Updated September 26, 2004

Imagine

November 6 2003 -- Rewritten January 11. 2004 -- tweaked, August 7, 2007

by Ramon Sender Barayon

Nov 6 2003 --

Imagine

Imagine you are a star, named by its self-aware creations (at least in one language) 'the Sun,' and yet in truth you are a conscious being, their Creator/ Sustainer, Mother/Father, source of all their light and life, all love and consciousness -- and food -- on their planet. Yet these children of yours currently wear mental/spiritual blindfolds and insist, if and when they decide to worship a god, that it must be an 'invisible god' somewhere outside of what 'stares them in the face' every morning. That's too obvious for them, not complicated enough. Besides, they've been taught that the physical universe is inanimate -- you know, hot rocks, fire, gas, stuff like that.

Because this invisible god cannot be seen anywhere, or talked to or even heard (in the majority of cases), these humans then try to 'have faith' that this god is really real. Also sometimes they tend to get a little paranoid, those that 'have faith,' because they are never sure when this invisible god might be watching what they're up to. They struggle with their doubts, and then prop their belief systems up with various theories and analyses -- and of course some wonderful myths and stories. These they then enjoy deconstructing and re-deconstructing, with stories about stories about more stories. All this keeps academic publishing companies in business, which is a good thing for those of us on a tenure track at a university. By the way, for a detailed and amusing look at the strange antics of what a certain Mr. Gurdieff calls these 'three-brained beings,' read his irritating but very amusing book "All And Everything -- Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson."

Meanwhile, while the presses print ream after ream of great thoughts such as those on this page, our conscious creator-star, Father/Mother Sun, keeps pouring light and love and consciousness down on all planets and life forms, believers, nonbelievers, awake or sleep-walking, good and bad alike. For the most part, we humans are much too busy thinking great thinks, and worrying about 'our bottom lines' or 'our checkbook balances' or our shiny new _______ (fill-in-the-blank) to notice the golden waterfalls of scintillating eudaemony (I prefer this word to 'bliss' because the latter has been so devalued by Joseph Campbell and others) -- or well-being, if you prefer, that pour down around us and grow our food and enlighten our days.

I could rant on for many more pages about the remarkable methods to which we humans resort NOT to see the obvious. I actually could argue that a great deal of culture and the science as they exist were erected as filters so as NOT to live a quote 'brute' existence of direct experience of THAT golden presence. Yet beyond the sun's embrace nothing exists except at very sub-zero temperatures for quite a few light years until you snuggle up to another gorgeously radiant creator-star.

However, all sorts of teachers and pointers to the truth surround us. If you sneak a glance at the animals and plants, you will find they are very sun-oriented, phototropic if you prefer. Birds greet the sun at dawn and sunset with liquescent-like melodies, although the ornithologists amongst us might pooh-pooh my explanation of our local male mockingbird's rapturous warbles as merely his staking out his territory.

Today we live with serious warnings about the dire effects of sunlight on our physical well-being. Now that the effluent of modern civilization has melted our protective layer of ozone, the sun has assumed in our imaginations a strangely destructive persona as the harbinger of disease and death. Yet despite the increased activity at the skin specialists, we continue to gravitate to the beaches in the summer and to outdoor activities, slathered in the sunblocker creams that recently I read actually may be causing some of the problems. Sunglasses also are bad news for our health because they block out the trace ultraviolet that activates our body's repair systems. Our sun is not a steady-state star, and in its active mode shoots us full of tiny pinholes that we have evolved a way to control. Our bodies monitor the sun through the light that bathes our eyes and adjusts its repair activities accordingly.

Note: for more information about this, see also my essay/interview with full-spectrum light inventor, John Ott

We seem to be stuck, because the solar exposure that makes things worse for our bodies makes things better for our mood. My dearest father-in-law, who inclined towards a seasonally affective gloominess, used to migrate south every winter for a few weeks, returning with his bald pate as crisp as a well-basted turkey but with renewed enthusiasm and a smile on his face. 'Sunny' makes for a sunny disposition, but not the enlightened recognition that we actually bathe in the splendor of our creator consciousness daily. Instead of recognition, we have religion, which I personally view as using the promise of 'pie in the sky in the great bye-and-bye' as a way to assuage the "why poor me's" of the underfed, underpaid and socially disadvantaged. Although today we also have television, drugs, antidepressants, booze, sex, and food as a smorgasbord of opiates for the masses, religion continues to keep at least an ever-dwindling number of the 'less economically favored' amongst us from rising up and demanding their fair effing share of the goodies.

For my spiritual communion, I am very content with the light in the sky every morning, and the eudaemony that I receive from our Creator. Every day is a day of worship for me, a literal Sunday even when it's cloudy because, as the song almost says, I always look for the golden lining, and a fun game of solar peek-a-boo. Our congregation is so huge it cannot be counted, if I include every blade of grass and tiny gnat. We all are light-to-love transformers, because I am convinced that the light drenching our retinas moves in some manner to our hearts, which function as light-to-love transformers. Light is vertical love and love is horizontal light. I like to believe that when we pour our love out to others, mirroring what the light does for us, it thrills our parent star. Our Sun thrives on the knowledge that all living things beam love, consciously or unconsciously, in small or large amounts, even those of us who live two-dimensionally (never gazing up and recognizing our ever-beaming Source), busy scratching in the dirt and bemoaning our god-abandoned state in lengthy tomes and lonely lives, or floundering in a dummied-up materialistic, mechanistic view of reality that even today's quantum scientists have long ago discarded.

Actually, this state of affairs would be VERY FUNNY if it were not, in my candid opinion, very sad. I can't help wondering if this also must sadden the Sun a little bit. Maybe that's why, recently, our star shouted a little louder when early last November she began throwing us unusually large solar kisses.

"Yoo-hoo, kids! Here I am!"

"Big Mama! Watermelon-Ripener! I hear you!" I called back.

A little girl once told me, "The sun is my friend." And when I asked why, she said, "Because he's always looking over my shoulder to see what I'm doing!"

I suggest that we might learn from our children more about the very innocent truth of what is REALLY real.

Of possible interest, Stanford's About Arts - The Sun in Literature:

- directory of the sun in literature.