Jewish (and human) identity

Don't let facts get in the way of a good story…

The identity of human traits may be scientifically determined by DNA but personal, tribal and cultural identity is determined by story.

There is no law that says anyone else's assertion has to play any role in the story of a tribal or cultural identity other that whatever role or meaning such a group decide to give it.

However, if communication is seen to be usurped by any such group-ID mentality, such that only the FORM of communication is used as a defensive persistence of wishful or wilful assertion, then the word of such personae is invalidated - whatever form it takes - because where it comes from is an unwillingness TO communicate.

What IS communication but a condition of mutual receptivity to a current or fresh movement of expression?

Listening in the heart is different from strategic thinking that identifies the heart in story - however sacred one's suffering has become as a substitute heart, and however justified the hatred of all who do not 'support' one's point of view. Listening in the heart is not going to occur while it interferes with a story one wants to be true - because of what one believes it gives or promises.

In the mind of those who we see as enemy can we also see that which we hate in our selves. Only an honest owning of what is ours can restore us to a true communication and thus know Home without having to deny it to those who we feared would deny us.

All controversy serves as distraction from the essential. It isn't about being right or wrong, but a matter of whether one wants to be homed in a current movement of living communication or assert identity upon the movement of Life and have to defend it against being exposed.

The fig-leaf is the symbol of the priest-mind that would come between a true Communication and which fears exposure as worse than death. But "who told you you were naked?". I read this (OT Bible quote) as the movement of our own heart's enquiry Only guilt and fear of shame or punishment stops us Listening Within. The voice of such story is backed by terror in the world - howsoever it is disguised. But is it the Voice of our true knowing?

Re-cognition is a gift of re-membering what we had forgotten or believed lost as a result of becoming caught up in prodigal stories.

Commented into: An article entitled:

Jews are not descended from Khazars, Hebrew University historian says

I add here that the book 

'The Wandering Who' by Gilad Atzmon

offers a rounded consideration of Jewish Identity that I recommend

The Mythic self

 Comments into an article on Myth and Modernity:


As soon as there is self definition, there is a differentiation that generates or creates experience.

However, differentiation within a unified consciousness is more of a vibrational resonance - that cannot be directly translated into terms of a segregated consciousness, because it Is You, rather than something happening TO a someone presumed to be you.

The differentiation of a segregating intent is the basis of the story self. A self-construct that uses mythic or story continuities to assert its narrative as the central character framework that defines and filters a seemingly private experience.

The personality construct is a vehicle through which to experience the physical or externalized 'reality'. It operates as self definitions and beliefs, feelings and thoughts - with the experience reflecting this activity - much of which is unconscious or filtered out by the surface persona.

Choosing in a sense, to be defined by our own story rather than the energetic reception of That which is prior to the operation of a segregating prism, makes story the nature of our self and reality.

Drama of personae, cast amidst scenes and props that embody and reflect a will to power; a wish that things align THUS! - which then unfolds a multilevel Script of infinitely rich reflection - all of which reaffirm and uphold the 'identity' of the central character in a process of unfolding transformative changes.



The uncovering of the perspective beyond the drama is sometimes called self or Self-Realisation. The motive of the reintegration of Consciousness is that which stirs, wakes, reveals and uncovers the self and its world-reflective experience and identity - from a Unified Perspective that is essentially timeless.

Myth and stories reflecting the outgoing or segregating movement provide the dramatic frameworks for developing and growing themes and specific abilities; 'Man as a process of becoming'.

These are recognized or 'known again' as qualities of being.



Mutual reinforcement is the sharing of core beliefs and definitions such as to 'agree to focus on self-segregating consciousness'. In this sense our subjective sense is always already communicating itself as the presumption and assertion of a separated 'will'.

The symbol of Jesus is the idea that this 'will' can be discerned and truly accounted for, put aside and so make way for a Universal 'Will' which is not other than the undistorted communication of Being unto Itself. In this 'story' Man does not become the Light, but yields coercive distortion to the Light of an All Pervading Awareness. An awareness that the mythic 'self' forgets, usurps and denies in order to 'know itself' as judge or determiner of reality.



The mythic or symbolic aspects of our experience in the world can thus serve the discernment of the structures and devices by which such 'divide and rule' consciousness appears to replace 'Unify and extend'.



"Go forth and multiply" is not an option - but WHAT we each choose to extend and propagate will be the nature of our experience.



The reintegrative capacity of consciousness is the capacity to discern directly what is resonant and relevant to the current unfoldment of unique signature vibration. When we are aligned truly, all else is aligned to our clear appreciation and there is the capacity to move within an overall flow rather than assert a coercive will in ways that exacerbate struggle and pride.



Resonance is a different order of 'knowing' than rational construct. The knowing in the heart can guide and support rational activity instead of being usurped and enslaved or denied by it.

Cosmology, mythic consciousness and self-justifiction

Things That Were,Things That Are, And Things That Must Soon Come To Pass

An opinion-article on the idea of a catastrophic cosmological past and its effect on our consciousness and culture and world, published in 'The Watchers'

I've scanned most of this (article). There are many narratives that point in similar directions from received historical/mythological sources as well as channelled material.
What if everything is true but your own resonant pathways of acceptance and sharing constituted your unique thread within a rich reflected infinity of All That Is?

Original sin is a concept of Christianity - but not from Jesus - who regards sin as something to awaken from and engage or identify no more. Jesus does talk of the lie and the father of the lie and this is a clue to the error from which and within which only further error can issue. To sin is to persist in unrecognized error because it seems to give something more precious than truth's acceptance.

It is all a matter of foundation - and indeed of true context.Our true foundation and context is Consciousness, and yet what we have mostly come to identify with as our consciousness is a mentality operating within and as, a walled off, separated and therefore disconnected self that equates itself with a body in a world of bodies or material reality. Be aware that actual separation is impossible. This is a journey within perception only. Thoughts do not leave their source. So to believe impossible thoughts is to experience the impossible as if it were true. It is all a matter of choosing - although the true spontaneous expression of what we have called choosing is creating - for Creation is out of Itself and not the 'choosing between' of a split mind.

Cosmologically, the separation/disconnection from the Non Physical aspect of our consciousness and its truly unified integral resonance is in past and our present is experienced within it framework. It operates as a reenactment loop and perhaps one way to look at it is to observe the traumatized split consciousness that dislocates from what it cannot tolerate in its own mythological creations - its own fearfully self-asserting story. Which is shrouded in 'mysteries' such as to be protected as subconscious necessity upon which a superstructure of self-justifiction is constructed as a personality construct that holds focus of continuity within the physical reality experience.
The identity that grows within the world is not at root in a consciousness in any way separate from Consciousness itself - yet is structured so as to 'flesh out' an individual focus within a collective 'agreement' that in truth is always a Unified Will and only seems to be many competing or conflicting wills. The mind can be used to disguise and in a sense deceive itself while it so desires - including the hiding of its desire in order to call forth and engage its experience - which is infinitely more than anything the filters of our mythic narrative and self justifiction allow.
The shock that collapses and fragments the mind so as to seem to turn it inside out upon itself, is unconscious to our justifiction or surface reality, it becomes symbolically communicative to our archetypal or mythic sensitivity - and yet can be interpreted as a reinforcement of the identity in denial that segregates and rejects in judgement against its wholeness, OR one can open to the interpretations that guide and reintegrate the seemingly segregated focus of attention to its source nature and consciousness.
The first is coercive and the second is receptive. The first is self-protective in terms of fear, the second is self embracing as willingness to love's awareness - although to desist from engaging fearful reactive thinking is to diminish the 're-enactment' of separation within the mind and allow love's awareness to rise to a conscious moment of appreciation.

Cosmology prior to a mono-religious assertion and its mono-Universe materialism, was fluid and yet all thought is creative and so holds the qualities of its creatorship integral to its creation.
The reawakening to the Consciousness that Lives us - That Lives All Things - is not inflating or adding to our identity so much as replacing and aligning a structure relevant to previous growth, with an expanded purpose.
The 'purposes' of fear are distraction, reaction, contraction and forgetting. As this purpose wears thin the movement of reintegration reinterprets it.
Each has their own timing and yet we are all part of each other because the One is in All and the All is in the One. But this is not Coercive upon you - ever.
What you put out is what you get back. The wages of 'sin' - of acting out of alignment with your joy is death of the awareness of your Soul Expressing. But only while you engage it!
Though the symptoms may persist as echoes - the immediacy of the turnabout of consciousness to alignment with its Source Code - is tangible, recognisable and restoring of peace of heart even if the mind yet persists in reflecting old habit choices. This is where one has to want alignment over and above the self-protective illusions of fear in order to demonstrate to yourself that your true will is free of all coercive intent, and so 'come home' to your natural creative belonging as one with the movement of being that you cannot not be; unfolding the ever New.

Texting as a “miraculous thing”?

A TED Talk on the miracle of texting

Comment 1
Well one can study anything that people do and find all the qualities of life in it - but are they there abundantly and in clear shared appreciation?

I meet LOL mostly in those who want to affect a mask of fun while actually being mean or perhaps just just no fun at all. But I don't use text except occasionally for a specific purpose. (So perhaps not qualified to speak on its usage there).

But perhaps the most important aspect of a communication is not the form it takes, but the consciousness of intent that is its context, both in the sender and in the receiver.

Communication is intimacy and words were invented to limit and block intimacy so as to de-localize or dissociate into one's private domain. Since Eden, there's been no going back, and the process of alienating ourselves from our actual living contextual being proceeds to an almost machine-like isolation - in which management and communication of stuff between its distanced parts becomes the new meaning of life!

And avoiding relationship allows much more scope for fantasy existence in virtual identity.

Though everyone can do this without texting and online activity, it is true that these devices extend our capacity to dislocate ourselves from those we may be in the room with.

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Comment 2 - went onto the actual video page:

Language is a way to block or limit intimacy - and then became necessary to convey information and negotiate trading of emotional, psychic and physical exchange.

Of course the mind that withholds itself from intimacy will structure itself to be integrated with itself, insofar as it can maintain itself amidst a field of intimate relation. One doesn't become something different than one is by withdrawing into one's own story and making culture of it together, but the priority of the identification in story will effectively discard, distort or deny the Whole Cloth from which it cherry picks to serve its own interpretation.

The miracle is communication - AT ALL.
It fundamentally witnesses to that minds are NOT actually separate - though the cultural imperative is to deny and limit this Intimacy for a modus of personal authority and control - as if actually a self-separate entity. And so the experience will seem to reflect the validation of private thoughts - albeit within culturally shared beliefs or presumptions. And experience seems to be proof or self-evident and so we each act as if we 'know' - when what we know is our personal experience as a 'take' on something that we may not really be intimately or directly connecting with at all.
The fact that almost everyone goes through life like this and doesn't actually connect with themselves, each other or their world very much, is a kind of sleepwalking or collective mesmerism in which we are seduced by our own thinking and yet it tells us we are free agents, along with a whole load of other stuff.
Yet freedom is not free from intimacy - but is freedom to be intimate - to feel and know viscerally the energies and qualities of life as the full range and nuance of what Communication actually is.
Reality may be posited as a state of perfect communication in which nothing is withheld or rejected. And human consciousness tends to identify as a withholding of embrace or attention from that in itself that it rejects . CUL8r!
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question:
"And human consciousness tends to identify as a withholding of embrace or attention from that in itself that it rejects."   Say what?
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reply:
The inwardness of thinking is a large part of a current split sense of human consciousness, and has symbolic and conceptual structure of thought and language with which to both define and identify its self and its 'not self'.
So the best answer to your question is what arises to your own experience when you ask innocently of yourself in simple curiosity and desire to know.
The activity of the mind is very fast and runs a bit like background processes on a computer, to serve up something of a user interface that one simply uses as if it were real in and of itself.
Clearly,something is going on - but do we look at the apparatus of our mind as part of pur perception and observe both what is within at the same times as apparently looking out? Occasionally in moments of insight - but the default directive tends to be to relate to the world as Reality and one's thought, intent and belief as something not to observe so much as to have freedom to play in or control.

Another way of approaching this is to look at the mind and see that in normal terms, everyone - or as near as makes little difference, has active defence mechanisms at work - which run out from previous interpreted experience and indeed fit exactly the model of Darwinian thought, because they dump the past (interpreted experience) onto the present - so as not to actually connect in presence - but to re-enact the past, albeit in endlessly modified and evolving forms.
Yet you ARE present - at least there IS something here where there is awareness, that is present - only the acts of definition and identification are making exclusive assertion as a basis upon which to judge and effect control over one's own experience. And this inherently rejects aspects of what is intimate to its being in favour of a sense of becoming something in its own right. Yet without the actuality of awareness - there is no being to either reject or to exploit.
In truth we are not in control of life, yet are almost hardwired to seek it.Why?
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Question:
: I believe Nietzsche called it "the Will to Power".

Sorry for the short answer to your long (and enjoyable) post. Some answers to your question might be hidden in the works of Freud, Heidegger, Deleuze and Metzinger.

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Reply:
The question was an invitation to listen (in the remaining 4 character limit available ;-)

When we ask a question, if we ask it with the mind of the mind, we get or embellish what we already 'know', but if the question is of the movement of our being (also called the heart), we listen there for an answer without the noise of our thinking, and sometimes something comes immediately or sometimes the sense is that a real question HAS been asked and to wait on an answer in trust is the presage of more to come. A process of transformation occurs a step at a time.

The disconnection from presence is also the disconnection from an innate sense of guidance or innate intelligence that 'knows how to be appropriate' in any given situation. And so there is the substitution for and the overriding of the natural flow of the parts towards a healing or reintegrative wholeness, by a manually applied wilful intent to control.
Indeed the 'will to power' - yet this is embodied and enacted in every judgemental thought.
The wilful determination to assert a separate mind wielding power in its own right is fundamental to the dream by which the true nature of love is rendered un-recognizable and unwanted in favour of a self and world at war with itself. It is structured to prevent exposure - but there is nothing to prevent noticing its operation but that innate curiosity has become lost to self-certainties, backed by emotional or personal fears of invalidity.
The diversion into psychology or philosophy tends to be subverted by the mentality that seeks to control rather than be itself transformed. As if Life doesn't exist until we 'discover' it and articulate it into a language of separation - and control. When really it is our consciousness that is changing as new information insinuates itself into our awareness. Human consciousness is a conditioned and conditioning set of filters and distortions, upon a Consciousness that is unwithheld or unlimited. Our personal sense is a construct for...

The mind in its story : Mind revealed in Story

The mind in story is a mind both based upon, and conditioned or programmed by, an active and many layered process of definition and interpretation.
Insofar as it is engaged in exclusively identifying with an identity within its virtual narrative, it is unconscious or unaware of the wishes and desires that constitute the virtual narrative and seeks to prevail, over a sense of chaotic threat to its own existence. It thus identifies over and against that which it cannot control by identifying with a desire TO control.

Perceived reality and thus behavioural response to it, is thus a contest of determinations and definitions that establish a broad range of mutual agreements established in tacit collaboration towards maintaining the narrative of an independent definer and determiner of its own reality.

Thus mind seems to make its own reality, and validate it by apparently sharing it through a process of mutual persuasions, agreements and collaborations, excepting the alliances of such intent do not truly share more than a partial aspect of their minds in highly conditional terms of alliance. For in the onset of threat as a result of conditions not being met, the status and validity of the other, shifts  to be redefined in hateful or self rejecting terms.

But actually mind makes its own experience of reality as a result of setting up a sense of conflict within Mind - that is - within the undefined and undefinable, felt quality, of an indivisible self awareness. Whatever such pure awareness is, remains the undefinable true context of every experience, directly known or interpretively imagined via a derivative and conditional experience of self-limitation.

The narrative sense of mind in process of becoming in time and space is like an overlay of  images and meanings upon an omni-projecting light, such that, instead of recognising our nature in our thought, we identify with a false reflection and feel trapped within our own thought without recognizing our thought. For the true nature of mind is hidden to the desire that would make itself lord rather than express true authority. Self-making denies true authorship in which one recognizes one nature or light in all - (and in all its infinite expression)


(This was the first writing of which the The self in story - a narrative in observation replaced. Not because This was in any way less, but because I thought to write a short reference linking to a longer article here - but the short reference flowed to be its own article. This, though similar, still makes points that felt worthy of reflection and so I also include it here. The mind is not going to understand its way to realization, but it can understand why it cannot understand! Essentially it cannot stand apart as if outside and separate to all that it conceives and perceives. It can however, generate such an experience and believe it, and does so by believing it. Investment of attention is desire, and to give attention is to extend your presence. But to give the gift of you to what is not true is to place images upon the heart and make false association. The gift of you is the basis upon which you know that you are - as you are. But the giving and receiving of what cannot be truly shared is the way of believing that you are - as you are not! To rest in the moment and allow an intimacy of being, restores the mind to its true function - as the beholding and recognizing of You. At first this might not seem You - but Being or Spirit or God or the Buddha-Nature - or whatever cultural symbol serves your own acceptance. The important thing is allowing the sense of being in and of - without recoiling or controlling or interfering. This is an extension of trust - and that is the realignment of mind in Mind - or a coming back into our right mind - which is entirely capable of holding your current local or limited sense as one with your Universal Source and Nature, and bringing it to a true appreciation of life, as we are willing to receive it.

The self in story - a narrative in observation

Uncovering the living context beneath the narrative sense of being allows a reintegration of that which seemed lost or disconnected and thus of its perception or experience of being alive. The mind-in-story operates as a device through which we have an experience of self limitation within which, identifying with the mechanism, as oneself, engages a virtual or distorted and fragmented rendering of being.

This, in narrative terms is where a Singularity seemed to become a duality, from a movement of expansion and contraction - and subsequent fragmentation - or to put it the other way, where a mind seems to come into a separated sense of its own existence, upon the death or loss of unified and undefined being as a direct consequence of the wish and exercise of power over. The experience of self division gives rise to the attempt to rule. The split nature of the mind is such that guilt and fear arise as protecting and controlling devices relative to the ongoing wish for power. The imposition of a narrative sense upon what is native lawful and unified, becomes an unconsciousness, because truth that is simple awareness at rest in its own nature, MUST be denied or reinterpreted as to be rendered either unrecognizable - or in terms that validate what is essentially wishful thinking, but identified as one's self in guilt, fear and confusion.

This leads to an upside down or inside out scenario in which guilt and fear of power become the mechanism of believed power; the power to kill Life or Mind - yet also the power by which to prevail - albeit temporarily - as a separate mind in its own private experience.

The essentials of drama are all provided, the bid for power, the betrayal or abandonment, the loss and the suffering, the attempt to regain or the will to revenge - the sacrificial horror of the killing of the innocent - the watering of the roots of guilt. The righteous identity that needs evil or guilt in order to self-validate over and against.

This drama re-enacts itself unending until something stirs beneath the mind that thinks it is as it thinks it is. Honesty is not bases on narrative, but on a direct awareness - as a discernment occurring outside the realm of apparent control. We yield to it - or yield our own will in order to discern, to the degree our mind is able to accept - and this depends on its current investment in its own story as its self.

There is a process by which to heal the mind of unconscious divisions that play out over and over as 'the human condition', but it is not the exercise of a personal will prevailing over others in assertion of power. Nor of depersonalising this will in mechanisms of state or indeed of applying mechanical models for controlling mechanical process. Indeed there IS no mechanical way to relate, communicate, listen and discern and recognize wisdom. Yet in some sense we do so - DESPITE the imposition of such a mechanical process. Life still happens DESPITE our best attempts to control or have power over it. No one but has some sense of true blessing in their lives, however dark or difficult.

How much MORE can be revealed to our appreciation if we desisted from persisting in what doesn't work in the insane attempt to make it work?

We do need a new narrative basis for what life is, what we are and how to live together in law that serves all - and thus finds welcome in the hearts of all. But I do not see that this can arise from the persistence of a blindness to the true nature of our own 'identity' or mind. "Truth will 'out" because the lie becomes too convoluted and untenable to maintain. What I would say is that truth may humiliate - but that is not true. We are humbled of our self-image and thus open to see and recognize ourselves in others.

But Truth is not humbled or made small - for it is the light in which we live and of which we truly are. Unless we abide in a truly connected sense of being, we get lost in our own story and defend it against our truth. All of the abilities by which we try to control life become useful to a willingness to embody life. It is simply evident that the mind is deeply habituated to an addiction to its own story.

I am indicating the basis for awakening to a basis for a unified direction, regardless of what others may yet be willing to allow or accept as their own learning. The only certainty available to us is of our being itself. That this is brought into question sets the stage for self-certainties of belief or assertions of power.

But when our beliefs of self-assertion are released or paused in even a little true willingness, we receive in place a clearer perspective. This is a step at a time undoing or reconfiguring of the mind to a true alignment. We don't 'do' this but let it be done through us as we release identity in reaction.

When discerning the correction for behaviour that is harmful to oneself or others, we do need a process of correction and not a process of guilt and punishment. Correction is the process of coming into our right mind. This needs to apply to all involved and not focussed only on the one who is identified in the role of transgressor. It is appropriate to limit lawlessness by whatever means is proportionate. But the old 'law' of revenge is the worship of sin amidst a luxuriating in blame, in full justification for hate and the indulgence of the sense of power in personal terms.

As long as we appease the mind of war, we can have no peace - but only a phony and manipulated peace that lives in fear and distrust amidst an isolated and chaotic sense of threat. This may serve those who claim to offer protection, at a price, but actually undermines a true integrity of being. Yet the Integrity of Being itself - which is innate to being - remains un-coverable to a willingness and desire to live from it.

Guilt and fear present the most blocking device for the prevention of trusting and following an innocent curiosity. Truth is not truly obscured, but only wilfully so. Therefore to be curious allows the noticing of the wilful intent - and thus the opportunity to release it in favour of what is uncovered in the wisdom of our being - in place of an often unconscious fearful reaction. This is simply a conscious responsibility for our own mind that is a capacity for immediate discernment and release of an unreal or imaginative thought or intent, without requiring a process of mental self-validation. In effect to reconnect with a true sense of being is the condition in which all else will harmonize.

But the seeking out of guilt will ALWAYS find it - even if it only exists in the mind of the inquisitor. What we seek we ALWAYS find, and what we are finding is reliable witness to what we seek. The experience of finding conflicted and unfulfilling outcomes IS a reflection of conflicting goals. Until we wake up to what we are choosing to give and receive, we will not recognize what we do, and so are in need of forgiveness for an error of mis-identification from which confusion must proceed.

The alternative is the reinforcement of such an error in the minds of both the judging and the judged. There is nothing ultimately fixed or locked down about our mind apart from our own decision - which as an expression of mind is innately unlimited. Resting in such being allows a different basis for outcomes than an 'isolated chooser' amidst an obstacle course of fearful penalties.



I wrote this into an article 'A story can be more useful than math' in the FT