Lesson - Part 2

To the best of my own personal knowledge it would never be possible for God or Heaven to become manifest as a Human Being. However in all of recorded history, there is one man who has made a convincing claim, and his name was Krishna. This man Krishna told some remarkable stories about fantastic realms of reality, and its hard to compare his stories with our own experience of this reality. But Heaven is full of a multitude of persons, we may never know the exact number, but its safe to assume that number may not be encompased by the total number of Human Beings here on Earth. Even our favorite pets seem to have personalities all of thier own, and by some stretch we may even venture to endow every living thing with a kind of personality. However it would be a further stretch of the imagination to endow non-living things with a personality. Yet it has been in several traditions that the Earth itself has a kind of personality, and even our Sun has been cosidered the manifestation of a God. I expect that the Univese is absolutely full with a wide diversity of personalities, we can not account for consciousness but we consider volition and movement as the best evidence for consciousness. In my opinion Consciousness is one of the natural forces of creation, in the same sense that gravity is a force. It is a force which pervades the entire Universe and interacts with all substance and the vacume. Now our Universe is believed to have some absolute begining, and therefore it has some limitations of scope, but we here on Earth may never be able to discern what those limits are exactly. The distribution of substance has some variation, matter forms together in clumps in other words, but its difficult to understand why this would be so. Clearly the substance of creation has coallesced into stars and planets, because this is the place as we find it. The Universe itself and Heaven are one and the same thing, but this Universe is only one of an unlimited number of possiblities. There could be enough Universes in the Eternal Kingdom for absolutely every event to be true, it is often imagined that another universe exists exactly like this one except for one small difference, perhaps you failed log on to the interent and read this Blog in THAT Universe. But even though the number of possible Univereses is uncountable, this one is still unique, and there may not be another exactly like it. But by making the point that this Heaven may not be the ONLY Heaven, we need not be concerned with possible events in other possible Universes because for the time being we are here, we are inhabitants of this Heaven and can never know another evidently. All in all its really quite a wonderful place, and the Earth is still a beautiful planet despite Human occupation. In fact I would go so far as to say that the Earth has been considerably improved by Human occupation, because we bring a higher degree of order into the world for everything we lay our hands upon. And all the works of Humankind may easily be considered works of art, although its hard to see the art in some objects. Just cutting the grass creates a work of art in my opinion.

Now the human animal being a creature of uncountable desires, some desires are still more or less common to all people. We are individual and unique, we enjoy a degree of seperation and yet for many of us there is still not enough seperation. We desire more seperation in many cases, for every person that you could point to, there should always be found one or several other members of the same community for which they want no personal relationship. Some people we would prefer not to give our attention to, our time and attention is limited afterall and we must make some choices. If we are well organized people we will make choices everyday about what matters are more or less important and need our attention. We should all list our daily tasks in a descending order of importance, and while we are choosing to think some jobs are more important, we also chooose to believe that some people are more or less important. Naturally the people that we deal with most often are going to be most important to us, but we would like to believe that some people are unimportant and that we shouldn't have to deal with them. Like it or not, we each bear some relationship to every other person on Planet Earth, of those who now live and all those people who have already lived and died here. For any two people that you can point to, there will always be a common ancestor, the only question really is how far back into history you would have to go to find one. And so for all intents and purposes the Human species is one family and one race, we have blood ties. And this is going to be true if you beleive in the story of Adam and Eve or in evolution, both stories work out to the same conclusion, there is at least one common progenitor for all people. Evidently God does love diversity and yet despite all our differences, there is more than enough similarity.

Now imagine poor Adam, the father of us all, what if he could be here today? What would he say, how would he deal with all his squabbling children? The one true King, takes upon himself the role of sire to the people; but of course it is not possible for a King to appear in the world today who is also the biological progenitor of our species. Personally I would prefer for all good things to continue moving forwards in time and never backwards, but Heaven is such a strange place its hard to rule out the possibility completely. I would like to see a world here on Earth, that would allow me enough days to meet and have a conversation with absolutely everyone. And I would prefer to believe that I could meet my companions without showing prefereces, but I know that I may have some personal favorites. Yes I would like to imagine a world here where everyone would have enough time to entertain a day of conversation with absolutely everyone else, and there should never be heard someone making the excuse of not having enough time! And this is exactly the Earth that God seems to have promised within the vision of John of the Revelations. I prefer to think that this vision of John's is authentic versus mere wishful thinking, because I love the way the story ends. What could be better than a ressurection to immortality? The people will finally have the time to become old and wise, and through the medium of conversation the cause of Justice may finally be served. In fact I do not believe that the cause of Justice may be served in any other way. So the promise of a ressurection is something that I dearly desire, if it could be packaged and placed on a store shelf I would buy it as a gift for my favorite friends, no matter the price! If the children of humanity can be made to live again here on Earth in immortality, this would be the ultimate good and the ultimate victory in my opinion.
But according to the vision of John it would appear that God still has conditions!
Among those several conditions, 1000 years of Peace on Earth must come to pass; and the people of every nation must be goverend by a king once again, a king who will rule with an iron rod! Now obviously it would be a great honor to be chosen to take the part of King for myself, but the personality of the King is not the only person of the vision. According to John's dream, there must also be a great villan who will do certain things and rule the world in his own way. In fact the officers of the catholic church have long imagined that there would have to appear in the world one day an anti-christ. And as the story goes, the propects for that person are not very good, it is said that he will suffer unending torment in the company of the beast and the ancient red dragon within the furnaces of Heaven. This is certainly not a very promising reward for someone who would be fulfilling some neccessary role in God's great plan. It is certainly not a fate that anyone would choose. But it may just be a job that needs doing, and once upon a time i voulenteered. I decideded that i would be willing to pay that price, for a guarentee of the ressurection for everyone else! And I proposed this very thing to God, I would take the part of the Villan, i was willing. And I knew that even the bad guy gets to overcome the world in some way, and I certainly had some desire to overcome the world.

On the day I made that promise to God, I witnessed an event; it was a very private miracle. And since that day I have known that there really is a God, and that he was paying attention to events here on Earth and even to the events of my life. And I guess that for some reason God really does care about us, because on that day i found my way into his heart, it was a personal victory. The events of one day in my life provide the full measure of a successful life, but even so I went on to become a father 3 times over, which is certainly something that I wanted to accomplish in life. Or well, at least I wanted to have sex; the urge can be overwhelming at times for a young man, and I suppose for women as well. I certainly would not say that I have won every one of life's battles, but I believe that victory will always be a possiblitiy and even a guarentee in the long run. I am a firm believer in eternity, and no thing that comes into existence ever truely passes away entirely.

So how can the role of the world's greatest villan, and that of King of Kings be one in the same? Is it possible that the anti-christ, the King, the general of Heaven's Armies, and our judge be rolled up into a single personality? The world has in some sense been promised a day of judgement, that there should be a Lord of Judgement appear in the world with power has been a favorite theme of apocalyptic thinkers. As we all should be aware, in the doctrines of christianity, Jesus came into the world teaching Forgiveness; and he appeared among the people who were most in need to learn the lesson of Forgiveness. Judgement may be considered the antithesis of Forgiveness. Perhaps the world is in need of another great teacher, someone to teach the lesson of judgement. Judgement is natural to human behaviour, its something so common, we all exercise judgement on a daily basis. But in the same sense that Johnathan Livingston Seagull excelled at flight, a trait common to all seagulls; is it possible for one man to prove excellence in judgement?

Please consider this for a moment, the final words of Jesus upon the cross are very well known. Essentially Jesus gave his endightment of humanity with those words, in effect he admited before God that, "Yes indeed the people are ill behaved!" But Jesus said that the cause of the problem was a lack of knowledge, and on that basis he makes his pleae for forgiveness. Jesus very well may have said the words, "God bless these people with much knowledge!" And so it has come to pass, knowledge has increased in the world tremendously, the people have been blessed by God. In fact our knowledge is so diverse and abundantly available now that we should really have to ask the question whether or not the final plea of Jesus is still valid. By all indications the knowledge is now available to the people, and yet the people are still ill-behaved! Perhaps Jesus was wrong in the end, and knowledge was not the problem? Even though factual knowledge may be available, the people still seem to prefer mere belief over evidence. Of course knowledge has become so abundant now that no one person can encompass it all. But knowledge is one thing, and understanding is something else, a little bit of good knowledge can go a long way toward understanding our situation in the world. It shouldn't be neccessary to know everything in order to understand everything. We are each a witness to events in the world and it may seem very difficult to get the big picture, there is simply too much going on. It would seem that we all have enough problems to worry about without considering that there may be still more problems of which we are mostly unaware!

But for every problem there is a solution, and part of the solution is understanding the problem.

Hatred is a problem in our world, because the many people have a will to violence.
And violence may be defined in the broadest of terms, as any application of force.
If hatred may be attributed to one cause, it has defied our ability to identify and eliminate it. Yet I believe that there are some indications that hatred may be subject to an education. We, as individuals can not be held responsible for the content of our education. If we have come to accept certain ideas for truth, and we have instead been decieved, then i guess that truth isn't always obvious.

We should always prefer to believe that we are special, that we belong to the best groups, and that the people who agree with us are the best people. Yet this kind of thinking leads to a denial of basic human dignity, as a concept of who should be deserving of fair treatment. The honorable man is clearly deserving of the best opportunities in life, they deserve our attention - and the dishonorable man deserves none. But for the lack of good companionship in our lives, the developement of healthy personality is handicapped; and despite the fact that friendship should be considered a basic human need, some people go shunned and unsocialized.

The problem of poor companionship has become more and more of a crisis in our world. Children have become mass murderers in the public schools, clearly this is evidence of some serious problems in our society. And it is a problem of exclusion and inclusion, because we exercise our judegement to make choices about other people.

No one is undeserveing of my attention, and i can not decide that one person is more or less important than another person.

Puting such principles into practice can lead a person into situations that many people would consider evidence of poor judgement rather than extraordinary judgement.

But i do care for my own opinions the most, and the opinions of another person may be of little to no significance. Because most people have the expectation of instant gratification, they will make thier observations and walk away. Patience and enduring commitment are hard to come by. All those shallow and destitue people still believe that speration is a possiblity, but in the long run it is not a possibility because we are all companions within Heaven and the Eternal Kingdom.