The Spiritual Aspects of the Unreal World

In the beginning…

Well, in the beginning what we started with was Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. According to the story, there was God and God created the world and all and everything. After getting the Garden ready for residence, God created Adam and then did some fancy surgery to make Eve from Adam’s rib…or so goes the story.

So Adam and Eve were fairly “blissed out”. The Garden of Eden was absolutely perfect. Every need was automatically satisfied. There was no conflict, no stress, no labor, no words, no depression, and no strain. There was apparently no clothing necessary. The weather itself was perfect. There was sun and trees and sand and seas and rainbows and sunsets and nature in all her magnificence.

It was nothing less than perfect existence. And God was always around in case they needed something new and different.

It was paradise. It is paradise.

It is “Eden before The Tree”.

The Tree?

Yes, well. As the story goes, God also had this tree. And for all we know, God placed that Tree for no other reason than to test out this theory he had about “free will”. Anyway, as the story goes, the Tree was called The Tree of Knowledge...or The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

But God had flat-out told Adam and Eve, “You have all of paradise. Do whatever you want. There is no sin. Enjoy. Enjoy it ALL. Just don’t eat the fruit of that one Tree…The Tree of Knowledge. Stay away from it.”

You see, there was no good, nor evil in Eden. No need for words. If you needed something in paradise, either it was already there…or God would soon have it provided. Paradise didn’t need words for Good and Evil. Good and evil did not exist, why would we need a word for something that didn’t exist?

And then, according to the story, Eve got around to having a conversation with a snake and Eve ate of the apple on the Tree of Knowledge. The snake even suggested that God didn’t want Adam and Eve to taste the fruit of the tree because then they’d be as smart as God and God wouldn’t be necessary anymore.

Which ended up being true in a strange way…Knowledge had made God unnecessary. We adore Knowledge. Admit it, you KNOW that man has made Knowledge the new and reigning God…adored by far more of us in the civilized world. There’s always some sort of priest to talk to God for us.

But knowledge is POWER. And real power is everything.

Eve convinced Adam to join in…and the unreal world came into existence when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge.

They felt shame and fashioned clothes to cover their nakedness. They came to know good and evil. They came to know Right and Wrong.

Without words judgment was impossible; but with words judgment was inevitable.

A flood of words filled the earth, but of course, only man had the proper tools to utilize these new accoutrements. Words just didn’t seem to appeal to animals.

For some reason, words were like heavy narcotics to Adam and Eve. Humans became quickly addicted to stories…(simple things).

Man began to consider that he could pass judgment on God.

I have often gone on at length to try to define and describe the unreal world. Well, now you have it.

The unreal world is the Garden of Eden after the eating of the fruit. The unreal world is the world of words; the same world that is the Illusion…from the flood of words that overwhelmed us after the eating of the fruit. What was the fruit? Good and Evil; Right and Wrong: Judgment.

Eat hearty.

Remember still that the unreal world is that laboratory where we are sent to work out our spiritual problems. We are all just tortured souls on a spiritual journey, right? Where do you think that spiritual journey happens? The spiritual journey happens inside the Illusion, of course. That way, nobody really gets hurt. You didn’t think all those burning babies were real, did you?

So the illusion…the unreal world…are required components of the spiritual dynamic. If you didn’t have a place to come and work through your spiritual problems, then where would you go to work through these critical/crucial elements of your spiritual growth?

And my, oh my. What a world we’ve created with all our fancy words. Yes, we’ve created things like religion, philosophy, opera, some great novels, law, movies, NFL Football, medicine and psychology. The list of that which we have created using only words is awesome. Magnificent, really: a thing of wonder and delight.

Let’s examine what we have created.

By the fears of most social workers, the total of reported and unreported incest is probably somewhere between 30 and 50%. The amount of sex we force on our children is absolutely revolting. Of course, it’s mostly not reported…so we can all pretend that we don’t really know that it’s happening. But there are some laws that protect the fact that it will continue to happen. But we do know, don’t we? We just don’t talk about it.

If we only cared enough? We could do what it takes to stop it. Why are we so sick that we have chosen not to?

Think of all the advances in every last science…except psychology. Excuse me, yes we have developed better meds. Medications that will realign chemicals level to stop certain types of behavior.

But we haven’t made a single step towards improving the field of psychology.

We can’t really tell how sick and individual is. We have no idea how to cure him. We can test him and declare him sane and he will return to society and rape children within days.

Face it, we can do years and years of therapy…in prison or in fancy clinics…and accomplish nothing at all. Or we get better. (We haven’t a clue how that happens.) The one scientific failure of our society is psychology.

Focus on it for a second or so. We know, in our heart of hearts, that psychology solves nothing. If progress is ever made, we have no real proof that psychology had anything to do with the result.

There is a certain level of undisclosed insanity that runs through the core of every society. I estimate that is runs between 40 and 70%. (Actually, I reserved 75% for Hitler Germany where the good corporal goes to work and tortures Jews all day long and is judged by his society as being a good German. He may even get a citizenship award. But then, Cambodia ranked right up there for awhile. And there have been others throughout history.)

We arrange kiddy sex tours all over the world to carry our rich executives to meet with 8-year-old sex slaves. We could wipe this out. But we don’t care enough. There’s money involved, you see.

We have such a profound belief in the phenomenon called love. Love is somewhat different in the real world. But love in the unreal world is most peculiar. When a man or woman or even child is murdered, who is most likely to have killed them? Why someone who loves them, of course. This is not crazy? That we kill the ones we love?

And holy religion…with thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands littering the battlefields: the crusades, the past few hundred years in the Middle East, the “troubles” in Belfast. Even Hitler can be blamed under “religious persecution”. And still it goes on here today…in Iraq and Afghanistan.

How many deaths are worth a few more shekels in our pockets when we step away from the fueling station?

Then of course, there’s the whole undercurrent of unfocused frustration and rage and simply unloved and unlovable degenerates…who seem to find a reason to kill and maim and rape and torture….and they hardly need any reason at all.

Consider how many hundreds and thousands of children all over the world go to bed starving. Harry Chapin has shown us over and over that we have far more than enough to feed everyone, but we don’t choose to go to the effort. We would rather burn surplus food or toss it in the ocean. True. We choose to allow all those children to starve. Hell, they starve right here in America. There’s a local ad that reports that, in Hawaii of all places, 60,000 children go to bed hungry. (Ph: 808 836-3600 http://www.hawaiifoodbank.org.)

Hundreds of thousands dead each morning all over the world…their little bellies painfully distended. They were all found dead this morning, dead because we chose not to spend like 8 cents to ship food. And it’s just too damn inconvenient to dig out that nickel and three pennies for Raul, and another for Pietro and Ji Goon. Really damn inconvenient.

Then again, there will be millions and millions dead as we continue to keep AIDS medication too high for the population of an entire continent to afford. We generally hate homosexuals and we have to assume that AIDS and HIV are just God’s little clean-up program, right?

Perhaps one of the strangest forms of the evidence of rampant craziness…is our insistence on the destruction of our planet. We burn our rain forests as quickly as we can, we pollute our rivers, destroy our wet lands, destroy levels of the marine food chain, over-fishing our oceans, and burn fossil fuel as if it will never end.

We are strangling our planet to death.

We know this.

We ignore this.

The wonder is why we choose to ignore this.

Are we all pretending that we don’t understand this?

The only thing we don’t know is exactly when that line will be crossed. But in a way, that makes it very safe for us continue. Weird. One of us will actually be responsible for driving the last nail into the coffin of mankind, but since we’ll never know which of us… Well, we’re not to blame, are we?

It’s like the one of us to kill off the planet? We’ll be wearing hoods. Or the one to be executed will be wearing a hood. Can we somehow get a river to wear a hood? Or a tree maybe? This could make a great TV special if we could only nail down the exact action …oh, yeah, I see. That would spoil the whole point.

We really can’t know cause then maybe we’d have to back off…..even stop. We’d have to stop the destruction of our planet, our species. Hell, we don’t know that this step will be the final irreversible step. We can’t know that, right.

We know that there is a point, sometime in the future, where we will turn on one more oven or dump just one more vat of mercury in some unspoiled stream…and we will have passed over the line…the line between “Yes, there is still a chance that our planet might still survive”, and “No, we just passed the point of no return. The planet will only survive between 16 and 30 years. It’s too late now to do anything. Would you like to buy a new car?”

It was Thoreau who mentioned those “lives of quiet desperation”, wasn’t it? Have those number of lives diminished over the past hundred years or has the level of rampant insanity simply gotten much worse?

Do you think that the current level of cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, crystal methadone, sh’rooms, morphine, designer drugs, ecstasy…do you think that this is evidence that we have found a greater peace within?

What percentage of our population would you estimate is at least semi-suicidal? I mean, between the cigarettes and the drugs, the alcohol and the freeway speeding? How suicidal do we need to be until we swing our entire society from almost crazy to full-on nutzo?

But like I say, we need this particular level of time and space in order to play out the crazy Dance of Life. We need to learn, to fail. We need to indulge. We need to sin.

All of us who enter here…this unreal world…this world of words…are merely more twisted souls come to trudge out our spiritual journey along these rocky shores.

We are taught “how things are” from the moment we can understand the words…and then we go on to lie and cheat and hurt each other. We learn to be kind and to be cruel. We excel or we create hell. We become poets or pimps. We are molesters, murderers, mobsters and various mercenaries. We are saints and sinners, rich and poor, dead and dying, enlightened and basic Neanderthal sludge. Welcome to the spiritual path.

And we all come to this time and space to work out our spiritual journey…precisely because this is the raison d’etre of this unreal place…the Illusion.

The real world (the Garden of Eden before the Tree of Knowledge) and the unreal world (the world created entirely of the words accumulated in our heads.)

By the way, do I know that the unreal world and the Illusion are one and the same? No, of course not; it just sort of makes an ironic sort of justice. Just a loony belief I have. I’m nothing more than a crazy old man, remember?

Note: The unreal world is entirely without any real things…made totally of past memories and future hopes and fears. It holds not a single baseball, orange, waterfall, computer mouse, sand, pizza, etc.

The cosmos saves the real things for the real world.

Ain’t it funny how that works?