I AM, WE ARE

For the contemplative soul . . .

“Who are you?”

Sounds like a simple enough question. One being asked, may be inclined to cordially and rather impulsively respond by offering up their name. But our name is not who we are, it’s a label affixed to the avatar we’re currently occupying. Who Are We? is an even more complicated riddle to unravel and explore. The very active applying any labels in a feeble attempt to define ourselves is a lesson in absurdity. If I say, “I am a doctor, I am a sale rep, I am a father, I am a mother, I am a husband, I am a wife, I am an American,” or any other label we choose to ascribe to ourselves, hidden behind all those statements is a lie, because you cannot BE or exist as any of those things. “I AM,” is a statement of entirety, a declaration of totality. It’s an all-encompassing statement. Any label added to “I AM . . .” in the context of defining yourself is to fractionate the whole. It only fragments something that cannot be fragmented and viewed as separate from the whole of existence. It’s undefinable, inseparable from the whole of existence, and therefore cannot define or describe YOU in any fashion, because the intangible consciousness you call “YOU” cannot be defined.

So let’s peel back layers and layers of human conditioning, labels, adjectives, nuances, and proclamations that we think define something undefinable, and take a deeper look into this mystery that few even think to ponder and pontificate.

Years ago, I was asked the very question this writing of mine opens with, and was asked to really give it thought. Drawing upon decades of learning both in the sciences and eastern mysticism, and the key takeaways from my own personal experiences (which by the way, is the ONLY truth - everything else is belief) here’s what I came up with . . .

I, as well as everyone and everything, have been woven out of and into the very fabric of the universe. The energy that created it and permeates every square nanometer of its entirety, is the very energy I’m made of and flows through, but is not contained in this body of mine.

What I know to be true to the very core of my being, is that

I AM.

I AM a boundless, infinite, eternal, non-physical, spiritual, soul-based, coalesced, energetic, point of consciousness, temporarily animating the avatar I reside in while immersed in a realm of duality so as to have a temporary human experience. I AM here to learn, love, grow, elevate and evolve, in this three-dimensional classroom called LIFE.

I AM of NO religion, NO country, NO state, NO ethnicity, NO race, NO species, NO political affiliation, NO group, NO sex, NO form. The body is MINE, it is not ME. I see NO boundaries between countries, states, or provinces; NO distinction, and NO lines drawn between me and others. I see NO race, creed, color, tint, or hue. I only see reflections of myself in every stranger’s eyes. I temporarily belong to only one race, the human race. I AM NOT a citizen of America; I AM a temporary visitor and citizen of the planet. I AM one with the planet I’ve emerged from and am an extension of. I AM connected to every living thing, as the whole of existence lends itself to me, and I to it, in an invisible ballet of energy exchange. I AM one with the cosmos, not separate from it. I stand as the observer, at the center of the universe from my perspective, gazing out on a limitless sea with no center. I’ve emerged from the quantum, intangible, immaterial field of energy to the perceived physical plane to contribute to the expansion of universal consciousness and to lift and magnify others.

To ask who I AM?  I AM nothing and no one in particular, and yet everything and everyone at the same time. NO labels, NO words can define me or give me context. Who I am is simply a role I’m playing, the rules and context of which was taught to me by others and the world around me. With every element, atom, and subatomic particle that comprises the physical aspect of myself having been formed in the crucible of a burnt out star, I AM quite literally made of stardust. With that star arising from the original source field, a sea of infinite energy, with no beginning and with no end, I AM not only existing within the universe, the universe is within me. I AM the LIVING UNIVERSE

As Rumi once said so beautifully,

“I AM not a drop in the ocean, I AM the entire ocean in a drop.”  

Separation is An Illusion - And a Destructive One at that

So, from a conceptual standpoint, if we were to expand that sense of knowing into the much broader context of everything surrounding us, we have to really reevaluate ourselves, our sense of importance, and what we believe is the meaning of life. Let’s start with the illusory aspect of life.

Separation is only an illusion in a reality where we perceptually experience the most infinitesimally narrow bandwidth of all known frequencies that swirl around us. Most of “reality” is hidden, as 99.99965% of all known vibratory frequencies are completely imperceptible to us with our 5 senses. Thinking you SEE reality, is like looking through the keyhole of a thousand story building and thinking you have it all mapped out with what you can see through the narrow lens of a keyhole. Here’s the thing. The entire universe, everything in it, even the things that appear solid, are vibratory fields of energy in a constant state of sub-atomic agitation, movement, transformation, and energy exchange. But we’ve be conditioned to focus on the 0.000035% of reality we can perceive, and therefore believe this is the entirety of existence. Plenty of room for one’s ego to get entangled and trapped thinking “Life’s short!” Life’s not short, “this” life’s short.

Spoiler alert: You don’t inherit eternal life upon the demise of the body. Something finite (having a beginning and an end) cannot become infinite, and something infinite (having no beginning and no end) cannot start as something finite.
More on that later . . .

The universe is a conscious energetic system where we are each like a wave on the ocean’s surface; appearing to be separate on the surface but intimately, interwoven, indivisible, connected, and ultimately one beneath the surface at a much deeper level.  Life at the “surface” is illusory. There is no objective reality, only subjective, fashioned by our beliefs and biases.

WE ARE ALL ONE.

To label is blasphemy because it destroys the essence of everything. To label our self or others as anything is a dangerous and violent act. It is to prejudiciously and preferentially categorize, alienate, and separate others from ourselves. It is to segregate and see “us” and“them” as separate from one another. Although perplexing to many, we are anything but. To label is to focus on our differences instead of our similarities. It’s to divide instead of unite. Or it’s to find camaraderie and a sense of belonging in a group or others, which yet again, separates us from others not sharing our collective preferences, opinions, or point of view.

The reality is, we are all far more alike than we are different, having the same basic needs, fears, desires, hopes and for the most part wanting the same things for ourselves that others want for themselves and those dearest to them.

We tend to lose our true sense of identity because society’s labels put us all in boxes that count us as part of one group or another. Once we identify with these labels, especially beginning with our name, it’s hard to see ourselves as anything other than the accumulation of labels we use to fashion the story of who we are. This is dangerous because in today’s world, faced with countless challenges jeopardizing our survival, and the integrity of the civilization we’ve built, we now need a cohesive sense of community more than ever.

Worse than restricting ourselves with these labels, is to apply them to entire groups, stereotyping and reducing them down to a monoculture of uni-dimensional beings that can be represented by a banner, a sticker, a tag line or even a single word.  

To make broad sweeping generalities and point fingers at an entire culture, ethnicity, or religion because of the interests of an infinitesimally small portion of the population (governments, military, and corporate interests included) is reckless and irresponsible. It only serves to perpetuate stereotypes, promoting bigotry, racism, profiling, and is at its very core the very bias, hate, and prejudice that breeds pride, antagonism, hostility, division, and endless war.

I’ve never personally met an Islamic, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, or any other label we choose, that showed me anything but love, kindness, and compassion, unless fear was present in them. I saw in their eyes, the same beautiful kindness, love, hope, and aspirations for themselves and their families, that I see in every person I meet.

Our churches, mosques, and temples are filled each week with those who listen to the message of universal love, inclusion, and acceptance, that has been preached for millennia, but does what we hear ever move from our head to our hearts? Beyond our societal programming? Beyond the pride and prejudice of believing our country, our religion, our way of life that is better than everyone else’s?

How can we claim to believe in the practical application of such divine principles and still subscribe to the pride associated with the archaic concepts of patriotism and the vitriolic fervor that arises in individuals by identifying with such an abstract notion such as a country? After all, what is a country? Is the flag we wave representative of all of the people that live under it?  If not, what people? Does it represent all of their values? If not, whose values does it represent? Are they the values of the most predominant ethnicity? Religion? Race? Dominant political party? Sports team? Those with celebrity status in Hollywood? Those on Wall Street? Or the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, as the epitaph on the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to our country reads?

Though there is a beautiful story of triumphing and overcoming oppression behind every nation’s flag, I tend to believe that today the banners we wave as representative of our country and its values, tends to be now used against us, to perpetuate the hope in the ideology of a collapsing global system. Their utility lies in the fact that they are emblematic, like team colors, signifying the cumulative sum of that country’s corporate interests and financial dominance or lack thereof, since the only thing that tends to identify a country as a world power or not, is their economic viability and the size of the military defending those interests. The concept of one’s country is really not representative at all of what any one given individual may hold as righteous, dignified, respectable, or as an inalienable right.

What do we really believe. Racial bigotry has been so evident in recent years at presidential campaigns rallies. Religious profiling of Muslims in recent years making us terrified and suspicious of anyone that appears to be from that corner of the world. Transgender and LGBTQ debates, vaxxed or un-vaxxed ideological clashes and confrontations, we have no shortage of things to fight over. And then there’s the degree to which we were appalled years ago by a NFL sports figure’s choice to kneel during the National Anthem, because he couldn’t see the values sung about present in the society his sees around him. Rather than commending him for have the courage to make us pause, contemplate, and question, most condemned him. There’s little evidence that we believe in the very values that our forefathers fought so dearly for . . . the atrocities of slavery, the slaughter of countless Native Americans, and the subordination of women and complete absence of women rights aside . . . ah, our misguided history. Slavery is alive and well more today than any time in human history. Only slaves today don’t wear chains, they wear debt and are robbed blind and unconstitutionally by their government, their masters who only sold them the illusion of freedom by having them build their own cages so they keep working. We call them a “home,” the masters (government and banks) call it a “mortgage.” Anyone looking at the amortization on their house will instantly feel the weight of their slavery and the invisible chains that bind them so they keep working.

So, what does it actually mean to say, “I AM AN AMERICAN” or “WE ARE AMERICANS,” or Russian, or Serbian, or Greek, or Kurdish, or Iraqi, Gay, Strait, Left, Right, Liberal, Conservative, or anything else? These labels are all illusions that divide that which is indivisible.

To collectively make such a claim with any degree of pride or arrogance, elevating ourselves or our nation above or as being better than others is a profoundly underdeveloped mentality tantamount to that of a high school pep rally, pitting one country against another through the segregation of ideologies that may or may not represent the collective interests of the individuals living in each country. How can we believe in something as amorphous as the concept of a country that doesn’t even exist outside of a map. Show me the lines dividing personal property, cities, counties, states, and nations. Viewed from space, there are no lines, only imagination. Oh, the illusions we spin and how conofined we are within them.

How can we espouse these ideas when the idea of a country is in fact imaginary? There are NO countries, only corporations engaging in a marketplace.

Viewed from space there are no visible boundaries dividing the Earth up into individual countries. These boundaries, though universally believed in and accepted as real are in fact completely imaginary and only serve to polarize and divide ourselves into groups based on imaginary lines and labels that don’t exist anywhere in reality outside of a map. And yet, there are those who will die defending these imaginary lines and labels. Show me the city, county, state, nation or province you live in. You can’t? Outside of lines on a map it doesn’t exist. It’s a fiction, simply an agreed upon collective hallucination.

The endless wars - aka “The Sport of Kings” - are fought for resources, national/political/financial/economic dominance, corporate profiteering and the never ending consolidation of wealth into the hands of an elite society. That’s not to say all wealthy people are evil. But, peering behind the curtain, we can clearly see their interests, not ours, at the underpinnings of every war. What we see is the unconstitutional criminal act of robbing citizens and allocating taxpayer money to a military-industrial complex and captured government that removes more and more freedoms every year. As we all sit ring side, we get to witness the last gasps of a dying society and the attempts of an elite class trying to sustain a broken system that protects their wealth, their security, their isolation, their separatism, and continues to advance the nefarious global agenda of an unelected group of individuals referred to as the World Economic Forum, the Deep State, the Illuminati, or whatever other name you want to apply, who now demand every country resign their sovereignty to them.   

This is no different than the fighting that took place in the sandbox when we were children played out on the grandest of scales, with the same basic argument of, “This is mine, that is yours, and I’M NOT SHARING!” It’s my point of view vs. yours (Egocentrism/Bigotry), my religion vs. yours (Dogma/Institutionalized Thinking/ Profiling/ Stereotyping/Pride), my political beliefs vs. yours (Conceit/Idealism), my possessions, wealth, and social status vs. yours (Selfishness/ Pride/ Arrogance/Conceit), my people vs. yours (Ethnic Prejudice/ Racism/ Radicalism), and my country vs. yours (Nationalism/Pride/Arrogance).

Which of any of these abstract precepts that perpetuate fighting and serve as justification for war epitomize spiritual values? Where is the universal love, compassion, connectedness, acceptance, forgiveness, stewardship, or sense of community, as a collective family inhabiting a shrinking planet?  How can these values even exist in a world that has become predicated on the belief that life is competition and it’s “every man for himself?” Humans, outside of breeding rituals of other species, are the only species that competes against itself. Every other species cooperates to ensure the survival of the species.

Our Great Awakening

What humanity is painfully learning is that we haven’t matured much since we played in the sandbox as kids. There are very few grown-ups left in the world. They’re a dying breed on the brink of extinction. We play sycophantic games as individuals to get ahead in life, while we collectively plunder the planet, consume natural resources to fuel commerce and the marketplace with planned obsolescence, destroy forest the world over, animal habitats, and catastrophically pollute the oceans with plastic and garbage. Announced 4 years ago, we’ve ushered in the 6th Mass extinction the world has seen with the fastest die off of countless species ever recorded. We destroy the Earth’s life support systems, and exploit entire ecosystems to complete collapse in the pursuit of economic dominance and marginal gains on Wall Street. All the while we further detach from our essence, our spirit, and the divine within us, never knowing who and what we are, actually believing we are the bodies we inhabit as the entirety of our being.

The good news is, life in the physical plane is fairly short and subsequently ends, so it’s only a temporary state of insanity we suffer from. We arrive on the planet to experience what we are not, to better understand what we ARE.

All this division, all this discord, is caused by the lack of relationship we have with our self and collectively, as a society, is the terminal demise of an old system ready for retirement, collapsing beneath our feet as new higher frequencies enter this time and space. Till it does, a good portion of us will remain polarized with others having different political beliefs, religious beliefs, sexual preferences, and national affiliation because we simply fail to understand ourselves and understand our connection to one another. Manipulated by endless propaganda, society has divided us by perpetuating a constant focus on the transient, superficial, egoic, and everything external to us as a means of defining ourselves and our sense of relevancy. Society grooms and cultivates a constant focus on our egos, where we only live at the level functionality and constant comparison of ourselves to others, never reaching the ever-elusive perspective, that we are all one and that we are all in this thing called LIFE together.

Inclusion:

So then, let’s examine some otherwise unexamined beliefs; a portion of humanity is plagued with. WHO ARE WE when we pull ourselves out of the realm of such contrast and contradiction?  How do we rise above all this fear, misery, bigotry, nationalism, and religious pride?

To initiate one’s journey to awakening, consider for a moment, that the vast majority of the world believes in life after death, which is to subscribe to the belief that some part of us, our essence, survives the demise of our physical body. A loosely held belief in a world that desperately clings to the here and now, strives to look young forever, wears banners and corporate labels to project a sense of achievement, self-importance, and relevancy, and has a general fear of death, the events of 2020 - 2023 notwithstanding.

Taken a step further, is to subscribe to the idea that we are in fact something formless, intangible, ethereal, immaterial, non-physical. If we are something non-physical then how could our bodies, or the mental construct we create of ourselves by attaching these prescribed societal, political, religious, cultural and familial labels to ourselves, ever truly represent US?  Simply put, they can’t.

So if the essence of what we are is something that is inherently immaterial, non-physical, lacking any form, how is it we are here in what we perceive to be the physical plane in the form of a human being? 

I view our physical state as no different than the different states of matter that molecules can take. Just as water can take on the different states of being water (liquid/fluid), steam (amorphous vapor), or ice (a relatively solid form), we as spiritual beings can take on different forms, different densities, different mass, and the temporary state of coalescing or condensing into a physical being (or what appears to be a physical state) in a physical realm, but our essence is and always will be non-physical. And yet, we all have the same sensation of being “in here” behind these eyes, contained in this body we’re briefly animating, reading this blog.

We’ve been searching for consciousness in the body for over 150 years. Guess what? We still haven’t found it. Despite probing, cutting, surgically removing, electromagnetically stimulating every sulcus, gyrus, fissure, and organelle in the brain, we cannot find consciousness anywhere in there. Why? Because the brain doesn’t create consciousness. It only imports bioelectric sensory information from the body that the brain integrates into an experience that we observe with the conscious mind.

Everything, both physical – on the macroscopic level of our dulled senses - and non-physical (outside our senses), is vibrating, in motion, endlessly transforming, and cyclical in nature, including us. We have no beginning and no ending.

As a science teacher, I developed the realization that everything we need to know about ourselves can be observed in nature. In nature, EVERYTHING is an endless exchange of energy, with no start or finish. We’re no exception. Expounding upon that idea, I’ll provide an analogy.

Every square inch of the air we breathe is saturated with water vapor. Within every droplet of water vapor lies the entire molecular and atomic constituency of its source - the Ocean. It is temporarily separate from the ocean (its “source”) but it is the ocean (its “source”) and will someday return to the ocean (its “source”). Likewise, although we appear to be separate from the source field (the non-physical/ethereal/formless sea of energy) from which we all originated, we contain the entire constituency of that source field of energy, and will someday return to the source field.

WE ARE THE SOURCE

”We’re not living in the Universe. We are the living Universe.”

Our bodies are nothing more than an Avatar, a temporary housing, a wrapping so to speak, a vehicle for our soul, our consciousness flows through, but is not contain within when we incarnate. With the demise of our body, we let go and it’s recycled back into the Earth it emerged from, but we are far from ceasing to exist. “Ashes to ashes,” it’s all cyclical, all recycled. Just as a star’s life cycle involves dissolution (usually in the form of a violent explosion - a NOVA), going from something with form and structure to something completely nebulous and without form, the gaseous scattering of stardust over time re-aggregates and coalesces, creating new stars and planets with the now available heavier element created in the core of the star through the process of nuclear fusion, and the process repeats all over.

Drawing upon the laws of physics and going on the presupposition that prior to the evolution of this universe of form, things were formless, then we were there in the beginning, as part of the field of formless energy that gave rise to everything with form, even consciousness.  

We, being formless, before form, had to exist before the physical universe, or what we now identify with as form in this “physical” (again, largely illusory) dimension. Remember, approximately 99.9999% of an atom - the fundamental building block of everything perceived a physical - is empty space. Only a thin veil, and a very thin one at that, separates us from the infinite.

In other words, we’ve always existed because we’re made of the immaterial energy the gives rise to the material. We always will. We’ve always been immortal, eternal, limitless, immaterial and formless as a field of energy with no beginning and no end. We don’t inherit eternity, we’re living in it right now. We never die because we were never truly born in the first place. Birth and death are only observed events, and a product of form. We are formless.

Though we inhabit and animate this sophisticated machine we call our body, we are not the machine, we are the ghost in the machine. Once the ghost leaves the machine, the machine ceases to function. Just as we cannot see light, only what stops or reflects it; we cannot see LIFE. We only see what contains it.

“Death is not the opposite of Life. Birth is the opposite of death. Life is eternal.” 
Eckart Tolle

Our true essence is that which is formless, infinite, boundless, eternal, with no beginning, and no end. Therefore, the religion, political affiliation, or national flag we choose to identify with in this temporal experience as a human can never define us. We lie beyond definition. And yet, within this 3-dimensional holographic classroom, I like to call THE WISDOM CHAIN, we believe the illusions we’ve spun so much that we can wage war on one another in the name of these bizarre ideological concepts that only serve to separate us. But they are just that . . . intangible concepts, ideas, and beliefs and are completely imagined. Cultivated since birth, massaged relentlessly into our psyche, relatively unquestioned by the masses, they endure. We build the walls of our own mental/psychological prison.

Nationalism, politics, social status, and religion are nothing more than socially acceptable forms of separatism and prejudice that serve as the pretext for justifying competition instead of cooperation, pride instead of humility, egocentrism instead of collectivism, fear instead of love, hatred instead of acceptance, and intolerance instead of freedom, as we indulge ourselves in the competitive money sport this world has become . . . where we believe our lives are defined by what we do and how much money we make, by an imaginary class system creating an imaginary hierarchy of importance that is horribly lopsided in favor of certain groups, races, or even entire countries versus others.

To identify with a nation, a political group, or even with a particular religion for that matter, is to separate from that which connects us as a whole. It is incongruent with the most sacred, divine spiritual principals, and everything that quantum physics is now revealing to us . . . “Everything is interconnected and inter-dependent.” 

To awaken is to see that the world is only a reflection of what we choose to believe it is, that LIFE is for the most part imaginary and illusory, lived out entirely in our heads. What we see in the world is only a reflection of what we believe and what we see in ourselves. All we see is our beliefs.

Love & Light to You in your continued Journey of Self-Discovery