Albino Lizard

There is a deeper meaning behind the mundane

  •     At my mother’s memorial Dimas was wearing a fancy blue shirt that reminded me of a mariachi band uniform. As my mother’s friends and relatives were gathering, in what used to be my parents’ lake picnic area, for the service, Dimas seemed to be following me trying to get my attention. I walked the other way trying to ignore him.
        There had been a lot of prayer and meditation on my part in which I had surrounded Dimas with holy witnesses to observe what he had done. I had prayed and meditated in this way in order to heal people close to me who had been hurt by him, and in order to dissipate my own anger.
        It was no use, in the small crowd there was no way I could avoid him. My anger melted away when our eyes met. I had the feeling that he had confessed his sins directly to God and been cleansed. We were like two friends who had known each other for a long time, like two actors, one the villain, who shake hands once the play is over.

  •     I read, Filthy Rich, a biography of Jeffrey Epstein, checked out from the public library with the OverDrive app on my Android phone. It was hard to put down, and I wizzed right through it. The book was about a rich person who seemed above the law in the expression of his pedophile proclivity. James Patterson, John Connolly and Tim Malloy were the writing team.
        The book starts out with the story of Mary, a sixteen-year-old girl, who is lured by a friend of a friend to work for a rich neighbor, in Palm Beach, Florida, as a masseuse. With no experience in massage, she is promised $200 for showing up at the man’s mansion and providing a rubdown. Of course things escalate to more than she is comfortable with, and both girls get paid.
        Why it was such an interesting read, I don’t know. Perhaps I want to understand pedophilia and all its ramifications? Maybe I want to look at the sick so I can appreciate the healthy? Maybe I want to better understand some of the unpleasant encounters with inappropriate people I have had in my life?
         It was good to see an attempt at justice. The police chief did a really good job interviewing the victims and putting together the case, but Epstein’s legal team fought back effectively, and the sentence was reduced to less than 18 months with plenty of free time where he was allowed to leave the jail facility to go to his lawyer’s office and home and other places. It didn’t really seem like he got punished for what he did.
         A parasite on society in more ways than one, Epstein made his fortune helping billionaires find tax loopholes.

  •     The Great Being, wishing to reveal the prerequisites of the peace and tranquility of the world and the advancement of its peoples, hath written: The time must come when the imperative necessity for the holding of a vast, an all-embracing assemblage of men will be universally realized. The rulers and kings of the earth must needs attend it, and, participating in its deliberations, must consider such ways and means as will lay the foundations of the world’s Great Peace amongst men. Such a peace demandeth that the Great Powers should resolve, for the sake of the tranquility of the peoples of the earth, to be fully reconciled among themselves. Should any king take up arms against another, all should unitedly arise and prevent him. If this be done, the nations of the world will no longer require any armaments, except for the purpose of preserving the security of their realms and of maintaining internal order within their territories. This will ensure the peace and composure of every people, government and nation. We fain would hope that the kings and rulers of the earth, the mirrors of the gracious and almighty name of God, may attain unto this station, and shield mankind from the onslaught of tyranny. – Bahá’u’lláh.
        Reference for the above quote, Tablet of Maqsud by Bahá’u’lláh.
        Multimedia version: Maqsud by Baha’u’llah, viola by Jera Jones Igo, photos from Unsplash and Google Images.

  •     I’m 40% through the book, “Confessions of a Prayer Slacker,” by Diane Moody. Last night I enjoyed reading about the excuses we sometimes give for not spending time in meditation and prayer.
        Although the book is Christian orientated, I translate it to my more inclusive outlook. The writer gave an example of a Christian teenager having a meeting with Jesus, then telling Him, “You stay here, I’m going to a party by myself.” I thought, “How sad, I want to have mindfulness of Spirit with me all the time.” Sometime before, during or after my meditation session this morning, I realized that I have a lot of grief and pain within myself that I am not being mindful of, or sharing with my spirit guide. After what I call “reporting to headquarters” for half an hour or so (assuming my meditation position), I continued to meditate lying down for an hour or so more.
        I have had valuable things taken from me with no attempt to compensate me in any way. This has been extremely painful. I had thought that I was working through the pain honestly. But somehow I was keeping God out of it, thinking this is just my wound. I have to work through this myself!
        I put melody and chords to Baha’u’llah’s healing prayer. The melody I chose was mostly based on an Iranian scale that uses a lot of semi-tones. It is very challenging to me, both to sing, and to find and play chords on the guitar for it. This kept me chanting the prayer over and over. (I still don’t have it well enough to share with anyone, so I’ll do it more.) The poster above is an except from the prayer, “Remembrance of Thee is my remedy,” mindfulness again.

  •     Getting up before dawn, eating some fruit, seeds and grain that I put to soak the night before, brushing my teeth and getting back in bed with nutrition in my tummy. This is year 25. I have been doing that for 19 days every March since becoming a devotee of Baha’u’llah.
        ;25 Years, I have belonged to Him. My inner being overflows with love when I consider 25 years of Baha’i fellowship, 25 years of insight and revelation from the Baha’i Writings, and especially, 25 years of personal love and guidance from Baha’u’llah Himself.
         On April 21, 1992, I had a mystical experience while reading an introductory pamphlet on the Baha’i Faith which I had picked up 2 days earlier from the Baha’i booth at a street fair. April 21 is one of the Baha’i Holy days, as I would learn later. 129 years prior to my vision of Baha’u’llah, in 1863, He had begun to declare His ministry to His followers in a garden across the Tigris River from Baghdad. Banished the second time for His radical views, He and His family were preparing for a journey to Constantinople (Edirne).
        In my first vision of Baha’u’llah, nearly 25 years ago, I saw Him in the Siyah-Chal. It was as if the pamphlet I was reading came equipped with a hologram that opened when you read of how Bahaullah, barefooted and bare headed in the heat of August of 1852 Tehran, being conducted to the dungeon, had paused and offered His face to an elderly woman who believed she was serving a meritorious cause by pelting Him with a stone. Then He was led down a long, dark flight of stairs to the dungeon, seated on a bench with robbers and murderers, tied up in chains, an exceedingly heavy chain around His neck, His feet, wounded from the long barefoot trek, soaking in garbage and excrement, and yet He had a mystical experience during the four months He was there.
        He experienced the call of God. He saw the Maid of Heaven and heard Her voice. She comforted Him with Her nurturing presence. She praised Him, imparting to Him the knowledge of His exalted Station, Manifestation of God for the current age.
        I saw His Face, the Light around Him, in a dark, somber place, nothing like the photos of Him you find on the internet, posted by non-Baha’is. I saw Beauty, I saw Love, I saw Majesty. And in that moment I knew that I belonged to Him forever.

  •     As I approached the Sacred Garden this morning, thinking to offer my usual mantra, my Lord appeared with a look that said, “Please don’t offer a meaningless repetition.” My spirit drank in the Holy Presence in a wordless meditation. The mind eventually began composing a summary of the experience.
        You must root out superstition from your belief system. It is easy to see it in others and difficult to see in yourself. Prayers and mantras prescribed by spiritual leaders are one thing. Sometimes they seem to connect you to pure Spirit and produce a big blessing. But not always. They can be over-relied on. The truly spiritual don’t need them.
        Behavioral dogma is another thing. Sometimes there is a time to do the forbidden. It took years for my husband to obtain his divorce, and yet I knew he and I were married. After 5 years we finally had our public wedding. I don’t drink alcoholic beverages but I do eat kimchee, sour kraut, miso and drink rejuvelac, knowing anything fermented has a trace of alcohol.
        Prayers and exhortations of my Faith are in Its Holy Texts. I have a phone app called, “Baha’i Daily Quotes,” which I enjoy. Reading the words penned by the Lord of your Faith is a kind of food. Still sometimes I don’t read them. Sometimes when I meet Baha’u’llah in the Sacred Garden, He asks me why I haven’t been reading His Words, then the next Passage I read is particularly meaningful.

  • I read, THE FORBIDDEN RELIGION by Jose M. Herrou Aragon.

    Available here

    I learned:

     

    • The material universe, including this material world, is hell.
    • The God of this universe, and this world, is Satan.
    • Satan has underlings that help him. The lord of the material earth is, Satan Kumara.
    • There is a Higher God and a Higher Realm. This God is shrouded in mystique. He is referred to as, God the Unknowable.
    • The god of this world (Satan) has worked to deceive people into confusing him with the Unknowable God.
    • The Unkowable God sends a Representative of Himself to earth on rare occasions at enormous sacrifice and pain to His Messenger. This Person inspires worship of the Unknowable God.
    • Religious truths and writings are twisted over time to direct people’s love and service away from the the True God to the false god. The false god has also created the illusion of a devil that is not himself.
    • The serpent, Lucifer, who spoke to Eve in the Garden of Eden, was the Messenger of the Unknowable God. He encouraged Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of Knowledge. The god of the world had commanded her and Adam not to eat the fruit of that tree, saying they would die. When Eve and Adam did eat the fruit, their eyes were opened and they knew the difference between the Uncreated Kingdom and the created realm. Their god had lied, they did not die. The serpent had told the truth, they had been made wise.
    • The god of this world created the body and the soul of man. A physical material part, the body of dust, and an animic part, the breath of this creator, which we call soul.
    • But there is a third part, an Uncreated and Eternal Spirit. That Spirit was asleep in Adam and Eve until they ate of the Tree of Knowledge. The god of this world prefers that that part remain asleep so people will accept him as God and he can feed on their passive spiritual energy.
    • The god of this world likes battles, wars, diseases, accidents, plagues, disasters and so forth, so he can feed on the misery of human beings. He likes animals to be slaughtered by humans and other animals so he can feed on their misery as well.
    • The imperfections of this world reflect the imperfections of its creator.
    • Gnosticism was persecuted and it’s writings destroyed early in the Christian Era. The only books on Gnosticism that survive are those written by its critics. The critics would have, in my opinion, highlighted the more shocking of the Gnostic beliefs and exaggerated them to make them appear absurd. With that filter I have mollified some of the ideas which I found difficult to reconcile with my existing belief system as follows:

    My Belief

        I don’t believe that the Perfect, Just, although Unknowable, God would have abandoned human beings into the care of a lunatic demigod. I do believe that Divine Messengers are sent every age or so. I believe there is a way that we can come into the Dicine presence right now. (Of course that would be through our relationship with the Messenger which Gnosticism also acknowledges).
        I don’t believe that the Unknowable God would have delegated the created universe to an arrogant, inept, perverse spirit without there being a way to improve on his ineptitude. Perhaps that is where we come in.
        I found The Forbidden Religion to be somewhat depressing to read. There are demons and devils everywhere and there is next to nothing we can do about it, is what I understood the writer to be emphasizing. I derived comfort from the following passage from the writings of Baha’u’llah:

    The comforting words of Baha’u’llah

        “Say: Beware, O people of Baha, lest the strong ones of the earth rob you of your strength, or they who rule the world fill you with fear. Put your trust in God, and commit your affairs to His keeping. He, verily, will, through the power of truth, render you victorious, and He, verily, is powerful to do what He willeth, and in His grasp are the reins of omnipotent might.”

    From the Writings of Baha’u’llah (Cited in Shoghi Effendi, “The Advent of Divine Justice

  • ​Everyone wants peace and prosperity. What we disagree on, sometimes, is how best to attain it.  By alienating each other, we are driving peace and universal prosperity father away. Does your vision of the future include everybody, or are you attracted to some kind of an elitist view that seeks to oppress certain strata of society while elevating the segment you hope to be in?



  • Suchness, the bitter taste of knowing such a one,
    a fire burning out of control,
    consuming everything.
    The breath, the focus within,
    perhaps all the fruit is not bitter.

  • Who Is the Biggest Quack?

        The medical-pharmaceutical industry has a tendency to steer patients to treatments and/or drugs that generate profits for the industry and those in it, while other treatments, that may be just as effective, less invasive, and less expensive, are not discussed. This is in part due to the education health care providers receive that tends to emphasize patentable treatments and drugs to the exclusion of medications, treatments or diets that have stood the test of time, but the patents have either expired, or they were not patentable in the first place. Care is taken, when discussing diet, not to buck the status-quo of industrialized foods by recommending a return to a pre-industrial diet. Great strides have been made in the successful rehabilitation of acute trauma, however the death toll from degenerative diseases has become epidemic. Cancer accounts for nearly one death in four, with diabetes being implicated in nearly one death in two.
        Sometimes the medical treatment is worse than the disease, with cancer patients seeming to succumb to surgery, radiation or chemotherapy more quickly than they perhaps would have from the cancer itself. Yet with all the research dollars being spent, the medical establishment still does not have a clear understanding of the cause of cancer.
        When a cancerous tumor, a fibrous or discolored lump in a person’s body that may have been judged by a medical doctor to be malignant, manages to send out some kind of a seed that starts another cancerous tumor growing in another area of the same person’s body, the cancer is said to have metastasized, a dangerous condition that can hasten death as the cancer continues to metastasize, colonizing more and more of the person’s body.
        Recently a spokesman for the National Institute of Health wrote: “Approximately 90% of all cancer deaths can be attributed to the metastatic spread of primary tumors…. Although our knowledge of cancer has increased in recent years, the molecular mechanisms of tumor invasion and metastasis still remain elusive.”
        Those who have put forth possible theories about the origin and development of the disease have been discredited by an establishment addicted to the profitability of its entrenched treatment program, even though the death rate is rather somber. There are survivors, and that tends to justify the cutting, burning and poisoning, as a few jackpot winners seem to justify gambling.

    hulda-clark

    Hulda Regehr Clark, Ph.D.,N.D.
        I first encountered the writings of Hulda Clark in 1997, shortly after losing a dear friend to cancer. My friend, undergoing chemotherapy, seemed to fade extremely fast. I couldn’t help but wonder how quickly she would have gone without the chemo. Would she have gone more quickly, or would she have had more time? Would her quality of life in the last months have been better without the side effects of the chemo? I had asked the same questions before when losing a boss to cancer 20 years earlier. He also had faded very quickly once the chemo had begun.
        I found, A Cure For All Diseases, and, A Cure For All Cancers, in the Herb Store. I bought one of them, I think it was, A Cure For All Cancers. In both books, Hulda Clark makes the startling assertion that all cancers, and indeed all diseases, are caused by parasites! You don’t hear much about parasites from medical science, at least not back then. I was startled and horrified! What if it is true? What if I have tiny worms chewing and biting me all over inside? My doctor would tell me wouldn’t she? She would give me something to get rid of them and I would be ok again, right?
        Hulda Clark was branded a quack by the medical establishment and persecuted. She died in 2009 of blood cancer at the age of 80, shortly after being awakened in the middle of the night to be arrested for her efforts in promoting health.
        The arms of the medical establishment denounce the work of Hulda Clark and other innovators of alternative medicine in paternalistic platitudes: “It is preposterous,” “There is just no evidence for it,” “Fasciolopsis Buski,” (The parasite Hulda Clark blames for cancer) “only exists in Asia. There are none here!” Indeed, in this age of world travel they are sure that the parasite stays in Asia?
        It seems to me that the idea of parasites causing cancer, with their reproductive activity being implicated in the phenomenon of metastation, is a better hypothesis then, “We don’t clearly understand metastation, all we can do is cut, burn, poison and hope for the best,” which is the position of establishment medicine.
        In 1999, I tried Hulda Clark’s recipe of herbs and a 9-volt battery powered device called a Zapper, which I built from the schematic in her book. The first thing I noticed was bouts of vertigo, that I had been suffering, went away. I had come to on the closet floor where I had passed out moments earlier, prior to treating myself, and this was not an isolated incident. I had been experiencing the vertigo more and more. But it vanished completely after undergoing Dr. Clark’s parasite program.
        Medical uniformed personnel are good at scaring patients into submitting to their protocols. However, their paternalistic assertions that one will benefit from the latest advances of Medical Science fall a little flat without the actual science. Their doctors die of cancer too, and many of them younger than 80. They charge for their services too, billing individuals, insurance companies and even governments. Their therapies kill people, but where are the statistics? I personally know several people who died while, or soon after, undergoing radiation or chemotherapy, and only one who survived it, and she was the only one, in a group of 30 cancer patients taking treatment together, to survive! Statistics are skewed, by changing the diagnostic categories before and after treatment, to make it appear that there is a greater cure rate, or a smaller death rate, then there is. They command us to ignore the alternatives because, “There is no evidence.” Where is the evidence that their way works?