, germs, accidents, violence, coincidence, a machine-like universe and a capricious God; to a being that is a self-responsible creator of himself and the world he lives in. You will find that things are not what they seem; an intuition you have had all your life.

"Moreover, science's thesis meets with no answering affirmation in the human heart - and in fact arouses the deepest antipathy, for in his heart man well knows his own worth, and realizes that his own consciousness is no accident. The psyche, then, possesses within itself an inner affirmation, an affirmation that keeps man from being completely blinded by his own mental edifices.

There is furthermore a deep, subjective, immaculately knowledgeable standard within man's consciousness by which he ultimately judges all of the theories and the beliefs of his time, and even if his intellect is momentarily swamped by ignoble doctrines, still that point of integrity within him is never fooled. (Jane Roberts: Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Volume 1)

I hope to arouse that part of us that is never fooled.

Chapter One: In A Nutshell

The Reacquisition of Meaning

Steeped in the rational and materialistic thinking of the past three hundred years we have come to regard consciousness, when we think about it at all, as a mere accident of evolution, a cosmic crap shoot of DNA struggling for dominance in a dangerous world. We are taught that our mind is the result of various combinations of chemicals and matter. Consciousness, therefore, is completely dependent upon the body. The idea that a random combination of chemicals can come together in such a way as to produce consciousness is ludicrous. Rational thinking, however, says exactly that. Who we are essentially is a product of our bodies. What meaning in life can there be when the central idea of our time states we are machines, albeit machines made of tissue and bone that were made by chance? If we have it backwards, and consciousness is the creator of matter, then it becomes of paramount importance that we understand how our small island of reality is set up to work. First, however, let us take a look at who we believe we are now and who we can become.

Man of the Present

Isaac Azimov, the late, great science fiction writer and admitted atheist, argued that man need not have a belief in God to live a moral and ethical life. Keep in mind, however, that the terms moral and ethical are relative to the person describing them. What is ethical and moral to one can be immoral and unethical to another. Azimov was living testimony to his own philosophy and would be the last to admit that he was a spiritual man, which, of course, he was. One need not be attached to a house of God or even believe in God to be spiritual, but then that is dependent upon one’s definition of the word. A point to be made later is that one need not follow any particular religious path or philosophy to be spiritual. Our mere action of Being is spiritual.

Azimov’s science fiction and his life was completely a product of the present; not the present moment, but the present era. For him the future was merely an advanced technological projection of the present, an evolution merely of man's surroundings, but not of man himself. The future was as yet uncreated. Cause and effect, rational thinking, materialism (the universe as machine) and science made up the body of this man's God. Azimov was a man of the present, a one-third man, integrating neither the past psyche nor the future psyche into his consciousness. He believed there was nothing beyond the personal unconscious, that unknown aspect of the psyche Freud tells us is created only during an individual lifetime. Azimov thought of his consciousness as solely a product of matter and that it held only the contents of his past and present experience. As imaginative as his science fiction was, I suspect it would have changed our times had he believed that mind created matter and that the past, present and future all exist in the present moment. Simultaneous time is an idea whose time has come.

Man of the Past

To the right of the man of the present is the man who fears change. The man of the past believes the earth was created in six days, that there is a literal heaven and hell, and that God sits on His heavenly throne somewhere in the cosmos. There is nothing wrong with this type of thinking, but it does limit the man of the past’s choices. Consciousness loves change and will do everything to get us to move. Afraid of the present, and even more afraid of the future, the man of the past’s morality and ethical behavior is outwardly directed. To him, Gandhi's words, "all good deeds that are prompted by a hope of happiness in the next world cease to be moral," makes no sense at all. Based on his beliefs he reverts to a system of spiritual feudalism that caused trauma and conflict in the Middle Ages and has even less chance of working now, for it keeps him stuck. God's only purpose in creating humankind, according to his view, is to have someone to judge vis-à-vis his set of heavenly inspired commandments. If you obey, you get blissed-out for eternity; disobey and the Gobi at high noon will seem like an ice hockey rink. Our earthly life is nothing more than a testing ground for God’s devotees.

When comparing an atheist such as Isaac Azimov, who lived exclusively in the present era, to a fundamentalist such as the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who lived entirely in the past, it may seem Azimov, although not believing in God, stands on higher moral ground and is further along the spiritual path than the latter. This is a judgment based on the beliefs (not the truths) of each individual reader. Both remain one-third complete, however. The former denies spirit while the latter sees matter as corrupt, with the body being a skin encapsulated prison in which our fallen souls reside. But, these are all judgments of better and worse based on our belief systems as we will discover later in the book.

The predominant beliefs of our age are science and materialism. If placed on a balance scale opposite matter, spirit (consciousness) would not budge matter off the ground. Matter, thanks to Descartes and Newton, still carries the considerable weight of gold. Several hundred years ago the opposite was true, but that was a different time, and a different belief. Both however, are still beliefs. Our compensation for the older view has swung the pendulum so far to the left that another compensation is unfolding. You can see it in the New York Times Best Seller lists, in our movie theatres and in our acceptance of differences. Spirit must come into balance with matter so that we see the spirit not as some puny thing imprisoned by the body, but rather its opposite, an infinite thing of which the body is but one aspect. We must see that the one is not complete without the other, and that who we are in the mirror is but one small focus of an infinitely larger self.

Past, Present and Future Man

So who is this whole man, who is not merely the past, who is not solely the present and who believes the future exists in the present moment? He is a synthesis of the two, with a clear understanding that in every moment of his life he creates himself anew, and that in each moment resides the eternity he seeks to find after death. He understands that his present not only has an effect on the future, but because the past, present and future all exist in the present moment, the present also affects his past. He regards his life as a journey within a moment point, with a goal not of perfection (however you may define it), but of creation itself. Experience to this man is everything. He is, as Matthew Fox so aptly describes, panentheistic. He knows that God is in everything and everything is in God. This differs from pantheism where everything is held to be God. He knows that the God he thinks about is not the real God. The real God is beyond thought yet can be found in thought. He is the man of the future who is creating himself now in this very moment, while realizing that the future already exists in the spacious present. This man has left feudalism behind and has taken his rightful place as a creator of experience in time and space. To this point, C.G. Jung, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections says that man is indispensable for the completion of creation and likens him to a second creator of the world. He states that human consciousness created objective existence and meaning.

The Transformation

How do we get to this new being? We follow the steps of those who have begun the process. At the age of forty-six (I was born in 1945), I was struck with a series of coincidences that were so powerful they virtually shattered my notion of cause and effect and precipitated a meltdown of my rational twentieth century concept of reality. What we usually do when struck by extraordinary coincidences or experiences that don’t fit into our world view is to ignore them or merely note their oddity. We never see them as messages and yet they maintain a hold on us.

I began to open to the significance of coincidence. My intuitive self stirred from a deep sleep. I began to dream, or rather to remember my dreams, and I began living under a navigational system that seemed somewhere outside the confines of my body. After a thirty year period of agnosticism I began a search for an understanding of God that would work for me, that would exclude no one, and would make sense of the playing field we call physical reality. Books began appearing serendipitously before me and my newly awakened intuition directed me to titles on the library shelves.

People such as C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, James Hillman, Thomas Moore, John Sanford, Deepak Chopra and Matthew Fox triggered my encounter with a far more complex God than the one I learned about in my youth and then abandoned. But, lest you think they gave me a clear conception of God, such was not the case. At most I may have glimpsed a single thread in the weave of her robe. It was Seth that broadened and lengthened my road and allowed me to weave the thread into a pattern. It was Seth who made sense of the good, the bad and the ugly. Eventually it was Elias that gave me the blueprint to create with intent.

Nicholas Berdyaev in The Meaning of Creation said, "The too perfect cease to create." Although I’m not sure what he meant by too perfect, I do know that what is perfect to one is imperfect to another. The sense of his statement was that perfection signifies completion, an end state. Once an end state is reached, creation ceases. If God is creation itself, rather than the creator, it becomes obvious that creation is a continuing process. Creation is ongoing and ceaseless according to science’s view of an expanding universe. This suggests that God continues to unfold as creation and therefore is incomplete himself. If we are the sole creators of our lives, as many believe we are, then how have we missed the boat for so long? We haven’t. We are just finished with this particular experience of consciousness and are now ready to lift the veil of forgetfulness and to create consciously, with an awareness of who we are. This being the case, what are the signs and what is the process through which we create?

The process begins at birth. We come into the world with no sense of I. It is a near total subjective state. Who we are does not end at the boundaries of our flesh. In the beginning we are what we perceive, since what we perceive is a projection of our perception. We are a We, with no separation between self and not-self. Only gradually do we come to the realization, as we take on board our belief systems and develop an objective awareness, that we are also an I. The trick of individuation, the process of becoming a whole individual, is to maintain the feeling of We during the process of becoming an I. I suspect that which the Buddha experienced as enlightenment has much to do with the recovery of We, although Seth and Elias tell us we are all already enlightened. Most of us lose the We very early and never consciously recover it. Jesus’ admonition to "be as this child, may refer to the reclamation of We. I and the Father are One," was an insight into the reality that everything is a unified whole.

The We is most often resurrected during times of emotional stress, and we've all felt it, although not recognizing it as a We feeling. I've felt it when gazing at the TV images of the bloated bodies of starving children whose eyes and nostrils provide nourishment for flies. A fireman feels it when risking his life to save a child he doesn’t know from a burning house. Army medics in Vietnam felt it as their MedEvac choppers swooped in to a hot LZ to save the lives of their anonymous wounded comrades. In Transformations of Myth Through Time, Joseph Campbell asks: "How is it that what we take to be the first law of nature, preserving this separate entity, this ego, is suddenly dissolved; and as though one were that other, one acts spontaneously in the interests of that other - even at the risk of one's own life?"

Campbell goes on to answer his own question, "It's the realization of the universal consciousness of which we are all manifestations. So in that sense you and that other are one."

During these moments when we become heroes our belief in separation is pushed aside and Jesus' words "Love thy neighbour as thyself," becomes Love thy neighbour for he is you.

We have been so conditioned by Fall/Redemption theology (as Matthew Fox puts it) and by Darwinism to see ourselves as sinners and base animals driven by mindless genes that we've come to project our own light onto others. It takes the form of hero worship. There occur in all of our lives certain events, certain experiences that, if we are awake enough to pay attention, provide clues to reacquiring this We-ness and lifting the veil of forgetfulness.

The Whispers of God

In Modern Man In Search Of A Soul, C.G. Jung says that a state of grace is something we fall into, not something bestowed. My sense is that grace is our natural state and can be accessed if we but had the eyes and ears and sense to pay attention. Its effects become manifest only when we trust in its existence and realize that it has always been there, like a taproot waiting to feed us. Grace is self-created. We need not ask for it, we merely need to open our senses to it. It is difficult to believe in its existence, however, or to trust that the cosmos is attuned to each individual when we believe we must constantly guard against our so-called baser instincts and that we are somehow fallen and must prove ourselves worthy in some way. This is a belief system, if aligned with, that serves us poorly, for we will be constantly confronted with the evidence that we are fallen and unworthy. Grace is not something to be earned. It hangs before us like fruit on a tree, but we have been taught to face away from the tree.

James Hillman in his Insearch: Psychology and Religion tells us that attention is the cardinal psychological virtue, that all of our dramas are played through us on our behalf. When he says, ‘on our behalf’ it makes it sound as though someone else is directing the dramas. Such is not the case. Each individual is the actor, the director, the producer, the cast and the set.

When I reflect on my life I am astounded by my inattention. But what is it we are to pay attention to? How many times have we uttered the words of the rationalist, What a Coincidence? How many hundreds or even thousands of times have we suffered the embarrassment of Freudian slips? How many dreams have we attributed to the wild imaginings of an over-tired cerebral cortex? How many unexplainable ‘moods’ have we endured? How many impulses have we ignored? How many intuitions have we blown off? How many times have we blamed others or fate or luck for what befalls us? These are the whispers of the Self that we refuse to hear because we are taught they have no meaning and because our focus is always outward. We are cut off from a large part of our being because we believe the creation of the earth is an accident and that chemicals and cells create consciousness and that we really don’t have free will. We have made consciousness a by-product and have robbed it of its enormous power. In The Hero With A Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell speaks of the call unanswered. He tells us we get to the top of the ladder only to realize it is leaning against the wrong wall.

For me the call was as subtle as a whisper, but whether loud or soft, it comes to all of us without exception for we are constantly bathed in its noise. Elias calls it our Intent. To a few, such as Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen and Brother Klaus, it is the clarion call of a powerful vision. Although not expecting a call such as Paul's vision on the road to Damascus or Jung’s vision of the turd falling out of the sky and splattering the Cathedral of Basel, I did expect something more dramatic than what I got.

My call, or more properly put, calls, was not the stuff movies are made of. My calls were the same as yours. Coincidences, (which I've come to know have great meaning), serendipity, Freudian slips, dreams, conflict and even happiness comprised my reveille. Until I focused my attention on them, dreams were no more than the result of one too many bean burritos. Freudian slips were nothing more than slips of the tongue. Serendipity, the gift of finding without seeking, was good luck. Coincidences were meaningful accidents, conflict was caused by someone else and happiness was self-created. I could have ignored these voices from a long abandoned part of my self, but my inattention would not silence them. The knocks just got louder.

Where’s the Prophet?

You may be a modern twenty-first century rationalist who believes in the sanctity of cause and effect and statistical analysis. I, too, was such a person until the trail blazed by Jung, Campbell, Watts, Hillman and Fox led me to Jane Roberts and Seth. Much of what religion and these insightful men say about humankind and God has a ring of truth, but the bell is too small. There was always something missing. Their view of us and particularly of God was Lilliputian. Do you believe that the only reason we are here was so that we could get to there? It makes the here a place to endure or escape from rather than an Eden in its own right. Another problem lies in our belief about prophets. To believe that the only true prophets for the Islamic, Judaic and Christian religions or for any other religion were men that lived between nine and two thousand years ago seems myopic at best. Jesus said that a prophet is not recognized in his own town. Not only is a prophet not recognized in his own town, but is almost never recognized during his own time. Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination envisions the prophet in this way: "It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one."

One's fame or mark is often thrust upon an individual long after he has left this world. Consider C.G. Jung as an example. When he first renounced Freud's dogma of the unconscious being the exclusive seat of repressed sexuality, the whole psychoanalytic community turned on him. It is only during the last thirty years that his ideas have gained a wide audience. We hate change, especially when that change requires risk and engenders fear. We are told the way to salvation is