The Forgotten Self: A Book of Reminders

The Forgotten Self

Asa E. Lennon

Copyright © 2001 by Asa E. Lennon.

Photos by Joseph Kuzmiak

Library of Congress Number:   2001089484

ISBN #:      Hardcover   1-4010-0498-9

                   Softcover     1-4010-0497-0

                   Ebook           978-1-4931-6928-3

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Contents

Part 1:   The Essence Of Reality

1 A Heritage Forgotten

2 The State Of Grace

3 Time And Space:the Earth Years

4 The Natural World

5 The Dreaming Self

6 Belief, Ritual And Ceremony

7 God And Religion

8 The Spiritual Self

9 Reality And The Perceiver

Part 2: The Mystic Way, The Forgotten Path

10 Acceptance

11 Letting Go

12 Meditation

13 Dream Alchemy

14 Nature And The Life Force

15 Giving

16 Karma

17 Intuition

18 The Point Of Power

Part 3: Remembering The Self

19 Concepts For The Self

20 The Human Laboratory

21 A Final Reminder

Dedication

Too often in our lives do we fail to recognize

those teachers who we meet in our lives.

I would like to thank those I did recognize.

Mom, Christy, Asa, Christopher Michael, Paul,

Mike, Rusty, John, Joe, Chris and Mike.

Some of you taught me to believe. Some of you taught me how to tolerate—some taught pleasure, some pain.

All of you however taught me to love.

A BIRTH REMEMBERED

I t began like all of us had begun, violently thrust choking and

kicking, sucked into the intensely bright new world-cold, alone. Yet, I was strangely aware of an energy long forgotten, now found again. Laced with familiarity, I felt something distantly there. Somewhere out there was a new way; a new perception now bound to me once again like some old parasitic friend. I knew this life again, rushing into my awareness uncontrolled, gushing in with its all encumbering embrace. Sense was now mine. I was now something touchable, hard, dense. I screamed in fear. I screamed in agony. I screamed with joy. Life, pleasured life, had returned to me.

The world began to flow in now. I felt it. I knew it was there. It wanted me. It took me. Once again I found myself somewhere-in space, in time. I felt like we all felt, cast indiscriminately into a tornado of sensation with my soul already beginning to distance itself from my new found fixation. I was born, born again.

Like each of us, I had done it many times before and most assuredly will again. This time would be different though. I had my memory. I knew, as I know now, this life is a magical, mystical journey to be played with, to be caressed, to be enjoyed. But, there was also endeavor for me now. I was to tell of my memory. I was to speak of what truly is. And, to those who chose to listen, open their world to the totality of the Cosmic Mind that creates, and is created, timelessly in each and every one of us.

Birth is an aggressive friend, pushing you to the awaiting arms of a world that seems apart, unnatural. But, for those who see the reality of life as it is, there is not a more magical experience in the Cosmos. Each and every one of us, aware of it or not, is here to learn the processes by which we turn thought and desire into reality. It is a wondrous journey of exploration, introspection and cooperation that culminates in an ascension to a state of awareness once attributed only to gods. We are those gods. We turn energy to form. We love, hate, help, fight, see, learn and teach; traits we have long given to the various icons of the religions that have accompanied mankind on his road to now; the very same now that balances precariously between existence and nonexistence. Only our attention maintains the validity of this world, a world that is sorely in need of more attention, a world that grows thirsty for the conscious awareness of the creatures whose dreams brought it to life in the first place. We turn our backs to the teaching of the ancients in favor of the sensuous now. We let the true nature of man wither in hunger as he falls further and further from the center of being that is all things.

Life then, must return to the roots that gave it birth. That overwhelming feeling of creative consciousness that you can experience by simply trying to remember who or what you were before you landed in the light. Close your eyes and see. Cover your ears and hear. Still your mind and know. There is a primordial essence that you can feel. It gives rise to all you see, hear and touch. It is what you know, what you dream and what you desire. Only the mundane, unfulfilled presence of an uncontrolled Ego keeps us from the ecstasy that comes with the knowledge of self, humanity and the creative force behind All That Is.

It is this creative force that man has fallen away from. He has distanced himself through ignorance, self-aggrandizement and lack of respect for life in general.

I hope these words and those that follow will at least open a few channels to a world that we all once knew. We can regain the grace we have carelessly mislaid. We can once again see the world, as it truly is, not a cold, desolate maze of unfeeling materialism that leads to the decay of physical death. But, instead a vibrant world of magic, love and fulfillment. Then, and only then, can man truly be reborn to the former glory that was once his heritage, a heritage long forgotten.

The Essence of Reality

PART 1

THE ESSENCE OF REALITY

1

A Heritage Forgotten

All truths are old, and all that we have to do is recognize and utter them anew.

-GOETHE

E veryday of our lives here on Earth is filled with the questions

that all men seem to ask themselves… why? Why are we here? What is the purpose of this existence? Indeed, is this even real? Is there more to the day to day drudgery that so many of us seem to routinely accept? And, what comes after the death so many of us seem to fear?

Science would have us believe that we are the product of an endless onslaught of accidents that began after a primeval Earth violently mixed the chemicals of planets and stars with the happenstance of an ancient tempest. Matter bound with matter to form the basic components that would eventually swim the seas, walk the land and fly magnificently through the air.

Intelligence also would be a chance-born mistake made by this same array of dime-store chemicals. These chemicals would one day roam the Earth sustaining themselves with life giving prey and eventually learn to bring forth other chemical anomalies from the Mother Earth in the form of nourishing plants.

These same accidents would be destined, as our history shows to fight incredible wars, build magnificent civilizations and even one day leave the planet of sustenance in quest of the very unknown from whence they came. This would be quite an accident for a very average planet in an average solar system with an average star twirling purposelessly in the heart of an average galaxy that hurtles blindly through space.

While science certainly has offered its advantages to us, we have let it become the tyrannical dictator that presents us with a sterility and hopelessness that seems to be the earmark of our current distrust for God, Nature and Self. How could we, for example, deny the diseases cured, the cars that transport us, the photo-electric box that entertains us, and the rockets and planes that take us to worlds of which we could previously only dream?

Science is a dogma that achieves certain ends. Religion is a dogma that attains certain ends. And even complacency has become a dogma for those who lazily allow their lives to pass uneventfully and uninvolved. All these things are ways of life, and who is to say any way of life is better than another? However, outcome can be said to be better. Better in that it aids your fellow man in some way, improves your life, or more deeply, adds to the experience of the Cosmos.

There is a great intelligence that creates and drives all things. Accidents don’t build civilizations. Accidents don’t discover truths about themselves and the world around them. Accidents don’t love.

We are all here on a journey of self-discovery. And on that journey, it is our purpose to help those with whom we come in contact.

Somewhere in each of us there is a voice. It’s a voice that speaks to us from a world of knowing, a world seen only to those who look to see it. You need only find that voice to unleash the magic that is your birthright. There is indeed a magic inside us all. It is the very same magic that creates a cosmos from dust, a child from a cell and a flower from the Earth. It is the same magic that guides the planets through their orbits, assembles molecules into neat packages of form and allows us, insignificant us, to perceive it all.

I hope that each and everyone of us can regain the knowledge of our ancestors, knowledge that has been eroded by beliefs in time, beliefs in space, and especially beliefs that we are apart from the world from which we spring. We must trust in ourselves, not the seemingly concrete environment that surrounds our every waking second. I say waking because it is here that we are most bound by time, space and material. When we are not awake we find ourselves devoid of the restraining concepts that guide our day. We dream. We dream of fantastic voyages, strange powers, and dimensions alien to our waking consciousness. And, yet when we return, we forget what we learned there. We forget what we found, where we were and how we felt. There is magic in the dreaming self. Magic that must be retained, in fact, regained if we as modern men and women are to continue.

Modern man has found himself stumbling into a junction where his technology advances beyond his spirituality. It is this point in history that will spell either the end of man, or his triumphant coronation as true ruler and keeper of the Earth.

Many religions, prophets, ancient civilizations, sages and spiritual writings predict that the former will be our fate. Uncannily, however, man’s eventual demise takes the same shape in all of them. From the Bible, to Nostradamus, from Edgar Cayce to the ancient Mayans, every prediction of mankind’s end is the result of his failure to recognize his spirituality and his relationship to God. His material world has become far more important than his respect for life, his concern for the planet on which he lives and his inherent union with the creative intelligence of the Universe… God.

It is God in all the various forms we devise for Him that is at the beginning, center and end of all remembered and practiced religions. These religions in their many abstract forms, from the bizarre to the most conservative, seem to hold several things in common. They all lead to union with the Absolute as known to that particular religion, provide a dogma by which to lead a fulfilling life, and precipitate a oneness that its followers can vehemently call their own, giving them identity. Be this a union with, or separation from nature, distrust or embrace of materialism, or the solemn acceptance that we may be insignificant dust thrust in a whirlwind of uncertainty, religions in their infinite varieties provide a reason to be. They provide a reason to allow the myriad of sensation we experience every second of our lives to fly by unchallenged or, at least, attributed to the whims of something higher than, or apart from, us. While dogma and worship have certainly offered insight and purpose for the naked creatures of third planet from the Sun, we have arrived at a time when our seemingly concrete world teeters on the brink of holocaust. And through it all, each of the billions of us cries out for significance. We long to make a difference, to know that our existence is on purpose.

Cars and Machines whir about in incalculable numbers, feeding feverishly off the fuels created by millennia. The forests known to our forefathers fall indiscriminately to the hands of progress. Diseases once held deep within pristine jungles now run rampant like some unleashed demon through the ranks of society. And, the horrific power buried within the smallest atom has been unleashed on our brothers in the name of peace. Indeed, it may be hard for some of us to even remotely hope for any form of salvation for a race so bent on such destruction to the world around him and his fellow creatures. Man has doltishly forgotten that he is a part of the scheme of life, not the sole dictator that lavishly uses and abuses a finite treasure upon which he walks. Even the most sterile of hardened scientific skeptics realizes that such madness must end if we are simply to maintain our Earthly ecosystem. But, there are those of us who dwell beyond the illusion of three-dimensional existence. And, they bring forth words and ideas from a time, in fact a soul, long forgotten, lost in an onslaught of logic and reason.

They know and can tell that each and every one of us is the creator of his or her reality. They know that we have lived before and continue to reincarnate as part of the natural cycle of life and death. They know that the dreaming self is not only as valid as the waking self, but is actually part of the entire identity. They know that every animate and inanimate object vibrates with the very essence of God. They know that God is not a symbol or an archetype, but an intelligence that is present is all things. They know that before something appears in physical reality it must first be a dream-a thought. And, they know that all men are part of a cosmic network of creative intelligence that drives the entire Universe. These are the things all men should know.

We have, in our fascination with the light of three-dimensional existence, been hypnotized into an ignorant daze devoid of the fervor that is consciousness. Hopefully though, there will be a new awakening. The hearts of those who care to try can once again be filled with the primordial love that gave rise, step by step, to this very moment. It is this moment from which the power that creates the future must inevitably flow. If you even remotely accept the idea that each of us creates the personal reality that we know, then