Why The ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act Can Suck My Balls

I’m done pretending to be an all-wise spiritual teacher. I’m more of a student than anything, and some things still piss me off. American Education is one of them.

I saw Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education, on The Colbert Report last night and she talked about how great this Act is, talking about how schools must meet certain standards in order to receive funding, etc. Wikipedia says the purpose of the Act is “to improve the performance of U.S. primary and secondary schools by increasing the standards of accountability for states, school districts, and schools.”

America says, “My children aren’t getting educated enough. What should I do?”
Dumbass American Logic says, “Hold schools more accountable so that they will educate our children more.”

This would be perfect, if kids didn’t have FREE WILL. Ms. Spellings said last night something about “making sure the kids are at their grade level,” as if it’s someone’s choice other than the kids. She’s not even denying the fact that the education system has no respect for free will.

Children aren’t empty boxes that get filled in proportion to how many books the grown ups place inside them. Education is not a mechanical process. You can’t put a child on a conveyor belt and expect him to come out the other end with an ‘education’ AND a soul. If you treat a kid like he’s a machine from age three to twenty-five, he’s gonna treat the WORLD like a machine, ‘functioning’ for 60 years and dying before his heart opens. He isn’t gonna know he has the potential for anything beyond his mechanically-educated, loveless, soulless ass.

American Education is a slaughterhouse.

Walk in the door and the education machine immediately chops off your will to live, one day at a time, starting when you’re a little kid so you never even notice. Then they hang you on a meat hook, upside down by your obedient carcass, slice you open with a piece of chalk, rip out your heart and replace it with books and papers and information. They tell you this is GOOD. You weren’t born perfect, you need to be EDUCATED. You weren’t born with infinite love and a unique gift for the whole world, you have to fill the mind with tripe so that you can calculate your gift to the world by using the kind of logic that brought about the hopelessly inane No Child Left Behind Act.

If we keep educating children the way we have been, we’ll keep getting grown ups like the ones who are making and voting for these stupid fuckin’ laws.

Here’s a sad story:

My friend is at her University orientation right now, meeting her schoolmates for the first time and signing up for classes. This is a girl who’s pretty awake. She’s at a very well-respected university, and the fruits of the education system came as a shock. She sent me a text message:

“Seems like a lot of people are going to college just to go…”

Yes, she even added that ellipsis (the three dots at the end) to emphasize the sadness.

I realized it too, back in the day. That’s why I dropped out. Someone asked me “What are you going to college for?” one too many times, prompting the answer “Because I was born and raised to like a sheep and didn’t realize it until now.”

Here’s how it works:

1) Place kid in mechanical education system young, so he has no idea what hit him
2) From the age of three to adulthood, create a system that makes all his decisions for him. What he’s gonna study, how he’s gonna study it, what building he’ll be returning to hundreds of times a year, what classroom he’ll be sitting in hundreds of times a year, what he does with his spare time every night, etc.
3) Keep him in this machine until he’s demonstrated enough obedience that you can reward him with a diploma
4) Congratulations, you now have an obedient, ‘educated’ young adult who has no idea what it’s like to run his own life. Perfect for all sorts of slave institutions, like society.

Ooh, I done called society a slave institution! Why?

Ever seen a homeless person? What sets him apart from all the other people?

He doesn’t have a job.

If you don’t WORK, you don’t LIVE.

If you don’t function in this country exactly the way it wants you to, you don’t have the right to live. You can choose to work a job, or you can sit your ass down on 3rd and Broadway and wait for death.

Soulless.

Are humans machines, who are to be thrown away as soon as they stop ‘functioning’?

Is there nothing more to life than ‘functioning’?

The more people are treated like machines, the more they’ll believe they are machines. We will forget that we are beings of love even more than we already have, and we’ll spiral down into an epidemic of apathy. Men whose facial expressions never change, functioning all day, then going home and sedating themselves with shitty movies and shitty beer. You like that picture?

I say, let beauty be a profession. Not cosmetics, not modeling. Let acknowledging and nourishing your own inner radiance and perfection be a profession. Let us transcend functioning, and acknowledge the value of life itself. Let’s recognize people for the unique works of art that they are. You can’t put the Mona Lisa and Doryphoros through a machine and have them come out the way you want them. Let us treat living beings as living beings, let’s remember that we are ALIVE.

FUCK functioning.

I’ve got an idea for a new act. It’s called the “Bring Children Back to Life” Act. Sign it, bitch!

Let Nothing Escape the Field of ‘Yes’

I was just watching some Adyashanti and Eckhart Tolle videos on youtube. Several times they talked about complete acceptance of the moment, and how even when emotions such as anger arise, accepting them puts you at peace and allows them to flow through you and out.

So I’ve been sitting here with my eyes closed, just accepting everything, saying ‘yes’ to everything. A thought comes up that’s discouraging or negative, I say ‘yes’ to it. A fear arises, I say ‘yes’ to it and accept it. I feel physically uncomfortable, I say ‘yes’ to that sensation and miraculously the unpleasantness disappears. Even when I forget to say ‘yes’ to something and say ‘no’ instead, I immediately say ‘yes’ to saying no. If you make a ‘mistake’, you can even say yes to saying no! You can say yes to messing up, being imperfect, letting yourself be tricked by the ego, anything.

So I was allowing the mind to wander and think of how it would describe this magical method to my mom, and the sentence came… “Let nothing escape the field of Yes.”

Identify with awareness, center yourself in that empty space that is nothing in particular, yet is the perceiver of everything. Allow the light that shines through that space to be the light of Yes, so that Yes falls upon everything your attention does. I’m noticing a lightness beginning to permeate my being and the space around me, and sometimes even extend a little out into the world, like a limb of empty consciousness reaching out and saying yes to something.

It is time to learn the art of not-striving. It is time to learn how to allow. I wasn’t sure how to do this at first, because when you want something really badly (for me, it’s the unconditional love state and enlightenment, whichever the ego thinks is reachable at the moment) the way that seems right unto a man is to pursue it. That’s the way it works in the world. You’re hungry, you see a rabbit, you need to catch it and eat it, so you chase after it. It runs away, you get closer and closer, run faster and faster, and then you catch it and you have what you want.

But when what you’re seeking lies inside, wanting, chasing, pushes it away.

I’ve never felt like I’ve been able to release on things totally (referring here to the Sedona Method), because there’s always been the feeling that I’m using it as a tool to get something. I’ve never been completely non-attached to the outcome of releasing. I’ll release the fear of death, hoping and expecting that as I do I’ll let myself die a little and “gain” some Light. I’ll release wanting something, hoping that I’ll get it. I’ve been treating releasing as a mechanical process. Do this, and I’ll get that. Like, flip that switch, and the light will come on. It doesn’t work that way. Releasing IS a mechanical process, but you can’t treat it like one or you’ll have expectations, and expectations block the light as you try to fit it into a certain shape.

By creating a ‘yes’ context around everything within awareness, it allows me to non-attach from the outcome. It allows releasing to happen on its own, to the extent that it feels like it at the time. When it’s done, whether it’s complete or incomplete, you say yes.

I’ve gotta go practice this more now.

How and why we identify ourselves with obstructions to divinity

Imagine you’re watching TV, and it’s the series finale of your favorite show. You’ve been watching these characters for years, and you appreciate all their little jokes and quirks. After an hour, the show comes to a beautiful ending, and the credits roll. You turn off the TV and experience a slight sinking feeling as you ‘come back to reality,’ remembering that this is just a TV show, and it has no actual significance in your life.

This sinking feeling, this disappointment, is the ‘coming back to reality from a vacation’ feeling. You have given this show so much attention that your very sense of identity has leaked out into it, just a little bit. This show has been your escape from the reality of your self and your life. By identifying with the glorious people and events taking place on the TV screen, you pretend, just a little, that you know these glorious people, and that this is your glorious life. Ah, what a vacation! I’ll be the last man to deny how pleasurable this little vacation is—but ultimately, it restricts you.

Most people live life with the same ‘vacation’ mindset that they have when they watch TV.

“Oh, I have a crush on this guy and it’s driving me INSANE!”
“Oh, that guy insulted me and I’m so ANGRY!”
“Oh, I have a math test today and I’m so WORRIED!”
“Oh, all my life’s events and opinions MATTER SO MUCH!”

We take vacations in the drama of our lives by placing huge amounts of attention on things that don’t actually matter, and thus we allow our very identities to leak, little by little, into these objects of attention. We do this so that we don’t have to face the emotions that we’ve repressed into our subconscious, or the fact that our fundamental beliefs about the world are wrong, or that our behavior hasn’t been so loving or ‘good’ over the years. We KEEP these things subconscious by burying them under the excessive attention we give the phenomena of the world. We take vacations in the phenomena of our lives in order to avoid taking responsibility for the phenomena we have rejected, or are hiding from, within ourselves.

The ultimate vacation from responsibility is the belief that each of us is separate from the All—from each other, from Life itself, from God.

After all, “If I am separate, I can’t help it if someone hits me with his car! Everything that seems to happen outside my physical body is out of my control! Therefore, I am absolved of all responsibility!”

Sorry folks, it doesn’t work that way.

By taking this ‘vacation’ from responsibility, we place responsibility in the hands of the false identifications we’ve created. Now that we’ve got the illusion of separation, oh no! Now we have to find food and shelter for our separate selves so that we don’t die! And then, oh no! That guy is taking the food I collected, now I have to fight him to get it back so that I don’t die!

It’s easy to see that all suffering comes from this illusion we’ve given our identity to in order to try to escape the total responsibility that comes with A) being of divine nature and B) having Free Will. It is also apparent that freedom and responsibility are the same thing. Our freedom is directly proportional to the amount of responsibility we choose to take over our experience of reality. The more we vacation in false identifications, the more ‘victimized’ we feel at the hands of the world. And to take complete responsibility, to accept your divine nature as a co-creator with God, is to take responsibility for reality itself, and to free yourself from the illusions you created in order to escape that responsibility.

As we create illusions and escape our responsibility, our true nature as co-creators with the power to shape reality doesn’t change. We project the false identifications we’ve created for ourselves onto reality, and the universe mirrors back exactly those identifications. The universe, subject to our divine will, manifests exactly what we tell it to with the power of our attention/identification. As we become angry, we see anger in others. As we become stubborn, we see stubbornness in others. As we believe ‘I have no money,’ the universe obeys by manifesting our poverty. As we believe ‘I’m no good with women,’ the universe obeys by refusing to date us.

Before we realized what was happening, we’d used our power and freedom to render ourselves powerless and limited. We attempted to give away the responsibility while keeping the freedom, but the two aren’t seperable. We gave away so much responsibility/freedom that it may indeed seem like the entire world is out of reach, or maybe even out to get us. It sure may appear that we are separate beings, whose only power is over the movements of our own physical bodies. How limited this is compared to our true nature!

(Side note: Trading freedom in exchange for safety/freedom from responsibility is exactly what the United States is doing with the Patriot Act and all that counterterrorist airport security bullshit. Ben Franklin said, “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither freedom nor security.” I finally see why. It’s denial of a COSMIC law, not just a human one.)

There is only one way to remove the limitations we’ve put on ourselves.

As we release our false identifications, as explained here, we “inherit the Kingdom of God.” This kingdom was ours all along—but we attempted to reject the responsibility while keeping the freedom. This was later called the Fall of Man.

Ask Real Jesus

Mother Mary’s Garden

Saint Germain’s Golden Age

The Action of Non-Action

It took me forever to understand this concept, but I’ve had an insight about it recently that I’d like to share:

When you think of ‘action,’ you think of physical action in the world.

Let’s take one of these actions and look at it. Say, for instance, you punch someone. How close to your identity is this action? Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re not the kind of person who punches people all the time, but maybe you have once. Does this make you a person puncher? Does your identity stem from the idea that “I am a person puncher” and from there, all thoughts are about punching people, all emotions that stem from those thoughts make you want to punch people, and then all you do is punch people?

NO!

Why not?

It’s because actions are on the level of physical manifestation, the level furthest from your true identity.

Here’s how things come into manifestation:

Pure Consciousness –> Identity –> Thought –> Emotion –> Action –> Physical thing

(God) –> (I am an architect) –> (A building with a dome would be cool) –> (intense desire to create building with a dome) –> (designs building with a dome, hires builders –> (building with a dome now exists)

Pure consciousness, your true, pure Being, shines its light through these filters: your perceived identity, thoughts that spring from that identity, emotions that those thoughts cause, and actions inspired by those emotions. Pure consciousness shines pure light, pure love, pure being, pure wisdom, toward the world, and these divine qualities and power are colored and diluted and distorted by your filters. Your sense of identity has the greatest effect on how you experience the universe because it is the closest to your pure Being, pure consciousness, the Light that is the source of your (and all) life.

To illustrate, hold your hand in front of a flashlight. The closer you hold your hand to the light, the bigger the shadow is on the wall. The closer a certain belief is to the light of your pure consciousness, the greater the effect that belief will have on your experience of reality.

The reason most people don’t see that they are responsible for every aspect of reality itself, is that the beliefs that are closest to your consciousness, your fundamental beliefs that compose your sense of identity, are often unconscious. One of the goals of spiritual work is to rediscover these unconscious beliefs so that we can choose to let them go, let divinity shine into the world without those subconscious obstructions.

In order to let this divine energy, the source of all wisdom, love, and life, flow unobstructed into the world, a spiritual person seeks to let go of the obstructions on all four levels of his sense of self. Conscious or unconscious beliefs about one’s identity, thoughts that stem from those beliefs, emotions those thoughts stir up, actions those emotions inspire, and physical manifestations those actions create, all obstruct the flow of this divine energy.*

To let go of these obstructions, a spiritual person focuses on simply that—letting go. This may be called surrendering, releasing, un-attaching, etc. To do this, a person withdraws his sense of identification from things of the world, actions, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs, and chooses to identify with his true identity, pure consciousness. In choosing to identify with consciousness, one sees for himself that his beliefs, thoughts, emotions, actions, and things are outside of him; therefore, he has the power to free himself from their influence by letting them go. In seeing that he is truly pure consciousness, he KNOWS that he cannot not lose anything or hurt himself by allowing these obstructions to his true self fall away.

In short:

1) Identify with pure consciousness
2) Let go of all obstructions
3) Allow divine energy to flow through you and into the world, unobstructed

The more you let go of, the fewer obstructions there are between pure consciousness and the world, the more clearly reality presents itself to you. You no longer perceive outer phenomena that are actually projections of inner phenomena, because you’ve freed yourself of inner phenomena. The more freely divine energy flows through you, the more clearly you see reality, the more you love others, the more joy you feel, the more power you have to influence the world, and the more wisdom you have to know what needs to be done. You realize your oneness with this divinity and all its qualities, as the hands obscuring your flashlight of pure consciousness disappear. ‘Enlightenment’ is the complete surrender of all obstructions, and you truly realize your identity as God on Earth. This is what Jesus Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Gandhi, Lao Tzu, and relatively few others have done.

What does all this have to do with non-action?

The withdrawal of identification from obstructions to divine energy appears to the onlooker to be non-action. It is indeed non-action on a physical level. Instead, the action occurs at the level of identity—the deepest roots of physical action. By completely letting go of one fundamental belief, one immediately and completely eliminates the potentially unlimited errors one may have committed as the result of this belief obscuring the light of divine consciousness. This is the action of non-action. Although it appears that one is not ‘doing’ anything, one is uprooting the source of all ignorance, all non-love, all wrong action, all limitation, all selfishness, all weakness, all cowardice, all greed, all fear, all misunderstanding, and all suffering.

How and why do we identify ourselves with obstructions to divinity in the first place?

*Most people are aware that they are not their actions, and they are not physical things. Therefore, actions and things are not obstructions in and of themselves, but attachments to them are obstructions. For instance, to act for the sake of a particular result—or attachment to the fruits of action—obstructs the flow of divine energy. Also, attachment to physical things, as possessions or otherwise, deny the innate holiness of all creation by projecting value and ’specialness’ onto one particular aspect of creation.

Ask Real Jesus

Mother Mary’s Garden

Saint Germain’s Golden Age

The Power of Faith

A few days ago, I was reading about faith healing, and somehow for a few moments I was able to ‘believe’ a little bit stronger than usual that God’s energy can just enter me and heal me. And in those few moments where my faith was stronger, I did feel divine energy fill me up with peace and light. The amazing part is even though it was happening—it was obvious that the more I believed, the more energy I could allow in—even though it was obviously happening, I couldn’t believe it was happening. I couldn’t believe WHAT was happening. I wasn’t meditating or anything; it seemed like I was using the power of my will to hold a fundamental belief (“this isn’t possible”) back, hold it back like a heavy curtain, in order to let God in.

So, today I was giving Mother Mary’s Rosary for Clearing the Heart out loud when something interesting happened. Now, when giving these rosaries, you feel surges of spiritual energy throughout the whole thing, but I felt one particular ’surge’ that was especially powerful. So I paused and stared off into space, feeling myself glow. And I felt my faith strengthen again, so I seared the thought into my mind, “My heart is completely pure.” I felt light enter me, and with the power of my focus, I allowed that thought to recede in my mind, burning a hole from the surface of conscious awareness all the way down to the ‘fundamental beliefs’ section of my consciousness. When I felt it arrive there, BAM, a huge rush of light entered and transformed my heart in an instant. It was so startling that I lost focus and stopped the light before it could purify my heart completely, but in that moment it became apparent that indeed, “With God all things are possible.”

So then I set my sights a little higher. This time, I chose the thought, “I am enlightened.” I felt the reality of my statement grow around me as this thought now burned its way down into the deepest recessions of my awareness. I felt the atmosphere around me become one with my consciousness, and I grew less and less ‘attached’ to my mortal identity and body. This thought actually didn’t quite make it all the way down to the ‘fundamental beliefs’ section, but it did get pretty close, and it was exciting.

It seems that when you make up your mind absolutely, the universe conforms. This is the source of much theory behind the Law of Attraction and things of the sort. Try this out, guys! Just pick a belief and surrender all doubt, feel the truth of it, feel how it would feel if it were true, then forget that that it isn’t true. Make it true, and it will be true.

Ask Real Jesus

Mother Mary’s Garden

Saint Germain’s Golden Age

Why Surrendering Your Will to God is Awesome

Today I practiced surrendering my will to God. When you’re making progress, it feels like a thick column of energy is being sucked upward through your body from your solar plexus, upward and out through your third eye. To help me along, I used techniques taught in The Sedona Method. For instance, when I’d get stuck, I’d ask myself, “Can I let go of wanting to surrender my will to God?” or something like that. It seems that letting go of the ‘wanting’ to let something go is just as effective as letting the thing itself go.

Anyway, I was able to surrender some of my will to God, and when it released I immediately felt an inflow of divine energy, peaceful and powerful and blissful and sweet. I realized that by surrendering my will to God, I don’t become a robot whose body does God’s work all by itself while my consciousness sits back and watches, but rather God’s will becomes mine. In surrendering my will to God, I start to see the world the way God does, and desire to do the things God wants to do. It’s still me! All I’m doing is giving up the desires that lead to suffering and lack, in exchange for desires that lead to fulfillment and service. Wow! It’s just a trade off, the destructive for the incredibly constructive. I cannot recommend this highly enough. Don’t be scared–you’ll still be completely you! Only you’ll be a better person, literally. By surrendering your will to God, you pour the poison out of your cup and let God pour you a nice blend of wisdom, love, power, peace, and optimism. It’s glorious!

These three websites are incredible. From now on, I will promote them at the end of each of my posts.

Ask Real Jesus

Mother Mary’s Garden

Saint Germain’s Golden Age