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Anniversary Letters

The following were written on the occasions of birthday anniversary celebrations:

Our Essential Being

    On the occasion of the return of the home planet in its annual orbit around its star to the position it had when your body first began to record the daily cyclic impressions of light and dark caused by the turning of this same planet on its axis of rotation thus setting up within you the illusion of time - I salute you.

    Once when talking with your first daughter about the idea of time she mentioned that children are born without such an idea. It is not until several trips around the home planet's star that they begin to be able to work with the illusion as though it is real. I remember responding to her that "It's a hard thing to acquire and it's a harder thing to get rid of." I said this then because I had begun to have occasional moments when a wonderful sense of timelessness enveloped my being and in those moments time seemed to fall away as being simply this collection of impressions which make up the memory traces on my particular body. Is this the "mortal coil" the shuffling off of which Shakespeare makes Hamlet to contemplate with such dread? Are these cyclic impressions, winding coiled traces around us, blocking our True Eternal Vision?

In The Gospel According to Thomas it is related that:

Jesus said, "The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same."

And elsewhere:

The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us how our end will come to pass." Jesus said, "Then have you laid bare the beginning, so that you are seeking the end? For the end will be where the beginning is. Blessed is the person who stands at rest in the beginning. And that person will be acquainted with the end and will not taste death."

    Many human beings, in all ages and cultures, have express the idea of "cycles of birth and death" and with it the further idea that Our Essential Being stands outside of these cycles in Eternal Life. May we each return to the One, Our Essential Being.

    - A fellow traveler in cycles


The Dream of the Senses

    Long ago, a frog came upon the little pond wherein he had spent his earlier days as a tadpole. Sitting on the edge for a while, he gazed into it and then he jumped in. The memory of his life in that shallow, murky, water-world presented itself to his mind and soon he fell fast asleep. As he slept his dreams of tadpole life seemed so real that when he awoke he forgot that he was a frog. To this day, he remains below the surface in that little pond, having forgotten his true nature.

    We are like that frog but our little pond is the world of our senses. Everything we remember is nothing but the contents of our own little pond where we seem to have spent our lives. We have forgotten that above us, where our senses do not reach, is the Infinite and Eternal World from which we came. Every now and then, we come near to the surface of our little pond and perhaps for a moment, we have an idea that somewhere beyond is a Greater Reality but we are so attached to our senses that we consider anything we can't see or hear or touch to be unreal.

    Like the frog who fell asleep in the pond, only in the dream of our senses are we confined to a particular time and place while above this world is Reality Itself and our Higher Mind dwells there Eternally.

I welcome any thoughts on the above subject.
You may send email to:
tneff [at] earthlink [dot] net

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