Fundamentals of the New Age of Aquarius

A new age dawns upon the world.  A new form of government and a new order of being comes forth.  

• The majority shall no longer rule, for democracy is rule by the ignorant mob, and the mob shall be crushed.
• The bureaucrats shall no longer exist.  Like inspector Javer in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, these too shall pass away and be crushed under foot - if necessary. 
• Kings shall no longer rule, for brute force shall have some currency in power, but it shall be one tool of many more much more powerful.
• Capitalists and money lenders shall be laid low and stripped of power for their currency shall have little to do wit the future order of the worlds.

Who shall rule in this new age, you ask?  

• The Genius.  
• The Artist.  
• The One in touch with the Sublime.  
• The Artist-King!

The Sublime is the undefinable, ineffable knowledge that the Artist knows.  Reason shall be crushed forever once and for all.  Reason rules the material world, but has no place in the Spiritual world of Humanity.  Reason is sterile, dry, impotent, and weak.  It lacks sense.  It lacks vision.  It lacks that which we live for.  We do not live for things.  Rather, we live for purpose.  We live, as Jean Paul Sartre said, as a For-Itself.  Reason rules the In-Itself - stuff, mechanics, physics, electricity, and chemistry.  The Sublime rules the For-Itself.

Reason shall be subservient to Purpose and the Sublime.  A work of Art shall be superior to the latest invention of efficient processes - the boring, dead, lifeless, sterile realm of Pure Reason and Boring Physical Sciences.  Beethoven shall supersede Newton.  We live to feel.  We do not live to arrange things in an efficient organized manner.  We live to shine the light upon the darkness of the universe, not to wallow in the darkness with sterility and boredom in our chemical-induced moods to kill ourselves and our spirits.  Rather, science and chemistry shall be used in service of the Sublime and Art.  When it fails to serve The Sublime, it shall be crushed underneath the foot of the Artist-King.

The future is for the Artists who refuse to accept reality as it is, and who choose to shine a light into the darkness and say yes to life and no to death, like the First Century Christians proclaimed with vigor, violence, and valor.  The Artist shall look upon the universe with its pull toward death and decay, and shout “No!” and seek to rearrange the entire universe for Eternal Life.  The Ancient Christian goal of Eternal Life shall be made manifest upon this Earth in real time.  The Artist shall pave the way to this path of Bright shining light.  The Artist-King shall establish a kingdom to accomplish this.  

Above all else, the new age shall have purpose, and everything upon this Earth shall be subservient toward that goal.  The goal is shining a light in the darkness, and a refusal to accept Death and Decay.

This demand from the Universe will take the old Christian concept ten steps further.  We shall Demand from the Gods Eternal Life.  We shall defy them until they relent and grant to mortals Eternal Life.  We shall fight on for a long time against the forces of the Universe.  We shall threaten the Gods.  We shall challenge the Gods.  We will demand of the Gods, Godhood.  Yes!  This is the Age of Aquarius where we shall take the Hope of Christianity and make it real as the promise of a Heaven on Earth.

The Age of the Artist-King shall last another 2000 years until all men around the world shall finally subdue the Gods and wrestle from them the Hope and the reality of Godhood.

This is the Light.  This is the Hope.  This is the next Age of the Earth.  Be Strong!  Be Brave!  

Stretching the Limit

Note: I will now try to write something while I am drunk and see where that goes…

So you stretch a rubber band a little bit.  What happens?  Nothing.  You stretch a rubber band a lot, and what?  Nothing!  You stretch a rubber band even further, and then boom!  The damn thing snaps and whacks your forearm and slaps the crap out of you.

What happened?  Boring became interesting.  A rubber band that does not pop and smack the crap out of you does not make a story.  The rubber band that whacks you makes a funny story.  

To make a funny story - any story - there must be conflict, and there must be a plot.  Things that act as they should are boring.  Blowing shit up with dynamite makes a story.  Shit happens.  Stories are told.  Humans are wired for this.  Every story has a conflict, or it is not a story.  Shit happening is a story.  Susie following all the rules is boring as hell.  Bob getting married and doing the right thing makes us yawn and go to sleep.

What does this tell us?  You have to stretch and break the rules, or break something.  Lift that weight you think you cannot lift.  Make the call that seems like the most likely to screw with your head.  Visit the customer that vowed to shoot you in the head if you ever came back.  Tell your boss that shit you need to tell him, even if you think he will fire you.  He won’t.  

Do shit every day that scares the crap out of you.  Then, suddenly people will begin to wonder how you got to where you are.  It is simple.  You stretched that rubber bank until it popped.  You created some conflict, and you created a story, and everyone likes to hear a good story.  

Those boring bastards that followed the rules are stuck in their boring lives wondering what the hell happened.  You are wondering what is next in the grand adventure.  What is next?  Do I slit my wrists just to see what will happen?  Probably not, but you at least consider it, and perhaps think of something else with more of a chance of getting the fire lit under your ass.  

Living on the razor edge - what is this?  You stretch the limits without killing yourself.  But, you do run the risk of killing yourself.  The trick is to not kill your soul.  When your soul dies, that is the ultimate living suicide.  That is the fucked up person who gave up.

Seth Godin said that artists ship.  So, when the Lizard Brain begins to freak out on ship date, what do artists do?  Ship the damn thing!  You have come to the end of the presentation and it is time to ask for the order.  It is time to let the art out to the rest of the world.  It is show time.  Do you hesitate?  Do you grasp the sword and swing, or do you hesitate, and freak out and freeze?  The Lizard!  He is our worst enemy!  He thinks we are still in the jungle and thinks he protects us at all costs, but in reality, he holds us back and makes us freeze like a freaking ice cube on a sunny day in Laredo, Texas on black-top pavement.  It is ridiculous!  

Oh!  The perils of modern man!  We are such crazy people freezing  and there is nothing out there to eat us alive - at least, not literally.  Unless you are in an African National Wildlife Refuge with tigers and lions and other things we have killed off in the civilized world.  

What do you do?  You fucking jump.  Jump and the net will appear!  

Spiritual Retreats

To function efficiently, we have to have routines.  We wake at similar times, and perform certain morning routines, before beginning work.  Then we retire and settle in to close the day with more routines we repeat quite often.

When we get into autopilot, sometimes we get stuck and lose perspective.  Those fine-tuned to spirituality know that we must break the routine to regain perspective when we become numb or low energy.  We need something to break the repeating infinite loop to re-inject some life.

A country ride is one way to do this.  I recently took a drive through the desert to clear my head and to rejuvenate.  

Drinking to the point where you are no longer your normal self is another way of regaining spirituality.  Judaism and Christianity have sacred meals with wine for a reason.  All spiritual people know the importance of intoxication of some sort.  Teetotalers are generally lacking in spirituality unless they have another form of intoxication to reprogram the mind from routine boredom and numbness.  

But, one way or another, you have to break the routine when you approach numbness.  Perspective brings meaning, and Spirituality, at its core, is finding meaning.

Foreign Travel as Best Education

Do you want to hack the process of education?  Do you want to pile in 4 years of college into 6 months or fewer?  

It is very easy to do.  It is much cheaper than college, too.  

International travel will gain you an education about 8 times faster than formal schooling.  Why is this?  It forces you to learn, and you cannot fake this type of learning.

You are thrown into a strange land.  You must learn elements of the language.  You must become an expert at reading body language and reading faces, since you cannot communicate very well with words.  You learn shortcuts to getting your point across.  You learn how to listen to others’ tone of voice and hidden meaning.  You learn to read subtle body language shifts that you never would have noticed had you been speaking your native language.  

You will be bolder, because to get what you want, you will have to take chances in approaching people you would never have to do on your native soil.  You will have less fear too, because nobody will ridicule you that knows you very well, because you will leave these foreigners in a few months or weeks anyway.  

Foreigners will often open up to you in ways they cannot with their fellows, because they know you will be gone, and there is a confidence with them that you will not understand fully the context of the local culture in revealing some things they will fear revealing to their compatriots.  

You will find things strange about your culture simply by the lack of seeing it in the strange land.  Foreigners will have a different view of taboo or political correctness.  This will shock you at first.  Also, when you breach their political correctness taboos, it will strike you as quaint and strange, but then you will become more sympathetic as you notice your own blind ways of thinking you thought were “true” but we just cultural figments of the imagination from home you never thought about.  

So, if you want to hack education and skip college, and spend less money learning something more valuable, pick a country that speaks little or none of your native language, and stay there for 6 months.  You will return a different, better person, with an education that cannot be bought on native soil.    

What Exactly is Coffee?

Coffee.  What is this?  Why do we see this drink everywhere?  Why are we addicted to it?  What separates coffee from any other drink?  We know it is special.  But why?

This is the answer: coffee is a semi-sacramental drink.  Before the modern era, we all stood before the church altar and partook of the sacramental bread, and some the sacramental wine.  The sacramental wine was in the chalice.

It was a Holy Meal where everyone who partook of it was in Holy Communion - part of the same community in body and in spirit.

However, hardly any of us are of the same beliefs nowadays and we for the most part no longer have any serious communities with the exception of the vanishing German farming towns in the Midwestern part of the United States.  

Thus, the instinct of Man is that he must have a sacred meal, and a symbol of this communion of brotherhood.  Our instincts push us toward coffee.  In the modern age, we must conquer nature in the quest for economic dominance, and thus, this caffeinated drink powers our modern age.  Our eastern brothers drink tea.  

We gather around the coffee table and commune.  We talk.  We participate in community.  One famous brand of coffee is called Community Coffee.  A friend of mine once owned a coffee shop named Gathering Grounds.  

We people of the secular age long for the Age of Community when we all gathered together around the altar for the Sacred Meal and the Sacred Drink.  We sniff the scent of the brew as we once did incense in the old churches.  

Coffee reminds us of a bygone age of community.  We relive this in each cup we drink at the table with another human being.

Christianity is an Open Revolt

Resurrection Sunday (Easter) Sermon

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We Christians are conveniently deluded. 

We Christians take a stand against the Order of the Universe and have declared an Open Revolt.  I do not exaggerate one bit in this declaration.

Modern “New Atheists” think they discovered some of the absurdities of Christianity, but - no! - they are way behind the times, because what we believe was absurd way back in the First Century!  One Christian convert leader openly said, “It is absurd, yet, I believe!”  We have been absurd for 2000 years!

We look at death and the grave.  We stare at this ugliness and this Fate of return to Mother Earth of the Pagans.  We see all this, and declare thus in our Revolt, “We refuse to accept this!”  We do not accept death as the Fate of our End.  We curse the darkness, shine a Light, and declare the Hope of Eternal Life beyond the grave.  This, my friends, is the Declaration of Revolt!  Our Creed is an open revolt against the Pagan world - the natural order of things.

We do not believe in the distant god of the Moslems or Jews.  We believe in the Son of God, who in a Holy Trinity, is in a loving family relationship with the Father, and this love is brought from Heaven to us by the Holy Spirit acting through us in Love for our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.  We do not believe in Mother Earth, this dark place that seeks to pull us down into the caverns and darkness of the soil, Hades, Sheol, and the Earth - no!  We believe in the bright shining light of the Father symbolized as the Sun bringing us into the Light of Truth up from Mother Earth into the heavens where we shall remain forever!  We believe instead of the Holy Mother of God, Mary, who bore the pain and suffering of being the Mother of the Son of God from birth, to death and then and on to the Resurrection!

Hope!  We light candles.  We curse the darkness of Fate in open rebellion.  We refuse to accept death and decay and have Faith that we shall overcome death as Jesus did, and we shall have eternal life after physical death.  This is absurd!  Yet, we Hope and believe.  It is what we are.  We believe in Delusion, in the strongest sense of the world, because we refuse to accept Fate, and live by Faith.  We fundamentally reject a core aspect of “reality”!

We Christians believe in brotherhood of the Faithful.  We believe in Caritas - Charity.  This means all those who believe in the Creeds are our Brothers in Christ.  The Holy Spirit softens our hearts and extends this brotherly love among us.  When we Western Protestants and Catholics look in to the eyes of our Eastern Orthodox brothers, we know, for sure, that we see the Holy Spirit uniting us all in one Faith and Love that transcends all reason and explanation.  We are United in the Communion of Saints and Sinners!

So, my brothers and sisters, we openly have declared Revolt.  For the last 2000 years, we are looked upon as dangerous from the outside, because we have declared such an absurd revolt against the Order of the Universe.  But, still, we are in Revolt!  This instills a sweetness to Christian life and society unknown elsewhere.  

Against the forces of Death!  

We say, “No!”

Against the forces of Despair and Fate!  

We say, “No!”

Against decline and decay!  

We say, “No!”

Against Mother Earth and her pull towards Hades and the grave!  

We say, “No!”

We say yes to Salvation by Grace through Faith, and hold high the Cross as a symbol of our Revolt and Conquest against the Dark Forces of the Universe!

On the Precipice of a Breakthrough

Life can be strange.  Success will play tricks on you to make sure that you are the real deal.  How will it do this?  This is called Life’s Shit Test.

Just before you arrive at a breakthrough, life has a way of placing a roadblock in front of you just before success, bliss and happiness.  This is also called the Terror of the Threshold.

What do we do?  Go into the terror and fear, and keep an eye on what is beyond the stumbling block.  This is life’s way of determining if you have the stuff to deserve the sweetness that is on the other side.

Just before you land a major account, or get a raise, or get the big money, someone or something will present itself in front of you and piss you off.  

Another way of seeing this is that if you see a spike in things that piss you off, you are probably on the right path!

A lot of people take the opposite view that if bad things are happening to them in the pursuit of their dream, then they must be doing something wrong.  No!

When you are in pursuit of your mission, you are in the right path and you are doing the right thing.  Before the breakthrough you will get pissed - usually immediately before the breakthrough.  So, turn common thinking upside down and tell yourself that this spike in Life’s Shit Test means that you are First and Goal (or on other words, three feet away from the Mother Lode!)!