The Life of Jesus Christ

I'm collecting, and ultimately re-editing and expanding, everything I've
written about Jesus on The Urban Mystic. This has been my intention for
a few years now, to basically write a short book called "The Life of Jesus Christ: An Urban Gospel". Currently it is 9,000 words, but I'd
like to double that over the next year. You can read it by following the link in the text or just below Page 2 News.

The Science of Eternity

An older documentary with Alan Pemberton, featuring interviews with survival enthusiast Michael Roll, physicist Ronald Pearson (whose work has come under scrutiny by other pro-survival scientists, including Brian Josephson), Tom Harrison and Gwen and Alf Byrne who have participated in medium circles where their loved ones materialised, and David Icke, who talks about why the elite do not want us to believe in life after death. Runs 68 minutes.

Spirituality in 2016

Ken Wilber talks about the "spiritual but not religious" people in one of the footnote videos and there's points of agreement and disagreement I have with his assessment. I've written about this topic at least twice before. Just taking his numbers as given, 20% of Americans are "spiritual but not religious." Ken says they don't want the mythic elements of organised religion, they want direct access to genuine transpersonal realities. And I think there's definitely some of that. In the back of everyone's mind there's the drive to return to the Source, but I don't think that's the main reason people are checking out of religion, and I say that because people don't seem any more "spiritual" today than 50 years ago. People today seem much less likely to accept non-physical realities, and they also seem far less moral and far more materialistic. I think the main push is that people don't want guilt. People reject absolute morality so they can have, mostly, guilt-free sex, along with guilt-free gluttony (1/3 of Americans are obese), guilt-free envy, celebrity worship, and just all around hedonism. That's why drug addiction is so high, because people know they are living crappy lives and even though they have rejected religion they still know that buying $400 of shit and wondering why you bought it is wrong, people know this Weimar cabaret lifestyle of nights of heroin use and anonymous sex with 50 people followed by mornings of detoxing with green coffee enemas is wrong, and it's causing massive anxiety and massive depression. I do not see this as an ascent to Integral spirituality, I see this as a descent into egocentric hedonism.

He also mentions the mindset of terrorists, that I've written about here. He does a good deal of equivocating, "Southern Baptists bombing abortion clinics"? When was the last time that happened? "Buddhists releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subway"? Aum Shinrikyo are not Buddhist, they are an apocalyptic cult led by a blind man who believes he is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ as prophesied by Edgar Cayce. That's not Buddhism, nor is it Christianity, it's worship of a charismatic figure by nihilists. And he lumps these people in with Al Qaeda (and radical Islam by extension). He says the reason these terrorists exist is because modernity has no place for their ancient religions, so they will destroy modernity completely. Well, if that were the case why are so many terrorists highly successful, highly educated Westerners? These people very clearly don't reject modernity because they are mostly educated professionals. Saudi Arabia, the largest state sponsor of terrorism, the place where Salafism was invented, exists only because of modern technology! These people do not reject modernity, they reject the meaninglessness of post-modern boomeritis.

I'm not saying very bad Christians don't exist, just that the worst of them tend to be assholes who disrupt solder's funerals. The very small handful who turn to violence can be easily handled (and are easily handled) by the police. They are such a tiny minority that they can be dismissed as mentally deranged. The only two groups of people who have a very large number of very violent terrorists are radical leftists and radical Islam. All, or very nearly all the mass shootings of the past decade have been perpetrated by radical leftists who were on psychiatric medication, the other groups causing trouble, the Black Lives Matter people who burnt Ferguson and Baltimore to the ground, they are opportunistic nihilistic leftists. I have yet to see a prototypical far right group like the KKK or Neo-Nazis kill a lot of people in the US in the past two decades. And there is no small minority of Muslims who support terror. In every majority Muslim country surveyed the majority of the populations, while not terrorists themselves, support terrorism, or at the very least a strict interpretation of Shariah that says infidels have no rights, women are property, gays should be murdered, and Christians and Jews should be second-class citizen dhimis. Religions do not need to get with the program and integrate modernity, not to eliminate terrorism, cultural Marxism and radical Islam need to stop seeing terrorism as a means to achieve political ends.

The Joe Rogan Experience with Graham Hancock

Joe Rogan talks with Graham Hancock about ancient civilisations, the ice age, psychadelics, the war on drugs, and why the power elite don't want us asking questions about deep antiquity. Runs 2 hours.

The Purpose-Guided Universe

Dr. Bernard Haisch, astrophysicist and UFO enthusiast, author of The God Theory and The Purpose-Guided Universe, talks about God, physics, the anthropic principle, and the meeting of science and religion. This talk is a little dated, as the Higgs boson has since been discovered (or, more accurately a Higgs boson has been discovered, there might be more than one), but it is still very good. Runs 2 hours.

Richard Rose

Do things for the sake of a higher power, and it will correctly guide your every step. There is a god within every man... that finds his contact with the Chief Engineer of this scenario... the Absolute God that has everything planned or is able to at least enable us to see that everything is for the best. And the best includes eternal contentment at the cost of momentary inconvenience.

Yesterday was Richard Rose's birthday. He would have been 99 years old.

The American Buddha. The last unquestionably enlightened being of the 20th century. Mr. Rose, as he was called, was only ever interested in one thing his whole life: the Truth. He got special permission to enter a Capuchin seminary at age 12, believing the way to Truth was to become a Catholic monk. He was disillusioned with the worldliness and lack of critical thinking within the Church, so he left at age 17 to find the Truth through science. He studied chemistry and physics and worked in a laboratory and on submarines, but was again disillusioned by the whole system of science as just another ego trip. Rose then decided to embark on the path of mysticism, making his body "a laboratory, not a cesspool." He became a vegetarian, stopped drinking alcohol, coffee, and tea, and became completely celibate, later remarking "Those years of celibacy and solitude were the most joyful of my life."

At the age of 30, in a hotel room in Seattle, Richard Rose had an experience of death as had Ramana Maharshi half a century earlier, wherein the last of his ego was dropped and he experienced God Realization. For years he lived a quiet, unassuming life afterward, not speaking about his experience until 1972, when he gave his first public lecture. The next year he would publish The Albigen Papers, a book outlining the system he had used 26 years earlier to gain enlightenment. Rose would continue to give talks and teach a handful of students at his ranch in West Virginia, until the 1990s when his health began to decline from Alzheimer's.

When asked if consciousness survives death Mr. Rose said "Yes. If it did not, I wouldn't talk to you. If oblivion were what is waiting for you, I would keep my mouth shut. It would be better for your peace of mind. It's better to have peace of mind if you're going no-place. If I had discovered that oblivion were the answer, I wouldn't talk."

But immortality is not all it's cracked up to be. You have to cultivate the enlightened mind in this lifetime in order to prepare for very real prospect of continuing forever: "You have to go through these traumas in life--now, while you're on Earth--in order to improve your situation after death. Everyone may be immortal, but we don't all go to the same place when we die. Awareness may not terminate for anyone, but you can't expect to advance into a dimension that you haven't mentally vaccinated yourself to beforehand. If the average mind--with its convictions and limitations--landed in an Absolute dimension, it would think it was either in oblivion or hell."

And about his own death, he said: "My life is no longer tied to this planet. This place is a stage, and when you leave, you turn out the lights."

After his death the teachings of Richard Rose have been kept alive by the TAT Foundation (Truth and Transmission), in West Virginia.

If you want you can buy his book The Albigen Papers at the link to the right.

Male and Female Energies

Kriyananda talks about the differences between the male and female creative energies, the strengths and weaknesses, and how the two compliment one another. He talks about both the spiritual and the physical aspects. Runs 20 minutes.