Wider View

I have gone through a lot of changes over the past couple of years. First, out of fear, I decided that the only path to peace lay by getting rid of Muslims, especially when they are migrating to Europe and settling into the cities with the hopes by the various governments that their burgeoning birth rates would result in filling the gaps that the Zero Population Group had left when the ZPG goals had been met and the aging population of socialist countries were running out of young and healthy people to pay for the elderly and shore up the socialist medicine, often called universal health care, financial bottom line. Chancellor Angela Merkel and leaders like her welcomed the immigrating Muslims with open arms -- and open coffers. Their hearts were in the right place while their minds were nowhere near the vicinity.

Muslims, purporting to be fleeing war-torn Syria, brought with them the young men who were fit and determined to find brides to fulfill their overwhelming desire for more children to become more fighters for the Islamic cause. To that end, the creation of a worldwide caliphate that stands in opposition to the European Union, the Muslim hordes descended on Europe, keeping to themselves in "No Go Zones" specifically for keeping Muslims to themselves and for themselves, except when they roam the streets looking for nubile young women, many of them still children in european eyes, to molest, rape, and bring back to their enclaves to fill their ranks by breeding and birthing more children to be brought up as Muslims determined to spread the Islamic Caliphate until all kaffirs (unbelievers) are gone and only the faithful remain to spread the Quran and Mohammed's transcription of Allah's words.

I spoke out of personal fear for the fate of mankind as the Islamic faithful spread their seed among the western civilized nations and infiltrated the bastions of democracy and freedom with their theocracy and violence.

I realize that not all individual Muslims are bent on violence and destruction. There are average people among the Islamic hordes who wish to make a good life, feed their children, and raise the next generation of average people to continue the legacy of family and community without ever getting into the jihad. After all, do Muslims not believe that the Quran is not just about Mohammed's views, but the words of the Creator of All -- Allah? Forget about the 1400 years of murders and beheadings that lie between Mohammed's faithful transcription of Allah's messenger, Gabriel.  Ignore the centuries of lives lost in the pursuit of the worldwide caliphate and the unwavering annihilation of the Jews in order to create Paradise here on Earth where the Creator of All needs human hands holding swords to get rid of everyone who has denied the Creator of All's pronouncements and must be destroyed as a gardener rips weeds from the carefully planted garden to provide room for the plants that will feed him and his family. Even the Creator of All -- Allah -- is not as all powerful as the only living Creator of All must have been to set the universe in motion and keep it all spinning, living and dying, as the mechanism of the universe spins on.

Who am I to spread more fear in the wake of terror perpetrated by zealous believers in the omnipotent and omnipresent Creator of All? Spreading my fears to the people only gives the marauding warriors of Allah power to sow the seeds of terror ahead of their hordes of faithful warriors beheading those ignorant of Allah's power and reach, making them that much easier to dispatch to clear the field. What irrational fear did the man unleash who told the future when he named my country, this United States, the United States of Islam?

My fear kept me from seeing the wider view. That same fear that hounded me as a child every time I was punished for going against God's word and that God was Jehovah or Yahweh, the same god the Hebrews followed out of Egypt and finally settled once again in Israel where the wall that remains of the Temple destroyed in ancient times stands and where faithful Jews and many penitent Christians offer their tears and prayers in fearful and hopeful anticipation of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the son of Jehovah/Yahweh -- or so we are told.

It is said that Mohammed was illiterate and I wonder how he managed to write the words Gabriel gave to him without the ability to read or write. Mohammed was a vicious and bloodthirsty war lord, but I wonder about that as well. The first verses of the Quran are peaceful and it is only the later verses that are full of violence and beheading. Shari'a law is as onerous and lacking in mercy as the militant portions of the Quran.

It makes sense for Muslims to learn the Quran by heart in order to brand upon their minds and hearts the words supposed to have come from Allah through Gabriel to be written down by Mohammed. How else would they understand it all? I also wonder if that is why the verses start peaceful and then become violent and full of death to unbelievers. Could it be that Gabriel was nearing the end of his patience with the illiterate herder who became a warlord or does the message of the Quran reflect the growing need for violent action in the face of failing efforts to live in peace with the fellow men?

The point of all these ruminations is that of the limited and narrow view. I know little about Mohammed or the Muslim customs and I freely admit that. I have read some of the Quran and have had verses forced upon me by Muslims determined to show the wisdom of Allah. There is some evidence of wisdom in the words, but nearly all the wisdom is as nebulous as the peace purportedly at the heart of the Quran. If there was inherent peace in Mohammed's transcription of Allah's words through Gabriel it is negated by the violence and history of Mohammed's life and the actions of Muslims acting on the transcribed words. One could say that Muslims are peaceful among themselves, but that is a lie. Muslims murder, maim, and destroy Muslims as frequent as the heart beats and the lungs fill with air. As murderous as Muslims have been in their 1400-year jihad, they have been more so among themselves.

Have you ever heard of the Sufi? In popular culture, Danny DeVito, in the movie, Jewel of the Nile, was found by Sufi and taught their philosophy of nonviolence and peace. Danny became a much less vicious and murderous thief under their peaceful influence.

Sufis are an unpopular and peaceful sect of Muslims who seek enlightenment through poetry, music, and dance (whirling Dervishes) and have been repressed and constricted for decades. If the Muslims want to prove their peacefulness, they would welcome and promote Sufism instead of treating Sufis like unwanted, sinful, and reviled Muslims and spend more time emulating Sufi culture because the Sufi have gleaned the peaceful heart of Allah instead of promoting more violence, more destruction, more murder, more rape, and more sinful pursuits that should be anathema to the Creator of All if Allah is such. Allah is the name of the moon god Mohammed chose as the name of the Creator of All, but maybe it was a words that Mohammed could spell and thus was able to transcribe in his illiterate way.

I've no idea what was in Mohammed's mind since he lived more than 1400 years before me. Although his thoughts and words were written down, I have my doubts that time, translations, and the meaning at the heart of the words the Creator of All gave to Gabriel before he whispered them to Mohammed to transcribe once he learned to read and write, and that does not take into account the 6 versions of the Quran written and passed out to people in their own languages.

My advice for Muslims is to take a step back and realize you have been had just as the Jews/Hebrews, Christians, and all followers of religions based on man-made religions have been had. Maybe that is why Islamic people have so much pent up rage that motivates them to murder, behead, maim, and annihilate their neighbors as they seek to destroy children and lives all over the world.

It is said, the unexamined life is not worth living and it seems the Muslim/Islamic life is not worth living at all especially when they are being used as pawns by unscrupulous powers that play on their fears and violent tendencies in their ignorance and slavish devotion to the worst version of the words supposed to be from the Creator of All's lips to Gabriel's lips whispered into an ignorant herder's ears to write down when he could not write and eventually became as vicious as any illiterate man attempting to learn the skill of reading and writing without a proper teacher or any experience in wisdom or facility with languages. Maybe it is time to take a broader look at these divine revelations and see them as just another version of man-made gods exerting their all too human vices on the ignorant and weak-minded people.

It is for this reason that I gave up my childhood training and all of my delving into hidden magic, alchemy, and religion and chose to become atheist. At least now I am on the right track at last and it only took me nearly 60 years to figure it out.

That is all. Disperse.

Blame the Mirror

Too often, people will point to an uncaring and unconcerned god as proof there is no god. That is only proof, as people see it, of a god that does not love and does not care for his children not of lack of proof of a god. What is really at issue is that the god they have been taught to believe in, the fire and brimstone-breathing god of vengeance, the loving god for whom all is forgiven, the god who demands obedience and submission, the god who is going to smite or reward followers as deemed fit by the gods' infallible and incontrovertible sense of right and wrong.  The god of such trivialities, preferences, and ego is a god made by men and worshiped by men without too much interference. We point to the old gods -- Zeus, Hera, Jupiter, Janus, Zoroaster, Ba'al, Odin, Thor, Quetzalcoatl, etc. -- as having been gone for a long time, far longer than modern man has known and of no consequence, except for those pagans who refuse to move with the times. We no longer believe in the old gods of civilizations long past but in the gods we were brought up to know: Jehovah, Yahweh, Jesus, and Allah. These are the gods that govern our thoughts and our actions and to whom we turn in times of need. Why do these gods not protect a young child from cancer when life is just beginning or give us, the faithful, a reason why such a young and innocent soul is taken? Why? Why? Why?

People are barking up the wrong tree, expecting answers from a god that is as false as the gods the ancient peoples believed in and sacrificed to. Their idols, or statues, still need to be mended, which the Jews and Mohammedans avoided by making their gods invisible with no need of mending, setting them in the imagination of the believers' minds and thus inviolate. The Jewish god will not allow his believers to submit their faith to Asherah poles and will have no god before him as stated in the First Commandment of the Ten Commandments. You can't state the rules clearer than that. The Jewish god, Jehovah, Yahweh, or the dozen or so other names he is called in the Torah, is a jealous god and will have no other gods before him. That is presupposing there are other gods out there vying for the same throne. You do not have jealousy when you are the only one and jealousy cannot exist in a vacuum. So, why was Jehovah a jealous god? Vacuum or contenders?

We as modern humans see the ancient gods of Rome, Greece, Egypt, South American tribes, and others as no longer part of the game, no longer relevant, so why do we continue to submit ourselves and our beliefs to the so-called modern gods of Jehovah, Yahweh, Jesus, and Allah. Sure, Jesus was the purported son of god, but was he merely a teacher who got caught up in the media hype and branded as God's Son? Did not Jesus say he came to fulfill the Law and offered a very different way, one which he taught as The Way, which was to be spread among the Gentiles who did not and had not been circumcised as a sacrifice to God? Is that not why the Jews do not see Jesus as the Messiah they had been waiting for, the one who had been prophesied? The Jews, devout as they may be in following the Law and living the kosher life (Hassids) are not the genetic children of Abraham, but a group of Eastern Europeans who have accepted the Jewish beliefs and follow the Jewish law, keeping the customs of the Jewish law, who are not the remnants of the 12 tribes of Israel. The remnants of the 12 tribes were lost hundreds of years ago and have not resurfaced as far as we know.

Jesus taught us the way of peace and loving your enemy as yourself, spreading his beliefs in the slaves and among the Gentile for which Saul, now named Paul, acted as teacher and for whom the Roman Catholic Church is built even though the Romans killed him and Peter, Jesus's chosen disciple who envisioned the spread of The Way to the Gentiles. The Pope is the heir of Peter, whom the Romans also crucified.

Gods appear and disappear unless someone rebrands them and gives them new life as the Roman Catholic Church did with the Gentile version of the Jewish faith spreading it throughout the conquered world by the Jesuits. The Romans couldn't eradicate the slave religion not even after Christians were murdered in the Coliseum by the Emperor Nero and his followers and the Emperor Constantine realized if he couldn't destroy it, the slave religion would be the new way to save the Roman Empire through the sign of the cross.

All worked well until Martin Luther rebelled against Rome and spoke of another way, a schism in the Roman ranks that was sparked by the availability of printed bibles that were affordable by the man in the street. Luther sparked a rebellion and others followed with their own take on the official Roman religion that was part of the Protestant rebellion that made the Holy Bible easier to understand and to spread throughout the Protestant ranks.

In the 6th century Mohammed decided to make his views of Allah the basis of his religion, giving voice to the forgotten son of Abraham, Ishmael, and giving the sons of Ishmael more power. Allah is all about submission. I believe that is what Islam means -- submission. The whole point is rewriting the focus of Abraham's relationship with God/Jehovah/Yahweh that makes Ishmael his heir and the sons of Isaac the pretenders to the throne that must be wiped out and destroyed utterly, so says the word of Mohammed writing for Allah.

It's all ego. From the gods to the prophets to the teachers to the faithful of all kinds. Everything is about ego -- how I and what I believe is powerful and how I must get everyone to submit to me and what I stand for.

What we as humans should be doing is following our ancient ancestors who out grew their gods and became autonomous, looking to the stars as destinations and not for the face of god. That is what artists, writers, and poets have done for centuries and what beauty they have left us with their talents. What ultimately matters is what is inside of us, what Jesus began to teach with his The Way that was all about love and peace and avoiding violence.

We have examples in modern day parlance on how to live a good life. We call it by including magic in the message, but it's not magic in the sense of witches and demons. Magic is what we have all around us every single day and fail to see. There is no need for lies or ego or power, except the power that resides in each of us. We do not need to pray to gods because they do not exist. We need to look inside ourselves, face the wo/man in the mirror and see what is there, and choose to deal with the outside world with peace and friendship and the tenets that Jesus taught in his sermon on the Mount where he fed thousands with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. He shared all among the gathered and taught the most important lesson of all -- peace and harmony.  Balance. We do not need Gods' or gods' permission. We do not need to submit to gods or Gods. We need to face ourselves and accept that we are all we need, that all the power was inside us all along. All we need to do is cast off our shackles and ignorance and embrace the true peace and enlightenment that is around us and within us.

We are all we need.

It will take time to get over the need for violence and force and it will take generations because violence and force have been such a part of our lives for so long. Peace is within our grasp as long as we stop praying and look inside, see ourselves as we really are, and manifest what is inside us all around us.

It has taken me a lifetime to realize what I knew as a small child. It takes me time and struggling against what I have learned to choose the peaceful path. It is there inside me. All I have to do is keep facing myself and choosing the right path, the right way, the peaceful choice. I will slip and stumble, but less so each day. Each right choice brings me closer to what I have spent my whole life believing in and manifesting in small ways. This time I choose truth and peace. Each time is easier. Peace is the only way.

That is all. Disperse.

Turning The Other Cheek

I was trying to explain how to deal with violence, abuse, and negativity from others. Dictating into the tablet is not as clear for me as typing it into my laptop. I'm sure I confused them terribly.

What I was trying to explain -- and it has been a hard lesson for me to learn -- is that we affect people around us by OUR attitude and thoughts. I finally get what 'turn the other cheek' really means and it is not the act of turning your cheek when accosted by an opponent intent on violence and subjugation. Maybe that is going a bit far in describing opposition from others . . . and maybe not.

The change has to come from within you. If you turn the other cheek when slapped or struck and you grit your teeth and force yourself to back down while holding resentment, anger, rage, and violence against them (I'll get you whenever I get the chance kind of feelings) then you've missed the point of turning your cheek. Turning your cheek is not dismissing the assault on you nor is it backing down, swallowing your pride, giving up control, or any of those negative activities and feelings. Turning your cheek is the outward symbol of not returning their assault with a mental or verbal assault of your own. Turning your cheek is not about you, but about what you express within yourself.

Maybe writing it out won't help anyone either because I cannot find or do not have the words to express what I feel.

It is not pity or understanding of the other person's motives and actions. It is something within yourself -- within me -- that has happened and continues to happen because it is an ongoing process.

Though I may in time come to understand what drives the other person to act as they have, it doesn't matter because what I feel within myself is peace and calm. And even love. Not the airy-fairy kind of peace and love I once made fun of and joked about, but a deep down peace and love that has changed me inside.

We are all connected. Every person, child, animal, plant, rock, and mineral on this planet and throughout the Universe because we are all the same. We are different facets of the Universal Thought that created us all.

Before you call for the men in white coats and dismiss me as needing a wraparound jacket that buckles in the back and look for a padded cell, stop and think about it. You can change the world ad the people around you, but you must first change yourself at the quantum level. People will still be the way they are until they change themselves fundamentally.

I was verbally and mentally, and sometimes physically, abused as a child. I have spent most of my life on the defensive, ready to defend my position and my body even before anyone said or did anything to me because that is all I knew from the time I was very young. My parents were overtly cruel, although everyone offered my their pity for the way they saw me being treated, shaking their heads because they didn't understand why I was being abused, especially not in public. They didn't get and neither did I. All the people who claimed I was full of rage confused me. I wasn't full of rage or anger or violence. I didn't feel that way and I'd certainly never harbored feelings like that, except that I did in a way. I was always defending myself, proving myself, giving evidence as though on trial that I was not a liar and that was where I lived -- always on trial, a whipped dog cowering and waiting for the next kick, the next slap, the next abusive word, criticism, and ridicule. I didn't know how deep that went until I began to change myself.

That old story about the woman who keeps getting dumped and dumped on by men is asked what the one thing all those men had in common finally made sense to me. What did all those jerks, liars, abusive, and violent men have in common? The woman.

As above, so below.

What you give, you receive.

Turn the other cheek.

They are all the same and emanate from the same source. You.

And me and everyone else in this reality.

When I forgave my abuser, even though the abuser was dead, I began to change. I began to be at peace and became calmer. It's like Carrie Fisher says in her one woman show, "Wishful Drinking." Resentment is drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

People still ridicule, criticize, and abuse me but I no longer feel the need to defend myself. That is why when a discussion veers into that place where names are called, violence is offered, and ridicule is heaped, I let go and walk away. Without a focus for the name calling, violence, criticism, and ridicule, the other person will still fume, froth at the mouth, and be angry and will eventually move on and the flames will die down. With no focus for their negativity, there is no longer any point.

I find myself avoiding those situations more and more. I've nothing to prove and nothing to defend. I hold no ill will towards my abusers and see no point in giving them fuel to rage on. It is not important that I win or that I prove my point. They will either see things as I do -- or they won't. The world will keep spinning and life will go on. If they don't learn now, they might later or in the next life, but eventually we all learn the one Truth. Love can conquer hate. Not the romantic and physical kind of love, but pure love. Peace comes from that pure love and that is what we think we're striving for when we talk about peace and goodwill toward men, even though we miss the point.

By becoming more peaceful myself and approaching that pure love that is available to us all, I approach the better part of me and hopefully become a source of that peace and love that will affect everything around me. It changes me a little more each time I choose that peace and get closer to that pure love. It is a struggle, but I'm getting there. I keep tripping over my old habits and defenses and I keep getting up, look at why I tripped, and find that peace inside of me.

I have so much to atone for and, though I think of myself, have always thought of myself, as a good person, I still have a long way to go. I'll get there because I feel myself change a little more every day, every time I pick myself up after I fall. And the rage inside me dies a little more, replaced by the peace that approaches that pure love. That airy-fairy stuff I used to laugh and joke about in others. It's not in religion or vegetarianism or marching and civil disobedience that I have found that peace. It is, and always has been, inside of me.

I turn the other cheek not because I need to feel I'm better than you but because I no longer feel the need for anything but peace and love. It makes everything and everyone around me look and feel different because I am different.

That is all. Disperse.