It has been stated many times, that we cannot hope to define love, or truth.
Here is my definition of both.

Truth is the context of things.
Love is the embrace of the context of things.

We confuse, and even lose, our spiritual path to wholeness and integration, when we equate the need for our own legitimacy with our need for love.

Legitimacy has its founding in law, in ethics, in moral codes. Love has its founding in our universal context.

To the extent we insist on receiving a sort of legitimacy from others, to that extent we are incapable of receiving love. We must choose whether we will embrace love for our soul, or legitimacy.

None of us are legitimate. We all are so far from a state of wholeness that any notion of us being lawful, that is, moral, or legitimate, must be completely thrown out, in favor of the reality that we all are significantly damaged goods. Our humanity is broken. Our functionality as human beings is ruined.

Let’s be done with our protests to the contrary, which can only result in the sabotaging of our spiritual journey toward wholeness and integration.

What we really need is to be loved with our flaws and dysfunctions, really loved, thoroughly loved, and that implies absolute forgiveness. If we turn up our nose at the suggestion of forgiveness, it is because we are still invested in a search for legitimacy.

If you still are not inclined to leave your quest for legitimacy, for the better quest for love, then perhaps the following observation will help. A quest for legitimacy will never be realized, in fact it cannot possibly be realized (even accepting as real the insane premise that you actually are legal in all things, or in anything, completely), in as much as this quest is, and always will be, directed at the people who have failed to accept your legitimacy up to this point, and no two of these, or any, people will ever agree on what the law, on what moral integrity, is.

Your quest for legitimacy is screwed from the outset. It is a thirsty soul’s maddening pursuit of a mirage.

So much of what passes for psychology, or social progress, today is a pandering to this reactionary impulse in mankind to seek legitimacy. We should not be fooled. Legitimacy is not what we want; love is. And all of the skillfully tailored psychological or political gimmicks, complete with slick, intellectual, or political, or spiritual-sounding, jargon will not change this human equation.

So what if someone does not think your sexual orientation, or your culture, or your religion, or your ideas or beliefs, etc. are moral or natural or correct, and you do? Changing their mind, changing everyone’s mind, will not get you what you want, what you really deeply need; that is, to be loved.

I have a suggestion for a practical course of action. The next time someone gives you a hard time with your particular legitimacy issue, agree with them about whatever they are suggesting is unlawful, or unnatural, or wrong, and then ask them if they will forgive you.

You won’t lose the use of those functional parts of you, just because you act this little pageant out, and if you truly are legitimate in whatever aspect of you that is being wrongfully judged, you will still be free to be you. The thing that will change is that you will begin to travel down the road that is the quest for love. Traveling down this road is what transforms us, from the wounded, dysfunctional, souls, who are busy earnestly licking our own wounds, into people would can love themselves and thus can turn their attention outward in love for those around them.

What do you have to lose? You have been trying the other path your whole life, and what has it gotten you? Look for love, and live, really live.

You may protest that if people truly do love you they will embrace the legitimacy of your significant issue. That is true, of course (assuming you are in fact whole), but love from other people is not the love I am suggesting you go in search of. Look for love from the spiritual force underlying your human existence. If you get love from this factor, you will be able to love your self, and that is all you need in order thrive, to fully, proactively, live out your life as a human being.

Of course, everything I have been trying to sell you on here depends on one thing; that the spiritual force underlying the unfolding material universe does, in fact, love you. I can tell you from my own actual, enormously illegitimate, human experience, that it does.

Whether you see the point I am making here, or not, I want to love you perfectly, so I will be continuing to quest for love, and reject my impulse to seek legitimacy. I hope I see you on this Road. 

The restoration of the species is dependent upon the same thing that the restoration of the individual is; the spiritual force underlying our existence. And just because this is so, no amount of damage done by an individual or a nation, will ever adversely effect the individuation of the individual, or the collective restoration of our species.

Those elements that opt for ego-fear-driven-control will simply cancel themselves out of the universal equation at some point. The universe/God, will move on without them

When God judges humanity, his judgement is to give us what we have chosen for ourselves. If we have chosen prideful disharmony with our own underlying spiritual force, we are effectively cutting ourselves off from the factor that is responsible for our continued existence.

God will judge mankind, just as the prophets have been telling us for thousands of years. It is an inevitable outcome of the process begun by the force that expresses itself in human free-will, and that underlies our existence.

The existence of choice, implies, and logically requires, a corresponding outcome, in order for the choice to be viable. If our choices don't result in a choice-based outcome, then our choice is merely a con. 

And it must be understood that the system responsible for us having the power to choose, will logically be the factor giving us the outcome of our choices. I view human society as being moved toward a collective psychological state in which our ego's problem with fear is being brought to a head, in much the same manner that our individual emotional issues come to the surface. Things will get very much worse for our species, and then God/the universe/insight/judgment will come and deliver us from the prison of our own collective and individual, fear-driven psyche.

It is a natural process, and thus it is a divine process, just as our coming into existence was. And this divine process will resolve into a state of universal harmony, with those of us choice-making creatures who have chosen to pursue restoration of harmony between us and the spiritual force underlying our existence, being given that very harmony. 

   If time is a concept relative to space ( a concept of a sequence of events in the material universe), then things of a non-material nature, such as those things that we traditionally identify as spiritual things, and which today we might identify as the underlying ordering factor behind the systematically unfolding material universe, such things are not limited by time and space. Rather, time and space are limited by this underlying ordering factor. 

    And since this underlying ordering factor is not limited to time and space, it would be able to interface with time and space as a whole (in what we time and space-oriented creatures would describe as past/present and future, all together). 

    This type of interfacing, with time and space, absolutely knows the unfolding of time and space, and thus could both express itself in a temporal free will, and in its interaction with our temporal free wills. Such interaction would not invalidate our free will. If we temporal-oriented beings knew the outcome of our choices in the same manner that the underlying ordering factor did, this would effectively invalidate out free will. We don't, so our freedom to choose remains viable. 

    And because we are inherently subjective enough creatures to carry a viable freedom of choice, we are also subjective enough to require consistent moments of spiritually originated objectivity/insight in order for our choices to rise above the ordinary influences of instinct, and emotion, and our value structure (what Freud would have called the super ego). 

    Without this objective input, we would be fated by our physiology and our physical and emotional environment to live out absolutely predictable lives. We don't live out absolutely predictable lives, just because there is this interaction between the underlying ordering factor of the material universe, and us. 

    Jung would call this interaction, the collective unconscious at work in our subconscious mind, and would vaguely and alternately define it as either a product of human evolution, and a product of something much bigger than human evolution. 

    I would call it God, and would say that regardless of the actual extent of human evolution, it is a force that is the context of the systematically unfolding material universe, and as such is expressing itself through every material thing in the universe, and through our human psyche as well (which is capable of interfacing with this spiritual force). 

    To the extent that human free will is an expression of this underlying ordering factor, it implies that the root cause of all human dysfunction is a product of our choice to remain in disharmony from this underlying ordering force, and the reason we choose this path is because we opt for pride instead of love. 

    Pride is our wounded ego's reactionary attempt at solving our problems, and is invariably self-directed. The ordering factor underlying the unfolding material universe is patently loving, and when we respond to it, we are raised up out of the conservative acting, self-directed, destructive impulses of our ego, and freed to see our real options. 

    So, our choices are ultimately about whether we will respond to love (the underlying ordering factor of the universe we are an aspect of), or whether we will opt to react to fear (and its ego supported perceptions of reality). All of our human behavior is a result of this choice, and we are constantly making this choice, whether we are conscious of it or not. 

    Becoming conscious of this ongoing series of decisions is itself, a product of our consciously deciding to seek, to knock, to ask for harmony with this underlying ordering factor of our life. We are all being wooed. Some of us will respond. Most wont.

    You think that if you can somehow learn the most significant truth, that you can become whole, that you will become fully realized. You think that if you can somehow see the greatest spiritual reality you will then be able to overcome and rise above, to transcend your mundane and your damaged soul, and spread your spiritual wings and fly off to a state of perfect oneness with all things.

    The problem with this notion is that you already have seen the greatest spiritual reality, and you have already known the most significant truth (in fact you are constantly seeing it), and you are still the same troubled, stalled, dysfunctional human you have always been. No, chances are you are even worse off now than you were before.

    The greatest spiritual reality and the most significant truth are shouting at you, from the colors and textures and sounds and smells and sensations and patterns, of the universe all around you and in you, and you cannot appreciate any but the smallest measure of it all, because there is something broken inside of your consciousness. You do not work properly, and the attainment of more self-originated experience, however profound, will not change that.

    And yet, you say, people have been spiritually transformed. So, how did they become spiritually transformed? What did they do, or know, or see, that changed them? Again, I say, they did nothing to change themselves. We are the problem, and deploying our problematic human being to bring restoration of our dysfunctional humanity is to guarantee that the same human errors will be repeated in our sad lives, but only dressed now in the camouflage of new and different-looking terminology and ideas.

So how do some people experience spiritual restoration?

    The answer lies in the fact that we have been made by a spiritual force underlying everything in the physical universe. And because we have been made by this force, there is logically only two possibilities as concerns our potential for change and realization. We are either already what we were made to be (in our present condition), or else, because this force also made us with the special ability to opt out of harmony with it, and consequently become damaged goods (and we as a species did, somewhere in our past, opt out of harmony with this originating and maintaining spiritual force), then we will somehow need to have a state of harmony with this originating force restored to us in order for us to become fully realized.

    And here is where we come to understand why most of our previous efforts at becoming whole, and becoming realized souls, have failed miserably. We have become, just because we have become bereft of our natural harmony with this originating spiritual force underlying our physical existence, uncomfortable facing the facts of our present disharmonious state of existence, and equally predisposed to rely upon our damaged psyches for the solutions to our worsening condition.

    In fact, some of us even come to a point of hatching the delusional idea that we are not made by that spiritual force, and that nothing has been made by that spiritual force, and that therefore, we are already all that we can ever be. Denial of the problem is without a doubt a much easier road to travel, than is the scary road of humbly dealing with the reality of our problems, in the hope that the spiritual force that made us will be willing and able to remake us, to restore us.

    So, we have been in denial of our state of disharmony with the spiritual force expressing itself as our human existence, and we have thus turned to ourselves as the source of the resources needed to restore the life that we have lost as a result of our broken harmony with this spiritual source.

    In as much as we are turning to ourselves, out of fear of the truth of our true state of disharmony, we are also afraid to receive any aid we might be offered from the spiritual source we are now in a state of disharmony with.

    It is not fear that keeps us from receiving this harmony-restoring aid from our spiritual source however, it is pride. Love can conquer all fear. It won’t conquer pride, because pride is volitional. It is our choice. We don’t choose to be afraid, but we do choose to rely on pride.

    And our pride is wrapped up in every religious path we think to travel. There are no exceptions to this. It is only our responding to spiritual experiences offered to us by this spiritual force underlying our existence that ever produces restoration of harmony and the wholeness and realization generated by that harmony.

    And we are, each of us, carrying much pride. And some of us choose to turn from pride in order to embrace the aid of this spiritual force underlying our human existence, and most of don’t. There is a direct tradeoff for us: we embrace the aid at the expense of our pride, or we cling to our pride at the expense of the aid we need.

    And, of course, most of us will not agree with this particular breakdown of the human condition, because we are still choosing pride over aid. And until and unless we humbly turn to the spiritual force underlying our human existence and plead for its aid in overcoming the disharmony between it and us, we will always cling to our pride, because we blindly think that is all we have left.

    If we do choose to humbly face our disharmonious condition and ask for aid from the spiritual force underlying our existence, then we will be given all of the aid we need. This is guaranteed in as much as this underlying spiritual force is essentially perfect love.

    And we can know this spiritual force is love, even in our disharmonious state, because we see love’s harmonious order, and love’s design of free will, and love’s systematic patterned production of matter, throughout the universe around us.

    Love made us, and love will remake us, if we turn from pride and seek love’s aid. Love made our ability to opt out of harmony with the spiritual force underlying our human existence, and love made a way for us back into the state of harmony we require in order to become whole, and fully realized human beings.

    And this way produced by love is a way that is completely produced by love, by the spiritual force underlying all things. No aspect of this way has been produced by us humans, or originated in our humanity. This is important in as much as any solution originated by humanity would include the errors generated by humanity’s damaged state of harmony.

    This gift from the spiritual force underlying our existence is completely contained in, and fully expressed in the person of Jesus, the full expression of God (another word for the spiritual force underlying all things). That such a solution would have taken form in a particular part of the globe, and within a particular society, should not cause us to reject it unless we are, out of pride, upset that it did not take form in our own part of the globe, and in our own particular culture.

    Jesus is what he is, and there is no reason to reject him other than pride. There is nothing in Jesus (or the biblical account of him) that expresses anything other than love. There is nothing but love’s forgiveness being offered us in Jesus, and only pride would induce us to turn down forgiveness. Only pride would protest that we don’t need it.

    Whether it is intellectual pride (and its many reasons for believing that Jesus could not truly have existed (or truly be what he claimed to be), or cultural pride (and its silly excuses for spurning something wonderful that takes form outside of our own culture), or pride in our own moral condition, or pride in humanity, all pride will only seal our human dysfunction, and our spiritual demise.

    What can you possibly lose by turning and kissing the Son, by embracing Jesus and his sacrifice’s provision of forgiveness of all of your sins? What will you have to give up, except the pride that has left you buried in your own private emotional and spiritual crypt?

    Receiving this aid from the spiritual force underlying your human existence will produce a foundation under you of harmony between you and this spiritual force. And you need this foundation of harmony (this spiritual rebirth) to begin to grow more and more in harmony with this spiritual force.

    When it comes down to it, it is just you and this spiritual force facing each other, waiting to see what direction you will choose for your self. No one else is there, no culture surrounds you, no society, no ideology under girds you, your friends and your family are not present, it is just you and this spiritual force.



    I should also mention that receiving Jesus (whom the Bible refers to rightly as the Way, the Truth, and the Life) does not imply that you do not already have a spiritual path/way, or spiritual truth, or spiritual life. Nor does it mean that your culture, or society does not have these things. You and they do. All humans have spiritual life, and thus every culture’s religion contains much spiritual truth and a spiritual path, and spiritual life, and yet there remains something singular about Jesus.

    The writer of the biblical text known as Hebrews, expresses a concept that applies to every religion. I will quote the entire passage here, so that you may see it in its context, and then I will summarize it for you.

Heb 8:3  For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices: wherefore it is necessary that this high priest also have somewhat to offer.

Heb 8:4  Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, seeing there are those who offer the gifts according to the law;

Heb 8:5  who serve that which is a copy and shadow of the heavenly things, even as Moses is warned of God when he is about to make the tabernacle: for, See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern that was showed thee in the mount.

Heb 8:6  But now hath he obtained a ministry the more excellent, by so much as he is also the mediator of a better covenant, which hath been enacted upon better promises.

Heb 8:7  For if that first covenant had been faultless, then would no place have been sought for a second.

Heb 8:8  For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, That I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah;

Heb 8:9  Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers In the day that I took them by the hand to lead them forth out of the land of Egypt; For they continued not in my covenant, And I regarded them not, saith the Lord.

Heb 8:10  For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel After those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, And on their heart also will I write them: And I will be to them a God, And they shall be to me a people:

Heb 8:11  And they shall not teach every man his fellow-citizen, And every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: For all shall know me, From the least to the greatest of them.

Heb 8:12  For I will be merciful to their iniquities, And their sins will I remember no more.

Heb 8:13  In that he saith, A new covenant he hath made the first old. But that which is becoming old and waxeth aged is nigh unto vanishing away.

    The gist of this rather radical idea is that our religions were a type, a shadow of the restoration that was to come in the gesture of restorative forgiveness by this spiritual force underlying our human existence, known to us as Jesus the messiah. I see in every religion that I have looked into just such symbolic truths, which point to the need for, and the promise of, a spiritual gift of restoration, made by the spiritual force underlying our existence, not by us (Islam is an exception to this, in as much as it developed after the coming of Jesus. Islam is essentially Muhammad's externalization of his conscience's prideful reaction against his own soul's rebellion against the spiritual force underlying his existence. In as much as this is so, Islam has become an institutionalized mockery of Jesus and all he represents. Islam's renowned mistreetment of females is a testament to the distrust of, and disharmony with, and prideful reaction against, the soul, which is the feminine counterpart to the spirit).

    This text goes on to say that each of our religions is incomplete, and that we need a second phase of revelation/insight (or a second covenant), in order to complete what the first spiritual phase/covenant began in us.

    Lastly this text states that receiving forgiveness will promote a highly individuated state of existence in mankind. The text expresses this in terms of; no one will teach his neighbor truths any more, because God will put his truths in their heart by fully restoring their harmony with Him via full forgiveness of their sins.

    Jesus is what every human religion is pointing to. The Muslims have this thing about authority and submission to it, and authority and submission to authority are two very valuable ideas/truths for social creatures such as humans. And Jesus is the way back to harmony with the very source of all good authority, and the source of all healthy trust in good authority (which manifests as sincere submission).

    The Hindus have this thing about the Oneness of all things. And Jesus is the means that the spiritual force underlying all things has provided for us to feel a firm harmonious connection with this Oneness, this underlying spiritual force (and not merely a recognition of this Oneness).

    The Buddhists of course have a thing for the need for the balancing of things.  And things have come to a state of imbalance in mankind because of the disharmony between humans and the spiritual force underlying their existence. And Jesus is the means of restoration of the lost harmony between mankind and this spiritual force.

    The Tao Te Ching has this thing for quiescence being the way to life. Jesus (and the forgiveness we have because of him) is described as being the full embodiment of the rest that God brings us into.

    The Europeans were once a hybrid of shamanistic practices and Greek and Roman Pantheism. Yet they found that Jesus fit there needs wonderfully. Then, they replaced Jesus (as the mediator between them and God) with the Clergy (followed by a resulting dependence upon a collectively agreed upon notion of orthodoxy), so that Jesus was moved out of the picture. When they did this, the European Christians came to have very little to do with Jesus, and correspondingly came to embrace their old hatred of other people’s religious ideas.

    It has thus come to past that much of the rest of the human race now considers Jesus to be associated with the outright rejection of their individual spirituality, and their culture’s spirituality, yet it is in fact merely European Christianity’s rejection, not Jesus’.

    If the European Christians (and their descendants) had held onto Jesus, instead of turning to the clergy, as the mediatory factor in their relationship with God, then they would have been able to love people of other cultures around them, and would have seen the spiritual life present in their respective religions.

    Therefore, it must be said, Christians must come to embrace Jesus as the mediator between them and the spiritual force underlying their human existence just as the rest of the human species must.

    The human species is headed into the dark night of our collective human soul, in which there will be those who attempt to fix our collective human problems with human originated solutions. Among these solutions will be an effort to rid the world of humanities inability to love and respect each others religious and ideological differences by forcing us to accept a homogenized blend of our respective religions. Our religions are unique because we are unique, and our cultures are likewise unique. Uniformity is a bad version of unity. It replaces harmony with conformity, which effectively kills individuation and wholeness.

    Jesus is the antidote for this coming spiritual calamity. Jesus empowers the individual, in as much as they who receive him are directly connected to the spiritual force underlying their own existence. They need no human go-betweens. They need no membership in any social group in order to thrive. They just need Jesus.

    And now I have preached this spiritual truth to you as best as I could.  If you have read through this document to this point you have what you need to make an insightful choice. And yet, in order for you to choose to embrace Jesus and the forgiveness and harmony you get via his sacrifice, you will still need to trade off your pride for love’s aid.

I will leave you now to your choice.