Book2: Mistakes i made on the road homeward

This is a work in progress, its my second book called "mistakes i made on the road homeward". It is far more personal than the first book detailing some of my suppsedly worst mistakes, some of my traumas and hopefully a way out from them. Comments are welcome.


Book 1

Chapter1

Mistakes I made on the road homeward.

The tentative working title for this book is “Mistakes I made on the road homeward.” Hopefully after I am done writing it will still be an accurate title. One of the most important steps on the road home, the road to the inner self, the core self and in essence to who you are and who you want to be is admitting once mistakes. The second step on the road is letting go of the blame. Could just as easily be the millionth step because when one lets go of the blame one is almost to the goal anyway so it’s all relative really.

My biggest mistake is … self hatred? Or perhaps it is my rational mind or my obesity. Or the very search for the mistake that is the mistake itself. I don’t know that yet and I hope that by writing this book I will. It is difficult to hold all the thoughts in a coherent form for long, over the last 10 years I have gathered so many thoughts and ideas about myself that it is getting impossible to hold them all for any period of time and try to integrate them into who I am and still remember not to lose more when I integrate less. So I wrote the first book in an effort to teach healing, views on the universe and go through my personal purgatory emotionally. What I called books in the first book are closer to acts or parts. In the future I will attempt to refer to them as parts or acts instead of individual books. So this is my second book by the new calculation. This second book then will be more about my study of my own mistakes on a more personal level as I go through my own healing journey now that I am out of the emotional purgatory I was in during the first book. Having just recovered from emotional breakups and the likes I start this second book from a far more balanced approach, ready to come out of the emotional sauna and take my first uneasy steps on this road. Soon I will leave my country of birth, Finland, and go on a journey I do not know where to. This journey was started by me long before I was born, by the choices I made in the past lives that lead me here and through the infinity all of my existence has culminated on this one point, this point that will lead me away from the womb. Of course every step of the road is a step that the entire universe listens to with silent reverence as well as a cacophony of applause.

Even the smallest of ants taking the smallest of steps warrants a symphony of ecstasy from a universe that knows nothing but beauty. So, now I am sitting on the doorstep looking out, where will this new path lead I wonder, who will I meet, what will I laugh about, what will I cry about, how will I suffer, how will I enjoy. All that my mind is focused on is how exciting it will be. All the feelings of dread, fear, anxiety, and horror are mixed in a pot in my stomach and my soul throws in one breath of spices and it is all transformed into loving anticipation for the journey ahead. I will try not to bore the universe with too many details of how this journey came about but it is best to write it down at the beginning.

I am a conscientious objector, when I was assigned to work at a government facility, the supervisor and I did not exactly see eye to eye, and eventually the situation reached a point where the supervisor forged documents against my wishes and postponed my service illegally. I sued and I was returned to service but by that time the situation was so inflamed that another incident was bound to happen, which did when they first refused to give me a mandatory work assignment in effect once again delaying my service illegally and then refusing to compensate any of the trouble they caused. After this I was forced to admit that Finland despite my deep love for my country and commitment to it, was and still is a class society. Thus I refused to serve as I was being seriously mistreated and threatened for doing my job as a conscientious objector. I took the matter to case and lost, as I am writing this I face four and a half month in prison because I refuse to be a warrior, because in essence I refuse to kill others to defend a state that does not defend its own.

Like Mahatma Gandhi I refuse to accept tyranny and a silent class society as the way forward. I refuse to live in a society where it is accept that the government teaches how to kill for free but to learn first aid you have to pay. I refuse to live in a country where there are tens of thousands of homeless people risking death every day, and we spend billions on defense, preparing for a war that nobody can win. It is like a man spending his entire life building his sons funerary pyre but never having any children. So I leave, in the hope that Finland will wake up and see what it is doing to itself. I know there is little chance for that as my life is too small and too insignificant, yet I do it anyway. It is not about how small or insignificant my life or my actions are. It is about standing up to tyranny and oppression.

So I leave, I leave my country of birth, I leave the country where my family has lived for more than 10 generations. I hope I will come back one day, what the future holds in store for me I can not say.

It is so hard, so hard to think I have to leave. I know I should simply lay back and let it happen, to go with the flow and let what is going to happen to happen. I always have a choice but I’m not sitting here to make a choice, I am here to try to understand it. Then again, I’ve made my choice and I do not write about it here in the hopes of changing my future, I write about it here in the hopes of changing your future. There is divine beauty in everything in fact everything is nothing but divine beauty. I do not refuse to serve because violence is wrong by definition a man who makes a choice to kill is as beautiful as the man who makes a choice to love. In the eyes of God, if I dare to even think what he would see, all are equal and all acts are one. So I am here, choosing to refuse armed service not because killing is wrong but because killing is unnecessary. In a world where we struggle for resources with too few for too many killing would be necessary, or more accurately, death would be necessary. But in a world where there is more than enough to go around for everyone and as societies develop birth rates decline we no longer need to kill and no longer need to struggle.

When we are threatened with violence we should first avoid our attacker, then embrace our attacker and if nothing else works, prevent our attacker. Meaning that we should seek to avoid confrontation, then reconcile differences and only then seek to defend ourselves with force and never strike in anger or in vengeance. If our neighbor takes our land in a war it is theirs and we should not seek to gain it back years or even generations later. As long as there is a way to survive on the kindness of friends we should never seek to survive on the weakness of our foes. A strong friend is always better than a weak enemy. If you surround yourself with weak enemies you can rule and dominate, one spell of weakness and you will find yourself surrounded by stronger enemies. If you surround yourself with strong friends no matter how weak you might be you will be safe.

So, we should seek to be friends to all and enemies to none. Not because it is what weaklings or cowards would do but because it is what a true leader amongst nations would do. Seek to be friends with all and enemies with none. Even those whom we hostile to us would be our friends, and like friends in error we should wait patiently for them to correct their ways so we can welcome them as brothers and sisters! All nations just as all living creatures need a system to defend themselves with. Countries need armies but before that they need something to defend. Is there a purpose for a defense if all you are defending is a system of inequality, illogicality and injustice?

Love is the answer, when you act out of love and not out of fear or hate you will be acting in accordance with your higher desires and through that, the will of god. When you defend your country or your land with the force of arms and do so in accordance with love combined with wisdom and courage you will do great things. A country governed by fear, by a fear of the foreign, fear of the alien or the strange assaulting a country governed by love will succeed if the country governed by love does not defend itself. The country governed by love can strike with the smallest amount of force needed to incapacitate the enemy and tend to those who no longer threaten it, with equal love as it does to those that love it. When your immune system fails and you get ill your body has to kill those viruses or bacteria that are already in and threatening you, but before that happened your body had to have a long series of weaknesses leading to the eventual illness. When tissue or cells don’t get energy and release of toxins as they need to they slowly build up until they get ill and eventually a sickness sets in, by which point the immune system has to step in. It is possible to tend to your body well and reduce the amount of viruses and bacteria that can enter you at all but some bacteria will always enter and your choice to stay alive is stronger than their choice to kill you. But still it is possible to vastly reduce, even if not completely eliminate death in your body by making it impossible for bacteria to get a foothold in it.

This is of course just my view as the universe and god, at least as I understand it, has no preference what so ever so you are just as right as I am. One of the hardest things I’ve had to do is realize that abusers, the dirtiest child molesting pedophiles and Stalin’s and Hitler’s in the world are just as beautiful as you or me or Jesus Christ or any other creature that has ever lived. They were not born with the tag on their forehead that reads, sinner, their actions were not and are not inherently bad any more than our actions are, by negative, inherently good. Their actions simply are. What defines us and them is how we want to be in relation to them. What do we want our existence to say about pedophiles and mass murderers? Looking at the recent fairly popular movie 300 about the Spartans and the hero worship that their culture had I couldn’t help but feel saddened by the lack of mention that Spartans considered it a proper education for young girls age 13 to be given to older men to do their sexual bidding, though I must point out it was only anal sex. The Spartans thought it was all right if it was simply anal but they forbade vaginal intercourse for these sexual pupils until they were properly married or so has been told. In their society it was the thing to be and the way to be, had our supposedly modern values been used in that era it would have been considered barbaric and godless.

So who am I to go back in time and say they were wrong and I am right, just as I wonder, who am I to go sideways in time and say they are wrong and I am right. That the act of killing or raping is badly simply because. It is bad because I choose that I do not wish to be so. I do not wish to kill and I do not wish to rape but it is not inherently so. I’ve gone through a development that led me to this point where I choose to be something other than a killer or a rapist. But knowing that there are still killers and rapists in the world means I have to defend myself as I see fit or risk having my existence over-ruled by their desire. So towards that end I have to be in the physical and be in the now. That is also why a country must have an army, to enforce the collective ruling of the country against other countries. The only way to completely eliminate war and organized pain and suffering would be to change or force everyone to be peaceful and agree and such a world is a world where change is no longer happening, a world that is standing still. The wonder, the beauty and the horror of Earth is that we are a world that is not standing still, that we are a world that is fast moving from one disaster to another simply because objects moving fast get to make more choices and we as humans are a fast developing people, mere 10 millennia’s ago we were living in mud huts and running after deer with sticks in hand while now we are blasting rockets into space and a few years from now we will begin to really settle into space. Just so we don’t miss the adventure we will come across some new universal danger we have to face, resist, struggle, lose or overcome and head to the next challenge.

The more people resist and struggle, the more people seek to be more, to be less, to be enlightened, to be earthly, to be tall to be short the more choices we need and the faster we go. Like a fast beating heart making love, we will fill with all that the universe has to offer before we explode in joy and start it all over again. It is the fear of the end of our journey as well as the love of our journey that keeps the journey going. As the end of our journey approaches we are filled with both fear and love, fear of the end of our journey, what truly lies beyond and love at the end of our journey and the beginning of another. Love truly has no opposite love simply is. Opposite of love isn’t fear since fear is an expression of losing love and to lose something you need to have something. Fear and love are deeply connected and will remain that way for all time. It is fear we do not face and love we do not face that is the opposite of love. Opposite of love is that which we do not meet and that which we do not feel.

Were a meteorite to strike the earth today and I to watch it come down I would be filled with fear as fear is a part of the human existence, I would also be filled with love, I would be filled with love at the end of the journey and return to the beginning. If I were to deny myself the feeling of fear I would deny myself a large part of my existence, a large part of what can bring me joy. It is like a rollercoaster, if you do not fear it there is no joy in it, it does not grip your stomach it does not make you love life if it is all safe. So enjoy your fear, enjoy your limited existence, enjoy all the limitations as they are in part what define you, they are also a great important part of who you are and who you’ve chosen to be. If you fear losing love then rejoice in that fear, it tells you that you value your love, you value what you love and be true to yourself. Act as you feel, if you feel fear don’t turn it into anger if it did not come to you as anger, let the fear come to you, let it flow to every cell and every fiber of your being, let it be everything you are. Go with the experience until something else comes along for you to play with. God answered to Neale Donald Walsch in terms he could understand because he asked the questions, God answers to you in terms you can understand because you are asking the questions. God talks to all of us in our terms always saying precisely what we want to hear because there can be nothing else. I would venture as far as to say that god speaks to the schizophrenics in their terms just as he speaks to the saints in theirs. Both of them have chosen their path and need their support, when I blame myself it sounds the same as when I praise myself. In my darkest moments the voice of god is there just as in my brightest moments the voice of god is there.

God spoke to Mohammad in terms he could understand, he spoke to Buddha in terms he could understand, he spoke to Neale in terms he could understand and speaks to me in terms I can understand. God speaks in every small piece of universe and every large piece of creation in the sky. There is no boundary to creation and we can do what we wish. So love when you hate, love when you love, love when you fear, love when ever you are and what ever you are. Some times let go and forget it all, sink back into oblivion and rise again slowly reaching realization, cry about your mistakes, shake, throw up, feel sick, enjoy, laugh, promise to never make the same mistakes, lie back and start all over again. What ever you do God loves you because God could do nothing else. God doesn’t tell you to enjoy life and do something, God tells you to enjoy life because there is nothing but joy, you simply need to be reminded of it every now and then simply for the joy of remembering it.

I’ve been here 3 times or more in this life time. Come to the top, realize it all, spin around and jump back into the water and climb again. Some people climb mountains, us spiritual enthusiasts climb truths, we scurry to the top, we fight clean, we fight dirty and once we get there we laugh, party, sigh and jump back into the water laughing the entire way down.

I can understand the true face of god but never talk about it any word I use to describe it always marks away something that it is as well. How do you say where to shoot to hit a target when you are in inside a bubble? No matter where you aim you will always hit the bubble and no matter where you say you shouldn’t aim you will always hit the same bubble. So it is pointless to describe gods love directly, I can only hope to describe its actions, but even that is impossible as all actions are of equal value, I can’t say you should love and not hate as God loves hate as much as God loves love. God is the absolute everything, from the most judgmental pieces of existence to the most all loving piece and everything in between. That is the difficulty in describing God, no matter how you describe it you will always be wrong, just as much as you will always be right. You can be a judgmental preacher and be right, you can be a loving and be right, you can be neither, both, all, or the box by the door and always be right and always be wrong. There really is no up and no down, no left and no right, nothing at all. Let there be light, let there be matter, sound, electricity, sports cars, MTV and pop music, though hopefully less of the last two. The thing that brought all of this together, all of this energy to matter was a thought, when a choice is made in a state with no choices that choice twists matter itself, forms it into a shape of your choosing. So the spark that set off this chain of creation was a simple thought that shaped the background energy of clay, to put it in biblical terms.

So what links all of these creations to each other, was it simply one background word, one creator somewhere far hidden that set it all in motion and decided how gravity will work, how all the forces of nature will work, how they can be bent, how they can be broken, how they can be used. Or is it us, is it our thought, is it the self realizing machine, the world exists because we exists and we exists because the world exists. Information, wishes, electricity and even matter travel backwards in time. What if when I stand up and flex and look back in time and scream. Let there be light! That thought, that scream, that energy travels on the winds of time back to the very moment the universe was born and plays some part. Moments later and moments sooner someone who lives next to me would scream. Let there be darkness! That thought as well, that scream, would travel back in time and disrupt the process, setting off a chain of events that influences us both billions of years later. A chicken or the egg spanning billions of years!

So, back to the topic at hand, I don’t leave Finland because what my government did is inherently bad, I don’t refuse to do armed service because it is inherently bad, I refuse to do armed service because the Finnish armed forces no longer serve our country’s interests and they no longer serve my interests. I refuse to stand by a ruling that is unjust because it doesn’t serve the interests of Finland or my own to let an unjust ruling become the norm.

So, now that I’ve got that written down its time to get back to the topic of the book, mistakes I made on the road homeward. I don’t know if I’ll ever get home, if I’ll ever find the peace I’m looking for, probably not but I should at least try. So this is a collection of my worst mistakes, my worst blunders and how I came to make them and how I got a way out of them, from many different perspectives.

Let’s start off with the big one. Love

Mistake Numero Uno; Love!

Or how you are and always will be unworthy of love.

Or at least the perception that you will be, since that is what the world is, simple perceptions of something that is not in the perception but what the perception hopes to point to. So, the truth is you are and you always will be unworthy of love, simply because love isn’t earned, love is given. You don’t give love to those who deserve it through actions, you simply give love. You can never be worthy of love because love as it is, is universal and pure and to live a human life is never to be universal and never to be pure, there are only varying degrees of impurity and varying degrees of filth. So stop trying to earn love, stop trying to strive to become something you can never become. Accept that all human life will eventually fail and all human endeavors will eventually come to an end when the stars and all of existence grows cold and dead. At best you can stem the tide for a few years, to create something more, to hope that your actions will speak well of you when you are no longer around. Trying to earn love and trying to strive to actually accomplish something is akin to trying to earn all the money in the world. You can never accomplish it as the moment you have all the money it become worthless, people invent another form of money and what you hold will have no meaning and no value. So don’t strive to be perfect to earn love, accept love when it is given, love when you wish to give it and stop trying to be perfect because you’ll never be.

This is one of those things I would tattoo on my eyelids if I could. “You are unworthy of love” to stop fooling myself that I could possibly ever earn love and accept that love is given, not earned. But all that true nonsense aside. True because it happens to be true and nonsense because even if it is true it still makes little sense. Fact of the matter remains that all of us, through the virtue of reincarnation are the worst scum in existence, we are all rapists, murderers, pedophiles, serial killers. There isn’t one of us that is above any other of us and as soon as we forget that and start to think that I am worthy of divine love, earthly love or even the base love of good food and they are not is the moment we are judged. It is the proverbial black hole calling the kettle black. The reason earthly love, the love between people is judgmental is because there is death. If death did not exists then we would all be equal in our spirit and eventually nothing would differ from one another, for creation and for judgment and love to exist there must be death and there must be separation. What this changes for love is simple, universal love and the love of the divine, the love of all that is can never judge simply because we are all the same, a murder in this life can be mother Theresa in another. God knows this and so God does not judge, God gave judgment to us so we could judge as we see fit, gave us the power of good and evil, so we can decide for ourselves what we love. While it is impossible to ever earn love in the universal sense from the divine source, it is possible to act in accordance with other peoples desires and have them reward you. That may not be the same as the universal love but in a world of relatives, in a world where all life is truly relative and nothing has any real substance everything is relative, even love. So love is never earned in the grand sense but it can be earned from others for acting in accordance with what they want. So to get the physical relative love what one must do is not try to seek some higher universal purpose to life simply because there is none, there truly is no meaning to life, but to seek what the other person desires and act in accordance with that.

In that goal lies the real mistake I made, I always assumed that what people want is to be happy and to do happy things and all things of that nature. I painfully learned that this is not the case. People do not wish to be happy, people do not wish to be content, what people wish for is to be beaten around emotionally and physically. But more than anything else, people wish to feel superior. Being married to an abusive partner fills that desire, so does working for some illusionary position in an illusionary company on an illusionary existence, it makes one feel superior to those who work less. Our existence amounts to a contest to feel superior to others, even in a society designed to eliminate the desire to compete and the desire to feel superior will breed little more than a competition on who feels the least superior. People will compete in anything they can, especially love. So the mistake I made here is making myself readily available emotionally, assuming that people want happiness and offering to give them happiness. This lead me to a great many bumps and bruises in life. When I saw into the minds of people I realized that the key to receiving earthly love is to be difficult, to be distant and to be hard to get. I got more action than I wanted to, it didn’t make my life any easier but now I understood how to get what I wanted. So I was equally as lost as the people on the street, the people who wanted to feel superior. After I got what I thought I wanted I was still unhappy, still lost, getting the illusionary price of an illusionary love was still not enough, so the next logical question was what I really want since this illusion was clearly not it.

This has always been the center of my spiritual quest, love. I could stop, click my boots twice and I would be home faster than I could say Kansas, in home in heaven. But I don’t want to and I don’t do it so there must be something here I want.


The archangel and the girl in the mountains

I sit here once more, in front of my computer with thoughts running in my head, am I truly back here, back in the state of nirvana, back in the state of buddhahood. To even say it gives me shivers, have I truly fallen so far from knowing what is proper that I might say I’m in a state of Buddhahood? That I’ve once attained what can’t be described. Yet my mind comforts me with what the great once have said before me, the wisdom of others fills my mind and whispers to me things I know to be true. That it would be the height of arrogance to say I am anything but what I am simply because to accept a gift I am given would offend those I mean to help. That I would be so tied to the world and the people in it that I could not dare to be myself out of fear that they would be offended, that what others think matters to me more than what I know to be true. It would be like Siddhartha abandoning his quest for Buddhahood when he was called a failure by his ascetic brothers, had he chosen to value illusionary bonds over his goal of Buddhahood he would have surrendered and never sat under the bodhi tree. To forsake what I know to be true simply to fulfill what others desire of me to do. Am I truly ready for this I wonder, am I truly ready for the steps I need to take if I finally surrender to the realization that I’ve reached buddhahood again. All the pain and all the emotions in my life have been set in motion by me and I can see how I did this, I did it when I was in this state the last time, I carefully chose my words an set in motion a chain of events which lead me here. Truly I must accept that it all returns back onto me, when mere weeks ago I would have cursed the world for giving me what I asked for now I feel differently, I am in state of Buddhahood. Yet even when I say those words I can feel my stomach turning, I can feel my fear, my sadness all my feelings crying to me; “Let others do it, let others lead, don’t stand up, don’t act, don’t help, you know it will hurt, you know how much it will hurt, some weeks back you called to us in pain, you asked us to end it and now you wish to do it again, you wish to start it again.” I know how much power words have and how many ripples on the sea of souls will expand if I truly take this step. There is no going back, there is never the possibility to go back, only to stop going or to go forward and eventually we all go forward.

I would trade all of this, I would trade all of what I have attained for a chance to simply lie in the grass, to lie next to someone I love and look at the clouds as they dance in the sky. Yet that is not my path that is not what I have chosen to do. Sometimes the desire to go home, the desire to go back to where it all began and simply lie still for an eternity overwhelms me and I forget why I am here. In time I must go through it again to continue my work but that time is not now. To have a pupil, to show someone the way you must be on their level, it is of little use to be so high no one can see you, the real teacher is exactly where others are, not above not below. When the pupil builds a mountain of repressed emotions so they may look down on others when they try to reach heaven you must build a mountain of your own repressed emotions. Sometimes the pupil must struggle to reach the master, sometimes the master truly must be on the mountaintop simply because that is where the pupil thinks he should be. It is equally true that sometimes the master must be in the gutter, must be the worst drunk, the worst addict, the worst pedophile to teach us the highest things, to teach us sometimes the master must do this. But this is so simply because the master must be like a mist around the student, never hindering their vision but always gently guiding. If the student falls into the ocean the mist must follow. To clear a vision is to allow one to see. This is why you must, as a teacher, be ready to do what is asked of you. I have enough scars on my heart, soul and body to prove that I’ve been down in the thorn bushes with the addicts, the drunks and the pedophiles. So, in the end, I would not trade all of this away for anything, I have had my greatest wishes within reach, all I needed to do was reach out my hand and I would have had all I wanted to and this is when I always realize that I am already doing what I most want to do. Many masters forget why it is necessary to be high, they meditate and remove themselves from the community they are meant to help because this is what Buddha or Christ did so many years ago and so this is what they do now, they don’t realize that they didn’t do it because the action itself was important, they did it because that is what the students wanted, they wanted Buddha to be the way he was, he is and was the precious wish fulfilling jewel. The wish you have when you go to him is what he will give you, you ask him for help and he will help you in what you ask. Same is true for Christ, he gave to his followers and the people he met only what they asked of him and no more. When you as a teacher forget that the student is not there to help you but you are there to help the student you lose your way and if you are not careful you will not find it again this lifetime. When the Buddhist monks in Tibet forgot that the country was not there to maintain them, but that they were there to maintain the country they invited the karma of a Chinese invasion. Truly it is painful to watch as the Tibetan exiles still yearn for a country they know they can not have, to return to a time they can not return to. I would carefully remind Tibetans that just as Siddhartha had to leave his palace to find his way so must you leave your home to find your way. In time you will return to your home but it will not be before you have found your way in the world.

I was just in the mountains with a pupil of mine, a young girl no older than I when first attained this state and was aware of it. We were not in mountains of earth and stone but in mountains of repressed emotions, in mountains of our own making. For so long she had pushed down everything she could not deal with and try to reach higher and higher. After a while all that was left of her was her soul and her heart and she was starting to cut those into small pieces too and push them down as well so she could try to reach the heaven she always sought. She would have reached it but she would have rejected it, she would no longer be able to live in heaven because that mountain of repressed emotions would contain all she ever was and when you have no more dreams you can’t be in a place that fulfills your dreams. You would find only nothingness. When you discard your emotions and your feelings to be lighter you become like a hot air balloon, with nothing but a sack of skin to protect the balloon that is where your heart used to be and everything that touches you will be a danger to you. You can’t let anything close because to hug you too tight would be to release the air and you would collapse like an empty bag onto yourself. You must always guard yourself more and more closely because the more of yourself you abandon the bigger the bag becomes and more dangerous it becomes for someone to be close to you. After a while nothing more remains than skin and armor, a heavy armor to protect the balloon that is your skin and eventually you start to sink as the armor becomes heavier and heavier and you have nothing left of yourself to throw away. The way out of this is to slowly bring back inside all the things you threw away, to stop trying to climb, sit down and start shifting through the mountain you were walking on. This is where the teacher must remember, to have gone through what the pupil is now going through, to remember what it was like and to remember what is important. To show the student that despite all the piles of emotions they were walking on side by side it is easy to come down again, the mountain can be cleared away in a fraction of a second if the will is there. To always show that it is possible, if the student strives to do it they will liberate themselves and no longer need a guardian, no longer need a teacher.

So there I was, mere days ago, on the mountaintop of repressed emotions side by side with my student, who for the first time in a long time stopped and looked in her heart, looked at all the things she had thrown away, turned around and look at the path she had taken. She had always done as was asked of her in the spirit, always been there to help others and been there to do the bidding of others, so I reached a time when I had to leave her to clear out the mountain herself, I poked a hole in her bubble and handed her a shovel and a bucket to clear it all out and left. The most difficult part about the state and path I am on is that I must always leave in the end.

The other part of the name for this chapter, the archangel, is one of my forms, just as it is one of your forms. Simply because I choose to hold true to that form in my life does not mean I am any higher than you. If you react with anger to someone saying this then study your feeling, why would it make you angry? Why does it make you angry that a normal man can become Buddha or an Archangel or anything he chooses to be. Siddhartha was a spoiled prince with no knowledge of the world until he was 29 and saw the world for what it was for the first time. Jesus was nothing more than the son of a carpenter born to a insignificant town in a poor part of the world yet he rose to great things, perhaps not the son of god, perhaps son of god but the lesson is the same non the less, never judge someone based simply on what you think they are. In your heart you should always remember that it all comes down to you, all the strands of destiny, all the Buddha’s and Christ’s and the entirety of existence is at your fingertips begging for you to play with it, so perhaps I, the old archangel, will stay here for one more show, for one last hurrah.

The maiden, the tramp and the young man

When you live in the past you are always struggling to get over the stuff that happened long ago. When you live in the future you are always struggling to get a grasp of the things in your life because you always aim too far. I use my love, I use the people I fell for in my past as a way to avoid my future and I use my future as a way to avoid the present moment and I use the present moment to avoid everything else. Instead of living in the time I am meant to, the future to the future the present to the present and the past to the past I am stuck. I use my mind and my energy in a way that is non supportive of what I truly wish because I use it all to avoid that which I do not wish to face. Most people go through the same stages when they are born and grow up, they are not who they wish to be because for some reason or another they choose its not good for them. Perhaps their parents tell them it is not the way to be or perhaps the stress of actually living here is too much and they flee, they can go up, they can go down, left, right, back, forward inward and outward to avoid the center of their being because to be in the center is to be where it all resides, where all the pain you have pushed away for your entire life is. So we spend our energy and our focus on avoiding that which gives us pain, even after the pain is long gone we still avoid it. It is like a broken bone that never heals because it never gets the blood and the nutrients it needs. We are like that, we refuse to give nutrients and we refuse to love the parts of ourselves that are hurt because to do so would make us relive the experience that hurt so much in the first place. Better to be away than to be hurt, better to be fat and hate ourselves than to take another chance at love and do what makes us feel better, better to hold up an armor that will never break lest we feel the imagined sting of love. That is how we live our lives from moment to moment, keeping up walls and barriers to keep things out and to keep things in and we wonder why we don’t have telepathy and we wonder why we slowly die inside day after day. It is no surprise that societies that are more developed and require more complex systems of operating also have a very high degree of depression and other mental problems. It comes mostly from the mixed signals we receive because our society truly requires an overhaul to make it in line with what we desire.

To reform our society we need to reform ourselves, every moment of our lives we decide what kind of society we desire to live in and every moment we are living in a state that is not in accordance with what we want, in a state of disease we will make the wrong choice. We will sign up for wars that we know in our heart are wrong, we will work in a system we know in our heart is wrong, we will commit to relationships that we know in our heart are wrong. Yet we keep doing this, from day to day and night to night month after month until the years finally stack up and we let out our last dying breath. Of course the soul doesn’t mind, the soul never minds, we could be plunged into the depths of the most carnal hate and butchery imaginable and the soul would only rejoice, the soul will always rejoice because it knows nothing but joy for it is nothing but the most perfect joy and the most perfect love. So it is not a matter of soul or a matter of God’s desire, it is a matter of our own desire, what do we want our short moment on earth to say? If we want it to say what our existence screams for us to say then we must start to reform our minds and face our inner fears before we start to face our external fears. Before we commit to changing our world we must be at peace with our self regardless of what happens outside. We must be able to live with our actions when we go wrong and to live with our pride when we go right and that is in the long run the true challenge, to reform society is easy, to give birth to the perfect system is easy, what is difficult is maintaining it when all our desires mix and create a mixture that can only lead to war and suffering.

I cant promise that we will succeed, I cant promise that there will be any kind of utopia, ever, what I can promise you that when you go to bed at night and wake up in the morning, if you follow what your heart tells you and are at peace with yourself you will never know fear and you will never know death. To touch the end of your life with no fear in your heart is to know eternal peace, if life truly ends the moment you die then is there no better legacy than to go out with no fear in your heart and know you did all you could to fulfill what you want to do. If there is life after death then what ever is out there fear will not help you, the only thing that will help you is to be at peace with yourself and if you truly accomplish that then no matter where you are you will always no peace, be it the highest heaven or the deepest pit of hell. I am not saying that belief in God and hell is wrong, I am saying however that if in your heart you believe you must do good things and believe in the Bible or Koran or any other holy book then act in accordance with that, if you believe something else then act in accordance with that. Follow your heart and always follow what love and the kind path tells you.

When you open your mind to your heart you will see things in such unimaginable beauty that you will cry for the time in your life you spent in the dark. Before you take that step if you only seek pleasure I should say that you will also see all the horror of the world in such unimaginable shape that you will shrink away in disgust. It takes a great man to be able to stand up to all the worst people can throw at you day after day, it takes a truly epic man to go out looking for more. What separates the saints and the holy men from everyone else is not breeding, holy or otherwise, status, age, gender, or anything like that, what separates them from the rest of humanity is their ability to go back in after they can stand up again and ask for more. The reason why spirits like Jesus are so famous and so good at what they do is not because long ago they did something great and we still remember that, it is because even now they still continue to do great things, pray and you shall receive, despite the almost 2000 years of persecution and blood spilled by Catholics, Orthodox, Protestant and all of the subgroups of Christianity, Christ still answers. Despite all the thousands of years Christians have spent defaming Christ he still answers their prayers. In the same vain, despite the fact that Buddhists have forgotten all Buddha said and are trying to do something as incredibly silly from the standpoint of Buddhism as building a huge statue plated with gold and huge temples for a man who himself said should never be worshipped he will still come and help you and hold your hand on your road to where he sits. But I digress here, the point I wished to convey was that follow your heart and you will not need a cathedral to worship in, you will not need to follow a Buddha for you will become a Buddha. Eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are tired.

I feel I’m simply circling around the same topics I have covered so often, hate, love, religion, how to be enlightened, how to no be enlightened, how not to die in a bathtub. So let us return to a more mundane topic, to what I set out on this book for originally. To the mistakes I made, or perhaps more closely, the regrets I have. I don’t so much regret what I’ve done as I regret or perhaps fear growing old. I have this romantic notion of meeting a girl and falling in love. Doing things together for the first time, going to the first date for the first time, the first movie, the first kiss and all that, I’ve done all those things so many times they no longer mean a damn thing, I could go on a date with a 33 year old burly serial killer named Ted and it would feel the same. It’s not that people have changed, its that I changed, I thought that love would be enough, to love another person would be enough to bring them to me or bring me to them and I would be happy, yet all the time I tried to convince myself I was in love I was simply looking to fill something I lacked in my life that they could never fill, I was simply looking to be content with who I am and in the process I destroyed what could have and perhaps should have been the most important thing in my life, falling in love. I did it in my hurry to find my peace outside, to find the peace outside that I could never find inside. So now I find myself stuck, I still pine for the feeling of love I held when I was young and then curse at myself for never finding love when in reality I’ve never looked for love, I’ve looked for acceptance and peace, both of which are necessary for love but they are not love. I hate the women and girls in my life but in reality it is not them I hate, I hate myself for pushing myself to go through this again and again, time after time and perhaps, lifetime after lifetime. I Want out of it all, I want out of the circle but once again in my haste I might overshoot and instead of leaving the circle I push myself into I might leave life altogether. So here I am, stuck, I fear that to let go of the circle I’ve been running in for what feels like an eternity would mean to die so I feel that to die is to let go of the circle but that is not necessarily true. To reproduce one must have sex but not all sex leads to reproduction. To leave the circle I must face my fear of death, my fear of letting go and that feels like a death yet it is not death. And to die I might not let go of anything for it would all simply remain with me for another lifetime where I would get to do it again.

I always fall for the tramp, the maiden, the perfect or the perfectly imperfect. To love someone like me and through that redeem myself. Even if I only fell for books or cars or butterflies it would all be the same. It seems to me that I always fall for that which is the certain way to bring out all out from within. The more I think about it the more clear it becomes, I fall for the once I know will fail not because I want to hurt myself or because they are mean. I fall for them because of the pain and disgust I feel inside. What I’m supposed to use naturally I use unnaturally, I use it in a way that brings out pain. A knife lodged in the chest will hurt most when one dances. That is in essence how I feel. I go for what I truly love yet in the process I will always bring out the pain within because as long as I don’t get it out I will always harbor it close enough that it is knocked loose and starts to wonder around my body every time I try to fall in love. So it is projecting, I attempt to love others when I carry out a fetus built of nothing but anger, shame, fear and pain and when that fails I blame them for it. Everything looks black when you wear shades. Everyone looks angry when your heart beats so fast you see nothing but red. How am I to love when all I feel is disgust and the stench of vomit when I’m touched, this is perhaps my burden to myself, to know how to love myself before I love others and to go through this again and again to show others it can be done. When I was a young boy I prayed not for happiness or money, I prayed for spirits who have problems to come to me and ask me for help and I will do my best. Am I then truly ready to forsake this path for a while and work on myself, to finally give time to myself to heal from 20 years of emotional trauma? Even as I ask that my mind floods with images and feelings of my youth, how happy I was, how content I was and how it all went wrong. I still have time to fix it all, I still have time.