Finding our way to The Way one situation at a time. I don't know how great it will be, but I expect it will be interesting, and I look forward to it going on past all reason because wonder is just that way. Are you coming or not?
What is your experience of That Which Has Always Been Called God?
It dwells in the borderland between physical and psychic reality.
It may be experienced as a dream state of being, or as intuition.
A time when things just "Clicked" into place.
A series of events that came together to "arrange" an encounter that transformed your life.
A realization that came out of nowhere.
"Something that can be experienced but not understood, understood but not explained" (R.D. Laing).
We all have experiences that belong to the "idea of God," and are the origin of our idea of God--the origin of God.
The experiences are real and "God" is our explanation of them.
Exploring the reality of That Which Has Always Been Called God takes us into "the world between words," between physics and psyche. A world that can be "experienced but not understood, understood but not explained," because words cannot go there, and "God" is the best we can do.
That world has been called "Psychoid" by Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, and they saw "the Collective Unconscious" as belonging to that world, along with intuitive and paranormal experiences, the occult, the supernatural, the magical, witch-craft and sorcery, ouija boards and astrology...
Something funny is going on that we can feel, sense, know but cannot understand or talk about. "God" is as close as we can come. And "that which has always been called 'God'" is the best I can do.
What is your experience of that phenomenon? How has it impacted your life?
Think of this image as theology broadcast to thousands of people of a scene that never existed anywhere in real, actual, time.
In real, actual time, the tree in the middle is the only one that is real and actual. At the time I took its picture, it lived across the street from my house in Greensboro, NC, less than a mile from downtown. I asked Photoshop's version of AI (Called "Generative Fill") to give the real tree some fictional friends and the rest of the scene fell smoothly into place.
Theology does the same thing all the time. Filling in the scene with an imaginary forest of fabricated propaganda, asking listeners to "take it on faith that what is being said is so."
Theology is (As I have said before) a collection of opinions about hearsay. Or AI as it has developed throughout history.
Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1328) and a handful of truthful risk-takers like him called theology out from time to time with little to show for it other than heresy trials, Lynch mobs and burnings at the stake. Eckhart died, or was killed, before he was sentenced for heresy, but he had been found guilty of it for saying things like, "The last leave-taking is leaving God (The God of theology) for God (The God who actually is)."
The people who created Christianity were people who had a stake in the outcome of their efforts, selling their version of the way it could have been to people who built the church as it is today out of their neediness for hope and mercy, kindness and consolation. It was propaganda. Indoctrination. Disingenuousness from the start and still going strong after all these years.
We begin dismantling the atrocity by simply realizing that there was no Garden of Eden, anywhere, ever. Only dinosaurs and then, thousands of years of "circumstances begetting circumstances," with human development coming along slowly over time. With no time ever for one man Adam and one woman Eve committing a sin worthy of hell for their millions of descendants and making the sacrificial, atoning, death of God's only son necessary for the salvation of all of those who believe it is so--making the belief in his death more important than his actual death because if we don't believe, the death is meaningless, inconsequential, and irrelevant, no?
Which leaves us with the work of understanding the world as it has developed with and around "That Which Has Always Been Called 'God'"--and how that which we experience as "God," as "Wholly Other," and "Out There," is, and always has been, the inner experience of ourselves projected outside of ourselves, to distance ourselves from the mystery of the radiance we experience as More Than Words Can Say. It is US that we cannot talk about or bring ourselves to believe that WE are!
But. The time is coming, and now is, for our realization to burst forth in a new world of overwhelming wonder that "Thou Art That"! And where we go with it. And what we do about it. Finally, at last, after all these years! May it certainly be so!
Meeting the day as the day needs to be met is all that is ever asked of any of us. What keeps that from happening varies around the room. You will have to speak for yourselves, but my excuse is a profound lack of clarity. If the day were only more obvious about what its needs are, I would be more likely to be responsive. If I got more cooperation from the day, the day would have more to be happy about from me. As things stand, the day ought to be glad to have what it gets from me. Guessing what the day wants is just not how I want to spend my time. I have my own obligations and interest to care for. I do well to remember what I'm doing in the grocery store. And there is the time I spend in silence and solitude! That would be a great opportunity for the day to break into my revere with a suggestive hint or two. I give the day plenty of time to get my attention. It has to be a lot more proactive if you ask me. An itinerary with my morning coffee would be very helpful. The days have been at this for as long as I have. If they refuse to do better, they have only themselves to thank for the outcome.
The place of the cross in our life is the place of death and resurrection.
How many times are we asked to take our place on Golgotha and die again?
Every time a "collision of duties comes along where obligation is pitted against obligation, will against will" (Carl Jung), where we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. When that is the case, up on the cross we go to be damned and be done with it, bearing, again, the agony of the damned and suffering consciously, willingly through it, dying and rising again to die and rise again-- with a gleam in our eye and a spring in our step. Understanding and embracing what the deal is, taking our place in the endless line from Calvary to the empty tomb over and over throughout the time left for living (and dying).
Mile Post 244 05/01/2012 — Blue Ridge Parkway Doughton Park, North Carolina
We have to know what we know. We have to listen until we hear. Probe, question, examine until we understand. Comprehend. Make connections. Realize. See. We drop into the emptiness, stillness, silence, and wait for the truth to become clear.
We know what we seek. We wait for the epiphanies.
The silence is filled with answers. Do not run from knowing. Enlightenment is awakening to the truth of who we are, and how things are, to what's what and what is called for. The click of knowing is the sound of things falling into place.
Park Road Park Pond 02 04/04/2025 — Mecklenburg County Parks and Recreation, Charlotte, North Carolina
We have to find our focus, our grounding foundation, the essence of who we are and what we are about. What makes us US, defines who are are, always have been and always will be.
We have to recover the face that was ours before we were born.
Don't we? Don't you know what I'm talking about? Doesn't it ring true with you? We know who we aren't, don't we? We know who we are NOT, am I right? That's a start. It's a help. And now we know what we are about. Let's seek out who we ARE! From this time forth, and for ever more.
I write. I'm a writer. I ask questions. I make inquiries. I get to the bottom things. I investigate. I am a loner, a lone wolf, a hermit, a recluse, a solitare. I don't trust people. I have been used, abused, lied to, betrayed. I seek a safe, reliable, place to be.
What are the things that characterize you?
We owe it to ourselves to know who we are before we die.
Circumstances will take our life away from us if we let them. Did someone just say, "Donald Trump"?
Our circumstances, our attitude, our "vim, vigor, and vitality," impact the quality of our life to the exact degree that we allow it.
We take our life back with regular immersion in emptiness, stillness and silence--emptying ourselves of thoughts, emotions, memories, moods, etc. Everything and anything that creates difficulty and adds to our burden.
The Jon Kabat Zinn YouTube Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction exercises are a great tool to use in creating an internal space free from anxiety, fear, chaos and despair. Just counting our breaths provides a quick shift in attention, which, alone is a refuge from inner cycles of angst on "the heaving waves of the wine-dark sea."
Enough overwhelming ourselves in scenarios we produce without end! Listen to Baroque music and watch the wind blowing through the trees.
Morning Light at the Jetty This image is entirely manufactured using AI and Photoshop
Jesus was all about salvation--but not as it is presented to us. Salvation rightly understood is about dying to the right things that we might live in the service of the right things. And who is to say what is right?
Meister Eckhart, who was probably--in my opinion--murdered before being sentenced for heresy in 1328, said, "The final leave-taking is leaving the God (of Christianity) for the God (who is).
The God of belief or the God who is to be known? Which will it be? Salvation hangs in the balance (we might say, "On the cross).
The Gnostics were all murdered in the genocide that was early Christianity for proclaiming a gospel at odds with the way the Church of Rome, and Irenaenus, Bishop of Lyons, understood, proclaimed, the gospel, evidencing what Jesus had foreseen with his "those who lose their lives for my sake will find it. Raising the questions, "What is the death worthy of resurrection?" and "Who is to say so?"
Who is to say what is right and what is wrong? How are we to know who is right and who is wrong? Who says so?
We each make up our own minds--and realize by living out the foundational truth of how things are: The bread of affliction is the way of life. The cup of suffering is the cup of salvation. This is so no matter how we understand what is life and what is death.
The Moon and Price Lake, 10/17/2016 — Blue Ridge Parkway, Blowing Rock, North Carolina, Julian Price Memorial Park
Being here, now is being nowhere else but here, now. How long can we be here, now? What is with drifting away? We drop into here, now, and we drift away. And we can drift constantly. What holds our attention? What do we dwell on? Desire? Dread? Fear? Anger? Anxiety? Where do we go when we are not here, now? How often do we frequent the same place? What is the attraction? The fascination? Our favorite mental escape is to where? What are we telling ourselves by going there? What are we saying? What do we need to hear? Drift into listening. What do we need ourselves to know at this point in our life? Do a walk-a-bout with ourselves, listening and making inquiries. See where it goes. Asking all of the questions that need to be asked. Saying all of the things that need to be said, heard. Repeat the exercise as often as needed to say what needs to be said, heard.
Goshen Creek 04, 10/04/2018 — Blue Ridge Parkway, Boone, North Carolina
I want you to join me in a pact to no longer allow our personal gain, benefit, profit, advantage to govern our choices and direct our life.
We are no longer in it for what we can get out of it.
Instead, we are going to live in the service of what is called for in each situation as it arises, devoting ourselves to doing what needs to be done in the service of what is called for no matter what for the rest of the way.
And we are going to commit ourselves to knowing what is called for by learning to live intuitively, by teaching ourselves to drop into the emptiness, stillness and silence and wait there for clarity and realization to arise out of the silence and lead the way to what needs to be done with the gifts of our original nature, our inherent imagination, our innate virtues (The things we do best and enjoy doing most), and our intrinsic intuition, in doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way and in the right place as only we can do it throughout the time left for living.
Will you do that with me? If you will, we will create "a brand new world, Golda."
Goshen Creek 02 10//06/2018 — Blue Ridge Parkway, Boone, North Carolina
Courage for the work, heart for the task at hand, rising to meet what's coming in seeing what's what and doing what is called for in each situation as it arises in the service of our original nature our inherent imagination, and our intrinsic intuition, one day at a time, beginning here, now.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 