The Cloud of Boring Sameness and Why Don’t We Stop Crucifying Christ Already: Experience Is Divinity, Part Eight — Love and Universal Consciousness
The Universe Is One Vast Expanse of Experience
And what is that One Reality we apprehend in doing service? We get a sense of the experience of another human being. We sense that our experience of the World is the same. This is called empathy; it is called compassion. But what that means is really that we sense that other people are just like us, they are “other me’s,” and that what distinguishes us is not what we are inside—meaning our experience or subjectivity of the World—but is merely the set of events and circumstances that that One Experience or subjectivity is confronted with, deals with, and focuses on. We are One Experience; the Universe is One Experience. It happens to be “looking” in different directions. We are simple foci of Awareness in the vast expanse of Experience.
Why the Bodhisattva Waits
And the other word used to describe Ultimate Reality and God, outside of being One is Love.
This follows from what was said above about the experience of Unity. For in apprehending the Truth that others are simply ourselves in other “clothing,” so to speak, we move closer to them in feeling. We call that empathy, compassion, but ultimately we call it Love.
What Is Love
Love is the feeling that another’s needs, wishes, wants, fears, pains, joys, and attainments are our own. That is, we “feel for” them; we feel also hurt when they are pained, happy when they are joyous. What they experience is additive to us, not subtractive. It is the reason the bodhisattva refuses to go into enlightenment until everyone can. For at this stage just short of enlightenment there is the experience of Unity and Love: We go beyond estrangement from others, beyond the feeling that we “are our brother’s keeper,” beyond even the sense that we are all in this together… We sense that we share in the experience of all others and our experience cannot be separated away from theirs … that we rise or fall together, not just in our fortunes but in how we feel about them.
Unity and Love
So the experience of Unity leads to the experience of empathy, then compassion… leading to the experience of Love, taking us to the shores of enlightenment, the shores of the apprehension of Ultimate Reality. They are all experiences, leading to a sense of greater experience, leading to more and more encompassing experience of Reality, of the Whole.
So, Love is closer to the truth of Ultimate Reality, or God, than what is normally thought. It is closer, but not quite it.
It is Love…. It’s also hate…in a strange way….
If God Is the Universe of Experience, She Is Also Hate
God is hate; but He is hate, as us, having allowed Himself to completely forget. So He is not hate really. God is not hate, not in essence. Hate is just an experience that a part of Him has wanted.
Hate and the evil that corresponds to it is God having a different experience than is His nature. So to have it She needs to forget who She is.
Why God would want to have such experiences that are not part of His or Her nature is the question. And it is what we take a look at shortly.
Universal Consciousness and The Cloud of Sameness
We also use the words universal consciousness to describe Divinity. But does anyone stop to think what that might mean? Can anyone even imagine or picture it?
The Cloud of Unknowing
If we try, chances are we think of something big and amorphous—something that could be both nothing and everything, like a Universal Cloud. Indeed, at least one mystic described it as the Cloud of Unknowing. 
And we would not attribute anything colorful to it, for how would we know which colors? So it might be a big grey cloud or a white light.
But, Consciousness? What do we think of it, how do we picture consciousness? Can you see consciousness? So how do you picture it? Like some gigantic cloud, right?
Does God Bore You? Ok, How About Truth?
Well one of the biggest secrets of all is that it is nothing like that, in fact quite the opposite. How would I know? Well, we are One with It and, like I said, we are immersed in it. It is closer to us than our breath, for it is the Experience of breathing, in that case. It is Experience, as I’ve been pointing out. And Experience is hardly dull and grey!
I said I like being an iconoclast. Why? I just gave you an indication that this idea of Consciousness…which we all see as being somehow vague is seen that way because of the words that are blocking our view, the “icons” that are in the way.. It is no thing, so we think it is nothing.
The problem with that is that it makes God, Reality, the Ultimate, and Universal Consciousness all sound pretty goddamn boring! And thinking of it that way has really hurt a lot of people when they want to become more of this Consciousness. For how can you desire very very hard and strive for something that at base seems boring, unwantable, undesirable… that’s nothing?
Is God Nothing or No Thing?
How many people have you seen—meditators and such—sitting for hours and hours and hours trying to have like nothing in their brain!?
Nothing in their brain!? That’s what they’re thinking is GOD!
Why Don’t We Stop Crucifying Christ Already…
Or do they think God’s going to show up in a nice pixie or elf uniform or something? No, so whatever they are picturing is boring.
Look at how we have changed Christ to conform to that. Do you ever see him pictured as smiling? As being anything but solemn and severe? How about playful or teasing?
He’s Actually a Nice Guy.
How could he possible have been a person and not laughed, kidded, played, and so on. Yet, all of that is removed from our depictions of him leaving a dour lifeless shell of a person, who is then said to represent Life itself. Do you see how confused … and therefore confusing … that is?
Yet even if we take a look at Christ’s life as we know it, was he passionless? Imagine how anyone could get into it with moneychangers in a temple and actually toss them out and not get a little roused up. Yet, being emotionless is even how He is depicted doing that!
We Remove the Essence of Divinity from Our Ideas of the Divine
The point is that we keep removing the essence of Divinity—Experience—from all our depictions of Divinity, guaranteeing we will be wrong. Wrong, and even end up getting the opposite idea. We turn living Spirit into emotionless icon and end up worshiping, even emulating, the very things that our holy people exhort us to look away from.
Continue with When Life is Ever New, a Revelation, One Has Turned the Good into the Wonderful: Experience Is Divinity, Part Nine — God Invents Joy by Forgetting.
Return to All Roads Lead Home and the Multi-Tasking Universe: The Universe is a Vast Expanse of Experience, “Looking” in Different Directions.
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity
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