Ah, it's been a while...good to be back. Some very interesting comments. For one, I never knew that Johnny Cash could be so deep! As for Rooson, yes, full circle - but it has to do with the readings I am doing, as well as the very subtle - even metaphysical - roots behind whatever "end times" might come. To fathom it is not easy for we of Middle Earth, and it speaks of our predicament. It has long been my notion, borrowed from others, that in some way or another we chose this place, dimension, or whatever we might call it. I sometimes see it as a bad dream, but then have to consider the immensity and complexity of it all. It is not our bad dream alone, but a situation we have fallen into, and it is not really "bad" but peculiar; in other words, a predicament, as said. In it, there is an immanence of the permanent, or divine, which is obvious in those special "moments of joy" that Krissy mentioned. It is clear to me that we are meant to grasp these moments and find in them the true- that is eternal - nature of reality, and expand this sense until it illuminates all our perceptions permanently. This is enlightenment. Why we have chosen - or been made - to have to work so hard for this I do not really know. To say "it happens because it it can happen, and all things must happen with God, as he is everything" simply is not satisfactory, at least to me.
In a nutshell, I would say that we must make the world sacred. That is the path. We all know how to do it on some level, but continually fail because of our faulty conception of life. It is what the great religions keep telling us to do, but we fail to live them - often purposefully. And it is in this that prophecy comes to pass. Were we to keep all things sacred, I believe we would be beyond the dynamics we see in the human world. But because we don't, we fall into a certain logic - that is, a feedback loop that makes it harder and harder to see the sacred, throwing us back on our "animal" reactions, and animal reactions are very predictable over a period of time. The dog will react to food, the bird will fly with the seasons, and the human animal will fall down his particular rabbit hole through his desires. Thus we can be free if we follow the Tao, or Way; but paradoxically (yet logically), we are slaves when we follow our own separate wills.
As for returning to the source of joy and "finding it empty" - now there's an enigmatic statement! On the one hand, I want to say: yes, just as when the disciples opened the tomb and found it empty. As such, the state of nothing, of emptiness, was the source of joy for its meaning - that death had been conquered, and God IS. But that is not what I think was meant, at least in particular. Rather, that this source of joy is un-graspable, in the sense that we cannot identify it and capture it. If we could, we would use it up and it would cease to be a source of joy, but it is that and more; the joy comes from beyond our quotidian (human animal) state. It is not something that we can grasp in this state of mind. This form of joy only exists in the context of the true mind, and it signals what is meant when it is said that the average reality is only an illusion. It is an illusion from the state of mind that is joy, just as this state of mind is inaccessible from normal reality. It is from this perspective that it seems empty. But it is not really. It is there and we can live it but we have to leave this, its shadow side, behind. That is the secret behind meditation, quieting the voice that informs us of the normal reality. With that done, the Other emerges and becomes real, while the "normal" is seen only as a sort of dream (that is, how we experience it. Life is not a dream, but like a dream because of how we normally perceive it). The two perceptions are incompatible. And to go full circle, back to Rooson, in the "normal" world we are destined for destruction; in the other "real" world, we are not. That is our free choice, and it is in becoming aware of the choice - and helping others to do so - that the world can be saved.
I don't think it can be any other way. Whatever we come up with in the normal world will fail because of its limited base for reality. The big fish will eventually eat the little fish. Different forms of government and Utopian communities, when based on the normal perspective, will naturally fail, just as the dog will eventually go to the meat. In the sacred, in the aura of joy, we are no longer the dog - we are not ruled by the wordly passions, and this is no longer so. Would that it was as easily lived as spoken of. FK
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