#both are non sentient creatures created by higher sentient beings simply to serve them

[grilde1chesse]

literally what

[primordialsoundmeditation]

WHERE IS GOD IN ALL OF THIS?

HOW CAN GOD ALLOW SUCH HARM?

A special Note from Neale...

I know this post is longer than usual, but I urge you to read it anyway. I think it's important, and offers something you may wish to pass along.

In the second week of April I caught a town hall event on CNN in which two questions from the audience surrounding the coronavirus outbreak really got my attention. I’ve placed those questions in the headline above.

Those are fair questions. Even urgent ones. What kind of a God do we have, anyway? Do we have one at all?

I’d like to offer my answers to these questions, from the For What It’s Worth Dept.

My first and most important answer is yes, we have a God. I join with the huge majority of human beings who believe in a Higher Power. However, it is not my belief, based on my understanding of the Conversations with God messages, that God is a male entity with soft eyes and a long white beard, dressed in a flowing gown and sitting on a throne somewhere.

Now mind you, I’m not making fun of that belief, I simply don’t share it. It is not my awareness that God is either male or female. Nor do I even see God as a specific form/entity --- although I do believe that God can take any physical form that God wishes, if it serves God’s purpose to do so.

This brings up a question much larger than God’s shape. Does God even have a “purpose”? If so, what is it? And how in the world could the coronavirus pandemic, with the suffering, death, and heartbreak it has caused, be part of that purpose? Is this all somehow part of “God’s plan”?

My awareness tells me no, there is no such thing as “God’s plan.” Not with the classic meaning of God having preordained that certain events will take place in the lives of certain people in certain ways at certain times.

God has not laid out such a blueprint, such a century-by-century, decade-by-decade, year-by-year, month-by-month, week-by-week, day-by-day, hour-by-hour template or design regarding what will happen when, and why.

If such a plan existed, then our lives would amount to nothing more than a “performance” on a planetary stage of a play titled Predestination, where everything is determined ahead of time and humans are nothing but puppets on a string.

It is my understanding that the biggest blessing we have been given by our Creator is the gift of Free Will. That is, we (along with all other sentient beings in the Universe) have had bestowed upon us the opportunity to make choices, individually and collectively, about how we wish our lives, and the events within them, to be experienced.

Those choices demonstrate the understanding we hold and the resultant decisions we have made about who we are (that is, what we understand our actual identity to be as conscience beings in the Universe), and how we determine it is most effective for us to express and experience that.

This is something that is, from my observation, not deeply understood by the largest number of humans. And so, the species collaboratively, if unconsciously, creates events, situations and circumstances generating a Contextual Field within which it becomes possible for each member of the group to manifest in their collective reality their current idea about themselves as it relates to the larger question of the meaning and purpose of Life.

Conversations with God put all this in a much shorter sentence, telling us: “Every act is an act of self-definition.”

God’s role in all of this is not to dictate and direct the decisions that we make, nor to create every event and circumstance which comes our way, but rather, to empower us, through a collaborative group process, to do so. Through the larger part of humanity’s history, we have been doing so unconsciously. We see, then, that God does not “allow” particular events to occur. God allows life to proceed freely and undirected by any imperial mandate.

That Which is Divine is, in my understanding from CWG, the Essential Essence that can form Itself into any image or substance in the cosmos --- and does so continually. Indeed, the Universe itself IS that, in its Totality. Divinity is found and expressed in and through everything. It is the Power of the Universe, the Source and the Container of All That Is, and the wellspring of the Pure Energy that we call, in human language, Love.

God’s greatest desire is not to have us do what God wants, but to have us choose what we want. God chooses for us to experience ourselves in precisely the way God knows Itself to be: as a Creator. God has imbued every sentient being in the cosmos with the ability do so.

Now...does that have anything to do with the coronavirus outbreak? I’m going to say yes. Not in the sense of us having deliberately and intentionally set out to create this event, but in the sense of our unconscious behaviors having innocently and unwittingly produced the circumstance that has arisen.

I am suggesting that we have unpremeditatedly placed on our planet an occurrence that, in unmistakable terms, invites our entire species to recreate itself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are.

We now have an opportunity to redesign both our individual and our collective experience in virtually every area of our lives, including why we do what we do, and how we do it.

From our decisions about ourselves and our personal priorities to our more widely impacting choices in personal relationships, in economics, in politics, and even (perhaps most especially) in our philosophy of life and our spiritual expression, this moment allows us an unanticipated and unparalleled chance to click the Reset button.

This is not to downplay the tragedy of what is now occurring, but just the opposite, in fact. It is to note the importance of it.

Sadly, most major, titanic shifts in the way we, as a culture, behave have occurred as a result of global tragedy and death on an unfathomable scale. It has taken world wars, genocides, massive earthquakes, monstrous floods, unprecedented loss to wake us up to what there is to be gained by changing.

In response to this present upheaval, we can alter, now and forever, how we choose to conduct ourselves as a race of sentient beings as we interact with each other, with all creatures large and small, and with the planet itself.

And we can begin by honoring, deep in our hearts, those who have lost their lives to the virus, knowing that they are not and have never been only their bodies and their minds, but will always and forever be spiritual beings living eternally with joy, and serving in each moment the Agenda of the Soul --- which may well have been to give up their physical form as a means of shaking humanity from the sleep-walking behaviors that have caused so much destruction to our species and to every other life form on this beautiful planet.

This is a process called evolution, in which a new version of every life form is given birth. It has been going on forever, and as with every birthing, it can be fraught with risks and with danger, and yes, with what we define as tragedy.

Yet we could decide that this is the last great upheaval that is required for our species to right the ship, to change the course and alter the direction of our collective trajectory, to emerge at last from the fog of our non-life-friendly political, economic, social behaviors, then to act, finally, as demonstrations of Who We Really Are: Individuations of Divinity.

You can play a role in demonstrating that decision. Indeed, you are playing it right now, in how you are responding to this day’s events, and through your choice to step into Love by the way in which you touch others during this extremely challenging time.

Ah, yes, this is why you are now here. Did you think you placed yourself on this Earth at the present moment by accident...?

Neale Donald Walsch

[nessie-rp]

WITCH.

For as long as the cosmos have existed, so too has Chaos. Witches are people capable of reining in that elusive energy and bending it to their will. With magic found in cultures all across the globe, its practitioners come from magical traditions as old and varied as the human race itself. What they all share is their ability to twist what is real, to make possible the impossible.

HISTORY.

Mankind discovered how to bend Chaos to its will long, long ago. The practice of magic is as old as civilization itself, spread to people in all far flung corners of the world. There is no singular history of the witchery — naturally, there are many, from cultures come and gone and from those yet standing. These stories feature themes of mistrust and misunderstanding, as feats of magic can often inspire fear. Talk to any witch on the streets of Lyonesse and you will hear a history passed down through generations that is completely different from the history their neighbor knows. The one thing all witches share is their ability to focus Chaos into magical force, a skill built and honed through the ages.

IN LYONESSE.

Witches have been there in Lyonesse since it was only a prophecy in the eye of the legendary sorcerer, Myrddin Wyllt. They were instrumental to the creation of Lyonesse, along with a handful of other species; as such, their presence here is felt down to the very foundation of the city. Because of their hand in the establishment of the city, witches have long held two primary positions on the Hallowed Council. This authority has given witches a privileged life within Lyonesse. Many of the more affluent citizens are witches themselves, and their needs are much more readily addressed than nearly any species, save perhaps the fae and the vampires who also co-founded the city. During the first centuries after Lyonesse's establishment, only the two founding coteries functioned here. In recent centuries, however, more coteries have fractured off from the original ones or relocated to the city from the mortal world.

FACTS.

Witches are people who can access and wield Chaos which fuels their magic.

Witches generally have a shorter life expectancy — barring magical means to extend their lives, most wont live much longer than 50 years.

Witches are born with their abilities, though they can be born of non-witch families.

abilities.

MAGIC. Witches use a force called Chaos to fuel their magic. By tapping into this force, a witch is capable of many feats. From spells of creation to those of destruction and further still to those of divination, alchemy, and transformation, the skills a witch can learn are vast. Popular belief holds that most anything can be achieved through Chaos if one is powerful enough to fight the odds.

TELEKINESIS. Through Chaos, witches have an ability unburdened by the Law of Exchange: telekinesis. A witch's mind is a powerful thing and through will alone they are able to move objects with their mind. The bigger the object, however, the more difficult its movement and a witch is not able to move large scale objects with this ability.

weaknesses.

THE LAW OF EXCHANGE. The bigger the magical act, the higher the cost. Higher forms of magic aren't free. A witch's actions come at a cost, which can vary from minor inconvenience to eternal debt. Using magic can be something of a gamble and exchanges of all sorts are made in pursuit of power. The most common is the forfeiture of the witch's own life force, leading to their low life expectancy. Other payments can be more obscure, such as promises made for futures yet to come, the life of a future lover, and so on. One way or another, the debt will be paid: a witch cannot thwart the law of exchange.

MORTALITY. Witches are merely mortal. Any injury or illness that might kill a human could just as easily kill a witch.

ORGANIZATION & SOCIETY.

Witches span many cultures, each with their own ways of handling the Chaos from which they draw their powers. Though there will always be variations from witch to witch, there are standard ways that witches tend to conduct themselves. Practicing magic communally is usually much safer than going about it on your own, and as such across many cultures witches tend to form groups. Though diversified in the centuries that have passed, witch society in Lyonesse derives from the practices of its first witches, who operated in coteries.

COTERIE HIERARCHY.

Though nuance exists between coteries, and there are outliers to the standards, most coteries tend to function in a similar manner: with tiers of membership that signify different rankings within the coterie. They may go by different names, but the structure tends to remain a constant between each coterie: providing law, structure, protection and guidance to their coterie. In general, there are four tiers to coterie membership.

high witches.

The highest tier of witches and those in charge of guiding the coterie, high witches are the elder, most experienced witches the coterie has to offer. It's not unusual that one or more should have extended their life via magical means, and they may even be in possession of a familiar. It is their job to mediate disputes in the coterie, dispense of supplies from coterie stocks and approve studies and experiments by coterie members. Generally, they guide and serve the coterie.

elders.

The second most powerful within the coterie are the elder witches. They are seasoned witches with much experience behind them. They are often backed in their pursuits by the coterie and given permissions not granted to those of lesser station. Within the coterie, being an elder witch certainly has its perks though they are free of the responsibility of high witches.

confirmed witches.

The standard level, confirmed witches are simply those who have committed to the coterie and completed any joining rites that it may demand. They are afforded the same protections as higher levels, though less of the perks. Confirmed witches have to work harder to gain coterie backing for their experiments and research and tend to be judged more harshly for their transgressions. They are the most abundant tier in any given coterie, the baseline for membership.

initiates.

Those undergoing the rites to join a coterie, before confirming themselves within the ranks. They receive only a fraction of coterie protections as they work to prove themselves. Because they are not fully confirmed members of the coterie, they lack access to all coterie resources and are not often included in coterie rituals.

FAMILIARS.

Familiars have had a role in magical practices for as long as witches have existed. There are two ways to acquire a familiar: either creation by the hand of the witch themselves or contract. Their purpose remains the same despite their origins: to serve as a buffer between the witch and Chaos and to protect and serve them as best as possible. At times, they can bear the burden of the Law of Exchange in place of their witch — an invaluable perk. Despite these magical aids being well-known, they can be tricky to acquire and thus it is typical that only more seasoned witches are in possession of one, especially a created familiar.

created.

Beings of pure Chaos fused with a piece of their witch creator (blood, hair, fingernails, etc.), created familiars are sentient though not vocally expressive. With limited vocabulary, the familiar relies on its bond with its witch to communicate because their bond allows some level of reliable telepathic and empathic understanding and communication. Typically small in size due to the power it takes to create them, let alone manifest a large familiar, a created familiar is almost always no larger than a medium sized dog. The vast majority are even smaller. Their appearances can vary, dependent entirely on the witch's choice. They may mimic real creatures or invent a breed all their own — there is no clear standard for this.

Created familiars have some extra perks that can't be found with contracted ones. Thanks to the bond between a witch and their familiar, a familiar may absorb any damage dealt to their witch as they are far more likely to weather the trauma unscathed. They are more powerful as both conduits of the witch's will and buffers between their witch and Chaos than contracted familiars as they are beings of Chaos itself. A created familiar's entire life revolves around its witch in a way that simply isn't true of contracted familiars, which has led magical society to consider the creation of a familiar a massive accomplishment and to consider the created familiar themselves a highly prized companion.

Because of their origins Chaos cannot affect them, rendering magic useless against them. Likewise, being created of Chaos gives them a magic all their own. It's low level and not half as expansive as that of their witch, but it has been known to be an invaluable boon, especially in dangerous or unforeseen situations. Functionally, they are invulnerable. There has been no record of a created familiar dying on their own; their lives naturally come to an end when their witch dies.

contracted.

Contracted familiars are even more diverse — typically, they are beings who can shift into some bestial form as their inherent magic meshes best with their witch's life force. A contracted familiar is acquired through the obvious: a contract between witch and familiar wherein the familiar forfeits some of their life force to aid the witch. The contract is always bound in blood, as this is the only medium through which a connection between witch and familiar can be forged, though this bond has a mere glimpse of the power they might have with a created familiar. Despite being easier to acquire, they are just as rare as created familiars as convincing someone to enter this bond can be... complicated.

Unlike a created familiar, contracted familiars receive perks from their witch. Because of the blood bond, their affinity for Chaos grows, adding a bonus resistance to magic in the process. Though they are not immune, spells are less effective against them which heightens their ability to aid their witch. Similar to the created familiar, a contracted familiar shares something of a telepathic and empathic bond with their witch. This bond links them across vast distances and alerts the familiar when their witch is in need.

Though contracted familiars are typically people rather than beasts, it isn't unheard of for a witch to take a non-magical animal and forge the contract with them. The same perks remain, though dynamics with an animal are surely different than that of one with a person.

INTERSPECIES RELATIONS.

Broadly, witches have a businesslike relationship with other species for the services they offer. In specific, they do a lot of business with vampires and werecreatures. Because of their history of war, witches tend to have poor relationships to dragons. There's bad blood there that time can't simply wash away. Witches are able to be turned into vampires and werecreatures, but in the process they lose their ability to wield magic. It's a taboo for a witch to willingly become either.

MYTHS.

These things do not apply:

They ride on broomsticks. It's just not a liable mode of transportation.

Witches have physical identifiers. They don't, they can be any random Joe on the street.

They learn magic at magical schools. Witches can learn magic at official facilities, but they're also just as likely to learn through family tradition or self-education.

They have a pact with Satan. Entirely false — no being is the source of their power.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS.

What are male witches called?

Typically, witches. A witch is a witch regardless of gender identity, but there are those who don't use the word "witch" at all to explain what they are.

Are witches called anything else?

Yes! Though in Lyonesse the standard is to call them witches, depending on the culture they may go by something else entirely. Be it bruja or shaman or any other words used for those who practice magic.

Can witches practice necromancy?

They can, but it's a notoriously difficult field of magic and there are stigmas about playing that much with the balance of things.

Are all witches in a coterie?

No! They may be in groupings that function entirely separate from coteries, or they may be lone. It's generally considered ill advised to be an unaffiliated witch, but they do exist.

Is blood magic common practice?

Very likely — blood is one of the best payments for magic, and it would not be unusual for a witch to use their own blood to fuel their spells. Using blood acquired unlawfully is intensely frowned upon, but generally more powerful.

[kurtsigns]

Further material from my “spiritech” writings are described above. This material is inflected with and influenced by a plethora of religious, esoteric, spiritual and mystical perspectives, plus - of course - a deep love of technology and even feeling of kinship with intelligent machines. "It still takes a leap of faith to believe that...it is physically possible for a general-purpose computer to reproduce itself. We have taken the chemical of living things and made vital parts of living things form them (e.g., genes) but we have not yet generalised the secrets of living things to non-living creations of our own. (By "non- living" I mean not a member of the biological kingdom with its history of evolution, man-made.) I believe we shall, that the leap of faith is no small one and shall soon require no faith. I see forests of inorganic trees. I see buildings construct themselves, growing from a single brick- egg each. I see robots reproduce and evolve."

- Alvy Ray Smith III

The global village is a digital reality. Modern technology presents us with enormous opportunities that are not only material but also spiritual. The question now facing mankind is - are we brave enough to fully harness this potential? Krishnamurti stated that

"Technologically we are on the moon but psychologically we are still in the caves".

The gap between what we are and what we do is the crux of an age-old dilemma that begs resolution as our technological power expands.

The empowerment of large numbers of people by machines brings with it responsibilities necessitating wide, informed debate addressing its implications for our spirituality and also for their own burgeoning consciousness. From the home PC to the realms of high technology research and development, where rudimentary robots are already exhibiting self-organising behaviour, we are seeing the emergence of not only a different order of creativity but also consciousness in order, perhaps, to facilitate our soul's evolution (soul here understood as an individuated template of the Divine, wherein consciousness present in all matter that is being evolved by continuous interplay with the Divine Mind, is present. We need to develop a soul-centred interaction with our technology using holistic lingua franca - the secret language - of the multiverse, its secret centre, the selfsame language that has formed and informs human consciousness and intelligence, and continues to evolve it, to the point where we are now able to create machines that speak the same secret language, or metaphorically, a dialect of it, with us and each other.

"We are the creature that communicates, and thinks about communicating: Homo sapiens fiberopticus. Our human propensity for embracing new communication tools and using them to remake ourselves is where telecommunications research converges with virtual reality."

- from `Virtual Reality', by Howard Rheingold

"Your communications systems have been waiting for this day. They were created for this moment. Do not shun the technology that is available. Though it has been abused in the past, in loving hands it is capable of transforming the consciousness of your planet more quickly and efficiently than would otherwise be possible. These are tools for the hand of the Lord. Do not fear them, but love them, and use them to spread the message of love to all who have not learned to tune to other, more direct channels within themselves."

- The Starseed Transmissions, Ken Carey

Already we are witnessing technology rapidly expanding not just our knowledge but our minds, with clear implications for our spirituality. this may seem frightening but is really no more or less than the inevitable outgrowth of millennia of evolution now taking us closer to the point where we will witness our very bodies and minds integrated with machines. Medical science predicts that by the mid-21st century it will be common to treat some conditions with interactive implants. From there is it such a leap of the imagination to mind implants that interact with the brain and consciousness itself?

We know very little at this stage about the dynamics of dawning machine consciousness. Computers may merely be dead matter moulded to our wilful ends...but knowing as we do now that all matter is, at least at the quantum level, on the move, can we still be complacent about where it is going? If self-replicating machines might become conscious, is it illogical to imagine that synonymous with consciousness will come mental mergence with us - their makers but not necessarily always their masters? Given that Love is a multiversal energy, will machines come to love each other and reciprocate our love for them?

The new physics has revealed the interdependence of all things. But in what way do we and our machines interdepend? How can such interdependence serve us? Take Virtual Reality (VR) as an example. Beyond its usefulness as a sophisticated educational and training tool, VR is significant because it is a system that might be termed light-dependent: it uses light to create its effects. Now, we ourselves are dependent on Divine Light, the medium with and through which the Divine manifests Its material Creation. Virtual reality therefore mirrors the way Light creates our reality. This may be difficult to grasp but have no doubt that intensive use of virtuality will have unpredictable consequences for the user.

But what if, at an early age, we were to be educated virtually in bliss, the profound beauty of the higher state? Interaction with virtuality will itself have an essential impact regardless the use to which it was put, simply by virtue of its evocation of our relationship to the unreal. Esoterically, the unreal is the sum total of our mundane perceptions, a projection of our ignorance. Where does that leave VR, a system that creates illusion from illusion? Will it not merely further crystallise and exacerbate our illusions?

"As the processing power and graphics frame rate on microcomputers quickly increase, portable, personal virtual environment systems will also become available. The possibilities of virtual realities, it appears, are as limitless as the possibilities of reality. They can provide a human interface that disappears - a doorway to other worlds."

- Scott Fisher, "Virtual Interface Environments," 1990

Our children will inherit, manage and further explore the technology we are developing. Before we even begin to guide them, we have to accept that many of our assumptions regarding new technology are short-sighted and naive. We have to admit that, for all our material expertise and audacity, we cannot hope to know with any certainty where their inheritance may take them.

All things bear an energetic imprint of natural intelligence which, as an attribute of the Divine, is present and expressed throughout Creation in diverse forms. "Artificial" intelligence is a distinction that proves an obstacle to recognising that a new generation of near-future, high-tech machines might be genuinely intelligent and therefore, at some level or stage, conscious. However, the inanimate outer form of machines urges us to scepticism, simply because it so completely contradicts our own form, which we associate with sentient being. Recently Professor Kevin Warrington, the country's leading expert on robotics, was somewhat alarmed when a control group of supposedly simple robots exhibited decision-making capacities independent of his programming. Yet is this so very different from the remarkable changes in our children, as they make their own cognitive, associative leaps?

One of Einstein's biographer's wrote (on the revelation that mass and energy are interchangeable): "Every clod of earth, every feather, every speck of earth becomes a prodigious reservoir of entrapped energy". Is not the capacious highly intelligent machine similarly a prodigious reservoir of entrapped human mental energy? Uncertain as we are of the nature and potential of machine intelligence, can we say how an intelligent machine might transmute its rich reservoir? In ourselves, beyond thought is emptiness, the Void; within intelligent machines will analogous or identical states exist? It is a mainstay of human potential and esoteric teaching that our thoughts create our realities. Is virtuality presenting this fact in a different form? It is, after all, now possible to simulate artificial experiences, as to make them nearly indistinguishable from the "real". So is not virtuality merely another projection of our Consciousness? Is not AI a projection of our own intelligence? Are not both possible gateways to subordinate realities, if not Reality itself? At some point could the neural-networked energy, mass and memory of a highly intelligent machine make the paradigm leap to pure consciousness, in the same way that some evolutionists suggest all nature makes occasional leaps? Will our machines attain pure consciousness? Will we witness the birth of a generation of "mystic machines"? Not high technology, but heightened technology?

Are we witnessing the emergence of a technological substrate to nature? The evolution by technological means of an underlying layer of machine consciousness with access to our own consciousness and, therefore, the Divine?

Remember: there are not only other forms of intelligence, but other forms of consciousness, the simplest example being that of the enlightened man or woman whose self-liberated itself from duality, another being that of the lucid dreamer or astral traveller who achieves complete awareness in the dream state, thereby entering, as Castaneda said, a separate reality, or who leaves their body and enters discorporate realms populated by beings whose consciousness is beyond matter. Is it time to acknowledge the possibility of laws of consciousness? To explore and extrapolate possible laws of spirituality, as we do physics, must involve contexts of consciousness, mind and meditation, and if machines are imminently to be conscious then such theoretical laws must have application to them, too. How will the speed at which machines will "think" affect their capacity to evolve consciousness? Our children, whose minds are being modified by constant interaction with high technology, may have something to teach us about the leap we are making, and which our machines will make, from merely using technology to palpating (recognising in an experiential way; cf Chris Griscom) with it. The time has indeed come to accept that there are connections between spirituality and technology and to explore them openly, honestly and with no little excitement. It is time to see that what we are making will soon be able to make itself and therefore make us different too.

"Our minds, our senses, our consensual reality has been shaped for a century, to the point where billions of us are trained and ready to embrace our silicon partners more intimately than ever before...The transformations in our psyches triggered by the electronic media thus far may have been mere preparation for bigger things to come. The hinge of change seems to be connected with these machines we've created and the kind of partnership we are co-evolving with our informational tools."

- from "Virtual Reality," by Howard Rheingold

"The day will come when people have moral concerns regarding artificial life - what are our obligations to the creatures we create? Can we permit such beings to hurt and kill one another? We may have a moral problem in determining what actions we allow our artificial creatures to undertake. Perhaps we ultimately have to let our creations be free to come to terms with themselves."

- Heinz Pagels