Struggling long and hard with the role of faith and religion in one’s life—enormous dividends can be achieved. Our thoughts and feelings are experienced as separate from the universe. It is precisely because of this limitation that we are able to seek and hopefully satisfy our needs and desires. In the world of non-being, where suffering, injustice, and cruelty occur, we sometimes feel compelled to look upon satisfaction and fulfillment as somebody’s idea of a joke, like some carrot out of reach dangling in front of our noses; and further, we are condemned to the ultimate indignity—our mortality. Without question, the price of freedom is high, but it follows from the nature of God’s freedom that in our suffering, God suffers. We share the price of freedom with God, but more importantly, in our rejoicing God rejoices, and it is in this light that we, as active agents of transformation, may come to understand our responsibility to work toward a happier, healthier humanity.

“Suddenly, and with some apprehension, I realized the meaning….of what my unconscious had been communicating. I am a bubble. My personal awareness, although it seems distinct and separate, is in fact the reflection of one great consciousness pervading the universe. So who am I when my bubble bursts, as it must, and I return to my source? The fear I first felt has long melted. It has been replaced by joy as I have explored what it means to burst and return home.”

This last paragraph is the concluding paragraph from “Consciousness All The Way Down,” an article written by Tony Crisp.

My relationship to consciousness–my self-consciousness (according to Sartre)–brings to consciousness the pure negative of nothingness, and, in so doing, denies itself the possibility of truly becoming self-conscious. Again, according to Sartre, a negation separates me from myself. Nothingness then, lies at the heart of consciousness. Sartre describes man “as the being by which nothingness comes into the world.” Being for-itself can never, in any final sense, be conscious of itself. It carries within itself the rift of nothingness that negates that very possibility, and as such, only makes itself known to me as a lack, a lack that typically fills up with ego, –but it does something else too. Without it, without the nothingness that negates, the question, the capacity for inquiry, would not exist. The annihilating act of self-consciousness is the real consciousness behind consciousness. It is the lack of self, a question unto self that we are left with. It is what Sartre calls the pre-reflective cogito. What this means is that any knowledge of consciousness is secondary to existing consciousness itself. This is not unlike what physicists experience at the quantum level. There too, existence precedes knowledge of it.

To sum up, the aesthetic continuum, –the precondition for anything whatsoever, and self-consciousness, –the precondition for knowledge of anything whatsoever, are themselves grounded in the “nothingness of freedom and self-consciousness”– the source of all possibilities. It is this nothingness, the nothingness that is co-dependent with all interacting relationships on the level of the aesthetic continuum, and the nothingness that rests at the heart self-consciousness, which, in the world that we live in, births our capacity to question, know, and change that world—hopefully for the better.

I’m done with keeping records (this blog is record enough for me)–however, “all the pain, suffering, heartache, and regrets….right along with the joys, happiness, love, and the rest of the ‘good stuff’ that makes life worth living, lives on in God. All the events of one’s personal history (in past tense one’s life lived) was/is to God the same as it was/is to a living human being—we are nothing without a history and our history is preserved in God”. I am not alone. Thanks again for the hugs and love.

“When all beings are seen reflected in the absolute creative nothingness of the basho, there is
an awakening. In the experience of the absolute interpenetration of nothingness with all the particular existents in the universe, there is an awakening to the “eternal now.” There, the distinctions Brahman/atman, self/not-self, have no place.

Understanding “self” without first understanding the Self/sunyata distinction is, in my opinion, impossible.

http://twosideddivinity.blogspot.com/2011/10/all-inclusive-interconnectivity.html

All-Inclusive Interconnectivity
Disagreement With My New Religion Professor
The Brahman Experience-Seat Of Freedom