2009-12-1 04:42:00
JJ:
I thought I would read a letter we got posted to the Keys. Two letters -- two people....
(Inaudible.)
One we got from a guy -- guy or gal, I don't know which one he is -- he just uses a screen name so it's hard to tell. I won't say who he or she was. Let me read the letter. The person sounded somewhat depressed as he doesn't seem to have a lot of grasp on the purpose of life. He's kind of looking forward to reading our stuff....
(Inaudible.)
So I'll just read this to you.
"Great story. Inspiring," he tells me, concerning a parable I posted.
(The letter:)
"I would like to post something personal here now.
"I feel that doesn't help me much. I still have the same overwhelming questions that I can't ignore, no matter how much I read and search for these answers. No one is going to be able to tell me. So I'm struggling for these answers and still am not finding them.
"I am struggling against apathy and numbness because of the pain. Is it my fault? I wish it was, then I could do something about it. I honestly feel powerless and don't know....
"When there is no solution in sight for so long, anger is also building. They say purity can pass anything. But I can't help but feel like I'm assaulted with a great injustice. For the limitations I admit my weaknesses. And to overcome I have to be more than human. I have to conquer wisdom and knowledge. I don't know how.
"Do you really think life is a simple package, or a simple perception? Do you really think you can hold that perception without being the all of it?
"Can it really ever be understood? Can the mystery of this infinity ever be understood?
"When you say, "You may as well self destruct without purpose," you may as well not self-destruct... you know what I mean? Think about that....
"What is the point of the decision to commit suicide, another weakness. It is pointless. What is the point of escaping suffering? What does that achieve? It gives you a break from your weakness.
"If there is life after death (I am dead right now) maybe you merge with everything that exists... maybe then you become nothing and everything....
"Everyone that is trying to understand is trying to wrap life up in a neat little package that can be understood so that they can have some beliefs about what they think the truth is... even with all it is that they are lacking... the rest of truth. It is like a hologram, if you are missing some part of it, you are missing all of it.
"I am frustrated and tired of not being free. I even feel it is my right to be free, to know everything I want to know, and to be able to do everything I want to do.
"Anything that limits my wisdom and knowledge and freedom is an obstruction. I believe I deserve to know the answer to all this and be done with it.
"For some reason it doesn't work that way. With all the searching, I still am not getting 'the' answer, so I will continue to search in this numbness. I am becoming so detached from it all and from my emotions and myself it is not even me. And I know it never was.
"But here I am conscious in an unending nightmare, still without answers, and I continue to try.
"When you make it sound so simple, JJ, like in those stories, it almost feels like an insult when I am reading it, I feel so naive.
"I appreciate it. I do more than anyone. But I also have my perceptions about who you are and why you do such things, as well as everyone else's place in this oneness. You are just you and I am just me. We have no memory of creating these circumstances of our identities. We just are. You are in your life and I am in mine. All decisions are based on some identity and personality we don't even remember creating; we just are it. And it's just here. Some seem more fortunate than others.
"You know what it feels like? Deja vu."
JJ: So anyway, this person is somewhat frustrated.
Wayne: "I don't think he's frustrated."
JJ: You don't?
Wayne: "No. He's full of himself. I mean, he tells us right at the start that he can't find the answers and then goes into this whole litany about why the answers aren't available to, not only him, but to anybody else. Anybody else who claims to have an answer is somehow inferior to this wondrous position that he has assumed that there are no answers that are available to anybody, even though they try as hard as he has. And he's full of it."
Audience: "But it's clear he's not really having any fun."
Wayne: "Well no, he's having fun being depressed. His whole theme is, 'I don't have to know. Nobody can know. But I've thought about it a whole lot, and so I know more about not knowing than is normal.' You know? It's gobbledygook."
JJ: Okay. Anybody else got any comment on the post?
Audience:
"It appears to me he simply doesn't want to take any responsibility for his own life and he'd rather blame everybody else."
JJ: Okay. Any other comments before we proceed?
Audience:
"I think that he is so far out of his body that he has lost humanness. He is so far out there in the outskirts of world that, as we have been talking about all along, we find the answers when we come back into ourselves. The divine answers are in here. And he is so far out there that he has become lost. He or she. And so, it sounds like he is just blaming the whole world. Because I think, like Wayne said, he won't take responsibility, come back in, and claim his own life."
JJ: Wayne says, "This guy's got to be a man because no woman could be that lost." (laughs) Well, you can't accuse Wayne of being sexist, anyway. Okay, any other comments on the letter?
Audience:
"You're not going to like me for this, but I think exactly the opposite. I think that person is at a crossroads. I don't care what he says. I think he's at a point where he is searching for something that will give him something to grab on to that will be a focal point where he can find meaning. And although I grew up with a brother who was an atheist, now he's just totally into religion. You couldn't talk to him when he was younger, but he was a good soul and I knew he was. And this person seems to me like he is also. He's real down, but...."
JJ: That's a good point. I feel a little bit the same way in the fact that I've been following his posts for a while and-- sometimes he posts just really positive things and then he'll post something-- I'll say something maybe that just rubs him the wrong way and he'll post, not so much negative, but quite disagreeable. Which is fine; we don't mind people disagreeing with us at all. But I think the guy is at somewhat of a crossroads. I think he's searching and he's hoping to find some answers. But we're all in that boat to some degree. We're just looking for answers, but we're all at different locations.
One of the key things in there that pinpoints his frustration -- he says something to the effect that he wanted to find the truth, but then be done with it. Now, are you ever done with it? No. Would you want to be done with it? Would you want to find the one true religion and, "I've got it! I've got it memorized"? You know, "I've got the Articles of Faith memorized now so I've got it all. I got the basic truth that God wants me to know and I can just sit back and relax and enjoy heaven when it comes and falls in my lap." Would we want that?
Audience: Inaudible.
JJ: Right. Remember that "Twilight Zone" story where this guy dies and, if I remember right, he was a mobster or something. He realized he was a bad guy and he was expecting to go to hell. He meets this guy that was kind of dressed like a butler who asked him what he wanted. He says, "Well, I didn't expect to be greeted like this. I thought I'd go to the other place." Then the guy there said that he was there to serve him, so he said he wanted to go gamble. So he took him to the casino and he gambled and he wanted some prostitutes so he bought some prostitutes and plenty to drink. And so he was having wine, women and song for about 3-4 days and he was having a good time.
He thought, "Boy, I guess I must have gone to heaven." Then after a while he started to getting bored with everything. He was tired of the women, tired of the gambling, and he said, "You know, I thought heaven would be a little bit different than this." And the guy says, "What makes you think you're in heaven?" It's funny how those old Twilight Zones often -- many of them have a strong point of truth that's not duplicated in the shows today.
Okay. This kind of fits in with the Law of Dominating Good. Anybody know what the Law of Dominating Good is? We're talking about principles. This law is built around a principle. First of all, do you believe in a dominating good? Does good dominate? Many philosophies -- new age, metaphysical, and eastern philosophies -- kind of make the point that good and evil just balance each other off evenly. But the Law of Dominating Good says that this is not so -- that good dominates. And if good dominates, why does good dominate?
Audience: "Because it's a point of evolution."
Audience: "It's the will of God."
Audience: "Because of the intention."
JJ: Okay, first of all, let's define what the Kaw of Dominating Good is. What do you think it is? Wayne?
Wayne: "I think it has to do with statements like 'All things work to the good of those who love the Lord.' Nothing can happen that doesn't bear inherently some benefit to the person that experiences it. So if you have a terrible experience, there should be something in there to learn."
JJ: Okay. So the Law of Dominating Good -- DK [Djwhal Khul] is the one who coined that phrase; I don't know if anyone said it before him or not. But he says, "This lies behind all that God has made," this being the Law of Dominating Good, which means that between good and evil, good dominates. Now, it's amazing how many people are out there saying, "Well, there's no such thing as good and evil. There's no good and there's no evil." Okay. Is that true or not? What's the argument they give that there is no good and evil?
Audience: "Well, there's different levels. On God's level, there is no good and evil, because everything is just the way it's supposed to be. But on our level, a lot of times there is the opposition and the good and evil, because that's the fallen world that we live in, the world of good and evil."
JJ: Okay. To figure out whether or not there is good and evil, we have to define what good and evil is. If we don't define it, then how can you say it doesn't exist if you don't know what it is?
Audience: "Isn't that just a perception?"
JJ: Okay, we're going to get into that.
Audience: (Inaudible.) "Isn't that from your archives? 'Good is that which propels us forward, and evil is that which takes us backward.'"
JJ: Right. And so if you do not define what good and evil is-- and what makes a lot of people say there is no such thing as good and evil is a rebellion against the biblical words again. Remember we talked about that? A lot of people just don't like these old biblical words because they make a person sound a little fanatical. Like "repent," "righteousness," "sin," "atonement," all these words in the Bible, and many of them are misunderstood by today's society. People hear them and they grew up hearing these words pounded in their head, and they're rebelling against them.
Now, one of the words that is in the Bible quite a bit -- a set of words -- is "good" and "evil." A lot people say there's no good and evil because of just an instinctual rebellion against religiosity, so to speak. But that's not enough. If you're going to rebel against good and evil, you've got to figure out what you're rebelling against. If you're going to say, "Good and evil doesn't exist," you've got to say what it is you believe does not exist.
So we're going to define what good and evil is. What's the normal definition that people have?
Audience: "Like breaking the Ten Commandments."
JJ: Yeah. Take the typical religious person. What does he call good and what does he call evil?
Audience: "Stuff of God is good; stuff of the devil is evil."
JJ: Yeah. And that's kind of nebulous, isn't it? What belongs to the devil and what belongs to God? If you're doing God's will, you're good; if you're doing the devil's will, you're bad. Well, that's pretty nebulous because if you're in the Seventh-day Adventists, you think the born-againers are evil, and the born-againers think the Seventh-day Adventists are evil. So who's right about what's evil there? So when we look at these nebulous definitions of good and evil, well no wonder a lot people discount what it is.
But let's look at what good and evil really is in the cosmic sense. Now, Sharon defined that a minute ago. Why don't you define that again, Sharon.
Sharon: "Good is that which takes you forward, and evil is that which takes you backwards on your path. That's not my definition; that's in your archives."
JJ: Right. And I actually didn't originate that definition. That comes from the writings of Alice A. Bailey through the Master DK. Good is that which moves us forward in evolution. Evil is that which takes us backward. So let's pick somebody who everybody agrees is evil which is Hitler. Was Hitler moving us forward in evolution or trying to take us back.
Audience: "Backwards."
JJ: Right. He looked at the kingdoms of the past -- the past glories of Germany where they were led by a great and powerful tyrant. He didn't look at himself as a tyrant of course, but a dictator. And he wanted to bring the past glories back. He was bringing back the past in so many ways, it's hard to believe. He was bringing back the past by concentrating on form instead of spirit. He authorized a lot of experiments to create the perfect human being through breeding and things like this, and he had a certain type of human being in mind that he wanted everybody to eventually look like. That's the past.
On the other hand, leaders like Churchill and FDR [US President Franklin D. Roosevelt] -- what were hey concentrating on? They were concentrating on moving ahead to where man has not been before. FDR enunciated the four freedoms. Churchill had a lot of great ideas about unifying the nations, bringing them all together. He had ideas like producing a United States of Europe type of situation. Both of them were forward thinking and had ideas that would move mankind forward. Hitler wanted to return to the glories of the past. That which brings us forward is good. That which takes us back is evil.
Now, if this is what good and evil is, then if you say there is no good, what are you saying? You're saying, "I don't believe in progress. I don't believe that I can move to spirit. I do not believe I can return to God. I do not believe that my life will be better tomorrow than it is today. I do not believe that I can achieve happiness tomorrow if I'm not so happy today." Is this what we really want to believe? Do we want to not believe in that? Evil is that which takes us back in our evolution.
Copyright © 2009 by J.J. Dewey, All Rights Reserved