“Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.” -- Albert Einstein

100125 08:43
--Albert Einstein
“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”
“Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.”
“Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.”
The most starling aspect of my joy--collecting quotes--is that many affirm my intentions and previously annotated thoughts/conclusions. I am reminded of what Albert Schweitzer called the “Brotherhood of Pain.” I reject the sexist aspect now and do translate “Brotherhood” into the “Family of Humankind.” His point was that once we pass beyond the sense and experience that everything is okay we tend to stay in consciousness that to return is impossible and undesirable. Judging by my life, we all go by different paths towards our truth, and those of us who do not, become addicted to one form or another of avoidance and denial. We are all people but few, it seems, are willing to become discrete and unique personalities. By experience, personal and collective, I sense this the origin of most, if not all, dysfunctions. Our unwillingness to take responsibility for, and participate in, our own lives. But then I am well aware of those twists and turns you and I are forced to take and the paths taken by choice.
It is often tempting to say “The Devil Made Me Do It!” The obverse is equally true in that some, perhaps too many, say the same thing about God. To be self-righteous is equally false since it leads to control, dominance and manipulation of others to the extreme of killing them for disagreement. The world does not belong to any one race, creed, gender or age. The power to destroy moves from one sane become lunatic civilization or epoch to another and the folly of the former revealed and reviled.
Moving into society, at large, I seek not affirmation of my conclusions but a sincere sense of what people want and need.
I am better informed by my failures in life than by my successes. Such success I have experienced were once jealously proclaimed yet experientially hollow. Upon close examination I came to question  my motives and understand that I was seeking my truth from others who could only respond  with theirs and none seemed adequate when taken to a logical conclusion imply exclusion of all life, others less worthy or adequate.
The wonderful part of being self-educated, and derived, is to recognize that all life seeks the same freedom from tyranny and fear. My sense and conviction of  the numinous is inclusive of all life and not exclusive to a few forms or individuals. My normal inquiry swiftly reveals motives of taking rather than giving; to take is self-impoverishment and to give is to know a greater wealth. After a lifetime of shame I have begun to choose my truths as passed through the prism of what had former been a mirror; ala 1 Corinthians 13.  If our minds are prisms then we come to wonder what is the source of the light?
Everyone has a talent for love and life, but few recognize that the greed for either, or both, disables our inherent genius to have abundance defined by our true self as created. Life will teach us everything we need to know . . . in a sense we are in The Presence all the time . . . and the numinous is far more kind and forgiving than all the previous constructs of belief and knowing allow, and so we judge ourselves unworthy of life or love, and the future hopeless. What we are and have are adequate to the intention that life is worthy of continuance.
Thinking of Haiti now, it seems an appropriate simile for my experience of being buried under the rubble of other’s conceits and conclusions. How I survived is all that I wish to share.