دانلود کتاب The Immortal Perspective: On Who, What, and Where We Really Are

The question is ‘who, what, and where are we?’; for those who answer that question full of finite dreams - mortal beings in a finite universe in a unidirectional flow of time - I suppose it must seem like there are ‘high stakes’, their continued existence a critical deciding factor of what is right and wrong, good and bad; I’m always fascinated how sure people are that their existence is an important thing; I try to reason as a philosopher with people but when I question the imperative of human existence, all I hear is “that’s where you lose me”; so a bunch of human philosophers take what seems to me like a friendly football game and turn it into a reason for stress, grief, sadness, existential dread…so what’s the alternative? answering the question about who and what and where we are from a place of faith instead of a place of fear, from a viewpoint of immortality and eternity rather than mortality, limitation and lack; the answer from an angel of peace rather than from a prisoner of war; i grew up in this culture, too, i tried the prisoner of war personality, and grabbed the football and ran with it, cheered on like it meant something; but with experience, I saw that the other team eventually got the football and ran the other way, and then eventually it all turned back around again; I noticed that in our labyrinth walk, like sentries we pace back and forth, as if in opposite directions, as we each progress up the field to the center, and then progress back out; some of us look down the whole time, ‘so much at stake’, (“Collapse!”) and so hugging the turns with science and sobriety and ‘realism’; others trundle along staring up at a clear sky effused with the radiance of a white sun of boundlessness, beyond time and space in its immortality, and just smile when they glance below at the particulars, shining their smile out from the zero dimension of zero essence, partner in the treasure, glistening in the array, harmony on its journey, attitude of cloud, mark of mystery, the pattern, temple and road of its destiny that both holds and gently reveals it, destiny of forever, illusion stream conclusion, bridge of the current, lighting the dream, the happy blue symphony, fortune’s beam, candle of hope, ease in the waves of story, greening the bridge, text of wholeness, candle of completion, scaling the wonder, silencing the hurry, living the forever, growing the calm treasure, standing in the silence, entering the real, its destination a golden lake, cap on forever, time’s offering, the simple setting, mirror of happiness, gratitude in the destiny, star in the surprise, happy in the home, farming the illusion, grappling the goodness, living the surprise, foraging the synthesis, dreaming the awake, sweetening the clouds, deepening the air, watering the tide, kissing the illusion, offering the dream;

Daoists call it 仙(xian)- a divine transcendent, or a Daoist immortal; Buddhists call it 佛(fo) - a Buddha; the Dao master at the Daoist temple says both characters mean the same thing and that another word for it is 聖人 (sheng ren) -"sage" or "saint"; Hindus call it Brahman, 梵 (fan) - and Ernest Holmes, who wrote Science of Mind and the course I was taking at CSL Dallas, just calls it "This Thing Called Me";

Christianity calls it "eternity", but that just seemed empty to me as a kid; still, the teaching is there, in an invisible cloud surrounding the phrase "your soul is eternal"; Hindus call it Brahman, Vishnu in Vaikuntha, alive and beautiful, yet outside of time; so I called it "anti-time heaven" in that spirit, and I call the place where my human body is, my "time-garden", 'cause it's something I cultivate, like a garden, like the planting of seeds; and if it does well, the fruit is prayers, for all beings in the garden; if something happens to the garden, then I can start over, but it doesn't affect "who I am", and that's the big difference in perspective, that's the end of "suffering".