Updated September 26, 2004
November 6 2003 -- Rewritten
January 11. 2004 -- tweaked, August 7, 2007
by Ramon Sender Barayon
Nov
6 2003 --
Imagine
Imagine
you are a star, named by its self-aware creations (at least in one language)
'the Sun,' and yet in truth you are a conscious being, their Creator/
Sustainer, Mother/Father, source of all their light and life, all love and
consciousness -- and food -- on their planet. Yet these children of yours
currently wear mental/spiritual blindfolds and insist, if and when they decide
to worship a god, that it must be an 'invisible god' somewhere outside of what
'stares them in the face' every morning. That's too obvious for them, not complicated
enough. Besides, they've been taught that the physical universe is inanimate --
you know, hot rocks, fire, gas, stuff like that.
Because this invisible god cannot be seen
anywhere, or talked to or even heard (in the majority of cases), these humans
then try to 'have faith' that this god is really real. Also sometimes they tend
to get a little paranoid, those that 'have faith,' because they are never sure
when this invisible god might be watching what they're up to. They struggle
with their doubts, and then prop their belief systems up with various
theories and analyses -- and of course some wonderful myths and stories. These
they then enjoy deconstructing and re-deconstructing, with stories about
stories about more stories. All this keeps academic publishing companies in
business, which is a good thing for those of us on a tenure track at a
university. By the way, for a detailed and amusing look at the strange antics
of what a certain Mr. Gurdieff calls these 'three-brained beings,' read his irritating
but very amusing book "All And Everything -- Beelzebub's Tales To His
Grandson."
Meanwhile,
while the presses print ream after ream of great thoughts such as those on this
page, our conscious creator-star, Father/Mother Sun, keeps pouring light and
love and consciousness down on all planets and life forms, believers,
nonbelievers, awake or sleep-walking, good and bad alike. For the most part, we
humans are much too busy thinking great thinks, and worrying about 'our bottom
lines' or 'our checkbook balances' or our shiny new _______ (fill-in-the-blank)
to notice the golden waterfalls of scintillating eudaemony (I prefer this word
to 'bliss' because the latter has been so devalued by Joseph Campbell and
others) -- or well-being, if you prefer, that pour down around us and grow our
food and enlighten our days.
I
could rant on for many more pages about the remarkable methods to which we
humans resort NOT to see the obvious. I actually could argue that a great deal
of culture and the science as they exist were erected as filters so as NOT to
live a quote 'brute' existence of direct experience of THAT golden presence.
Yet beyond the sun's embrace nothing exists except at very sub-zero
temperatures for quite a few light years until you snuggle up to another
gorgeously radiant creator-star.
However, all sorts of teachers and pointers to
the truth surround us. If you sneak a glance at the animals and plants, you
will find they are very sun-oriented, phototropic if you prefer. Birds greet
the sun at dawn and sunset with liquescent-like melodies, although the
ornithologists amongst us might pooh-pooh my explanation of our local male
mockingbird's rapturous warbles as merely his staking out his territory.
Today we live with serious warnings about the
dire effects of sunlight on our physical well-being. Now that the effluent of
modern civilization has melted our protective layer of ozone, the sun has
assumed in our imaginations a strangely destructive persona as the harbinger of
disease and death. Yet despite the increased activity at the skin specialists,
we continue to gravitate to the beaches in the summer and to outdoor
activities, slathered in the sunblocker creams that recently I read actually
may be causing some of the problems. Sunglasses also are bad news for our
health because they block out the trace ultraviolet that activates our body's
repair systems. Our sun is not a steady-state star, and in its active mode
shoots us full of tiny pinholes that we have evolved a way to control. Our
bodies monitor the sun through the light that bathes our eyes and adjusts its
repair activities accordingly.
Note: for more information about this, see
also my essay/interview with
full-spectrum light inventor, John Ott
We seem to be stuck, because the solar exposure
that makes things worse for our bodies makes things better for our mood. My
dearest father-in-law, who inclined towards a seasonally affective gloominess,
used to migrate south every winter for a few weeks, returning with his bald
pate as crisp as a well-basted turkey but with renewed enthusiasm and a smile
on his face. 'Sunny' makes for a sunny disposition, but not the enlightened
recognition that we actually bathe in the splendor of our creator consciousness
daily. Instead of recognition, we have religion, which I personally view as
using the promise of 'pie in the sky in the great bye-and-bye' as a way to
assuage the "why poor me's" of the underfed, underpaid and socially
disadvantaged. Although today we also have television, drugs, antidepressants,
booze, sex, and food as a smorgasbord of opiates for the masses, religion
continues to keep at least an ever-dwindling number of the 'less economically
favored' amongst us from rising up and demanding their fair effing share of the
goodies.
For my spiritual communion, I am very content
with the light in the sky every morning, and the eudaemony that I receive from
our Creator. Every day is a day of worship for me, a literal Sunday even when
it's cloudy because, as the song almost says, I always look for the golden
lining, and a fun game of solar peek-a-boo. Our congregation is so huge it
cannot be counted, if I include every blade of grass and tiny gnat. We all are
light-to-love transformers, because I am convinced that the light drenching our
retinas moves in some manner to our hearts, which function as light-to-love
transformers. Light is vertical love and love is horizontal light. I like to
believe that when we pour our love out to others, mirroring what the light does
for us, it thrills our parent star. Our Sun thrives on the knowledge that all
living things beam love, consciously or unconsciously, in small or large amounts,
even those of us who live two-dimensionally (never gazing up and recognizing
our ever-beaming Source), busy scratching in the dirt and bemoaning our
god-abandoned state in lengthy tomes and lonely lives, or floundering in a
dummied-up materialistic, mechanistic view of reality that even today's quantum
scientists have long ago discarded.
Actually, this state of affairs would be VERY
FUNNY if it were not, in my candid opinion, very sad. I can't help wondering if
this also must sadden the Sun a little bit. Maybe that's why, recently, our
star shouted a little louder when early last November she began throwing us
unusually large solar kisses.
"Yoo-hoo,
kids! Here I am!"
"Big
Mama! Watermelon-Ripener! I hear you!" I called back.
A
little girl once told me, "The sun is my friend." And when I asked why, she
said, "Because he's always looking over my shoulder to see what I'm
doing!"
I
suggest that we might learn from our children more about the very innocent truth of what is
REALLY real.
Of possible interest, Stanford's About Arts - The Sun in Literature:
- directory of the sun in literature.