Starlight and moonbeams

The magician isn’t crazy. He is just being driven insane. Because he couldn’t fit the boundaries people set for him.

The idea of love has gone through many misinterpretations in most societies. We’ve been taught through religions, doctrines, media, and traditions that in order to experience love, we have to worry about it, search outside ourselves for it, sacrifice for it, experience pain and heartbreak over it, suffer for it, give up things we want to have it, believe it’s conditional/we have to earn it, and so on. Real love is always easy, unconditional, expansive, joyful, eternal, steadfast, and nonjudgmental. It’s simply the way people have misinterpreted love that has created the illusion that it’s anything less than those qualities.

People equate virtue with turning down dessert. There is always one person at the table who holds up her hand when I serve the cake. No, really, I couldn’t, she says, and then gives her flat stomach a conspiratorial little pat. Everyone who is pressing a fork into that first tender layer looks at the person who declined the plate, and they all think, That person is better than I am. That person has discipline. But that isn’t a person with discipline, that is a person who has completely lost touch with joy. A slice of cake never made anybody fat. You don’t eat the whole cake. You don’t eat a cake every day of your life. You take the cake when it is offered because the cake is delicious.

Are you prepared to live world peace?

The more we came to live in that artificial reality, the more separate we became from the inherently fascinating realm of nature and community. Today, in a familiar pattern, we apply further technology to relieve the boredom that results from our immersion in a world of technology. We call it entertainment. Have you ever thought about that word? To entertain a guest means to bring him into your house; to entertain a thought means to bring it into your mind. To be entertained means to be brought into the television, the game, the movie. It means to be removed from your self and the real world. When a television show does this successfully, we applaud it as entertaining. Our craving for entertainment points to the impoverishment of our reality.

PSA: There is no shame in admitting that you were previously speaking from a less informed place. There’s a lot of info in the world. No one has all of it. We do our best, and at your best, we help each other learn.

Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is brutal. The brutality of ignorance is such that it will make you dead while alive.

It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar. Fear it or not, it is happening already.