Enlightened!

From this morning's meditation...

1. Describing Tao is a paradox.
It is so indescribable that if you try to describe it you limit your understanding of what it is. You could write pages and pages of descriptions and still not have it all. You could call her the Mother of All Things but that only describes a small portion of what she is.

2. Gods can be lied to to or hidden from, gods get angry. Tao sees all, knows all, is all, and cares nothing about what choices you make. Tao never tries to teach you a lesson. Tao has no commandments but it does have rules (including the rules of physics and logic) that are impossible to violate. You can't pray mightily and get the sun to rise in the west, water to not be wet, gravity to not work, etc. You might figure out a way to temporarily bend them but they will always prevail.

3. I cannot climb the mountain to enlightenment because I'm already the mountain. I cannot become more spiritual because I'm already a fully spiritual being (having a human experience... thanks Pierre Teilhard de Chardin!) However... I can live more in balance, show more compassion, and be more humble.

4. Life is what it is. You can't influence it by praying to non-existent gods. You aren't being punished for your sins. You don't get rewarded for being more pious than your neighbor. Bad things happen to good people, and bad people get away with horrible things all the time. Eventually a bad person might be punished by his or her peers, but there is no comeuppance in the afterlife.

5. There is only life. You aren't going to get rewarded in heaven or punished in hell. Those are stories that are made up by priests to make people give up control of their valuables: their time or their income.

6. Holy books are collections of stories used by self-proclaimed holy men to put fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the minds of people who might otherwise be quite happy with the facts. If you can take away something positive from a holy book, that's great, but by-in-large the stories are used to scare you into behaving the way the priests/rabbis/mullahs/monks/etc. want you to. Show me a religion where the congregation decides who is the true mouthpiece of the gods and I'll show you the exception rather than the rule. Church leadership always decides who is "holy". You'd think if they were so good at it there'd be no pedophiles, drug addicts, thieves, or adulterers in the pulpit.

7. We did not evolve from monkeys, we evolved with monkeys.
Monkeys have evolved beside us, like chimpanzees, gorillas, chickens, bacteria and daffodils. Trees don't evolve into ducks and we did not evolve from the monkey. Similar structures but different evolutionary paths. This is probably why they haven't found the "The Missing Link" yet, they haven't gone back far enough to primordial sludge where the ant/monkey/chimp/daffodil/gorilla/human/elephant family tree split.

8. All things are made from same basic set of atoms. The only form of reincarnation is some of your atoms being eaten by a worm, who is eaten by a chicken who hatches an egg that carries some of your atoms.