A Personal Preface
From my earliest memories I have sought to do what is right and good. I wanted to be good, to learn from others and avoid painful mistakes and suffering. I never wanted to hurt or harm anyone, or almost any thing.
Truly. I'm not making this up. From the eyes of my childhood I saw beauty everywhere until I discovered evil. With evil comes suffering, which so violently tears joyous life from the souls of humans and beasts. All life struggles, in vain, for we all suffer unto death. Mortal necessity forces us to feed upon one another. Some do so with victorious relish. Death comes to all eventually. And that's the rub, because the "eventually" part obscures consequences and transforms lies into seeming truth. The fact is that we can never escape death, so then what?
Back to my youth. So I had decided that I wanted to be good, to be different, to find the better way. But before I found it, I encountered perilous agony in the frustrations of life experiences alien to my desired intentions. I found that others suffered from my existence and that I had both fears and lusts unwanted. I embraced comfortable lies, promises of divine power and assured immortality in some form of spiritual continuity, but I live in a material world of injustice and inequality when it comes to the distribution of wealth and power. Is there a natural balance to mortal life that reduces these socio-eonomic and political characteristics of mortal life? What role does Globalism play in all of this?
Life is instrinsically unfair and dificult. Truths I accept. Life in this materialistic socio-economic system often means that my gain comes at someone else’s pain. Something in me could not ignore the potential consequences of a complex system of exchange where my good fortune was necessarily paid for by others. This observation ran contrary to the fundamental ethical principle of life in which, "what goes around comes around." In other words, if others had to lose in order for me to win, then one day I would lose - perhaps permanently. How should I live now, in this modern age of seemingly endless struggle, suffering and challenges in hopes of a future, more idealistic one?
"Why?" I asked. Why am I alive both to observe and to experience this mystery called consciousness or life? What purpose is there to it? What need? Or is it all just chance occurrence so that the only reality is what we personally think and seem to experience?
What Impossible Frustration!
I became despondently depressed with my existence as a youth. When I became an adult, instead of getting better because now I could live by my own rules, it only got worse. It got worse because the harder I tried to make things right, to become the good I wanted for myself and others, the more pain and suffering I caused in my own perceived life and in the testified experience of my cherished others. The more dearly something good was desired, the more tortured was my soul as I lived in the hell of my own creation - a hell amidst a wondrous world that seemed to mock everything about me.
Oh yes, certainly there were victories where it seemed that good was executed enduringly well, at least for awhile. Nonetheless, any good seemed an illusion, or at best a half truth that was inexorably and inextricably bound to some evil consequence or ego-centered attitude of prideful self-sufficiency. Good bound to any pride at some point suffers damage and inevitably must collapse. In my personal life, some collapses took a decade to become obvious. In the broader affairs of this world, history is witness to numerous collapses, and biblical prophecy predicts that the largest one is yet to come – probably just around the corner!
Just as life is inexorably and inextricably bound to death, so good is to evil, but the lie is long in its uncovering. And when it is finally and usually forceably revealed for what it is, we do our best to avoid seeing it, admitting it or doing something about it by humbly submitting to death's demanded change in our present life. We aren't willing to give up our desires, our fancies or our secret pleasures of lust and sensual surfeit.
In desperation I submitted a bit a time, here and there, grudgingly it would seem in retrospect, to the truths found in the Word of God, a Word that had been around me all of my life. It was a Word more elusive the keener I sought for it, so I first looked elsewhere for a little plainer explanation of what was so elusive. When I did, I found plenty of people offering an innumerable and confusing array of answers containing promises of spiritual enlightenment and power to control the persons and circumstances around me to my everlasting benefit. In other words I found illusions for sale as proffered answers to my torturous soul.
These esoteric teachings from east and west, often rooted in antiquity and re-discovered by applied pseudo-science, were and are everywhere for sale. The higher the price you pay, the more rapid will be your descent into destruction because the measure of your desperation is mirrored in the price that you are willingly to pay as paced by your ability to pay it. The destruction you descend to is the void of identity nothingness, the nirvana of suspended consciousness that comes from angelic theft of your life and being, which is the power of free will fabricated into your identity, released to you at birth from the foundations of God's Creation. (Please note: My reference here is to the God of the Jews, to the Almighty of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, renamed Israel. Now this is something one who is not Jewish, such as myself, must accept. The level of difficulty accepting this varies from people to people, person to person, and ironically may be most difficult for the Jewish people themselves.)
By the way, thieving angels are called demons. The main thing is that you should not look to purchase or acquire a spirituality that is promised to operate at your direction and desire, or one that will - in any configuration - impart some measure of control to selfish fulfillment. Such a spirituality will gradually destroy you until you reach the point where there seems to be no hope of escape.
This is the promised nirvana or elevated consciousness emptied into the wholeness of all, the void, the nothingness of supposed ecstasy that comes with a bliss that is really a burning so searing that time stands still and consciousness with it, dead and unchanging, frozen in an eternal instant of pain without the popularly pictured repetitious interactions of convivial sins of lust and their demanded punishment with torment. The real Hell is not a night club for Satan's fiendish cronies as they inflict unpleasant horrors on others. No, the Devil and its demons will likewise be put on eternal fire ice inactive and unconscious, shut down apart from God in tortured state akin to an age-lasting burning that will be outwardly manifested by a lake of fiery brimstone at the time of the Last Judgment.
Such is the end of the search for spirituality for those who choose the way of the the spirit of hidden knowledge, who seek power over good and evil, who battle “evil” to enforce their own definitions of “good” in the name of "God," who pursue a false love's lusts, or who live for the fleeting fame, health and wealth that can be had in this age of temporal trial.
The way of escape from death by annihilation and spiritual confusion I found is shared here within. With it I offer my understanding of the spiritual chains and traps that are set to attract and capture us so that you may avoid them.
Christopher J. Patton
June 11, 2001, (revised a bit for clarity on 12-16-2007)
Minneapolis, MN
Click here to go to the Introduction.
