A few days ago I wrote that "most" of the people I knew in Grand Rapids whom I met who were working along the same lines as I was were garbage.  That’s some kind of error, whether a silly exaggeration on my part or just a typo.  I should have said "a lot" of the people I met who claimed to have an "alternative spirituality" were garbage.  Or possibly "enough that the whole concept of alternative spirituality lost all its glamour for me so that I no longer give your average wiccan or new ager any more automatic credit for being a good person than your average non-magical person, and in fact some people who have alternative spirituality that claims to be of the light are actually digging themselves vile holes which they’ll never get out of and you have to watch out or they’ll pull you in with them."

But of course my lousy experiences came from my own lousy energy, and my own lousy taste in people.  And this is in fact a lesson that is very obvious to many people a lot sooner in their experience than it was for me.  So I can’t really complain because just about everyone I know who’s tried to break away from the mainstream gets suckered into some kind of nonsense.

So where is peace in this?  How is writing this teaching peace?  Because it certainly felt good to slam that old city, even though there’s nothing objectively wrong with it, I guess, just my own bad memories.  And expressing that negativity did in some way allow me to make a psychic break with the past that I probably wouldn’t have made just by thinking positive thoughts.

It’s the age old question of course, the one that’s always frustrated me about spirituality.  If we’re supposed to be without resentment, why does the Great Spirit bother to allow this resentment in the first place?  

However I do know that our thoughts create our future and so I will now entirely avoid brooding over this question and focus on happier things, allowing my subconscious to work on it a bit.

Well Gordon here is my answer to that question:

I believe that there is an energetic state that human beings can attain which includes mastery of the physical existence, telepathy, and the knowledge and conversation of beings in higher worlds.  Some people call this "The Ascension", some "Nirvana", some "Nagual", or "Self-Realization".  

 Many people who have attained this state have tried to describe it and lead others to it, but they can never fully succeed because the world is designed to be irrational.  Since everything is known to be possible in the spirit world, which is generally a world of light and peace, spirits have to have special places to come in order to experience the impossible.  This world is one of those places.  Idiotic suffering and delusional misery are part of the purpose of this plane.    

Paradoxically there are also divine and semi-divine beings who come here specifically to alleviate this suffering and dispel these delusions.  They never succeed fully because that would end the game.  But while no one can ever succeed in alleviating another’s spiritual suffering and delusion, many people can and do succeed in alleviating their own once they have received a certain amount of assistance.  Unfortunately they can never really explain how they did it. 

And furthermore there are beings who come here for entirely different reasons and good luck to them all.  

So "war" and "peace" and "enlightenment" are just words to me.  They’re only ever useful in a narrow context and for limited purposes.  

Now in this context I can say that I personally want peace because I don’t want to get robbed or shot or anything.  I want to have tons of money and enormous amounts of free time to read all the books I want.  So, yes, there’s definitely the appearance of conflict going on but I’m sick of it and I want out ASAP.  And whether you want to call it Thelema or The Art of Allowing or the Peace that Passeth Understanding I’m perfectly happy to let everyone else do whatever they want while I go about my business.