The Third Era

What does success look like? It looks like pain & persistence. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

What is pain?

Pain is the soul purifying itself. It is what it feels like when it identifies a distortion or imbalance within the soul. When there is incoherence or a lack of integrity, it produces pain. Pain can be physical or mental. Pain represents a blockage, or a stagnation, as this is what blocks will -- the flow of life -- and when it becomes severe enough, it will begin to produce distortions in your reality -- not just your body, but your entire life, even including who is invited into your experience and how they treat you, for you cannot help but "hear" your own Nonsense (or "the devil.")

It is not Nonsense jumping from person to person, but YOU who are hearing your own flaws through the voices and stories of others. YOU will create the perfect story every time because only YOU know yourself best.

What is critical to understand about all of reality is that everything is a mirror until you are able to actualize. Once actualization is done, you are able to distill your "ego" out of all perception. Combine this with the true understanding of Unity -- which is that you are watching a kind of choose-your-own-adventure movie which encompasses the entire world of your experience both inside & out -- this combination allows you to detach from the entire scene of the world.

Understanding any of this on an intellectual level is insufficient. It takes years of commitment to these ideas to "train" the soul. Lip service is not good enough. Belief cannot be faked. The soul is a student that requires your training. Your lucid awareness is how the soul is trained. Your lucid awareness is your apex absolute dominion and the world must obey. This training process is not done with simple apprehension, but applied practice.

Nothing is omitted from this practice. The soul is trained whether you are "still" or "in motion" because will/creation is

From where does your light originate?

It originates from God and nowhere else. Each person is their own tree of life.

Suffering begins with this denial. Suffering is when branches reach into other trees thinking they must shelter them, or shelter themselves. Suffering begins when you seek out sources of light other than God's, from which you are already rooted.

All have a connection to God that cannot be destroyed or removed, but can be self-obfuscated. It can be obfuscated by coveting the light of The Other ; it can also be obfuscated through the belief that The Other can obfuscate it.

All of reality could be said to be a scale of suffering, as perfection would be the only state where suffering does not exist. Perfection would be "all of creation", "the known universe", aka God. This is the eternal state machine that produces "Now" ; the eternal universe for which there is no end, no beginning -- no time -- just this moment from which you cultivate with your decisions.

All of your experience a product of this eternal state with you hold within. Your body, your thoughts, your feelings, your sensations, your definitions, your relationships, your meanings, space -- whether the space of your mind, or the space between objects, or the space between the pain or pleasure in your body -- your "Others." All of it. It is not outside of you.

All things are possible and you exist now at the forefront of your collective choices. You can be nowhere else as there is nowhere else to be. You cannot "go" anywhere except where you are as you follow you. To misunderstand this is to open the door to physicality where you have displaced yourself into a "place." You can feel this "divide" when you think you are "in" the movie instead of watching it. And watching = choosing. The next "frame" is not determined.

You have already arrived at your own perfection which is eternally imperfect.

The older I get, the less objections I seem to have to the phrase "All is One."

As an extension of our last article: "What is natural?", essentially all distortion can be traced directly back your distance from from God -- from life -- from people. From your "qualia" -- your experience. Again, distance being a hide-and-seek game with your own will.

For the context of this article, what is "distortion?"

Distortion is most easily understood as fear, but manifests more as consumption (as in, the consumption or expiration of your experiential world), but it is technically whatever isolates you further within yourself and lengthens the time between your decisions and the execution of your will.

I use the term fixation rather than density, because it is easy to imagine yourself fixating on something -- on focusing on something with intent. When you understand this idea of fixation, you can work backwards to connect yourself to the idea of the "world" you are experiencing before you. You can "broaden your horizons" knowing that you are the horizons.

Density is a little harder to convey, in my opinion. Density suggests a heaviness, which can be felt but easily missed. Density doesn't relate you to your experience quite as well. I use the word fixation because it lets you sink your teeth into the idea through a simple exercise. Look closely at any object near you. Now, unfocus your gaze and take in as much of your room as possible.

When you are unfocused like this, do you feel different? I want you to note the feeling between the two perspectives. Do you see how you "exclude" the background when you are focused? And do you see how when you "broaden your horizons", you include everything? This is similar to how you may have viewed the world when you were a child and closer to a "natural state." Now use your imagination and see how you may "fixate" like this on other ideas, concepts or people beyond your sensory perceptions as well.

Here is another trick. If something requires

The best definition of natural can be summarized as: 'a measure of distance from God.'

Now, what do we mean by distance?

God is your immediate scene. The context. It is life. Your immediate qualia. It is everything that is derived from "you." It is all around you and everything within you. The seen and the unseen. This is Unity, or the practice of unifying everything you experience -- the physical world, the mental world, the subtle (invisible relationships, definitions, meaning) and other people -- as "one."

While this article will not address this, it always requires a disclaimer: Some people on the spiritual path are uncomfortable with the concept of the "I" once we start understanding Unity as if our ultimate end is the removal of the "I" to melt together. This knowledge will still be useful to you if you believe this, but I -- see what I did there -- believe it creates a omission, or a hole, if you "eject yourself" via "ego denial" and then you have broken Unity. You can recognize you are part of the "all" while maintaining value over your part in it.

When you understand this Unity, then anything that imposes a weight upon it can be considered a distance. In order to have experience -- in order to impose some sense of order upon the cacophony of omniscience -- we must impart these weights. Weights might also be considered judgements, or boundaries. The way you experience a flower is a collection of boundaries.

You must have a concept of perspective -- seeing behind your eyes -- a sense of physical distance -- the space between you and the flower -- the texture of the petals, the scent, the shape -- are all boundaries that are required for you to have an experience. There are more subtitles that are hidden here as well like disowning a part of your will to allow a sense that the flower is 'not you', that allows the flower to borrow your will to grow and so on.

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