The Water's Edge (formerly TheWay Side)

Is it possible that everything you  have ever learned in your whole life, is wrong? Shall you hit the back button?

What if I said it this way instead: “Everything you know and have learned your whole life is wrong”?

What if instead, I said: “You haven’t figured everything out”.

Should I continue?

Let me rebegin by saying that I do not know everything and I don’t even know what all I don’t know, but with the exception of a few people on this planet, I’m fairly certain that most of what you know is wrong. The question possibly forming is: How can I know this? Suprisingly, the answer is, you already know how I know this, but you don’t know this.

A flower can not unbloom – there are certain things that change people’s lives forever to a point where one simply can not go back to their former state. I did the same to you just now by what I have written.

Each of us has a different story and a different ontology. A different set of facts and principles we have learned over our lives that allow us to assert our favorite positions on whatever topic – ranging from religion to politics to favorite soft drink. In addition, it seems that certain findings in fields such as psychology and the like have revealed that as a general rule – much of our systems and thought processes are hard wired from birth. What a notion. Who am I and what are you, if such things are true?

This is a seeker’s blog. It is meant for seekers primarily. As a function of its content, most others either won’t be able to understand or will simply not be interested.  Shall you hit the back button?

Within my writings, analysis, and discovery process I have aimed at highlighting what I do not know by using the terms such as “I suspect”, or “though I can’t prove it”, etc.  so that you know what you are dealing with. In regards to completeness, I have not spent a lifetime searching the entire body of early Christian literature or other religions; however, I believe I have taken an approach which may avoid some measure of confirmation bias and an attempt to view things both big picture and small. As part of this process I began to accumulate what I can only describe as a “critical mass”. I began to see the themes and inconsistencies across not only Christianity, but indeed the whole span of our existence. If you are a seeker, it will be important for you to understand how I got to where I am at so that you can form your own independent conclusions.

I suppose the story should begin my first true seeking…let the story begin:

Around the tail end of 2005 a spurious thought entered my head which was something to the effect: “It would be awfully embarassing to be in heaven and walk up to St. Peter and have to explain that  I never once bothered to read the Bible”. Yes, embarassment is what motivated me to read the Bible cover to cover.

As I set out on my task, I found the Bible given to me by an uncle of mine some 5 years ago. It had sat there gathering dust. I cracked it open and began to read. I quickly made it through Genesis, but after going through I made several startling discoveries. There were books being referenced that did not exist. There were strange acts of killing seemingly innocent women and children. As I read the foot notes,  I noted that in various places my Life Application Study Bible informed me that God knows what He is doing and those women and children getting killed certainly must have done something to deserve it. I read of one man who even sacrificed his own daughter.

Eventually I made it to the New Testament and began to read of Jesus’ words. I had gone through Catholic School for some 13 odd years, and had certainly read my fair share of Bible passages, but never had I gotten straight to the heart of what was being said. I was in tears when I read of Jesus admonition that whoever does not do as Jesus has commanded has built a house on sand that will fall.

The more I read, the more I realized how little I knew and how right what he was saying was – yet still there was something missing.

I got back involved in the Church and around that time my wife and I started to have major problems. Soon, this search consumed me. I set out to prove that the Catholic church was right. After going through tons of commentary, apologetic works, and so on – I very quickly realized that something was not quite right. The Catholic Church was wrong – gasp.

I found myself on the “Protestant” side for the first time in my life. Big mean evil Catholic church always hiding things. Yet……

Something was still missing. Most of the “Protestants” I encoutered swore up and down that the world was created in 7 days.  This made absolutely no sense to me at all in view of the fossil record, what I knew of cosmology and astronomy (I was a science buff since as long as I can remember), and so on. I felt like people touting such things were idiots.  All that I encountered seem to be saying some good, some what I would call “truth”, mixed in with a whole lot of other things that made no sense.

Around that time, my marriage began to really falter and so for the first time in my life, I felt like I had a prayer answered.

Eventually, I stumbled on some things that brought the concept of translation errors (clickable link) to me and that it was possible to reconcile science and religion.

Translation Errors? What? Is this possible? Remember, a flower can not unbloom. Reconcile science and religion? The aforementioned web site brought a number of things to my attention, but it was still……. missing something and so I brought it up and quickly found that the group responded to my questions with disdain and fear.

I found myself wondering why people were so afraid to discuss such things. I realize then that “evidence” was inherently subjective. There was “evidence” all over the map on whatever side or position someone wanted to take.

Being a project manager, I realized that I did not have enough man hours left in my life to sort this puzzle out, and I was not satisfied with placing my soul or my family members in danger of hell fire because some scholar said this or that and I should just trust them. It made no sense to me.

I then stumbled upon the notion of “reincarnation” at Stephen Boston’s site, the Reluctant Messenger. He wrote a book, but I never got around to reading it. Everything else he wrote awoke me quite a bit. HEre is the most important concept, quoting from Stephen’s site:

“Please don’t focus on the individual or the medium delivering this message; it only gets in the way of our connection. Focus on the message. If it seems like nonsense to you, that’s perfect, your most likely approach will be to ridicule it. That’s ok, it’s the built in mechanism imbedded in the message to prevent those who aren’t ready for it from waking up prematurely .

You’ve been asking for this for a long time. So don’t be surprised you get it. That is the first thing you need to learn about communicating with God. If you limit yourself to allowing the communication to express itself only through certain channels then you miss some. Sometimes it’s the urge to take the back road instead of the highway that you ignore. A few minutes later you wish you had heeded the urge because the traffic is snarled due to a major accident. So don’t ignore this message. It’s actually difficult to get anyone to listen to me, let alone write it all down.

You have a lot of questions and I have all the answers but you have to understand, since I know everything, my difficulty lies in picking the essentials you need to know.

Of course you want to know why I allow suffering. And I’ll get to who I am soon enough. But rather than deal with each question separately, I will give the highlights so you can experience the “aha” of solving the paradoxes in your mind yourself.

Who is God? In other words, who am I? The question could be phrased better. Who are we? They are all the same question. Once you understand why these three questions are all the same question you will have your answer.

If you have read this far without the nonsense-circuit kicking in then you are ready for the next step. You and I have always existed. We have always existed. We always will exist. The only unknown is how much suffering can we avoid?”

Quite a message I thought to myself. If it is the first time you have seen it, it is probably quite a message as well.

Around the same time, I found a video discussing the concept of there being savior gods throughout many cultures. I was raised a Christian. Suddenly my whole world collapsed in a span of about 10 minutes.

I remember going outside and saying to myself, I’ve been lied to my whole life. Great. Well, let’s get on with it then and dig some more to be sure.

As I went through Stephen’s site, he had built a model for how the universe, God, religion, science, etc. all tied together. It was a model and well thought out at that. However, that little voice inside told me something was still missing.

I found another web site from Stephen’ site. This one was insane when I first read it due to the author’s claims, yet… it made sense on a level I had never seen anywhere. Eventually I also found a whole suite of web sites dedicated to similar spiritual topics. I found Edgar Cayce and the New Age. Eventually, I learned more and more shocking things that my mind began to break free from years of baggage.

The evolution and journey of the soul through multiple life times and that what we do actually matters was the most important thing I learned. Then I learned that the Bible is allegory upon allegory. Then I learned that our very lives are allegory and allusion to higher things.

I set out to  “prove” what I had learned and to verify the veracity of the author’s claims. My approach was to take on  a sample basis, many of the things he had quoted and see if they were out of context or if the man was playing games whether he was aware of those games or not.

I switched to a vegetarian diet and things started accelerating. I quit smoking. I quit drinking.  As my marriage crumbled despite all my efforts, I learned more than I had ever learned in my entire life. Each day seemed like drinking out of a fire hose. I adopted the practice of fasting.

Synchronicity began to abound daily. I discovered a process for entering into tunnels in my own mind. I discovered that I was more than my physical body. My dreams became more lucid and real.

Under Construction – more to be added.