Out of the silence he speaks to me a secret word.

The Two Witnesses .

I have learned that there are two types of mysticism; one is psychological, such as Buddhism, and the other is truly spiritual and includes Hinduism, Jewish Kabala, Sufism and Christianity. Taoism seems to fall between.

Also that pairs of opposites are really two sides of the same thing.

God has no opposite and so remains hidden.

God is known in the coincidence of opposites [force and form, light and dark, male and female, where what is and what is not, being and non-being, one thing becoming another, revelation meets understanding, mercy and love meet with judgement] and hidden things become manifest at the point of balance between all these.

We see beauty in symmetry and balance.

The universe mirrors God.

There is now thought to be "mirror" matter, possibly the same thing as "dark" matter, which balances the bias of the universe to left handedness. This would be a parallel universe that we cannot see.

There are two kinds of eternity: a) where time has no beginning and no end and b) where time does not exist at all

The second excludes the first.

It is possible in the mystical state to experience timelessness. This seems to prove that the soul/spirit is part of God, who is always in the "now" i.e. eternal timelessness.

Hinduism teaches that one must realise one's self as a spiritual being by stripping away everything else until the naked self stands alone.

In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus speaks of shedding clothes and standing naked upon them like the Hindu mystic seeking to get to the naked ground of his being; only to find that it is God.

Jesus quoted Psalm 82 saying "Ye are gods".

Learn to distinguish ego from the true self. The ego must submit to the true self, and then you can love your neighbour as yourself.

Shakespeare: "To thine own self be true, and as night follows day you cannot be false to any man."

"To be or not to be; that is the question".

To be is not static because life is change and a constant becoming.

"I AM the transcendent God and I AM BECOMING the immanent God.

YHWH.................. EHYHE : I am what I will that I will be." {Judaism}

"In my becoming I am the Lord of the dance of the universe, I am One who becomes many." {Hinduism}

There does seem to be a progression of revelation from an impersonal God to a God of love, who both loves and can be loved, in most major religions.

Perhaps this mirrors the evolution of man from animal at basic level to a more caring being capable of loving a neighbour and not just their own gene carrying offspring!

If you want to know about the universe, God, and yourself, go to the Hindu writings such as the Upanishads.

If you want to know the best way to live in that universe go to Judaism as taught by Jesus. Jesus applied the law of love to the Law.

For me these are the two witnesses.

Experiencing God.

From nothingness comes endless all. From the One come the many.

The aim of the mystic is to become as he was before he was: to return as a little child to being an idea in the mind of God.

The experiences mystics have in the states of deep meditation or contemplation are very difficult to put into words because language was not developed to convey such things.

[Meditation is mental activity, possibly in an altered state of consciousness, and is a means to an end to draw the spark or a path; but contemplation is silence of thought, passive. poetic, and is the spark and the path. Here truth is held in the mind for its own sake , and when the subject is God, it is the higher way.]

To live each day as if it were the last [or first] is to begin again as a new born and live a new life each day. Young children and animals live this way. Jesus said you must be born again from above and become as a little child to see and enter the kingdom.

Apparently stimulating the temporal lobe of the brain in a particular way can switch off the 40Hz brainwaves resulting in feeling of loss of self and individuality, so that everything, including the self and the world, is "one". So without these brainwaves we are at one with the universe. These waves normally operate to make us aware of ourselves, except in deep dreamless sleep.

Research has suggested that babies do not at first distinguish where they themselves end and everything else begins and so they are at one with everything. As time goes by they start to think of themselves as separate.

The right side of the temporal lobe is where the "God spot" is. When this dominates the left side of the brain [the language centre] senses another presence.

Surely all functions of the brain have been developed to experience the reality that is there. This phenomenon could be so that we can experience the spiritual world when what we need to experience the physical world is switched off?

Meditation or contemplation in altered states of consciousness brings us into this condition. The purpose is to strip away all the confusion of the world to be free to experience the ground of being that is God.

Some are now saying that the brain is a receptor for consciousness, not the creator of it!

This raises the question: from where and what does it receive?

Suffering is because of our separation from God, but it also brings us back to God.

The relationship of God with the soul in eternity is of such a personal intensity that none but the soul and God can have any knowledge of it. So "religion" is individual and personal and NOT collective and tribal as in churches and denominations. We come and we go alone and the contact with what went before and comes after is alone too.

When the soul is denuded of all its own qualities it is then a piece of God, identical with God, in His image, a spark or fragment of God.

By knowing even a tiny piece of the universe all is known because it contains the same ground as all being.

Dark places are necessary to spiritual progress because the background mess and confusion is obscured there and the gold and gem sparkle from the one source of light.

As my body is not all of me, so the universe is not all of God, but I can learn a great deal about God from it.

Love is the truth of the universe and from love all has come, and to it all returns.

Love is the force behind creation and its sustaining energy. It is the answer to "Why"?!

The universe is the joy of God's expression with all its exuberant variety. There is variety of form, but all is in reality only one. It is as though God is saying, look: all this, and more, is me in all my glories.

The universe mirrors God.

The spiritual is reflected in the material and the eternal in the transient.

Psalm 96 "The trees sing and clap their hands".

Psalm 148 "Praise him sun moon and stars, waters, sea creatures, lightening, hail, clouds, stormy winds, mountains, hills, fruit trees, cedars, animals, cattle, birds, and humans."

This more than poetic: it is literal.

God speaks and creation manifests, then creation speaks in reply.

Reproducing, multiplying, mirroring God in creation, and so replies to God the creator.

Can you hear the silent music of the dancing energy of it?

Parts of the eternal consciousness of God separate off to become our finite consciousness and our brain is the receptor for it.

Our minds are the source of bondage to the world, or the source of freedom from it.

The soul of man has come as a bridge between eternity and the world of time.

The soul inhabits the inner world and sees its light from eternity; it also looks at the light of the temporal world outside.

If God has manifested as the creation we know with our senses, is that not what we should accept, why deny it is real or worthwhile by saying it is an illusion or "fallen" and spoilt by man's sin?

When God pronounced the world created in Genesis to be "good", by inference there had to be something "bad" also as a balancing opposite.

The world is as God means it to be, hard though that may be to take sometimes. Death is part of the plan.

The Christian view of original sin through disobedience to God causing the "fall" and corruption of the good creation of God gives too much power to humans. It forgets that God is God, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.

So it did not all go horribly wrong because one woman and one man were disobedient [although much can be learned from the story about relationships with God]. It did not bring about physical death because they were told to go forth and multiply; which implies death in the cycle of birth, death, life, or the planet would soon have been uninhabitable.

Death has nothing to do with punishment, but is a necessary consequence of life in a material world.

It is meant to be the way it is.

Alice actually walked into the mirror thinking it was a real world.