A Dream, Miracles, and Messiahs

Whenever I do that, the first shift has normal dreams.

I had my first dream about Jennifer Aniston. Yes, we were together. This dream had a sexual component, which is very rare for me. I might have one sex dream a year, maybe.

But there was also the relationship component. One of the things I remember is that Jennifer had returned to “normal” life with a bank account like many of us have. She received an overdraft notice in the mail and was quite upset. She sighed and said, “This is the first one of these I’ve ever gotten.” I told her it would be okay.

I can’t remember the dream from the second shift, but I remember it was slightly disturbing.

In the third dream, I had learned to levitate. I levitated around a hotel room like I was in last night.

I went to Tulsa yesterday to see the cemetery my family used to own and to see Mom’s plaque near the Veterans’ Shrine of Freedom.

Afterward, I visited my dad and had a sammich. I also helped him build a little fence thing. It was nice.

I was going to drive home, but I was exhausted. I was afraid I wouldn’t make it and it was too hot to stop somewhere and sleep in my car. I don’t want to sleep in my car with it running, so I decided to stop at the motel where #2 and I lived for 15 months and take a nap.

Naturally, I wanted to show someone my new ability. A couple of guys were along for the trip. I went outside and one of them was packing the car. I said I want to show him something.

I watched his face as I levitated in front of him and his eyes went blank and he looked down.

I landed and then he looked at me as though nothing had happened. He didn’t remember that I wanted to show him something. He didn’t realize any time had passed at all.

I took him inside where there was a large analog clock on the wall. As the second hand reached noon, I said to watch the clock. I levitated, but his eyes looked away. I landed 5 seconds later and he didn’t remember any of it… He didn’t remember that he was looking at the clock, so to him no time had passed.

I look for lessons in everything I see. I look for lessons in movies, in the things I read, in “random” occurrences, everything.

So what’s the lesson?

If one did find that he had some special ability, he surely would have been provided that ability for a specific purpose from the Big Guy. It stands to reason that He wouldn’t allow that ability to directly benefit only the ego of the wielder.

Now, Christians would say that all of our abilities should be exercised for the “power and glory of our Lord.”

I’ve been locked in a mental hospital six times.

Three times were because I tried to commit suicide.

Three times were because I was saying things that people considered to be crazy and I was deemed to be a danger to myself and “responding to internal stimuli.” On each of these visits, I told the admitting doctor my whole story. On each visit, the doctor recorded the story wrong.

If you tell someone that you are “a messiah” with a little ‘m’ and then make the point that anyone can be a messiah, but they record that you think you are “the Messiah,” then your story just got a little harder to swallow.

Folks, we’re all messiahs to someone, or we can be.

Perhaps to some people, the term “messiah” implies some miraculous ability to save people, for instance to save their soul from eternal damnation, but the term “messiah” to me means that a person stepped up and helped someone out of a jam they couldn’t get out of on their own.

And the reason people can’t get out of their own jams sometimes is a physical reason — for instance a lack of resources, or literally being locked in a closet. But most of the time someone can’t get out of a jam because they don’t believe they have the ability to do so on their own.

We can all help someone else’s outlook by injecting a little light into their day.

I guarantee that if you are a positive person and you live your life in a positive way, that people around you are watching, and you are contributing to their eventual success in taking command of their own lives and learning there are no limits.

Human beings have a natural need to assign blame or give credit. This is applying shame or giving glory.

Having seen my simple story twisted in the 5 minutes it took to write it down, I can guarantee you that the Good Book is full of accidental and willful misinformation.

I have a relationship with It (or the Is) that you would call God and I will tell you with absolute certainty, that God doesn’t need you to respect His power and He certainly doesn’t need the glory. He delights in your happiness and success and wants you to love yourself, and spread that love to others, so that the Light may be multiplied and everyone wins.

So why does the Bible say to give all the glory to God?

This is a safety measure. It’s vitally important that you not inject too much of the glory into your ego. This will blind you to others and make you a less effective transmitter of the Loving Goodness.

So why doesn’t the Bible just say not to do that?

Well, we get back to the human being’s natural need to assign blame and give credit (or glory) to someone. If you’re not taking the glory for yourself, and you’re not going to give it to another human being, then there has to be a receptacle for the glory. There has to be a pole of glory attraction, and the Bible presents God as that pole.

God’s ego cannot be inflated. God has no ego. God doesn’t need credit. God doesn’t need your attention. God doesn’t need you to bow and plead and offer burnt things and kill your lamb.

These demonstrations of loyalty to God aren’t bad (I didn’t take a lamb poll). I’m not dissing Christianity or Jesus Christ.

Although some Christians will identify me as an antichrist, and some will eventually call me the AntiChrist, I wholeheartedly love Jesus as the most accurate representation of the nature of God to date.

I guarantee you that you can spend your whole life saying bad things about Jesus, that you can kill puppies, and you can mistreat your neighbor, and you can kill millions of Jews, and yet the character of Jesus Christ would admit you to salvation and save you from yourself. You need not give him credit and when He appears to you, you will not know it is Him, for he wouldn’t confront you in that way because he wouldn’t need to be vindicated because he doesn’t care to say “I told you so,” and he doesn’t need to be a poster child for a religion.

God is not religious.

What about hell?

Hell is what you will be tempted to put yourself through when you learn the truth. When you are shown the whole enchilada you may be tempted to feel guilty. Guilt is good. Guilt is healthy. God will be there to help you work through it and not to shame yourself, or label yourself as a bad soul, and put yourself through eternal suffering.

God is truly great.

My simple story was twisted by doctors. The Bible is thousands of simple stories.

Religion is a governmental system, which operates in your mind, the constitution for which was written thousands of years ago by people in powerful positions, each with an agenda of their own.

By writing a text in God’s name, with your acceptance, they wield the unlimited power of God to rule your mind, keeping your eternal soul hostage. They don’t need an army, or a police force, or a tax system, or even to still be alive, and they are governing your thinking and therefore your behavior.

Now this isn’t a terrible thing either.

It hurts me when I see people claiming that if you don’t accept the whole Bible as the Word of God and don’t apply yourself to everything and change your ways to accommodate the teachings of your Pastor, that you’re not a good Christian (which implies that you’re an eternally bad person, because if you’re not a Christian then you’re eternally damned).

Notice in Exodus after Moses brings down the Ten Commandments that the book records the other laws of God. Notice that if you insist on working on the Sabbath that you are to be stoned to death.

Now this morning, I saw some people working. I ate at a McDonalds. I saw some people mowing their yard.

Thank God all the good Christians were in church because otherwise it would have been a stoning free-for-all.

Wait, the Sabbath is Saturday, isn’t it? The seventh day of the week is Saturday, folks.

Of course, the lesson of Jesus is supposed to countermand some of that crap from the Old Testament.

I dearly love Christians. And I’m fascinated by Jews. I know I have a lot to learn from Muslims. I want to read the teachings of the Buddha. I loved every word written by Kurt Vonnegut. And, Douglas Adams was a genius. Captain Kirk was my hero, but I think Sir Patrick Stewart as Picard presented a more commanding presence.

I turn 42 this summer.

There are messiahs among us. Some have powers you wouldn’t understand, but they’re not magical, you just wouldn’t understand, so you would be tempted to call their deeds miracles. But I guarantee you that none of them will stand up and say, “Look at me, I’m a worker of miracles, I have been favored by God and given this ability to save you, to help you, to feed you, to know you, to love you, to free you. Now, bow. Carve my name in marble, and place it high, and remember it always.”

Of course the next step of the ego is to forget God and just add, “For mine is the power and the glory, for ever and ever and ever.”

How do you become an effective messiah?

First, as early as possible, you decide that you want to help as many people as possible. You decide that you want to help every single person on the planet be a little happier and healthier.

Here’s some words written by a messiah:

Those words helped launch the greatest free country in the history of mankind.

Holy shit, the Declaration of Independence has to be in the top ten greatest things written down. I always get emotional when I read it. I hope they still make kids read it in school. They do, don’t they??

Notice that these unalienable rights were not granted to us by our Founding Fathers, they were endowed to us simply via the honor of our creation by God.

Maybe at an early age you pledge your life to teaching every human being that they have these unalienable rights.

Maybe you pledge it out loud. Maybe you pledge it in your head, over and over, for whomever is listening. And then, maybe, just maybe, late in the middle of the night, while the whole house is sleeping, you will be overcome with Light and fall to your knees, and feel something that everyone will feel eventually. Unfortunately, most will experience it after death because they haven’t provided a channel, or a pathway, in their thinking for it to be received.

Jesus said to meditate on His Father’s words. That’s a great place to start. Actually, you just need to be thinking constantly about the nature of God. If you don’t believe in God, that’s cool. Just think about what God would be like if He did exist. Plan God out. Create God. Give him authority if you want. Give him some credit. Try to figure out why humans made up certain things about God. Sift those stories in your pan and pick out the nuggets of Truth.

I have a Bible that my aunt and uncle gave me when I turned 13. I made it half way through Genesis and then put it down for 26 years.

In 2007, I was at the end of my rope. I was frustrated that I had accomplished so little in comparison with my peers. I was about to be homeless. I picked up that very Bible and opened it to a random spot and plopped down my finger.  Under my finger was this passage of the 1st Psalm of King David:

Fruit in his season: Cool your jets, little Joe. Sometimes the best fruit takes the longest to grow. If you pick it early, you’re wasting future juiciness.

I’m distantly related to David, you know.  What a great thinker King David must have been.

Well, as usual, my writing has gotten off the original track.

You know, some people are just compelled to always create a plan and stick to it. I know, I know, you can’t build a pyramid flying by the seat of your pants, by cutting some stone and placing it where you think it looks good.

I have more important things to build than pyramids though and it’s impossible for me to know how to do it. I’ve just got to fly around on autopilot and have a good time.

He is leading the way, He is opening the doors, He makes the introductions, and I give Him credit, but He just says, “You’re welcome, man. Now get some sleep.”