Once we have begun to master the self, we are ready to begin the journey towards understanding the Universe and beyond. Without the Knowledge of the self, this Wisdom is useless, even dangerous. To approach the Goddess without an understanding of God is pointless but for personal material power and eternal damnation. Likewise, to approach God without an understanding of the Goddess is pointless but for cowards who seek escape and eternal salvation. Neither incomplete path is correct for those who truly wish to live up to the full potential that is the Divine.

    I have been often criticized for my opinions about the relationship between mortal beings and The Divine.  I really do not understand this.  The only thing it can really boil down to is Fear.  Fear of the Unknown?  Fear of GOD?  Fear of the Self?  Who knows?  Only the individual with the fear can really say.  I don’t share this fear.  I have never felt the need to be afraid of my Creator, my Lord, my Master, my Father.  All I have said and done in my time has been of the glory of GOD.  I have been guilty of many errors in both judgement and practice, but they all serve the Lord as lessons to make me better, and wiser.   There are those who say that I am not supposed to take the term “Father” literally.  It is accepted truth among most so-called Christians that all human beings are as brothers and sisters to one and other.  The assumed fact that He created us all is substantiation that He is very much like a Father; not only to the human race, but to every thing, both living and non-living that exists.  My argument is that we are then destined to grow up someday.  Why can we not grow up to be just like our parents?  We all have the divine gift of being able to draw things out of fantasy into reality.  Our whole artificial world demonstrates this fact.  There are places in the real world where you could travel for miles without seeing anything the way that GOD actually made the world to be.  We, as a species, are creative by design.  Creation, modification, alteration, and total destruction are ideas and divine concepts that are in our souls.  No other animal has done so much, so fast, to change the whole world around them as the human being.  Everything else is a mere creation.  Wondrous as they may be, ( and they truly are,) they are not the Children of GOD as we are.

     I venture forth the idea that it is our divine right to assume the position and power of our divine parents one day.  Blasphemy?  Heresy?  Or are you just too afraid to think about the possibilities?  They say that GOD and GODDESS are different from us pitiful human beings.  Of course they are!!!  But I say it is no more of a difference than a two-year old child understanding that one day in the future he/she will be taking care of themselves and doing all of the marvelous things they are now watching their parents do.  They say;  “No, GOD is Spirit Eternal and Immortal, and we are material and mortal beings.”  True again, no argument there.  But are we not offered the chance at immortality?  Better than that, (or worse – depending upon what kind of person you are,) are we not assured of immortality by the Word of GOD?  This is what I see in my knowledge, of myself and my creator.

     There are several important differences that set us apart from the rest of the animals.  These are important to consider, as it is this identification humanity has of itself as just another animal that causes the greatest losses to us.  All of these important differences stem from one basic one: the Divine Spark.  What this is, that no other form of life as we know it has, is the Mind that can conceive of the Divine.  Some would call this part of us the Soul, but I am not certain yet.  I have my own names, and use my own descriptions for mysterious things.  I do not trust others to lead me on issues that may concern ideas of infinity, eternity, and immortality.  I find this to just be good common sense, but that is just the way I was raised.  What I call the Divine Spark is that part of our minds that allows us to see the UNREAL.  This sets us apart and begins all divisions between mankind and the other forms of life that exist here upon the Earth with us.  What exactly is this that I write of?  Well, I do not know exactly.

     To begin to try and understand this Spark which is really just a Divine Imagination, I will go as others have gone in trying to identify the species as an animal.  Some say that animals do not dream.  I say that animals do not have imagination, but this is not entirely true.  To dream, a creature must have some sort of imagination.  As a dream is something which occurs in the mind while the body is sleeping, it must have a close tie to the imagination.  I have witnessed for myself, cases where it was obvious that an animal was dreaming.  I have seen this in both Dogs and Cats at least.  And, in analyses of what it seemed they were dreaming about from their unconscious movements of body, I determined that they dream about reality.  I believe that animals dream only about the things they encounter in everyday existence.  They possess an imagination which allows this, but little more.  What this means to say is that they can only form images in their minds which are images that they have actually experienced in reality.  The mind of the animal does not possess the divine ability to contrive any image which is not already some type of memorable experience from their real life.

     In defining this concept; I propose that a dog or cat might dream of hunting, chasing, catching, killing, eating, fighting, or running from an aggressor, maybe even about sexual actions.  I do not believe that they, or any other animal, can dream or imagine anything that they would not normally be able to experience in the reality of this world.  Normal is the key word here.  Can a dog imagine himself flying over the land as a bird does?  Can a cat imagine herself driving a large metallic vehicle across the land at over 100 miles per hour?  Can a parrot imagine constructing a skyscraper of metal, concrete, and glass?  I do not see it to be so.  I think if they were possessing such imagination, as we do as human beings, we might have seen some sort of progress in those species over the course of all the time we have been observing them.  This is also a grand stripping down of all talk of “Evolution” that people claim to exist as scientific fact.  ( But we shall not get into that too much here.)

     The Monkey Trials of the 50’s come into play here.  They set Man apart from animals strictly by the rule that only Man made tools.  They thought that the very definition of Man was such that only he could modify his surroundings in such a way as to benefit from them.  This was not the case though.  Every type of organic organism upon this world has varying extents to which they use the world around them to their own advantage.  Using the things around you in the natural environment is not any thing that humanity can be uniquely considered for.   The monkey can see a blade of grass as a long exploring and penetrating tool to get at the ants in a deep hole, but that is not taking the blade of grass beyond what it actually is in reality.  To see that blade of grass as a long fiber that might be woven into a string, and a garment that could possibly keep your bare ass warm through the winter is something that does not occur to animals.  Why does it occur to human beings?  Because they possess the Divine Spark.  This is something which seems to be an imagination above and beyond ordinary animal imagination.  Humanity dreams of things which are not at all directly drawn from the reality in which they live.

     I guess I need to get into the evolution argument here anyway, to try and prove a point.  4000 years ago, they described Chimpanzees in the earliest written books, from Egypt, China, and Babylonia.  In that amount of time, even geologically, what has advanced in the Chimpanzee race?  Nothing whatsoever?  Absolutely correct!!!  And what even of the Dolphins?  They are just waiting with their secret civilization until we destroy ourselves?  Come on, wake up!!!  They are all as they are.  They are as we are, and have always been.  We have grown in technological prowess, but we have not evolved one bit from where we ever were, even if some people like to think so.  I am so sorry, but it just isn’t happening.  I don’t see it at all.  What has any other species of life done that can even come close to what WE have done?

     Human beings created many forms of written communication.  These are ways of communicating ideas from one person to another, just like I am doing right now.  These are symbols upon a page, these characters that I type into this machine.  Once, they would have been symbols written by hand upon a page of paper.  A two dimensional plane of reality:  A page, a screen, which is capable of conveying thoughts and ideas from the mind of one of our species to another.  The sheer marvel of it all astounds me!!!  It so makes me believe in the divine spark inside each and every one of us.  And the mind which takes this message in is every bit as marvelous as the mind which hath written it.  That you may look upon this page of weird symbols: 36 possible configurations, with spaces and punctuation that you have learned also.  It is amazing to me that I can type this message out on a keyboard and another person might grasp the same deep significance of my thoughts and ideas as I do.  That is incredible to me.  Such a thing is a gift of GOD and no other as far as I am concerned.

     That IS the Divine Spark.  Something that one simply LOOKS at can change all of our realities at once, and as one.  Communication is such a gift of GOD.  And what is it that makes this wayform of communication so powerful?  Imagination.  Nothing more, or less. Not the imagination of the real, but of the UNREAL.  That which has not been seen.  That which has never been known before.  Human beings draw dreams out of this realm all of the time.  That is what shows me that GOD is ever-present within and without us.  This is the great difference between human beings and animals.  It is not at all the tangible tools as much as it is the intangible ones.

     Immanuel Kant wrote somewhere, sometime, that “If GOD did not exist, mankind would have created Him.”  I like the statement because it demonstrates a knowledge of the human imagination.  We can only imagine for ourselves in this time, the mind of the earlier man and woman.  They saw Deity in the Sun, Moon, Rain, Wind, Lightning, etc.  They beheld the miracle of growth in the spring, and the bounty of the fall harvest.  Praise, worship, and even sacrifice was given to that/those deities they saw as being responsible.  The fact that it existed in those early minds that something was responsible for all of the wondrous mystery that was encountered in life is a symbol of the Divine Imagination.

     Animals have no concept of the Divine.  They know the world around them.  They dream and imagine the things which they are accustomed to.  What else but the Divine imagination of human beings can account for the things we have drawn out of fantasy and made real in our world?  So many things, I cannot even begin to name them all. The buildings and structures of civilization that are all around us were neither designed nor built by Deity.  The seemingly infinite variety of vehicles and machines, along with the roads, freeways and parking lots for them, are not at all a part of the original creative plan for our planet.  Human beings have built this world.  We have taken the dreams of the elders and brought them out of the mind of fantasy into reality.  This is Divine power working through us.
 
 

Copyright 2000 by J.S.Graham