Did you ever wonder why a good God would build a world where the only
way to survive is by taking life? How long would you stay alive if you
refused to eat? You may love animals and grow plants inside your home
and flowers in your garden, but every time you eat, you destroy the life
of something. A something with a consciousness, that feels and desires
to live, as we do. The other day I grabbed an onion from a basket to
chop up, and I saw it had sprouted a beautiful, tender, light-green
shoot. It had a life inside it, a consciousness that wanted to take
root, breathe air and thrive. Any tears in chopping that onion did not
come from the fumes. I’m not a sentimentalist. I’m a person
questioning, increasingly aware of an insidious thread woven through
biological life. We are born, we feed, and we die. Life is a process of
consuming other living things in order to stay alive as long as possible
until death in turn consumes us. We tell ourselves life is a whole lot
more, but it’s reduced to that as long as we must feed to survive. If we
can’t stay alive more than a few months without food, how can eating not
be fundamental to how we define our existence? Eating is a
requirement for biological life as we know it. It’s the thread that
holds together material existence. More than a thread, it’s a chain,
binding us to the law that we must consume each other. Rebelling is
punishable by death. What kind of God or gods would create a world
predicated on killing? We don’t like to ask that, and we find every
excuse to avoid looking at this question. But every time a dear one
dies, or you find a nibbled bird in the yard destroyed by an idle cat,
or you read about an animal that has suffered mercilessly, or another
molested child, or a nation ravaged by a quake that’s buried thousands
of living people, your mind goes back to that nagging question. Who
would make a world like this? Was it truly a God of love? According
to much evidence, it wasn’t. The world was created by something else. Or
if it was created by the loving God our hearts insist exists, then
creation has been tampered with by someone else so merciless that it
barely resembles the original divine vision. The biological universe is
controlled by the law that to live we must take life or die. That is
sinister. Something there is that makes us have to eat, that makes us
age and disintegrate. This is the “something wrong with the world,” the
crack in the universe. Knowledge of it works “like a splinter in the
mind, driving you mad,” quoting “The Matrix.” Yet awakening to the truth
of our predicament is the first step toward radical change. Only radical
change can possibly right the fundamental flaw woven into physical
creation. And how well-woven it is. Not only does violence wind
through the lives of all Earth life like the fibers of a time-bomb
attached to a victim. It reaches out into space, where supernovas
implode, collapsing millions of stars along with all living beings on
all their attendant planets. Death and devouring are so pervasive most
people can’t conceive of a world without them, or if they can conceive
it, they label the concept preposterous. Yet quantum physics shows that
matter is nothing but atoms: emptiness vibrating. Emptiness does not die
and neither does the energy it oscillates. So why must bodies die that
are made of up of these things? Robert Monroe, in his book “Far
Journeys,” writes of contact he had with a light being in an out-of-body
experience. (Monroe is arguably the world’s foremost researcher on OBEs;
he started an institute with trainee/researchers to scientifically
investigate the phenomenon.) Reportedly the light being told Monroe that
when humans die, their energy is released and harvested by
trans-dimensional beings, who use it to extend their own life spans. The
claim is that the universe is a garden created by these beings as their
food source. According to Monroe’s story, animals are intentionally
positioned on this planet to feed on plants and on each other, thereby
releasing the life force of their victims so it can be harvested. In a
predator-prey struggle, exceptional energy is produced in the
combatants. The spilling of blood in a fight-to-the-death conflict
releases this intense energy, which the light beings call “loosh.” Loosh
is also harvested from the loneliness of animals and humans, as well as
from the emotions engendered when a parent is forced to defend the life
of its young. Another source of loosh is humans’ worship. According
to Monroe’s informant, our creators, the cosmic “energy farmers,”
intentionally equipped animals with devices like fangs, claws and
super-speed in order to prolong predator-prey combat and thereby produce
more loosh. In other words, the greater the suffering, the more life
force is spewed from our bodies, and the tastier the energy meal for our
creators. This story told to Monroe (which threw him into a two-week
depression) corresponds to reports in some of the world’s oldest
scriptures, the Vedas, Upanishads, and Puranas of India. There we read
that “the universe is upheld by sacrifice” (Atharva Veda) and that “all
who are living (in this world) are the sacrificers. There is none living
who does not perform yagya (sacrifice). This body is (created) for
sacrifice, and arises out of sacrifice and changes according to
sacrifice.” (Garbha Upanishad) Again: “(Death as the Creator)
resolved to devour all that he had created; for he eats all. . . He is
the eater of the whole universe; this whole universe is his food.”
(Mahabharata) In the writings of Carlos Castaneda, who chronicles the
life and teachings of a Yaquii sorcerer called Don Juan, we find another
story of the Divine devouring humans, in this case human consciousness.
Reports Castaneda: “The Eagle is devouring the awareness of all the
creatures that, alive on earth a moment before and now dead, have
floated to the Eagle’s beak, like a ceaseless swarm of fireflies, to
meet their owner, their reason for having had life. The Eagle
disentangles these tiny flames, lays them flat, as a tanner stretches
out a hide, and then consumes them; for awareness is the Eagle’s food.
The Eagle, that power that governs the destinies of all living things,
reflects equally and at once all those living things.” (“The Eagle’s
Gift,” by Carlos Castaneda) The idea that man must sacrifice (must
kill something or be killed in order to appease the gods) is apparently
intrinsic to all the world’s root religions. We find blood ritual,
including human sacrifice, in the Druidic tradition, Tibetan Buddhism,
among the Indians of the Americas, in Greece and Rome, Africa, China,
Arabia, Germany, Phoenicia and Egypt. Even the Old Testament (Judges
11:31-40) has a little-advertised story of human sacrifice, with the
Israelite judge Jephthah ritually slaughtering his own daughter to
fulfill a vow he made to Jehovah. While we may not think of Judaism
as typically promoting human sacrifice, it more than promoted it if we
count the genocide Jehovah demanded of the Hebrews. In one day alone,
they murdered 12,000 Canaanites “and utterly destroyed everything in the
city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey
with the edge of the sword.”(Joshua: 6:21) In Islam, the situation
is similar. Allah, while paying lip service to the immorality of human
sacrifice, orders his servants in the Koran to practice jihad against
all unbelievers. “When the forbidden months are past, then fight and
slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them,
and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war.” (Koran: 9:5)
Peace-loving Moslems interpret such passages as “symbolic” in their
desire to justify their faith, much as Christians try to justify
Jehovah’s sociopathic behavior with excuses. In many ways, the god of
Islam reasons and rants like the god of the Israelites. Could it be the
same entity? It isn’t contradictory that he would support two separate
peoples, then lead them to fight each other. Not if his agenda is to
stimulate and harvest plenty of loosh. Christianity, the religion of
brotherly love, is implicated in blood sacrifice by being rooted in the
Jewish tradition. The Bible declares Jesus is the son of God (Jehovah),
and Jehovah announces at Jesus’ baptism, “This is My beloved Son in whom
I am well-pleased.” (Matthew: 17:5) Where was Jesus when his father was
slaughtering the Canaanites? Jesus himself becomes a blood sacrifice, a
fact that Catholics reenact in the mass and that Protestants bathe
themselves in to be “saved.” Christians are no strangers to sacrifice.
If suffering and death were part of creation that no one, including
the gods, could help, there’d be some reason to be more forgiving. I
might even buy the story that they need us to support them with our
homage and we need them to keep the universe running. But when you add
blood sacrifice into the equation, I abandon ship. It’s one thing if the
gods can’t prevent earthly suffering and death – quite another if they
seek it out and thrive from it – or worse yet, created it. And that’s
what blood sacrifice, and the scriptures around it, indicate.
When the oldest scriptures of the world tell us we were created as food
for the gods, I have to ask myself if I want to live in a universe where
that might be true. The fact is, I don’t. I can no longer give my
approval to that kind of reality. So if I won’t live with it, I have to
come up with something better. I have to find something more fundamental
than the physical universe to locate my identity in, and my power in. I
sense, as many do these days, that there’s something beyond the universe
as it has been presented to us, something outside this box, outside this
system. That’s what I seek to know, connect with, and draw from.
Robert Morning Sky, a truth seeker of the Hopi and Apache traditions,
tells a story he learned from his people about a race of beings who knew
no limitations, who existed far outside this physical universe. One day
one of them declared his intention to visit Earth and take on a body
just for the adventure of it, for the experience. His friends cautioned
him, as this universe had a reputation as amnesia-producing, a place of
no return. But the entity laughed that off and promised to come back
after one lifetime. Centuries passed, and the entity never came
home. One of his comrades decided to enter the physical world to go look
for his friend. He promised not to get lost in matter and to return with
the other individual. More centuries passed, and neither being returned.
So another immortal entered physical mass, and he also never came back.
In time many members of these unlimited beings incarnated in human form,
and the story goes, none of them yet has gone home. Maybe we are
those people, starting to remember who we are. Maybe it’s time to break
out of the hypnosis we’ve lived under for eons, the unquestioned
assumptions that we must kill and eat, suffer and die, live in lack and
sadness, and undergo all the human drama as it has been defined for us.
Is it insane to think that humans can beat the system? That we could
make a choice to stop the activities that supply our up-line with fuel?
That we could minimize – even stop – our own refueling from the life
force of creatures lower than us on the food chain? Is it madness to
think that our bodies, made of undying energy, could themselves not have
to die, that we might learn to live on the power of infinite
consciousness, which we can access within ourselves, being part of it?
While some may call that madness, I prefer it to the world I see around
me. I certainly prefer it to death. I prefer it to loss of my dear ones,
and to sickness and poverty. The greatest experiment mankind can engage
in is mastery of the principles of freedom, creation, abundance, and
immortality. We’re wearing body suits that in 70-some years of use are
programmed to self-destruct. What could be more important than changing
that programming? In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna warns: “He who
does not follow the wheel thus set revolving lives in vain.” The wheel
is the cycle of birth and death, karma and retribution, human sacrifice
and divine blessing. To rebel against this system is to fail in our life
purpose as defined by those who say they are our creators and gods. But
surely life was meant to be more than dinner for the next rung up on the
food chain. If “living in vain” means breaking out of that, I’m all for
that kind of failure.
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