Theos-Talk Archives (February 1998 Message tt00019)

Keith and Pam:

Keith asks if spirituality is on the increase in politics,
society, or art, and indicates that things may be getting bad.

Pam replies with personal examples of how things are getting
better and suggests that "the coming generation was not born for
our time, it was born for their own".

Keith then mentions that "what if there really WASN'T a Santa
Claus?" He warns that we shouldn't "make over a cruel world in the
phoney baloney image of the namby pamby liberal mush".

As I see it, the world as we know it -- life on the physical plane
-- is neutral. It's neither good nor bad, awful nor wonderful, but
like tofu -- it takes on the flavor of whatever you cook it with.
The external world is like a blank sheet of paper that takes on
whatever you or I put on it.

This is not to say that behind things, there aren't higher planes,
and there aren't high spiritual beings that oversee external life,
providing a sense of natural order to life, and giving an
underlying basis of compassion to life.

For us as individuals, the world can be a mirror. It'll take on
whatever face we bring to it. It is rich in content, full of every
possible imaginable thing, like chaos, but *we draw out* certain
things into existence about us, we *exteriorize* them.

There are both dark and bright sides to life, and like different
channels on the TV, we can tune into one or the other. All the
channels are real, all are happening, but we pick the one that
we're watching, the one that externally becomes real in our living
room, our daily life.

In life, the world about us is like that initially blank TV
screen. We pick the channel, we tune into the type of content and
set the nature of our experiences. We can pick an awful channel
and say "life is hell" and see it that way and be correct. Some
other people can pick wonderful channels and say "life is joyous,
blissful, simply great!" and see it that way and also be correct.

The important point is that although external life is neutral, it
isn't cold, heartless, evil, dark unless we paint it that way,
unless we use our powers of mind to project a worldview that sees
it that way. The way that we fashion our worldview, and use our
mind -- we don't just affect our subjective impressions. We become
a source of the light or darkness that we perceive. Others are
affected by how we see and experience things. We can become a
source of light in the world, or a dark cloud and drain on the
life energies of others. It all depends on which channels we
watch, on which types of consciousness that we tune into, on how
we fashion our self-made experience of life.

-- Eldon