?? The Common Core to all Spiritual Traditions ??

Each spiritual tradition is based upon a seed thought. And really, they are all the same seed thought.

The challenge is that this thought is so big that it’s not even a thought.

It’s an experience of Oneness that cannot be adequately described or put into concepts.

So, when we do put it into concepts, we make a story to make sense of it.

And the stories that we use to make sense of something that big have a huge impact on our lives.

But they are still just stories, just conceptual frames. Ways of understanding and relating to the world and ourselves.

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The first lines of the Tao Te Ching could be translated thus:

The Tao that can be spoken is not the Constant Tao.

The name that can be named is not a Constant Name.

From the start, Lao Tse expresses that all spoken expressions of the Tao will fall short of expressing its fullness.

The words we use to make sense of the Tao – Good, Balance, Order, God, and so many more – all of these are caricatures of something that is too large to fit into words.

And, because we use words to express them, people can build conceptual maps, and mistake these symbols for actual experience.

I love the perspective of the Tao. A balance to the universe, the natural way that it all flows, a wisdom and order in the natural unfoldment of experience.

And I love it because it shows the limits of conceptual understanding, and because, through wu wei, we can learn to align with the Tao.

Wu wei means non-action, and it reflects the principle of releasing self-will and allowing the Tao to flow through you. A return to the natural state where this wisdom flows effortlessly through us.

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The seed thoughts of Tao are qi, yin, and yang. Qi, as the force, the invisible life energy that flows through and unites all things.

Yang, the rising or expanding energy, and yin as the complementary falling or contracting energy.

This energy flows continuously, yin to yang to yin to yang. Endless vibration.

We cannot hold to a particular side, only rising or only falling, without having to balance things out later.

So, in yin and yang there is a balance that is found, all on its own. An underlying balance to the universe, owing to the fact that yin and yang are both expressions of the One.

A common underlying principle, formless, and yet producing all forms.

Tao

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The approach of wu wei, non-action, is not a complete elimination of action, but rather a relinquishing of lower desires or attempts to control the unfoldment of nature.

In letting go of personal agenda, we are moved by the winds of the world, and amazing things can happen.

Taoist thought blended with Buddhism to create Zen, which is central to Japanese martial arts. The practice of Zen involves clearing the mind and allowing the action to flow through.

And, when we bring it into the body, it can make our motion efficient, graceful, and precise. In the flow state, we can perform at levels far beyond our conscious plans and intentions.

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The Taoist perspective was developed into countless forms of qigong, or energy work, all based upon a precise map of the subtle energy within the body.

And one who cultivates Tao cultivates skill in all things, by becoming simple and present in approach.

This flow state of Zen, this alignment with the Tao, can be brought into and enrich every aspect of our experience, each action and each word.

Becoming simple and present, and allowing the brilliance to flow through.

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This same spiritual seed thought came through in a different way in the Vedas, which inspired the development of yoga and tantra and formed a foundation for Buddha’s realization.

The Vedic seed thought has three parts: atman, which means soul. Something of our Being that is more than the body. Personal consciousness.

And Paramatman. The universal soul. The One life. Fundamental consciousness.

And the third bit: atman is paramatman. Our personal consciousness is universal consciousness.

The “I” that I know as me is the same “I” which evokes all of creation, and which is at the heart of all Beings.

We are the I Am. This is the Truth of our Being. We are the One, played out in this life, this moment of Creation.

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Now, this sounds amazing, but we often have experiences where we do not feel like our personal consciousness is universal. We feel like we are having a separate experience.

This is because we are identified with the body and the modifications of the mind. We are ignorant of our True nature, invested in a particular expression. And this creates friction.

Whenever we hold on to a specific configuration, it will eventually change, and it will be harder and harder, taking more effort over time to maintain that same configuration.

Change is a constant in the manifest realm, and the universe abhors a stasis. Things will continue to change.

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Our fixed stories, attachments, desires, aversions, all of these things cause us to cling to aspects of the world.

In this clinging, we have personal preference and active desire, and we act in ways that create karma.

Karma means action, but the idea of karma points to the root of this action, to the emotional and psychological motivations behind the action.

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Action taken with a certain feeling and motivation will have an outcome that reflects that feeling and motivation.

Manifesting, naturally, all unconscious. And all in alignment with our network of inner story and emotional charge. From the seed within, to its expression in the outward world.

We identify with the body and our network of story and emotion, with the context of our outer world.

And this identification can be so strong that we overlook the I AM at our core.

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The gap between the individual experience and the bliss of universal consciousness is, in Vedic thought, attributed to our karma, our clinging to certain emotions and experiences.

The Vedic seed thought, “Atman is Paramatman”, led to methods for clearing karma and achieving conscious union between atman and paramatman.

Many styles of yoga (union). Many practices and philosophies and traditions.

And integral to the Vedic story of the One is the concept of reincarnation.

The atman (personal soul), traveling through many lives, learning, developing, clearing karma and purifying, aligning with the paramatman over the natural course of inner growth.

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Over millennia of working through this concept, unpacking it and applying it, the yogic traditions came into focus.

And Buddhism rose right alongside this. Put another way, it was from within the frame of Vedic thought that Buddha had his realizations.

Buddha’s path emphasizes transcending suffering by overcoming clinging, attachment and aversion. All of which results from avidya, ignorance of our true nature.

Buddha expressed the nature of suffering in the 4 noble truths, and he points to the means to overcoming this suffering with the 8-fold path:

Right vision, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi.

As for the yogic paths, the yoga sutras were codified from the many oral teachings into the written form by Patanjali somewhere around 400-200 BC.

The approach outlined in the sutras is a practical, eight-limbed path of expanding consciousness, developing it in limbs or layers from the basest to the most refined.

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The methods and emphasis differ. But both yoga and Buddhism are oriented towards unifying personal consciousness and universal consciousness.

The Taoist perspective frames this same goal in different terms: becoming a hollow tube through which the Tao can flow through.

Universal consciousness is everything. So, if we wish to align our personal consciousness with universal consciousness, we must expand to become everything as well.

This is done by releasing our specific attachment to any one thing. By becoming open to everything, clinging to nothing. Letting the world flow through us without impediment.

Everything is (no)thing. Being arises from non-being. In stilling the fluctuations of the mind, we allow the brilliance of the One to shine through unimpeded.

In the Buddhist and yogic terms, this is termed clearing karma, overcoming the partial attachments and aversions that cause suffering.

Clearing the things that attach us to a specific personal consciousness, so that we can more fully align with and express universal consciousness.

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Each tradition develops over the years, taking interesting turns and layering stories.

Over the thousands of years since Buddha offered his vision to the world, many different schools have arisen, and each describes his message in slightly different terms, emphasizing different aspects of the journey.

Many now emphasize the importance, not only of overcoming personal suffering, but also moving towards awakening, becoming a bodhisattva so that we can ease the suffering of others.

There are many things in this. It points to both the potential for awakening and a responsibility to share that awakening with others.

This is inspiring for the personal journey and stabilizing for the relation of the individual to the society, though the ideas and stories that contextualize it can be mistaken for Truth.

A similar layering of tradition has produced the plethora of yoga styles and schools. Each is a practical pathway created to support the journey of the soul, aligning the little I with the big I.

All from the seed thought of consciousness: personal and universal, just one consciousness.

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The Western traditions began with the seed thoughts of the soul and the One as the supreme good.

The vedic and western traditions come from a common cultural source in the distant past, but they split up and developed in different directions, about 3000 BC.

And it’s possible that this seed idea was presented to both groups, who interpreted it in different ways.

In India, it became the atman and paramatman. In China, it became the Tao, the way of all things, the underlying order and intelligence in the universe.

In the West, it became monotheism. The One God above all gods.

You have the soul and the Supreme Being.

And you can either act in alignment with this Supreme Being, for the Good. Or act out of alignment.

And the condition of your soul will reflect your choices and how you impact the balance.

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Now, it goes quite a bit deeper than this.

The roots of our conception of God in the West go back to the pythagorean and platonic schools of ancient Greece.

Pythagoras was influenced by the teachings of Zoroaster, who had a vision at 30 years old, standing by a river.

He came to see that all the asha in the world, all the balance and rightness, was an expression of an underlying force. A deity: Ahura Mazda. The Lord of Wisdom.

And all of life was a balance between asha and druj. More complex than good and bad or order and chaos, but these two come close. Alignment and misalignment, perhaps?

And humans have free will, and can choose either to support the asha in the world, or to support the druj of their lower nature.

A person who had mastered their lower nature and aligned with asha in all things was known as an ashavan, and this was the goal of the Zoroastrian faith:

To become an ashavan by the three-fold way: good thought, good word, and good deed.

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The zoroastrian concept of the soul and this battle between asha and druj influenced both the formation of the Hebrew faith and later the development of the early Christian worldview.

But in Greece, it found a different expression.

Pythagoras was an amazing and inspiring teacher.

He traveled the known world and learned the mathematics, music, and mystery teachings of all the cultures that he could, and then returned to Greece and developed a mystery school.

Spirituality blends seamlessly with mathematics, as numbers are the most perfect expression of the underlying forms of the universe.

So the One was the seed thought that the pythagoreans used to understand the nature of Creation and the human journey.

All is One, and One is All.

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So the reality of the world is Unity, the Divine. The Creator.

And this Creator, having naught but itself to work with, divided from the One into the many forms, which dance together to create the tapestry of creation we experience as incarnate Being.

Which means that each of us, and all Created beings, are expressions of the One. God’s creatures, if you wanted to describe it in these terms.

Now, the ancient Greek culture produced many philosophers, and it emphasized the use of the mind to understand the world. To align with the rational spirit, rather than the animal nature.

So, this led to an exploration of natural philosophy, for in understanding Creation, we can come closer to an understanding of the ineffable Creator.

The One is too large for the mind to comprehend. But, by exploring the expression of the One in the world, we can discover the underlying patterns which reflect the nature of the One.

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This seed thought led to so many diverse things.

Science, for one, comes from the assumption that all of the universe works according to specific underlying patterns, and that it adheres to these principles mechanically.

Such as, if you do the same experiment in exactly the same way, you will get the same results.

This is a tacit assumption of a common underlying objective frame, and independent existence of the articles in question.

All of which makes sense from the perspective of a single frame of Creation, a single physical world, shared by all separate beings which have individual souls.

But things work differently sometimes, even if all of the input is the same. The world is not a machine. It’s a dream. And dreams operate on different rules.

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So there’s a very tricky element in Western spiritual understanding which imposes a singular “truth” (belief) upon the world unintentionally, and then creates consensus around this “truth.”

One right way makes sense, when framed as the One.

But the early platonic descriptions of the One were very much in line with the earliest Taoist teachings.

The One is all things, both the up and the down, the high and the low.

All things in Creation reflect the balance of the origin. The One, divided and dancing with Itself. All parts together comprise the balanced Whole.

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From this perspective, it is not necessary to have each person understand any one view of the One.

The Tao that can be spoken is not the True Tao.

Any view we come to is but a partial and imperfect expression of the Whole.

In fact, it is best to make space for each person to make personal meaning in the world, to understand the One, and Spirit, and their own nature, in their own personal way.

In lived terms rather than stories. Experiential, rather than conceptual.

The view we come to personally, in our own understanding and the context of our life journey, will be more calibrated to our lives than any view we borrow from others.

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But, as it has played out in the West, we have found “True” stories to serve as the Word of God.

And these stories, the frames and assumptions inherent within them, have shaped the culture.

When we share a story like this, it seeds a powerful vision into the collective dreaming, into the template of reality that we imagine and then act in alignment with.

So these stories, expressed as Truth, are stories, rather than Truths. Their spread is a magic of belief, fixing our collective Creative power on the same goal, expressed within the same frame.

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Stories can unite hearts and minds and help us to find meaning.

But, as soon as you have One True story and other people have another True story, or even anything that threatens your One True story, then you have a really big problem.

People will kill and die for a story like that, forever. For the magic of belief that comes from a consensus about our view of the world and our role within it, for meaning and purpose.

And this is an incredibly confusing space for the individual seeker of Truth, as each story is expressed as Truth, but conveys instead belief.

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If we dig past the layers of doctrine and dogma, we find that Christ’s message was the same as that which we might hear from the Hindus or Buddhists or Taoists.

Forgiveness, letting go of the fixed emotions, healing with love. Honoring the sacredness in the world, and in all fellow beings.

Love your neighbor as yourself. Love one another, as I have loved you.

Living in the world, but not of it. Engaged with the sacred experience of life without our inner life being bound to the conditions of the outer life.

Creating a personal relationship with the Father, the same One we have been describing with all of these words: Tao, Brahma, Ahura Mazda. I AM.

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Christ offered a heart-centered path of enlightenment. Union, through the realization of the Creator within human form as the Christ.

All of which was intended to be an example and a way of life, rather than a story to believe in and tell others.

And it is not only a surface teaching, but a deep energetic lesson on inner surrender, on filling with the light of the Lord and allowing it to flow through us.

Connecting inward with the omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal Creator at the core of our Being.

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The alchemy at the heart of Christ’s actual teachings is quite profound, and it is well-worth exploring the deeper layers of this tradition.

And, at the same time, it is another (equally valid) description of the human journey and the path to union. One more path to the realization of our True nature as an expression of the I AM.

The True teachings of Christ were not about “saving souls” or “winning souls”, but rather about encouraging one’s soul to blossom, and then acting in alignment with this awareness.

Coming to know our soul, that invisible and vast inner aspect of our Being. And coming to align our soul more completely with the Lord.

Aligning the personal consciousness with the universal consciousness.

The same goal as we find in yoga and Buddhism and Taoist philosophy and the Toltec path, and so many more: The Inner Path.

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Many other expressions of spirituality in the west have been underground, frowned upon by mainstream culture.

Especially with the persecution of witchcraft and suppression of tribal spiritual traditions.

But, it’s very hard to kill stories. They have a life of their own, albeit one very different from our own experience.

So the desire for Truth and discovery flourished in the background through alchemy, and hermeticism, and kabbalah, remnants of neoplatonism and reinventions of ancient wisdom.

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The Hermetic view of the human journey is framed by the alchemical quest to transform lead into gold.

Lead is a symbol for our lower nature, while gold represents the purity of our spiritual nature.

The western traditions emphasize free will, which means they embrace the goal of intentional transformation.

Lower magics direct this intention outward into the world to evoke specific effects in the medium of our physical experience.

But the deeper teachings turn this transformative intent inward to first purify the vessel, and then bring forth from that vessel the wisdom, knowledge, and love that reflects the Highest.

Burning away the impurities, separating the pure from the dross, intentional recombining, and then the fermentation (integration and realization).

Four stages in which we transform inwardly, aligning with the prima materia, the first substance, which is the substance of consciousness itself. The Philosopher’s Stone.

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This is the Magnum Opus, or Great Work, of alchemy. Self-transformation.

And the result of this work is both inward and outward.

Both the cultivation of consciousness through intense inner work and the offering of service which this new consciousness evokes within us.

And this is one of the things I love most about the core of alchemy.

It shows clearly the human inner journey of self-refinement and humbling which is the prerequisite for authentic service.

And, though the language of alchemy is initially confusing, all expressed symbolically, it offers a beautiful frame for understanding the mechanisms of the subtle energies.

It’s a science of the mind, consciousness, and will.

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And eventually, alchemy developed into science, which is in modern times practiced among laymen as a religion in itself.

Though this creates new problems: Science is a key influence in dividing the Spiritual life from the material life, when there is no real division. And we’re slowly coming to see that.

Science is amazing and very helpful as a frame for understanding the world. For our technology, it is not only practical, but indispensable.

And yet, even our own science is pushing us past a classical, mechanistic model of the universe.

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The cutting edge of modern physics shows us that all of the things we think of as ‘real” are made up of things that we cannot consider “real.”

And relativity says that the True value of something is relative to the observer.

So, each being is the center of their own frame of reference, which is a whole True view of the world, while still potentially being different from others’ True views of the world.

This is the space where the subjective sciences come to the rescue.

They come at an understanding of the world from a subjective, human angle, and they can offer context in the absence of a single objective frame of the world.

Put incredibly simply, we all choose what the world means to us. We create/invent meaning.

And then it becomes our “real.” We dream the world into Being.

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Now, this goes deep and can get really philosophical along the way.

And, while brain candy is fun, the Inner Path moves us away from conceptual complexity and towards simplicity. Out of story and into experience.

But this does not mean to eliminate the use of our mind completely. After we understand the reality of the world beneath the symbol, we can use symbol as an artist.

Framing our experience with inspiring, balancing, and loving stories. Stories we have chosen with open eyes and full awareness of the Creative act involved.

We know that no story is True.

And we know that with story, we can share visions that empower and liberate, open-ended visions that make space for each person to make sense of the world in their own way.

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Now, the mystical nature of science is a subject for a class all in itself. For our purposes, the development of psychology, sociology, and philosophy are most significant.

These are the western explorations of the psyche, which was the Greek word for soul.

And, among the early psychologists was a man named Carl Gustav Jung.

Jung was a brilliant early explorer of the inner human experience, a contemporary and colleague of Freud until they had a falling out.

Their argument was about symbols in dreams. Freud believed that only the meaning of the symbol was important.

Jung felt that if many symbols could be chosen to indicate the same meaning, the one which the individual selected must have some significance.

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Jung began to explore the use of symbol throughout history and across many different cultures.

He found that certain symbols extend beyond a single culture or individual, that they seem to have universal resonance.

This observation led to a concept which has today become commonplace: the archetype.

The archetype (or “old form”) could be seen as a primal symbol which has resonance for all humans and thus forms part of the fabric of the human experience.

This led him to postulate that we have a collective unconscious which is the repository of our shared symbols. A dreaming consciousness of the human species.

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Jung explored Tao and alchemy. Tarot and hermeticism. Astrology, I ching, and the nature of the divine oracle.

In short, he explored wisdom teachings through the lens of the psychologist, recognizing the divine qualities explored in various traditions as psychological forces.

And, with the hermetic principle, the same psychological forces present within the human being will be evident in a different way in the manifest world. Microcosm reflects macrocosm.

Jung also offered the idea of synchronicity as a reflection of the underlying pattern playing out in two places at once, like the planets and the human experience, or in the world and in the cards.

Deities as archetypes and psychological forces, and acausal mechanisms for the entanglement of outer world and inner world elements.

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The west, with these concepts, is poised to develop an entirely new subjective science which better handles the human experience.

Understanding the mechanism of Spirituality is a new evolution in the development of the species.

And it frees us from the fixed forms that have been played out for generations without understanding, while better helping us to realize the essence of these teachings.

This is what we need in civilization. To establish a conscious relationship with Spirit, with ourselves, and the world. First, heart-centered understanding, and next, aligned action.

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The same human journey is described in the western traditions, whether the path of Christ or the Magnum Opus of alchemy, as is described differently in Buddhist, yogic, and Taoist terms.

Aligning the little I of personal consciousness with the big I of fundamental consciousness, and then learning to act from this space. Making our home in the I Am.

And, with each of the descriptions we’ve touched upon, we see the journey from a different angle. See it fleshed out and contextualized a bit differently.

Each approach brings something to the table. Each offers its unique insight.

And, when you put them all together, looking past some of the accumulated layers of story, the path becomes a bit clearer.

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Toltec thought is my favorite wisdom stream for the purpose of showing the deep truth of the human experience.

The Toltecs were a wisdom tradition in Central America (rather than a tribe, as is commonly thought).

A bit similar to how the druids were the wisdom keepers of many different tribes within the Celtic culture.

Toltec wisdom is both profound and extremely grounded. And, as counterintuitive as it might seem, the simplest way to explain it is that we are dreaming.

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We are, each of us, dreaming our little bubble of world, right now.

And we communicate with one another and share stories and come to a common vision of the world, and this is our collective dream of the world.

It is as real as it’s ever been. But we are dreaming in that we do not see things as they are.

Instead, we see the thoughts and feelings that we have about things, and we confuse it for the things we are actually experiencing.

We can become so absorbed in our network of ideas and feelings that we cannot actually see what is happening around us at all.

We think we are seeing it, but really, we are seeing the reflection of our inner story.

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Now, that’s pretty easy to understand, but it sounds kind of far out.

And it goes deeper, too.

The Toltec view of the human being, on an energetic level, was a cocoon of light, as tall as the height of the hands above the head, and as wide as the hands out to the sides.

This cocoon of light is adrift in a sea of light called “The Rays of the Eagle”. A metaphor for the infinite and eternal Source of all.

At any one time, there is a small point of light lit up on the cocoon. This is called the assemblage point, and it is where the perception is focused. Where the perception is assembled.

What we see of the world is a reflection of how our assemblage point engages with some of the infinite Rays of the Eagle, making one Reality out of infinite possible expressions.

As we shift our assemblage point, we tune our perception differently, and we experience the world differently.

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So, essentially, we have a subjective bubble of reality that we carry around everywhere.

And we can, in theory, tune this bubble of reality to engage with the sea of infinite potential expression to bring forth any kind of experience.

But we often find ourselves stuck, doing things we do not want to do, feeling things that are challenging to feel. Having strong stories that do not align with our needs and values.

We learn (unconsciously) to give our personal power away to stories and people and situations. And it is the personal power which moves the assemblage point.

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So, while we could in theory choose to feel any way about a given situation that we desire, in practice, we encounter sticking points.

Things that are really hard to see from a different perspective. Things we identify with, and old pains that we try to make go away by pushing them deeper down.

So the Toltec path is focused on reclaiming our personal power so that our assemblage point can be once more fluid, less conditioned and more conscious.

The goal is to become first a warrior, seeking out and reclaiming our personal power, and then a master or artist, using our power consciously and in alignment with our values.

Dreaming gracefully and intentionally.

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At the heart of all of these different paths is a seed thought based on a spiritual experience.

For the Taoist perspective, we have the seed thought of Tao.

For the Vedic Perspective, we have the unity of atman and brahman. And, for the Buddhist perspective, we have an insight into the human side of this unity.

For the Pythagorean school, this seed thought took the form of One. Source. God.

For the Christian perspective, we have an illustration of embodiment of the Father as an expression of love. Again, an insight into the human implications of the One.

In the Toltec path, we have the insight of the Nagual. The dreamer. Which is surrounded by tonal, the dream. And we learn that we are the Dreamer, and the Dream.

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The way that the core spiritual experience is fleshed out is different for each tradition.

It is named differently, different aspects emphasized, offered in different frames.

Each of the frames were suitable at the point that these things were initially developed. Though, no story will be able to capture the full essence of this experience.

These stories are all intended to point the way to the same experience, to a natural process of development for the healthy, continuously growing human being.

And we waste so much energy trying to figure out which story is right. But, at some point, we find a gap between the thoughts and experience the depth of consciousness for ourselves.

And, once you do, all of those spiritual and religious stories will make sense in a different way, and you’ll see that they have all been imperfectly attempting to put something into words.

Because the depth of unity and the blessing of Now is so incredibly profound and brilliant, so full, that words offer poor metaphors only.

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So the human journey is, for the experience of all of us humans, universal.

We are all developing and expanding in consciousness, in our own way and time.

And the way we do it is a matter of choice. The way that we play this game of life is art. An act of Creation.

There is no right way to do it. Every part helps us to grow. All is part of the One, part of the balance and the perfection of the imperfect manifest world.

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The specific stories of all our spiritual traditions are constructed. Metaphors that help people to understand these deeper insights and live their lives in a way that works for them and the world.

But, if you confuse the word for the thing, if you get caught up in the stories used to indicate our deeper spiritual nature, then this actually locks us into mind and out of conscious connection.

Religion is, at worst, a repressive force for seekers of Truth.

All the best insight can trap us in a conceptual maze if we don’t keep an open mind and focus on aligned action.

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So, none of these stories are True. And there’s no one right way to live a human life.

And, at the same time, we learn in due course that the inner things are more important than the outer, and that the outer is a means to refine the inner and fill it with love.

We learn that we are all connected, and to harm another is to harm ourselves. And to love ourselves truly, is to love everyone and aspect of our experience. The blessing of our lives.

But, along the way, we get hurt or trapped, or go down rabbit holes. We're walking blindly until, through trial and error, we get a sense of what actually works for us in life.

These spiritual and religious traditions can help someone walking blindly to get by a little bit more easily. And ideally, to unpack these helpful insights into personal, lived terms.

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The simple Truth of it is that each one of us is so much bigger than we may think.

All of Creation flows through us, and the I AM at the core of my Being is the same as the I AM at the core of your Being, and at the heart of all Creation.

We are One.

And through this infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal core, we are in direct contact with everything.

It is absolutely incredible. And it’s what all of these traditions are trying to share. What I’m trying to share now.

But it’s not a matter of “believing” some story. This is a matter of letting go of all the stories that block the brilliance that flows through us already.

Making our home in the I AM. Surrendering and allowing. Present and consciously choosing. CoCreation in flow.

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Now, there is a perspective called the perennial philosophy that I very much enjoy.

It’s the idea that the same message has come through human society again and again throughout the years.

That all spiritual traditions are founded upon the same core insights, and that whenever the need is great, new voices arise to offer these same insights in new ways.

And this is important. Just think about playing the telephone game over generations. Things get wonky.

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So it’s incredibly helpful to have the core insights expressed in terms that match the conditions of the world. Framed in the present language, rather than that of a culture centuries past.

Sometimes our stories get so outlandish that they no longer resemble the insights which evoked them, and then these stories prevent the very same experiences they were intended to foster.

In other words, we get lost in our heads, and a fresh voice can sometimes cut through the mental maze and bring us back to the reality of the Now.

This plays out on a personal level, as we grow. And it plays out on the level of the human species, which is living and learning and growing, an unconscious entity all its own.

As we grow, our stories become more refined and the emphasis shifts to reflect what we are focusing on. Sometimes we let go of old stories to make way for new.

The same happens for the organism of the human race, for which we are each cells. The culture itself shifts and expands to reflect what we focus on, what we are learning and what we need.

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In short, it’s time for some new stories!

And I have some beautiful stories to share with you. These are some from my own personal journey, and perhaps they will be more suited to the people of the modern era.

A fresh presentation, and a unique insight, hopefully.

And the beautiful thing about these stories is that they are all just thought experiments, showing how things might be when viewed from a certain perspective.

Nothing to believe. Just tips for framing our experience as we choose, in a way that works for us and our world.

Freedom, Power, and Purpose for all Beings, in healthy coexistence.