He took everything away from me—all the obstructions, all the accretions, all the cataracts and clothes and scales-- everything but the truth.  And revealing it; raising it high enough even for me to see, I finally see I am hanging naked on a cross. The place I have always been. 
The sight explaining so much: explaining the ache in my hands and feet; explaining the stretching rack in my shoulders; explaining the piercing in my chest; explaining the tired collapse of my unbroken bones; explaining the bitter aftertaste of every drink; explaining everything and everything and everything.
And I cry with relief, “It is finished!"
I am ready to go home. I am ready to be free. I am ready to let go of this cursed tree and leap into the air. And if ever again I land, I will land in a new life.  I will love this world like Christ.  I will walk through the petrified forest of crosses shouldering my own as I go.  I will lay my hand on every bloody trunk. I will set up my cross and willingly scale to the top.  I will hang there again, yet this time helping thieves see and understand and live. Thank you Father for letting me see the whole world!
​"Into your hands I commit my spirit.”

Who is on the witness stand testifying against you?
Your arrogance.

He rebuts your facts and figures, your words, your photo documentation, your lengthy explanations and reasons, your graphs and diagrams and methodologies.  He rebuts all these and more; every polished, intellectual testament you present to defend  your life.

And guess whose testimony is more persuasive in the long, arduous trial of existence that, in fact, you learned nothing about being human--a soul unfit to walk in the cool of  paradise?
​Hmm?

Although sad and alienating, it is at least commonly known that many people walking through life with you simply wander too far away to be seen anymore.  But what is no less sad and  alienating, far less commonly known, and obviously far more dangerous, is that quite a few wander too close--becoming 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.

Because for every choice outside of paradise, there are actually two.
There is the choice one sees and the choice one doesn’t.
The choice to obey in spite of what one thinks...or not.  And to obey is to take what one thinks at the fork in the road, lay it down, and sacrifice it.
Underlying every fork in the road is a more important fork in a more important road.  A spiritual fork in a spiritual road.  A road to life or death.

t“The Wall” is a very good image or term or metaphor. It matches a question I have been thinking about the past couple of days:  Why are the waters are always at flood-stage when it is time to cross?
And I think it something about real change. Real change.  Real growth. Not small incremental change, but massive transformation. We “small increment” ourselves to death—right up to the Wall.  Then we divide the distance to the Wall in half, like Achilles, literally forever. Which is a great way of never hitting the wall, but also of never going anywhere. 
The Wall is like the flood-stage:   It is only when the waters are at flood-stage we finally realize there is no way that “I” could ever do it; “I” can never cross it. It is impossible. 
And at that lonely, terrifying place, the ONLY choice is to allow the transcendent in. “I” must no longer continue the journey of half-lengths—it isn’t working; “I” must turn a new direction—inward. “I” go deep. On the surface, near the Wall, I leave the husk of Adam Hankins, a cocoon; I must leave and go down—I am shrinking.  Dissolving. Making contact with something new, yet at the same time ancient—the self-organizing principle. My DNA is restructured in the primordial soup. Out comes something different—changed. No incremental thing. A thing with wings.
​

Peter Pan
It is a story about you.
It begins with a boy who lost his shadow.


This is a parallelism to Christ’s warning about one evil spirit and the clean house.


The most unruly ruler believes rules get rid of unruliness.  But getting rid of unruliness is impossible because ruliness and unruliness are like states of matter.  They just are. 
Unruliness is dependent on ruliness, just as ruliness can not exist without unruliness.
In the same way, it is wrong to say cleaning gets rid of dirt.  Of course it doesn’t.  In fact, it is just as easy to say cleaning makes more room for dirt.  
Cleanliness does not get rid of dirtiness.  
A set of external rules for right behavior does not get rid of wrong behavior.  It does not do anything because it is just a concept.  And a concept cannot do anything about something as real as evil.  Or said another way, morality that has a motive to accomplish something, accomplishes nothing.  It can neither create good nor destroy evil—if anything, it does the opposite.  Rather, good and evil simply exist, in the same way high and low do—one only exists in relation to the other. The rules the ego learns to follow are not primary education. They are an epiphenomenon of existence. It is why it was essential that the Ten Commandments were inscribed by the hand of God Himself—not man.  Just as it was essential that Jesus walk into the wilderness and stand in front of the mirror to face his brother—his dark self—Satan—not because he was told to do it, but because it was foretold by existence itself.   At the very beginning, the moment man awoke to self-consciousness in the garden, exactly then, he beheld a core of poisonous fruit in his palm.  From the tree that should not have been touched because it made the knowledge of God become the knowledge of man.   The moment man ingested desire--wanting--value—he blinded himself to the only cure: to un-desire, un-knowing, un-holding.


The villain never really dies.  He always comes back.  By not speaking his name Voldemort only comes back with more horcruxes. So something else must be done with evil besides pretending its not there or it multiplies seven-fold.  Somehow simply knowing of its close quarters in our heart, saps evil its power. 


It is learning to live with dirt—incorporate it—accept it—in your life that makes a home livable.
An Evil spirit does not exist without the good. And good can not be understood without evil. It is in seeing this and incorporating this, that halts the multiplication of evil within.

Jeremiah 29:8 ff

“Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have.

They are prophesying lies to you in my name.”

We who are in exile, hear what we want to hear...and then call that a message sent from God. But it’s not God’s message, it’s ours. The case is exactly this:
We mail a letter addressed to ourselves, then open it and are so amazed it says exactly what we were thinking that we say it must be from God.

But this is a lie.
God says, “I didn’t send that letter.  You did."
Here is my message:
“Learn to live where you are now, in your exile, not the promised land where you think you should be. It is by always looking towards what you want instead of what is at your feet that you lost the promised land in the first place. When you shift what you should have into what you already have, you discover that any plans for the future do not do much for the man with no capacity for enjoying life right now, because when his tree finally bears fruit, he is unable to see it, eat it, or taste it.  He can't even enjoy the fruit of his own labor. Because although he is there, he is no longer there. He is already worrying about what to eat as his fruit rots on the ground around his feet.

If you really want to find me, I will be found.
The only way to find your way home is by accepting that you’ve lost it, because otherwise you won’t listen. It is the first step in discovering that the home of your imagination—the home your ego experiences (yes, even that actual address on the mailbox) is just a concept and not really home at all. It can be a hell-hole, a heaven, a haven, just one more frustration to bear, a way-station, a limbo, a hidey-hole...anything. If you can accept you have somehow lost your way home as you stand at your own mailbox, you begin to see finding your way back home is the point—that seeking your destination IS your destiny. In the same way, you can find me only when you accept you’ve lost me. Because then there is no more wasted energy on what you think is going on and what should be done about it. You will seek me with all your heart; in every nook and cranny; under every bush and behind every blade of grass; in every corner of the house; in every human face. And maybe you will discover along the way  where it is you actually lost me.
Live first, plan second. Choose life—not your plan for life. You are not the plan maker. I am. I am the only one who understands how plans work and I know the plans I have for you.”

Jeremiah 2:14
Is anyone born as a slave?  
Or, as Jeremiah puts it: “Is Israel a servant, a slave by birth?”
I mean spiritually, psychologically, individually. No. We are free. Born as free as a bird in the sky. Free of the burden of the ego. Free of enculturation. So, the answer is no, we are born free.  
So who puts us into bondage? 
Jeremiah answers: “Have you not brought this on yourselves?” v17 
Which is similar to the profound idea:
            What goes out of you comes back to you as what’s happening to you.
Psychologically, we flat out reject our responsibility in the negative aspect of that statement, but on its positive aspects we quickly seize all credit and inflate ourselves with air.  Our psyche is wrong on both counts. We are double-blind:  blind, both to the evil within us and to the goodness without us. Like Samson; blind in two worlds. The world above and the world below.  Frankenstein’s monster is created this way. 

In all our running around and moralizing, “I am not defiled. I am not defiled. I serve no Baals!” (v23ff).  We loudly announce the approach our self-righteous morality to our own wicked spirits within us, so that they never have to fear being caught. These bandits can happily sit in our blindspot waiting for our inner moral police, our endlessly arguing attorneys, and our hypocritical judges (our entire mock self-judicial system) to leave so they can do whatever they want with our lives, our desires, our actions, and our thoughts.  Just look around you, moron. Look at the inner and outer Gotham of your lives.  
We have an invisible mole sitting right within our inner police force—spying out our morality. That is a HUGE problem to get around.  (Impossible?) If my own moral bloviating to myself IS the thing giving Evil the upper hand in my life, what can I do? How can I hide from myself? How can I keep my exhausting thoughts on the rules of good and bad behavior secret from my evil self? 
I must turn against my own moral system which I have corrupted—turn against the lawless laws of the pharisees; reject the unshielding armor of King Saul—and trust the hero. I must, deep within the walls, in the silence of night, give the justice of my broken city over to someone else.  Someone that comes mysteriously both from outside and inside.  I must trust in that which is both deeper and higher than I—that which completely transcends me.  I must become less. I must remove myself and give up control as ruler of the city.  I must trust in the one who knows what to do.

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.