Religion?

I was recently asked if the Heaven Path was a religion.

My immediate answer was that it was instead a philosophy, but it occurred to me that that wasn't really an accurate answer.

The Heaven Path, or more properly Sub-ascetics, is actually a framework for religion. Adherrants of Sub-ascetics could rightly call themselves Sub-ascetic Catholics, or Sub-ascetic Mormons or Sub-ascetic Episcopalians if they approached their religion of choice with the following understandings:

That there can be no objective proof of God's existence.

That fundamental structure of the world and everything in it is necessary and sufficient if God does exist, and is simply the way it is if no God exists and it isn't possible to prove which it is.

That each individual person is necessarily of equal intrinsic and extrinsic value because God, if such exists, chose to create that which is not created by God and therefore cannot know the means of fulfillment of the Great Work, and that each individual person is necessarily of equal intrinsic and extrinsic value because if no God exists there is no way for any person to determine the value of the fulfillment of any other person in terms of our own or others future.

And that it is the responsibility of each person to fulfill his or her own unique potential without interfering with any other person's responsibility to fulfill their potential, for the same reason as noted directly above.

So, a logical question to ask now is "Where does that leave religion?"

Religion qua religion has always been the means of integrating the religious feelings that we all experience. There have been, across time, those persons who through their unique potential have been able to convey their religious perspective in a way that, when experienced by others sets up a more or less harmonic resonance with the religious feeling apparatus of others.

This created resonance serves those with less of the particular potential for religious integration to find a greater degree of religious integration than would otherwise be possible, and the state of being that accompanies religious integration is generally perceived to be fulfilling.

The problem is that there are always those opportunistic ones that can create the resonance, but are not satisfied with having aided others to higher resonance and so seek to also profit in one manner or another from the practice of the resonance creation. And once profitability becomes the objective, marketing is never far behind.

And what better product could one market than "Grace Directly from the Pneuma of God-brand Scripture".

It's enough to make you want to corner the market.

Idolatry and religion

It strikes me as odd that all the religions of the 'Book', i.e. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all condemn idolatry, yet they also talk of the 'Book' itself, the Tanahk and other vesions, and its offshoots, the New Testament, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, etc. as the written Word of God, which is by definition idolatry.

Beyond that, we know that the Tanahk (the Old Testament as used by the people that wrote it) was written using only consonants with no spaces to separate the words or sentences. It has been translated differently by each non-Jewish sect that has used it, and in translating it, the individual books have been put in different orders, and some books have been left out, while other books that weren't originally included have been added.

If you read the English translation of the Tanahk used by English-speaking Jews, you find that not only do the individual books tell a decidedly different story than the translations used by the Catholics, Protestants, etc, but that the original order of the books tell a different meta-story than the order used by the others.

I have no problem with the idea that a book is inspired by God as far as individual spritual purposes go (I've always felt that way about Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein), but when you start thinking in terms of putting people to the sword because they interpret the book differently or simply don't buy it at all, I don't think that any book can legitimately say that that outcome is either condoned by, or inspired by, God. It is merely allowed within the confines of His Laws.

Throughout history, every death that was suposedly inspired by God or commanded by God was, in fact, nothing more than a murder committed by someone who longed for the 'happiness of the knife', and was committed in a milieu that accepted the claim of piety as a justification for murder.

Self-defense is valid based of the face-value assessment of God's creation, but self-defense is always counter-violence (violence in response to violence or the credible threat of violence), but violence against those who only think or believe differently than you do is merely violence to satisfy ones own desire to commit acts of violence.

'Thou shalt not kill.' (∞© God)

Turn the other cheek?

It is interesting being in a position to see a continuous sequence of different people in a setting that lends itself to watching their behavior.

It amazes me to see how many people set themselves up for difficulty and conflict over what is essentially nothing.

Here's how it frequently goes.

A person will choose to occupy a location that blocks a pedestrian thoroughfare and then ignore the people around them.

The flow of pedestrian traffic will start to back up and someone will politely ask the blocking person to excuse them, and that person will look at them but then ignore them.

The traffic flow will continue to back up as more and more people have to wait for the oportunity to get around the blocking person.

The blocking person knows that they are interfering with the flow of traffic but chooses to assert themselves and their imagined right to interfere with the traffic flow.

Then someone comes along and points out that the person is obstructing the flow of traffic and request that the person move along, to which the blocking person responds to the advising person by telling them to mind their own business.

The advising person then wisely contacts whoever is in authority for the area being blocked, and the authority comes and tells the blocking person to move, to which the blocking person asserts their imagined right to be where they are. If this is happening on private property the authority will typically try to convince the blocking person to move along. But if the blocking person refuses to move along, the authority will (in Nevada, anyway) eventually Trespass Warn the person and then about five minutes later handcuff the person and turn them over to the police. The police will then generally cite or arrest the person, but either way they are now forced to leave the premisses and never come back under threat of immediate arrest, and are now in an un-winnable situation where they have to pay fines or pay lawyers to prevent them from paying fines.

And this is the best case scenario.

A more likely outcome is that someone that is being blocked will wait until they are right beside the blocking person and then beat them like a bad dog, and then walk away. And someone else will hang around long enough to tell the responding authorities what it was that led up to the beating, but will mysteriously be unable to provide any description of the person who did the beating.

So what exactly does this all have to do with turning the other cheek?

As with the admonishment that 'should your left eye offend you, pluck it out', it is unlikely that it was meant literally.

You should, instead, adopt a behavior pattern on your Heaven Path travels that assumes that when you are struck you will have no other recourse but to turn the other cheek.

In other words, if you behave in a manner that will provoke people to hit you, assume that your only reward will be that you will have to now lead with the other side for the next hit to avoid the significantly greater damage that will come with taking a second hit on the cheek that is already been injured.

VT after a respectful delay

No one wants to die.

But we all will.

And there is an excellent chance that we won't see it coming until it is too late to do anything about it.

That said, I would like to suggest a few thoughts in the form of questions.

The first is "Why don't events like this ever happen in police stations?"

The second is "Why didn't ANY of the victims have a weapon?"

The third and last is "Were Cho's actions a violation of God's Laws?"

Esoterica and Science

In your host's view, the universe was shaped in such a way that the sincere could communicate with the Divine Ground. This is accomplished through such means as meditation, the I Ching, the Tarot, Astrology, etc.

Those who practice such things with diligence and sincerity swear by the results. I, for one, have found that the symbolism of the I Ching, also known as the Jou I and the Book of Changes, resonates stongly with me and provides me with invaluable assistance in pursuing my Heaven Path fulfillment.

Our scientist pals, however, tell us that these methods provide nothing but random gibberish.

They base this assessment on the fact that the information provided by these methods cannot be tested in a way that would constitute proof of efficacy.

On the one hand, whatever it is that the I Ching does (I will limit my discussion to the I Ching because that is the only one that has consistantly provided benefit for me), it does with absolute consistency for me right up until the moment I begin to test it. This is consistant with the Commentaries of Confucius which indicate that the I Ching does not like to be tested.

And on the other hand, this untestability actually serves as a sort of a weak, indirect proof that it is in fact a means of communicating with the Divine Ground because as we have looked at elsewhere, the Great Work depends on there being no objective proof of the existence of the Divine Ground.

If you feel the desire to explore the esoteric methods of communicating with the Divine Ground, then the fact that you won't be practicing a scientifically sound methodology should not put you off, because if it was scientifically sound, it wouldn't be communicating with the Divine Ground.

Beyond that (and I paraphrase Heinlein here), if you think turning your hat around makes you win at poker, by all means turn your hat around.

Economics vs. Legalism

In dealing with our fellow humans as we travel along our Heaven Path we will come again and again to the difference between the Laws of God which simply cannot be violated and the Laws of Humans which can and will be violated.

Today we will look at the category of Laws of Humans referred to as prohibitions vs. the category of Laws of God referred to as supply and demand.

Supply and Demand is usually though of as an Economic Law, and this tends to make people think of it as a glorified theory, that can be applied when it suits someones purpose to do so. This is not the case.

Supply and Demand is better thought of as a Law of God because it is the way things are whether anyone likes it or not.

Prohibitions, on the other hand, are a codification for the purpose of coersion of an opinion.

An excellent example is the prohibition of alcohol that existed in the United States during the early 1900s. The majority opinion was that alcohol was bad, and so a codification for the purpose of coersion was passed with the expectation that alcohol would be removed from the equation thereby ending its effect as a 'bad thing.'

The problem with this was that the Human Law violated Law of God, and we have discussed previously, a Law of God cannot be violated.

Alcohol, for all its perception by the majority as a bad thing, was in fact a necessity (in the scientific sense) to about 1/4 of the population. In that it was a necessity to that segment of the population, the demand was sufficiently high that the price those who needed alcohol were willing to pay was high enough that people were willing to violate the codification and risk the coersion to supply it. Beyond that, there was enough of a profit built into the demand that the very people that were charged with the coersion could be paid to look the other way.

Alcohol continued to be available along with all the effects that made the majority believe that it was a bad thing. But we also added the effects of the coersion which was doomed from the outset to have no positive effect on eliminating the bad thing. In other words a bad thing was made worse by ignoring God's Law.

And of course there are the people that were the recipients of the coersion; those who were made to suffer as an example to those who might, and undeniably would, violate the law. How do we classify them?

I like to deify the the principle that says that a Human Law can be valid while being in direct contradiction of a Law of God.

I call the principle the god of ignorance, because one has to ignore God's Law to find validity in a Human Law that contradicts it. In acting on this principle, one serves the god of ignorance.

And those who suffered were merely human sacrifices, made by the priests of the god of ignorance, to the god of ignorance.

The illusion of altruism

It is useful to understand what people mean when they say that they are doing something for someone else's good.

It is tempting to think that the person doing the good is self-less in the sense of putting other people's interests ahead of their own interests.

Unfortunately, this is never the case.

The closest that we ever come to putting our own interests ahead of someone else's is when we are satisfying one of our own interests in a way that makes it appear that our own interests are being considered second.

Here is how that works.

A person may be walking down the street and be approached by a beggar asking for some change.

The beggar looks pathetic, and so the person pulls a few dollars out of their pocket and gives it to the beggar.

The person has created the appearance that they have put the beggar's interest ahead of their own by taking money that they had to work for and that represents value that can be traded for food or some other desirable thing and given that value to someone else out of the goodness of their hearts.

That hasen't actually occurred though.

The person instead asked what their own will demanded of them in the instance and did that. They may have willed that the beggar go out of their sight and determined that it was worth the money they were going to give to have themselves moved into the beggar's category of 'those who I have already gotten some from' so that the beggar would move along.

Or, the person may be one of those who desire to see themselves as someone who gives to the poor, and in doing so receives some measure of reinforcement that they are 'good' people.

Notice that in neither case was the money given self-lessly. In both cases, the money was given because what was being bought by the person giving the money was actually a bargain, and was being bought for themselves, and only incidentally helped the beggar.

In the one case, the person serves their own greater interest in being free of the sight of the beggar, by putting a lesser interest, that of retaining the value represented by the money, after the interest of the beggar, that of obtaining the value represented by the money without having to earn it, and in the other case, the person serves their own greater interest of reinforcing their perception of their own good-ness, by putting a lesser interest after the previously described interest of the beggar.

The above, in both cases, is a relatively benign instance of the illusion of altruism because it is actually a transaction between willing individuals, both of whom received benefit from the transaction and have the option of not participating in the transaction.

However, much injustice is done in the name of altruism, and the only reason that it is possible is that people believe that actions that appear self-less, or are advertised as self-less, actually are self-less.

But altruism is never self-less. It's always an illusion.

The loneliness of the path.

In a way, this will be a warning, and an admonishment against adopting the Heaven Path philosophy.

As with so many courses of action that fall under the heading of 'taking the road less traveled,' traveling ones Heaven Path will frequently be a lonely trip.

The analogy holds together in this way.

If you walk on main street you will be surounded by other travelers, and the opportunity for companionship will come often, but if you walk on a back road you will seldom find company.

In the case of the Heaven Path, you will still often travel on main street and often be surrounded by other people, but you may find that opportunities for companionship are more consistent with traveling the back road because you will likely be the only person around you that is on the road you are on. Your path takes up the same physical space as the path of the others, but they are nevertheless traveling a very different road.

This will first be noticable when you give up certainty. Giving up certainty will make you a much less outwardly vocal person just because you will begin to recognize the inherent falsity of so much that is said. You will be ever tempted to try to shake those around you out of their own false certainty, and this will not be popular with them. Most people desparately need their certainty, false or not, to keep themselves going.

Then you will recognize the error of trying to wake other people up, but as the crowd closes back in you will find that their company no longer satisfies you.

You will seek others who have given up their certainty, but then you will find that most of them are merely cynical,and assume that all positions are simply false rather than limited in the scope of the aplicability of their truthfulness. They are no longer seeking their own fulfillment, because they no longer believe that ther is such a thing.

But if you are aware and receptive and persistent, you may find that there are a very small number of people who have either explicitly or implicitly adopted the Heaven Path, and whose Heaven Paths may run parallel with yours. And these travelers will also be seeking you.

This is the nature of travel on the Heaven Path.

Consider yourself warned.

Heaven Path vs. Intelligent Design

I was recently presented with the idea that the Heaven Path philosophy was essentially the same as the Intelligent Design theory.

Due to the person that presented the idea being historically insightful, I took a while to think about it before proceeding with my off-the-cuff response.

The two concepts are similar in that they are not inimical to the existance of a divine creator. Their similarities pretty much stop there, though.

The Heaven Path has as a fundamental tenet that the Divine Creator created the universe with NO unambiguos objective proof of His/Her existence. If we believe in God, our belief must necessarily be based on subjective evidence, that is to say, the presence of our religious feelings.

For this reason, each person must be free to deduce or extrapolate the principle that God wants us to operate under. God's LAWS, on the other hand, are inviolable so there is no need to enforce them, any more than there is a need to enforce the law of gravity (which coincidently is one of God's Laws.)

In the case of Intelligent Design, its promoters seem to want to have it accepted as a scientific alternative to evolution theory. The argument seems to be that there are parts of evolution theory that have not been proven yet, so Intelligent Design, which is also unproven, is just as valid.

Of course, my description of this argument will no doubt be condemned as a straw man, but that is the sense that I have gotten on their argument.

The problem comes in when we ask where the testable predictive power comes from in the theory.

To my knowledge, there have been know testable predictions made based on Intelligent Design theory.

On the other hand, one needs go no further than the study of pesticide or antibiotic resistance to find predictive power from the evolution theory.

The Heaven Path philosophy unambiguously predicts that no testable predictive power will ever be derived from Intelligent Design theory, and so any testable predictive power that IS derived from Intelligent Design theory will invalidate the Heaven Path philosophy.

So I guess they really aren't that similar.

Thoughts on speech vs. actions.

A person who has chosen to follow their Heaven Path will find that they still must interact with other people.

Interacting with people can both help and hinder ones travels on the Heaven Path.

The most frequent problem I encounter in interactions is that of misrepresentation. People say things that are not consistent with there actions, or they say things that are intended to change the meaning of their actions.

And this frequently goes unnoticed.

If you ask someone to assist you in some endeavor, they will typically verbally respond in one of four ways. They will say that they will, say that they won't, they will check to see whether there is a way to help within the scope of their existing duties, or they'll explain why they can't help within the scope of their existing duties.

But action-wise, there are only two possible responses, either they help or they don't.

The problem comes when they say that they will help, but then do not. And they may try to use use words to make it so they can get credit for helping without actually helping. This usually comes in the form of an excuse.

One example would be if you asked someone to help you move, and they agreed to do so, but then when the time came to move, they didn't show up and called and said that something had happened that if it happened to you you would have to have begged off as well.

The idea is, of course, that they were all ready to help but had been prevented by a situation beyond their control.

This may, in fact, have been the case, but without verifying you can only go on what they have said as if what they said was true.

If that person has a long standing history of agreeing to help and then showing up to help, it is probably safe to assume that something really did happen.

On the other hand, if the person has a long history of agreeing to help and then having circumstances come up that prevent the help from arriving, one should assume not just that they didn't want to help. but that they also wanted to get credit for helping even though they had no intention of helping.

This is a very simple example of how speech and action often interrelate.

In order to avoid being misled in this manner, one must look at the actions independent of the accompanying speech, and make sure that the speech isn't taking the place of the actions, or otherwise being used to hide the truth of the actions.

For ourselves, it is useful to ask how we would perceive others, and be perceived by others if we judged and were judged only on our actions.

Perhaps the opportunity will present itself for you to discontinue speech for a period of time, and then see how your relationships look after the ability to explain or make excuses goes away.

Thoughts on Forgiveness

It is interesting that so much of religion centers around guilt. I believe that this is because, ultimately, we all know when we are doing things that, if done to us, we would find to hateful.

This can be something as small as making someone feel bad just so we don't have to feel bad by ourselves, to undermining other peoples work to minimize their success or fulfillment, to exercizing force not because it is necessarry but because we can.

And it always seems like we are justfied in doing these things at the time we do them.

But later, after the exhaltation has warn off, we wish that we had not done them. This is particularly true when we do something small just to make things interesting, but then find that the damage being wrought by our little jest is far reaching. We find ourselves in the position of almost wishing that we would be caught out just so we could make restitution and not have to carry the added weight of the guilt around for the rest of our lives.

For most of us, our little injustices are actually rather petty. But for some reason, the memory of these little injustices, and there results, float up into our consciousness at the worst possible times, like during or right after something bad happens to us, and they always seem to have the same weight of self-loathing that they did when we first discovered that we had once again allowed ourselves to mislead ourselves into doing something that we would not want someone else to do to us.

It may be the source of the concept of Karma.

I think Karma can be considered 'real' in at least this limited sense: doing an act of harm does tend to affect other people in the way dropping a stone into a pond will effect the water throughout the pond. It tends to ripple outward, but the ripples tend to wash back toward the source of the original disruption after a time.

When we rationalize taking actions toward others that we know would clearly be merely rationalized by others if taken toward us, we seek forgiveness from the Divine because we know that we will not likely forgive ourselves. But the forgiveness from the Divine is a rationalization in itself, because the Divine made us rationalizing beings.

If you want to limit the load of guilt you must bear, don't take actions that you will be unable to forgive yourself for, because your own forgiveness is the only forgiveness you will likely ever get.

The Host’s Optimum-Minimum Meditation Method

Well, everyone has probably had time to determine that they would be better off if they were actually controlling their minds, instead of the other way around, so here is the basic meditation method that provides the basis for all of the more directed forms of meditation.

If you practice this method religiously for fifteen minutes a day when you get out of bed, you will receive, in some measure, every benefit derivable from meditation. How diligently you practice will determine how quickly you will derive the benefits, but you will be able to stop the thought process (which is extremely enjoyable when you get to where it lasts for more than about two minutes) within about three months.

Sit in a cross-legged position or in a straight-backed chair that allows your thighs to be approximately horizontal with your feet flat on the floor.

In either position, sit on your tailbone with your back straight and vertical, and your head gently extended upward as though you have a puppet-string attached to the top of your head and it is gently being pulled upward.

Close your eyelids, but continue to look at the inside of your eyelids as though you were staring at something a little above the level of your eyes and about one hundred yards away. This will be weird for a while but once you get the hang of it, it is quite relaxing. The point is to keep the visual signals coming in, but with nothing being seen.

Now, concentrate on the sensation of breathing and the blank visual signals your receiving. Any time you catch yourself thinking about anything, gently return your concentration to your sensation of breathing and seeing-but-not-seeing.

At first, you will continually find that you have been daydreaming since you sat down. Don’t be discouraged. Just lead your attention back to where it is supposed to be.

After about four weeks, you will probably find that you can maintain concentration for two or three breaths but then lose it at the top or bottom of a breathing cycle. This is good progress, and you just have to keep going until you find the balance of attention that allows you to increase the time that you are properly focused.

At about six-weeks of continuous daily practice, most people will have a no-thought experience that will last for several minutes. Once you hit that point you will not have to make yourself do the fifteen minutes-a-day anymore, because you will find yourself spending time you used to devote to watching TV and other things you thought were fun in meditation.

The Third Category of Sub-ascetics

So far we have looked at two of the three sub-ascetic practices in the Heaven Path philosophy. The first, meditation, is self-control of ones mind. The second, Tai Chi Chuan, is self-control of ones body.

The third is the most ascetic of the sub-ascetic practices in that it should be practiced all the time rather than for a few minutes a day as in the case of the other two.

I call this third sub-ascetic practice the Formal Observance.

In Formal Observance, one maintains self-control of ones outward relationship with the world by obeying the laws of justice, displaying good manners, being respectful to those who deserve through their actions to be treated respectfully, and also to those who don’t necessarily deserve to be treated respectfully, and where it is not possible to leave a situation better than one found it, leave no sign of ones passing. That is to say, one observes the form.

This seems like a rather mundane activity, but it is the practice that will have the greatest effect on the world, and on ones fulfillment in that world.

The purpose of this sub-ascetic practice is two-fold. The first purpose is to get in the habit of using ones own decision-making process and will to make the world a more peaceful and harmonious place. By observing the form, we are able, on the one hand, to avoid introducing, through our actions, angst and unhappiness into the world, and also actually set an example that, if followed by so much as a single additional person, will reduce the strife in the world beyond that reduction brought about by your own self-control. And on the other hand will, through conscious control of our behavior, prevent us from creating obstructions to our own fulfillment.

Let us consider a mundane example of the former.

A person has a car and a favorite song on some medium that allows the song to be replayed, on demand, in the car.

This person has a friend that looks up to, and admires, this person, and also likes the song.

This person picks up the friend in the car, and as they drive around they listen to the song in the car.

Now, you are this person. And you are now pulling into the apartment complex that your friend lives in to drop the friend off.

In the non-sub-ascetic approach, you drive up to your friend’s apartment complex with the song playing at a volume level that, while acceptable while driving down the road because it is drowned out by engine noise of the other vehicles and the distance separating it from residences, is unacceptable in an apartment complex because it will be heard by everyone in the complex, and because even the subset of dwellers therein that may also like the song will be further reduced by those who are engaged by other activities the likes of which being forced to hear the song coming from your car will constitute a disruption to their activities. (Sleeping comes to mind as an activity that even a fan of the song would find disrupted by being forced to hear it.) Your friend who, for whatever reason, looks up to you is going to admire, or at least fail to find abhorrent, this behavior for no other reason that the fact that they look up to you, and will likely mimic the behavior in the future.

The question then becomes “How much disruption have you introduced into the world by this single action?”

And it is unquestionable that, had been you been actively controlling your behavior with the objective of not introducing angst and unhappiness into the world, you would have recognized that leaving the music blaring was inconsiderate at the very least, and would have turned it down as you approached the apartment complex.

And your friend that admires you so may very well have, at that very moment, adopted a policy of being considerate based on your example.

One never knows when one is being admired from afar, nor does one know when ones behavior will determine the behavior of others for a long time to come.

Now let us consider the effects of the above scenario on your fulfillment.

When we follow our own path to fulfillment we are enjoined from obstructing others path because we don’t know whether our own fulfillment will ultimately serve the larger work, nor do we know whether another’s fulfillment will serve the larger work to a greater degree. In both cases, believing that you know is mere vanity.

Beyond this, as we approach the time when we will most desire that how we spent our physicality will satisfy our desire for fulfillment, we will not want the memories that loom largest to be those that stem from having done harm to others, and their pursuit of fulfillment. In other words, a given level of fulfillment will seem much less fulfilling if we did a lot of harm to others to achieve it.

Moreover, the effects of doing harm to someone will often have the effect of shifting us off of a particular groove of our Heaven Path, onto a groove that is less direct and less cost-effective.

It is odd, but the world seems to be shaped in such a way that causing harm does not lead to fulfillment, even when it leads to success. We see this in those who cause harm as they become older. They become desperately self- protective, as though they must preserve every possible moment left to them so they can continue to pursue whatever it is that they are after. It becomes particularly obvious in those whose harm of others has led to their own great financial or political success. As all the things they are going to do fall by the wayside, and all that is left is the things they have done, they experience a progressively less avoidable self-loathing that they desperately try to bury with the feelings of exaltation they had previously felt during their moments of conquest. But as they get closer and closer to the end, the exaltation itself feels more and more loathsome.

On the other hand, those who have pursued their own fulfillment but have habitually detoured around circumstances that would have resulted in their actions causing harm to others find that although they may not be famous or rich, they are able to accept their impending passing into the next world because the fulfillment they did achieve did not hinder the fulfillment of others.

Control your mind. Control your body. Control your behavior.

This is Sub-ascetics.

Health and Longevity and Physical Sub-ascetics

Our physicality is the intermediary between our will and our fulfillment.

Of course, it stands to reason that some people have their maximum point of fulfillment at the end of a Heaven Path that is primarily mental, such as the truly great philosophers and theoreticians, but for the vast majority of us, we will need our bodies to be in a good state of repair to achieve even a small portion of our potential fulfillment.

For this reason, we must consider the care of our bodies in order to plot a course that will allow the maximum amount of time as viable physical entities for us to work toward our fulfillment without having too much of that time in ensuring that maximization.

Beyond that, we must also consider all the other means besides failing to maintain ourselves that may result in premature loss of physicality.

Besides disease, we face such things as accidents and, of course, violence.

There are a very large number of people that spend a lot of time in daily exercise to maintain good health. This is admirable, but so much exercise serves only the purpose of keeping the body active, and possibly enhancing ones desirability.

Most exercise routines do very little towards protecting you from either accidents or violence.

One can enhance ones survivability from both accidents and violence by spending your exercise time in the study of a martial art. This is so because, on the one hand, virtually all martial arts systems will expose you to the strategy and tactics of personal violence, and on the other hand, practice of most martial arts systems will tend to condition your body and mind to work together without the slow decision-making process that so often gets in the way when confronted by the unexpected.

There are many martial arts systems and schools out there, and unfortunately, many of them are less than reputable.

As an aside, I should probably point out that my chosen profession for the last two decades or so involves frequent violence that comes in the form of a variety of people suddenly deciding to do harm to me, but I am not allowed, for several excellent reasons, to harm them back. That is to say, I have to confront the violence but when I’m done, those I have confronted should be gift-wrapped, but be none the worse for wear.

For my physical sub-ascetics, I advocate a single martial art. It is not the first one I’ve practiced, but it will be the last. As an exercise system, it is beneficial in so many ways and at so many levels that, for me, there is no other martial art.

The martial art is Yang-style Tai Chi Chuan.

Get sum!

Understanding understanding.

It is not unusual for people to mistake having a cherished opinion for having understanding.

Typically, an opinion becomes cherished when it seems to account for the facts and supports what we want to believe anyway.

Real understanding is not like that in that it tends to show that what we want to believe has significant limitations and weaknesses. We know that what we want to believe will always have these limitations and weaknesses because of complimentarity.

This problem is most severe in the human interaction realm. Conservatives believe that they understand the world, and the liberals are just idiots. Liberals believe that they understand the world, and the conservatives just evil.

In both cases, they cherish their own opinions, and ignore those of the other side.

How this is to be overcome by those who wish to really understand is not well known, despite having been well described for a long time.

There are actually two ways or methods that I advocate for ensuring that ones understanding is, in fact, understanding.

The first is known as the Law of Charity.

The Law of Charity states that one must assume the same level of intelligence, honesty, sincerity, etc., that one would ascribe to oneself in supporting a position in the persons supporting the opposing position. In other words, if the opposing party supports their position because they are idiots or corrupt or blind, you do not yet understand.

The second deals with understanding from a standpoint of debate, specifically, ones qualification to debate an issue. Of course, every person should be free to debate an issue whether they understand or not because frequently we learn that we don’t understand an issue in the course of a debate. That said, there is nevertheless a standard that determines whether our debate efforts are part of the learning process, or part of the teaching process. Debate positions that are based on cherished opinion will usually be defeated by positions based on understanding, for the simple reason that the position based on understanding, regardless of which side of an issue it is on, will be argued by someone who can argue both their side of the argument, and the other side of the argument, better than his debate opponent can.

You don’t really understand an issue until you can argue either side of the issue better than the person arguing the other side of the issue can argue that side of the issue.

Anger

The most difficult mindset to control is anger. Once it is unleashed, getting it back under control is very difficult.

Why is this?

As we learned from Yoda, or Daoism if you study such things, anger is part of an emotional cycle. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hatred, and hatred leads to suffering, which then, in turn, leads to more fear.

The reason anger is so hard to get under control is because it is so much more preferable to fear.

As soon as we become angry we, out of long habit, nurture and strengthen the feeling in order to blot out our sensation of fear. Being afraid is socially unacceptable, and as such, is strongly humiliating, and whenever we feel fear, it is compounded by our humiliation at being afraid.

It is, perhaps, easier to see fear turn to anger in other people than it is to see it in ourselves for the vary reason that it so hard to get under control. When looking at ourselves, it is too easy to pretend that what we got angry about, we were not first afraid of.

So, the next time you see someone you know get angry, ask yourself what it was that made him or her angry, and why they had reason to be afraid. But don’t necessarily accept the easy answers, especially if it doesn’t seem on the surface that there was anything for them to be afraid of.

Look instead for the deeper answer.

And don’t try to point it out to the angered person. Instead, study it and see if it provides insight into your own fear and anger.

One purpose of sub-ascetics in general, and meditation in particular, is to help you overcome your fears, and also to accept your fears instead of hiding from them in a cloud of anger.

It is better to acknowledge to yourself that you are feeling fear, than it is to get angry so that you can pretend that you aren’t afraid. Once you become angry, it is such a small step to seeking out someone that you don’t fear, and then making that person afraid just so you can prove to yourself that you weren’t really afraid.

But you were, in fact, afraid, and your anger proves it.

Now!

There are arguments besides the ‘lack of control of ones own mind’ argument in favor of sub-ascetic practices, meditation in particular.

As far as the current science goes, humans are the only species that are capable of engaging in any form of time-travel.

I know, this is news to you, but what I mean is that we are capable of thinking in the past, in the form of memory, and in the future, in the form of fantasizing. In fact, if we look at the average human, these two modes are very nearly all we are capable of.

It is the relatively rare human that ever ‘thinks’ in the present; that is to say, doesn’t actually think but merely maintains awareness of his or her environment, without running some sort of inner dialog or narrative that either leans toward the past or the future.

This points us to a benefit of meditation. Meditation, if practiced correctly and with diligence, prevents both remembering and fantasizing (or planning, which is really the same thing but with somewhat more discipline.) That is to say, it doesn’t eliminate it, but instead brings it under our control. We remember when we choose to remember, and fantasize (or plan) when we choose to fantasize. The rest of the time, we experience our existence as it is, now, now, now!

How does meditation accomplish this? It does so by conditioning the mind to not think.

Virtually all meditations are similar in the sense that a set of thought conditions are adopted mentally, and then every time the mental conditions collapse, the practitioner leads the mind back to the prescribed conditions. This is the nutshell explanation of meditation, and, like any other exercise, the more we practice, the more control we are able to have over the facility being exercised.

So what, exactly, is the point?

As I write this, I listen to music from my young adulthood. The music in question is quite capable of taking me back to a time and place that is quite exquisite in my memory. I wouldn’t trade these memories for any material gain that can be imagined. But! Due to the dependable exquisite-ness of these memories, it would be very easy to let them have there way with me, and in so doing, waste the present wallowing in the past.

Fortunately, having practiced sub-ascetics for a long time, I can tell you without qualm that the times these memories were acquired in were not times when I was saying “Boy, am I going to enjoy memories of this!”

Now is inevitably when valuable memories will be created, and the more time one spends experiencing ‘now,’ the more memories of value one will have when the past is all that is left to us.

In that time, the sub-ascetic practitioner will find their selves fulfilled.

Beginning sub-ascetics

Meditation and meditative practices have been around for several thousand years, and it is tempting to think that if they had any efficacy, everyone would be meditating. The reason this argument isn’t valid is because meditation, besides everything else it is, is hard work, and the benefits are subtle (at least at the lower levels of practice.)

Another problem with meditative practices is the fact that they have frequently been tied to doctrines of theology that were at odds with the prevailing norms, and with credulity.

My own doctrine being limited to accepting that which is, I would like to propose an eminently practical rationale for meditating; the vast majority of people alive today have more control over the muscles that control their toes than they have of their mind.

Here is a simple illustrative test you can take to see how much control you have of your mind.

Sit somewhere comfortable, in a place that has few distractions. Turn off the T.V, shut off the lights, and close the door.

For the next ten minutes resolve to think only about your breathing.

Breathe in fully but comfortably, and then breathe out slowly. As you breathe out, count in your mind ‘One.’

Breathe in fully but comfortably, and then breathe out slowly. As you breathe out, count in your mind ‘Two.’

Continue this sequence until you breathe out counting in your mind ‘Nine’, and then start over again at one. Do this for about 10 cycles.

The first time I did this, I remembered about a day later that I had started it, and was quite embarrassed to find that I couldn’t remember having gotten to four. When I tried it again later that day, I realized that it was because, as had just happened, I had never gotten to four. My mind had wandered off, as I was inhaling for the count of ‘Three.’

Go ahead and try it.

Your mind is not under your conscious control.

But it can be, and more importantly, it should be.

Let this breath-counting meditation be your introduction to Heaven Path sub-ascetics.

Make a New Years resolution to practice the breathe-counting meditation for 10 minutes-a-day until you can maintain the breath count for the whole 10 minutes.

At that point, you will be able to see whether your long-term fulfillment would be improved by adding meditative practices to your daily routine.

What about Heaven

The principle philosophy is called the Heaven Path, but so far we haven’t made any mention of Heaven except in the name of the philosophy.

There seems to be a lot of strife in the world, today, the source of which seems to be the intractable question of whose book actually represents the Word of God.

Aside from the rather obvious problem of believing that a book could contain the actual Word of God in religions that purport to condemn idolatry, there is also the problem of presenting anything remotely resembling objective proof that any of these books are anything but ordinary, if supremely well-crafted, books.

In fact, the only proof of the existence of God that strikes me as even remotely objective is the statistical measure of the number of people that seem to have religious feelings, that is to say, an innate propensity to believe in some form of supreme being.

Needless to say, this strikes me as only quasi-objective proof.

However, an innate tendency to believe does strike me a solid justification for considering the ‘what ifs’ of the existence of God.

Having found the Heaven Path philosophy first, and only then considered the possibility of religious justification for such a philosophy, I discovered that the philosophy held together rather well if I simply took God at face-value.

To start, let’s look at the creation that we must attribute to God.

We have what appears to be a limitless universe of near infinite complexity, which is nevertheless absolutely consistent. No matter the mysteries we uncover, sooner or later, they fold in with our more mundane knowledge to form an uninterrupted tapestry of consistency.

And no matter how closely or broadly we look, each subsequent understanding creates a whole new level of complexity and a whole new class of questions for us to ask.

If we assume that God did all of this for a reason, that is to say with an objective in mind, I think it is safe to assume it was for a good reason.

Moreover, seeing that it is God doing the creating, I think it is safe to assume that the objective could not be achieved by any of the more God-like methods that are akin to waving the Magic Wand. For whatever reason, The Objective could only be achieved through the medium of an objective creation.

At first, it seems contradictory to assume that an omnipotent being could not create something directly, and so would have to resort to some creative medium. However, this contradiction evaporates if we assume that The Objective can only be achieved through a creation that is not directly created by God. The choice of a creative medium is not a sign of lack of omnipotence, but is instead a sign of a Godly desire to be at one remove from the creation.

In creating a medium of creation for achievement of The Objective, it seems likely that each component included in the medium would be both necessary and sufficient for achieving the objective. In other words, everything that must be included to achieve The Objective is included, and anything that is not necessary to achieve the objective is left out.

It is now a relatively short step to seeing why no proof of the existence of God is available. Proof is not necessary, and lack of proof with a propensity for religious feelings is sufficient.

This makes determining what constitutes God’s Laws quite a bit easier as well. If it is possible, it’s allowed.

But it is possible to see beyond the question of God’s Law to find God’s Principles for achieving The Objective.

Humanity, the first level of the creative medium that is able to create independently, is designed in such a way that each individual is unique both in fundamental encoding, and in precise temporal and spatial point of origin.

This tells us that the exact means and method of achieving The Objective is indeterminate. The conditions necessary for achieving The Objective are in place, but the mechanics of achieving The Objective are left to random selection.

And if God does not know, by His own choice, how the mechanics are to play out, there is no way for us to know.

Which brings us to God’s First Principle for achieving The Objective: Each Creative Being is Fundamentally Inviolate. That is to say, those who fancy themselves to be engaged in achieving The Objective must not obstruct the fulfillment potential of other creative beings beyond what is necessary to prevent them from obstructing your fulfillment potential.

Do not do unto others, that which would be obstructive if done unto you.

What's it all about?

In everyone’s life there comes a time when the various strings of our intentions become unmanageable, usually brought on by our first compelling confrontation with the fact of our own mortality, and a fundamental principle of life is sought to assist us in sorting out what is actually important for us to complete in our remaining time, from what should be set aside as ultimately unfulfilling.

A significant problem that we encounter in choosing a fundamental principle within which to operate is the question of whether a principle that appeals to us, and our predilections, is in fact, a ‘True’ principle.

If we spend a long time sincerely studying this question, and its possible answers, we eventually arrive at the conclusion that both the question and the answers are meaningless because, in every case, the True-ness of the answer will depend on which point of view that we approach it from. Whether this is a result of the nature of reality, or the nature of the language that our mind ultimately uses to perform such work, this is invariably the answer to the question.

In this work, I don’t propose to provide a ‘True’ principle that the average person can depend on for sorting out what is important from what isn’t, that is to say a principle that is universally true. Instead, I intend to propose a principle that, when understood, will strike the average, and well-above average, person as being capable of satisfying the requirements for a functional, fundamental principle that the adoption of which will result in a fulfilling and fulfilled life.

The principle that I will describe and illuminate is the principle that I arrived at in the course of my own search.

We might now ask what constitutes a fulfilled life, and what is the virtue of fulfillment over, say, success?

This question becomes somewhat easier to answer if we first ask when this answer will be important to us?

Whether one is successful or not in any particular endeavor is far less important when a person is young, because when you are still young it is no major problem to simply start over, what with having lots of time left to obtain success.

However, as we get closer to the end of the road, each failure represents a greater chunk of the time remaining to us being spent without obtaining the sought-after rewards of that chunk of time spent. In other words, the time spent was wasted, at least as far as achieving our goals.

This leads us to believe that success or fulfillment will be progressively more important as we get older, and more specifically, as we run out of time.

So, what is success?

Success is fulfillment of ones objectives, whatever those objectives happen to be.

Then, what is fulfillment?

Fulfillment is success in the objectives that one should have pursued if they knew what successes would result in one being able to pass from this life knowing that one’s time was well spent.

At this time, a cartoon panel comes to mind, which regrettably, I am unable to find a citation for. A very old man lays on his deathbed, surrounded by a large crowd of obviously tearful and loving family and friends. As the old man breathes his last, he has a final thought, which is memorialized in a thought bubble over his head. In his final moment, he thinks to himself “Damn, I should have bought more crap!”