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November 26, 2012

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I'd especially like to see that "A Human Being Lives Here" banner hung on the Pope's Vatican residence, and the home of every supposed divine or quasi-divine person on Earth. Gurus. The Dalai Lama. Yogis. Anyone who claims to talk with God.

We're all just human beings living a human life. We all have human desires, human lusts, human cravings. For sex, for God, for all sorts of things. The force of life drives us at every moment, as it must. Until we're dead.


Even the quasi-divine wannabe is often the first to admit his human-ness and fallibility. But, he/she may counter that "the force of life drives us" only as long as we remain unenlightened. And those mysterious flashes of intuition; those few precious moments of peace and detachment from life's maelstrom; that sense of the surreal about this "too, too solid world" -- all are leakage of something beyond the "surly bonds of earth". And some mystics assert that total enlightenment is possible -- just not with a self-help book or 24-hour fee course. Difficult, long, painfully transformative but nonetheless, not impossible.


No, they can't prove a higher reality or spirit or God. How could you shoehorn proof of the transcendent back down through the wormhole into "reality" as we know it... Even a mystic's metaphor would fall absurdly
short. You'd have to experience this transcendence yourself. The alternative is to remain safely in a cocoon offered by the usual suspects - priests, idealogues, even men in lab coats. However well-meaning, they'll expound the only reality they know; doubt those without "proper" credentials and orthodoxy; inevitably reveal a bias that any other reality is a hoax, a chimera, the refuge of a young child or a scoundrel. They'll insist that there's no exit door from this train "driven by the forces of life".

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