A symbol 
Is mirror that doesn’t look like a mirror. 
It reflects but not all at once it slowly turns slowly focuses 
Into you. 
The best symbol annihilates itself. Annihilates the self.

Sometimes people are too close for you to see.  They have become trapped in the sticky, frustrating glob that is you and your world.  Easily hiding under your nose so high in the air, always getting under your over-sized feet, never free of your goo, unable to walk far enough away to be seen.  It is a great and terrible thing that a savior comes with a sword to cleave, separating brother from brother, wielding the only weapon magical enough to slice the unsliceable so you can finally hate enough to love.

Ezekiel 14:3
A stumbling block would not be a very effective one if it was at all noticeable. Even a mediocre stumbling block needs to be hidden.  A wicked stumbling block has to be incredibly hidden. Deadly, precisely because it mimics a clear path.  Otherwise it would be obvious, not stumbled upon, and therefore, only a block in the road to go around.  In a sense, it is just the same to say stumbling will inevitably occur when the one walking the path is massively blind but arrogantly thinks he isn't.  And the most wicked part:  The blind and arrogant Walker places the stumbling block in front of himself.  Hides a clear path from his own self.   That is why the stumbling block looks just like God.

Is your eye a projector or a camera?
Do you see or watch what you see?

The solution to any problem is not to get rid of the problem.
Then the problem really never goes away.
The solution to a problem involves water. It is a “solution.” It is a solute dissolved by water into a mixture. Solid becomes liquid. One state of matter into another.
It is solvent. Liquid. It is mixture. It is admixture. It is integration of the problem INTO yourself. It is ingestion. To change. To change. To change. To grow. Which is life. Not sterility. Not shooing. Not eschewing. Change (real knowing, real growth, becoming new) cannot occur without acceptance of the problem. An answer given —as opposed to found or realized--is not a solution: it is a cheat. It simply sweeps the actual problem aside, stunting growth and multiplying the problem in the future. The answer to any problem is not the same as the solution to that problem. An answer is only a thought, an idea or a concept that sits all alone  on the other side of an equation to null it out. The solution to the problem is the miraculous combination of the problem with the answer. This admixture must include two other elements: you and that which transcends you (that which without which there is no which). The solution includes the learning that came with it. It is the understanding that you must drink the poisoned cup you do not want as the antedate for the eating the poisoned apple you did want. It is now part of the body.
Here lies more firmament: The problems and these elements were always there, it is just that you did not know it. They can neither be created nor destroyed. It is what is called the problem of problems, and it always lurks inside your conscious awareness floating at the edge of your vision near the realm of the unconscious, waiting to become fully realized. The Answer exists completely in the realm outside of your vision…waiting to be let in…waiting to be part of the solution.


The profound questions to answer are not “what is the problem?” And “who am I?”
Rather, it is the reverse:
“Who is the problem?” And “what am I?”


Water--the living water--dissolves things.  It tells you things you did not know about yourself.  The woman at the well came into direct contact with  a deeper well and drew forth the kind of water containing the unconscious elements of not so much “who she was,” but more fundamentally “what she was” and “whose she was.” Bringing what was once swimming in the darkness below, up to her conscious world.

This is the effect of living water.

It  opens your eyes.  It descales the build up of chalky deposits blinding the vision of eyes exposed  to shallow well-water.  Blindness is the result of eating the apple of “I can choose what I want for better or worse!”  A power which opens the eye to one's conscious self, but shuts it to everything else. Only by drinking the cup filled with aqua vitae can the sleeping eye awaken.

​Living water is a thermal barrier within the cold depths of the sea; the barrier between the death of beasts and life of fishes. It is a barrier that must be passed through to arrive where you always were.

Living water stops thirst. It quenches the fire of egoic desire. “I I I!” and “want want want!” finally become, “I’m not thirsty anymore. Do you still thirst?”

Living water is much more related to afterdeath, which is today, than  afterlife, which is tomorrow.

Living water turns the end into the beginning--and the beginning into the end. "The first shall be last and the last shall be first."  It reverses conscious awareness’ tendency to separate these "two points" as far as possible on a line from one another; and then celebrate this long-distance marriage as a hard, crusty thing called an event. It turns the alpha and the omega of the Wedding at Cana into the circle it always was.  

Isaiah 60

I destroyed my own city walls in darkness.  In blindness, I self-destructed.  The anger of the Lord had smitten me. Eventually the walls were repaired--but not by me.
Who repaired them?  

Everyone else.
 
But only as I began to wake up to my brokenness and see the world with new eyes--see it as God does—with love.  I saw the healing that is possible if I ministered to others in their sickness as Christ did.  And it was ONLY then that my broken city walls began to be repaired. 
In the healing of others I am healed.
Now I understand that my Temple of Beauty is not desecrated by the world, but beautified by it.  As brokenness is redeemed, glory shines round consecrating all within its glow.

The idea in Isaiah 60 is that the protection and security we really want in life (the city walls) are best achieved and maintained, not by arrogantly hiding behind false walls, but by shining forth the Glory of God like the noonday sun in a dark world.   It is His love pouring outward from our temple towards the world that protects the temple on all sides.  God’s love and light is both vanguard and rearguard.  The gates can now stand open in every moment of life, in every reality, on the other side of every choice, marching into every future and promised land.  And the enemy we once walled off with exhaustive effort—piling and plugging stone after ugly stone into every defect—become friends and fellow workers repairing our crumbling walls without any effort of our own.

Seeing your eyes limits your vision. Listening to your ears limits your hearing.
Being self-conscious limits your existence.
The gradual development of self-consciousness is almost by definition enculturation. Enculturation is one’s gradual ingestion of the surrounding culture until they become like it. It requires willing participation in the game. A child does not start out self-conscious but becomes so. It is when one begins to know that he knows, thinks, and judges that one forgets how it is he knows, thinks, and judges. He forgets from where his golden gift came.  He breaks Samson’s rule and “lays a hand on his head.” 
It is when you think you know truth—that you don’t. 
It is when you know that you are the judge that you lose the ability.
It is the difference between feeling enslaved by your responsibilities in the world and feeling free to keep the temple and everything in it.
Are you weak?  Are you enslaved? Are you pushing the millstone round and round? 
​Then…you are also blind.

Watch your feelings. 
​
Why?  Why does watching help?  
It helps you to see your own backside. Your underside. Your blindside. It is so helpful to have an early warning system revealing what is going on beneath what you can see about yourself. It is like having a second mirror to see the very back of you—those parts you never see otherwise.  “Huh. I never knew that was showing.”  
But, first, even to be asking this question—even to be considering a second mirror— means that you realize you might have a problem.
I can see this now about myself, but the progression for me was that BECAUSE I wasn’t paying attention to my feelings (ironically, I even had contempt for my feelings); the underworld was brewing with snakes. I was calling forth my own destruction. Actualizing my underworld into Being. What I am trying to say is that because I spoke into my world contempt, blame, frustration, and resentment I was actually reverse terraforming earth into mars--making it uninhabitable.  And to make it more tragic, specifically, at the time my internal reasoning would be I was behaving based on justice, rightness, truth, respect, superior knowledge.  (Hear any God in there? Any spirit fruit?)  I was actualizing wickedness and destruction behind my own back, in my blindness and ignorance, AND suffering because of it.  It wasn’t happening to me.  I was happening to it!
Those snakes came out of nowhere (the underworld), to bite, to sting, to choke me to death. And they were my snakes.  I got just what I asked for.  It was long before I could see it is what I needed--what I "wanted.”
Or another way to say it is I fell though, smacked my face, bloodied my nose, and knocked out my teeth, way at the bottom. Bang!  Scraping myself with potsherds. 
Thank God! Look up! 
“Who am I? Who are you? What is truth? No, no no! After all these years, I don’t seem to know anything. Now, I am afraid.”
And God says, “Now we are getting somewhere. Now your fear is properly oriented. This is the beginning of wisdom.  Obviously. The beginning of wisdom must start with the belief—the first principle: ‘I don’t know anything.’  Where else would it start?
Now, watch. Listen. Be quiet. Do you hear that? It is your heart beating. Isn’t that awesome?  You are breathing. The lights are on. Can you hear the hum? The sun rises and it sets.  Fog rolls in from the bay. These things happen by forces you don’t understand and relate to you in ways you don’t understand, but are vital to life. Watch your feelings.  Here comes your wife. What will she see when she looks at you. What will you be 'full of' that you give off. Let’s try again."

I began to see spiritual truths in the old book where I had not seen them before; finding them not in scriptures scrubbed of all grime and paradox, but in dusty tales of donkeys and dragons. How did I not see them before—these glints of gold in the dirt?  It’s terrible enough NOT to see. But one sure way to make it worse is to think you can.  NOT to find is awful as well.  But, again, the only way never to find is thinking you already have. I was a self-deluded arborist stupidly smacking my face on the one tree, it so happens, for which I no longer looked. And it was this about myself—this dilution of myself—and these constant bloody noses: because I believed I possessed truth; because I believed I possessed sight;  I was like a man with a fatal illness he did not yet know he had; who somehow, unbeknownst even to himself, wound up at the doctor’s office.  My brazen ego alone confident of health, but all else below that proud little scrim, everything deeper within and further without the cosmos was unsure:  “Oh, it’s nothing doctor.  Just a vagueness here in the pit of my stomach.  Just an achiness there in sunsets and starlight.”

Maybe I was sick. 
​
There is a part of blindness that is sheer. A part that is utter. But there is another, sicker part that is volitional:  not that can’t look, but won’t. And that kind of blindness is a lie.  It is a willful blindness.  No sane person would choose to blind themselves.  But it is precisely what the rational person chooses all the time.  They rationalize. As long as there is a good reason to see, they will see anything.  As long as there is a good reason NOT to see, they will see nothing.  Like the emperor who refuses to see the empty spinning wheel, because to see AT ALL is to admit he was wrong.   This kind of blindness is the first step in drying out a heart of flesh.  The pharaonic lie: to look down from tyranny and call it ease.  It hardens the heart into a stone that gazes upon freedom and calls it betrayal.