The Thing That Is

We don't know who we are, and we’re born into a place where we can’t explain our arrival.  We make up ideas that fill the gaps to carry on, but ultimately, we don’t know why we’re here.  We find ourselves in a place where we are born without our knowing consent.  There is a history that we are taught that attempts to inform us of our past, but our only option in this place is to call things as we see them in the present.  With that hazy form of discernment, we are here making decisions and just surviving.  Religion comes into play in our journey at some point.  People, governments, and control structures come into play as well.  We are caught in the middle of all these circumstances, and life is confusing. 

God nowadays is more or less forgotten in the mainstream public experience.  That all-knowing being, that many believe we’re a part of, is gone from our mainstream reality.  While it’s impossible to say what God is, it’s important to think about.  Old concepts from religions and legends try to inform us of what God is.  There's Zeus.  There's judgmental guy in the sky.  There’s mother nature.  There’s the spaghetti monster.  Religions like Jedi and other designer religions exist which suggest that God is a force of some kind.

But what is it really?  What is that concept at its core, and why was it so heavily believed in the past.  Why was it such a strong part of the past civilizations and cultures but is just gone now from modernity?  Even atheists attempt to explain existence during their denial of purpose.  Atheism is more or less just another religion of believing that we’re just here by science, rocks float in outer space, and we’re bags of chemicals.  There are lots of definitions and attention paid to explaining our existence from many directions.  Each school of thought attempts to define what God is, but they all seem hazy for some reason.

When I open my eyes, I see a thing in front of me.  It's ever present.  It's the world.  It's life.  It's people, conversations, and time.  This thing is omniscient in nature.  It encompasses all energies and flows in a specific direction.  It’s beautiful.  It’s both happiness and sorrow. 

If you take a toaster oven and break it apart.  It will be pieces, and each piece has a name.  When you take those pieces and put them together, they make a toaster oven.   Then you call it a toaster oven.  If you break it in half, it becomes two halves of a toaster oven.  But really, it's just a bunch of stuff.  It's just a bunch of matter.  The term toaster oven, springs, and power cord are just names that we give things so that we can talk to each other about them.  We sometimes categorize things based on their use.  You can use it to toast stuff like bread.  You can also use a toaster oven as a hammer, right?  You can use it as a paper weight.  But we call it a toaster oven because we use it to toast bread, and that's what it's built for.

Anyway, my point is that a toaster oven is lots of things.  It’s a collection of individual things that in aggregate make up one thing depending on how we look at it.  But in the end, it's actually just a collection of matter.  The pieces of the toaster oven can be thought of in aggregate as one thing when they work in concert.  Thinking on, this toaster thing has that same relationship with the table it sits on.  There's the table, and there’s a toaster oven.  But they can be viewed as a single thing.  They are just two different parts.  When you put the toaster oven on the table, it can be said to be a new singular object called a “toaster station.”

The toaster station is now one thing in our minds.  Every "thing", any object that we would call a thing, actually has that relationship to whatever is around it.  Transitively and intrinsically, everything has that relationship with every other thing in existence no matter their distance apart.  This relationship is held between all things in existence, and by definition, all things can be seen as the same singular thing.  The plane flying through the air is, in this way, the same thing as the fish swimming in the sea.  They are the same thing when moving in concert.

The sun rises, and in comes the day.  It's goes overhead.  The sun sets, and the night starts.  We see the moon.  Then the sun comes up again, and it's a day.  It goes away, and it's a night.  Then it's a day.  Then it's a night.   But really, the sun is always somewhere, and it’s day there.  Day and night are just aspects of our view.  We label it day and night, but they are actually constant and work in concert in one motion.   The day and night working in concert was here before us, and is just one long day in the end.  There is no real separation between the days.  You just like to sleep in the dark.  And I don't blame you.  I do too.

It’s all really one long day, right?  It's all the same day.  It's just time.  It's just this place.  Our conversations are that way too.  You wake up in the morning, and there is no one there.  You talk to your dog, and, of course, I'm talking about myself now, right?  You talk to your dog, and you fix some breakfast.  You go to work, and you listen to the radio as you talk to yourself while you’re going to work.  Who were you talking to that whole time?

You get to work, and you say hi to someone in the kitchen.  You talk about what you’re going to do that day and what you’re lining up in some project.  That's a conversation with someone in the kitchen.

Then you walk to your desk.  While you’re hanging out on your own typing, someone else walks up to your desk.  They start talking to you about something else.  They may say, "We have this thing to do, and what do you think if we did..."  That's a different conversation, right?  But you think about a common thread of things in between all these conversations.  The ideas you think about in between the conversations pertain to those conversations.  You take information, stances, and emotions from one conversation to the next, and you mill them over in your head in between consciously or sub-consciously.  Thoughts bleed from each conversation into the following conversations.  These conversations seem to flow like this throughout each day. 

When it comes down to it, like day and night cycling, all the conversations throughout the day are the same conversation in your mind.  It's was just one long conversation for the day.  And as all of the days are the same day, all the conversations where just one long conversation.  Life, as we call it, is not a collection of conversations, concepts, and ideas you pieced together.   It is actually just one long conversation.  Your entire life and the conversation that you had with yourself is a singular experience.  The world that you found yourself in is a time and space for you to have the experience of that conversation.  I hope you enjoy it. 

That's what I see in life.  It's just one long day.  It’s just one long conversation. It’s a conversation you have with yourself in this place which I call The Green Gift.  The conversation ultimately isn’t with any specific person.  It’s actually with that singular thing which is all things moving in concert.  There is only one thing.  It all melts together without the definitions.  It encompasses much more than we could hope to envision.  It's all the same thing.  There is one object in existence, and it includes the green gift you found yourself in.  I’m not trying to be pedantic or overly meta.  There are important lessons to learn from simple observations.

Everything from the trees, the flowers, the breeze, the camera, the conversations, the people, and the days are all just one thing.  It's a force of energy that's just there, and we don't know where it came from.  We don't know what it is.  But we were born into it inside of its image and with some of its characteristics.  We are born into this.  And here we are.  We don't know what it is, and, as a part of it, we don't know what we are.

We can trace back our family lineage to some degree.  We can trace some science suggesting we were hominids at some point that we branched off evolutionarily.  We can hypothesize about the points in time where we were just single celled organisms.  But our view gets hazier and hazier the further back we look.

Closer to home, you may know about your mom’s life, but you know less about your grandparent’s life.  Most people don't know anything about their great grandparents, and almost no one knows anything about their great-great grandparents.  If you go back a couple more generations, it's just darkness and void.  We literally don't know where we came from.   You don't know your family line.  You don't remember lots of your childhood either.  We don't know human history past a certain point, and most of what we do know is revisionist history and fake.  We can't even get yesterday right anymore.    If you turn on the news to any channel, you will see talking heads lying about what happened 30 minutes ago.  What makes you think that your history books are accurate about things that happened 1200 years ago?

So, we are constantly in this state of not knowing where we are, and this experience is too large for us to see or understand.  It's just a motion of energy that's turning and moving.  It's not to be known.  It's not to be understood.  This thing, being all things moving in concert as a singular thing, I refer to with a proper noun, “The Thing”.  There are things like a cantaloupe, the camera, your dog, and the sun.  So, there are things, but then there is "The Thing."  Capital T; The Thing.  The whole Thing that is moving and churning.  That concept is what I feel to be monotheism.  It's the difference between thinking that there are separate things and that there is just one thing.  And that Thing is God.  That thing, which includes you, is God.  This is monotheism. 

This view of the nature of our experience is true for all living creatures.  It's also a concept that is religion-less.  Religions seems to chase this concept, and we know it to be true in some capacity.  It’s a concept that many religions have in common, even the atheists.  Some religions embody this better than other religions, of course.  Religions are found in books, rituals, traditions, and there is a dogma to them.  That’s because people seeing something complex want to place road signs so that others will take note as they walk the path.  They want to pass down helpful ideas from generation to generation.  In that cycle, the observations of The Thing That Is naturally turn into religion in a cycle of dogma wrestling with the divine.

I don't think there is anything wrong with religious structure, and I actually feel it’s important.  Humans have a deep symbiotic relationship with our religions.  We identify with rituals and traditions.  We use them as tools to teach our children to ultimately seek the spiritual though they may not understand in their youth.

We’re on a path that others before us have walked, and we actually can’t make it without listening to what those before have immortalized in testament.  It is, however, up to every individual to seek deeply enough to realize that it's all the same thing and look towards what brought us here.  When seeking that which Is and ultimate truth, lots of our ancient rituals and text make more sense.  Seek and you will find.  The Thing That Is brought us here, and It is our creator and father.

The Thing That Is includes everything that “is” and everything that is true.  It specifically excludes everything that “is not” and everything that is not true.  Truth is our only sanctuary and we are clearly commanded to never replace The Thing That Is with a false reality.  Everything outside of What Is is mental illness, sorrow, and death.  Optionally, once we journey through enough pain, we learn to seek out the father and return home where we, as newly risen warriors, clear the lies and live in peace with family.

There are those that hate What Is and they create a darkness that pushes against What Is.  The nature of this darkness and evil is very simple.  The darkness moves closer as a slow, deliberate removal of all the protective, truthful ideas that protect you and your mind. The darkness replaces then truth with mental illness and ideas that are intended to eradicate you and your family. It is the nothingness. There is no greater example of the darkness than the modern media which are consistently fraudulent.  The darkness inevitably reveals itself as a demand to alter the breeding pattern that produces life.

I was born and raised Jewish, but I was raised in the country.  I didn't have a strong connection to Jewish or Christian teachings.  I wasn't exposed to what the root of Judaism really was.  I did attend a bit of temple when I was young though.  Being raised in America, there’s a lot of Christian culture, so I saw a lot of Christianity as I grew up.  Earlier in my life, I didn’t understand any of the core concepts being talked about by the Christians or Jews.  Other people seemed to be into it for some reason, and that seemed nice to me.

I wasn't raised with a religious orthodoxy or any sort of fear of what would happen if I didn't act a certain way.  I was very free in my thoughts and explored the world freestyle.  But in all my experiences, I did catch wind of this concept that everything is the same thing.  I also saw clearly that there is a right direction to walk, and we don’t get to choose that direction.

I always got a strong sense that the Green Gift and The Thing That Is were meant to be observed.  I have always felt like there was something miraculous and veiled just beyond our limited sight that is designed for us to seek and find.  Buddha taught this and the rarity of life.  He taught self-reflection.  All of this, I felt from a very young age, and I think others feel it too.  It’s something learned throughout life even without heavy guidance from religious structure.  But the lack of guidance makes a very rocky road which can be terrible because sorrow and mental illness can spread like mold.

Later life, I read religious text like the Torah and the Bible.  They make a lot of sense to me now, and I see hints of that miraculous Thing that was always waiting just outside my sight.  I see an ancient guidance explaining that there is a right path to walk.  The text also say that we don’t get to choose that path and sorrow is the price of pride.  It’s not a coincidence.  Our religious roots make sense, and I see I’m not the first person that has walked this path.  Our traditions chase the eternal and help us on the path.

For instance, I focus on The Thing That Is.  Then later in life, I read:

Moses asked God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ What should I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”  God also told Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’ This is My name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered in every generation.…

When God was asked what he was in the testament, he responded with a phrase and not a label.  He said something along the lines of "I am what I am" which is a common English translation of the Hebrew phrase “אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה”‎ or “ehyeh ’ăšer ’ehyeh.”   Other translates of this Hebrew phrase include "I am who I am", "I will become what I choose to become", "I am that I am", "I will be what I will be", "I create what(ever) I create", or "I am the Existing One".  My addition, which I didn’t know fit when I adopted it from my dream research, is “The Thing That Is.”

There are concepts that you can think of that are fantasies.  And then there is a concrete Thing that is in front of you.  That Thing that is front of you IS, and it alone shows you truth.  It IS.  It is The Thing That IS.  And there is nothing else.  Being dishonest or deceived as to what that Thing is only brings sorrow by definition because a person who is lying to themselves is then operating off of assumptions that are not.  Sorrow is just confusion of operating off of assumptions that are not true and not functionally in tune with reality.

Pride is the origin of sorrow.  There are lots of things that we hear about, talk about, and think about that just are NOT.  They are false narratives.  These specific ideas are just not true.  Sometimes we convince ourselves of these false ideas.  We sometimes think that we can bend the concrete direction of life towards our will.  In these situations, we are operating as if we can choose What Is true, and this is pride.  While moving in pride, we are simply walking away from what is true and into painful lessons.  This can be referred to as walking away from the Thing That Is.  Society asks us to lie a lot about what is true in life such as the purpose of sex and the purpose of men and women.

Evil forces compel us to lie to ourselves about the obvious dangers to our families evolving right before our eyes in this modern world.  One of the biggest lies is that power over other men doesn’t corrupt. Some even lie and say there is someone out there in the dominance hierarchy of man that will represent you and look out for you.  The dominance hierarchy that man builds does not provide for you or look out for your family because it’s an aggressive pyramid scheme of flawed men and agendas.  It’s a tower with fatal flaws that inevitably crashes down.  Abandon the dominance hierarchy of man in your mind as soon as you can.

We can see many of the weak people around us completely drowning in lies that they tell themselves.  The main characteristic of modern society is mental illness.  It’s an eyesore.  We are approaching a point where you can be attacked or even killed for being someone who isn’t lying to themselves.  Fear of personal physical harm is a compelling factor in many people’s capitulation to the darkness.  Fear is the motivator of weak men.  I don’t know much, but I can promise you one thing. Walking away from discernment and what protects your family, The Thing That Is, brings more sorrow than any threat from a man or government.

There are lessons of people’s walk away from truth in any given testament.  It really is amazing.  The “I Am” is a recurring theme in our path towards resolve and tranquility for a reason.  Interestingly, we are given free will to ultimately choose The Thing That Is instead of our own way of pride.  We are born here, and we don't know what we are.  It brought us here to experience that observation as self-reflection.  We can’t say exactly what The Thing That Is is, but that doesn’t matter in the end because we simply know It Is.

Hopefully you think this is interesting.  If you want to see more reflections on The Thing That Is, read some more of my thoughts, and see where it pops up.  All glory goes to The Thing That Is.  And don’t forget…

To wake the Lion!