Outlands Community USA

LLAM:  You seem to have some very clear ideas today!  It wouldn't be because you've been sitting on them for over a month, would it?

ROY:  It does have something to do with it, yeah!  But we've been talking, and I've been thinking.....

LLAM:  Mm-hmm!

ROY:  You recall the night you guys showed up?

LLAM:  Of course!  It was pretty memorable from our end also, you know.  We'd not seen a group quite like you people before, and we'd not expected you to be so umm,  shall we say....

ROY:  Blasted?

LLAM:  That will do just fine!  We'd each of us seen a number of humans over the many years we've been around, but YOU guys, well....

ROY:  (grinning)  I'll take that as a compliment! [Llam grins]  It was what you said after you'd told us to "fear not."

LLAM:  I thought that that was a nice touch!  Biblical!  You looked like you were going to mess your jeans and try to hit me at the same time.

ROY:  I wasn't wearing jeans, I wasn't wearing anything.  But you're right - I was really scared.  But I was not gonna let anything happen to my loved ones, I didn't know who or what you were.  So, it was what you said, that we'd been praying to get across the barrier to God and that our prayers had been heard.  Or that God would reach across the barrier, as Bernadette Roberts described.

LLAM:  Okay.

ROY:  Well, at the time I thought that that meant that God, the real God, had actually noticed us.  You know I no longer think that.

LLAM:  It was shortly after that when you were online with Naseni that you and he had this big discussion and you realized that most of you were actually atheists.  Or that you had a large atheistic streak.

ROY:  Yup, that's what I was thinking about.   It occured to me at the time that there seemed to be a discrepancy between what we believed and your little grand-entrance comments, but I was also sure it would come out down the road and that at that time, we had other things to think about.  Like getting the first Old Sparky, getting online, all of that.

LLAM:  ......and getting a website!  This website is two years old today!  (blows party horn)

ROY:  Did you get into the kid's vodka?  [Llam laughs]  But in thinking over what you said, you merely said that our prayers had been heard.  You didn't say by whom, or what.  But at the time I thought you meant God had heard our prayers.  But I do not think that there is a God, or Goddess.  There may be tremendously powerful, godlike entities in the universe, but one great big one running the show?  Nuh-nuh-no.  The idea raises more problems than it solves.

LLAM:  For you personally I know that one of these problems is "evil."  If there is a big all-powerful deity running the show, why did he/she/it allow evil to be, why do people suffer?  Why is there war and famine?

ROY:  I could also make a case about Divine Laws, especially in regard to human sexuality, but that is plainly another subject.  What about you?  Do you believe in God?

LLAM:  No.  There is no necessity for a "god" or "goddess."  The universe runs, it has principles and laws, some rooted in quantum physics, others in descriptors a bit murkier than present human science and understanding allows, but things are running as the are running without the extra baggage of a deity.

ROY:  Right.  To me,"god" has been evoked every time we can't explain something.

LLAM:  Except evil!

ROY:  Okay......in saying you do not believe in God, you're making a conscious, exclusive choice?  I mean, you're excluding the possibility - or for some people, the certainty - that there is a God.

LLAM:  Yes, it is a choice.  If I knew everything I could say for sure whether there was a god or not, but based upon my information, for now, no.

ROY:  Sounds like you've been talking with Kris again! [Llam grins]

LLAM:  We were talking the other night, if you recall!  He has a point with that little comment, but I don't know if it is ultimately true or definitive.  Would I really have to know everything to determine whether a deity exists or not?  Sounds a little solipsistic if you ask me.  It assumes that everything can be known; is there a finite number of facts?  Who knows, who could know?  If there were a finite number of facts a finite entity could conceivably know all of them; if there were an infinite number of facts only an infinite entity could know them all, but then you're stuck with two infinities, or that the "sum total" of infinite facts is in fact this infinite entity, and somewhere along the way this entity would have to circumscribe the infinite number of facts in order to understand them.  Which would make the infinite number of facts, finite.  And would, or could, make the infinite entity, finite.

ROY:  Logic has never been my strong point, but I actually understood that.

LLAM:  Well, it's not infinite.

ROY:  My earlier thinking allowed for a finite deity, one that was not all and everything, one which was actually finite, not only finite, but flawed.  I know that this sounds kinda Gnostic, but I was confused and still troubled by the idea of evil in the universe. 

LLAM:  As in, why the good suffer and the evil prosper.

ROY:  For starters, yeh.  But where did we get this idea of a deity in the first place?  I have, we all have, a sense of immortality, I suspect it may lie there.  And that is pretty much what materialists have concluded at times.  We think that we are eternal but, by their measure, we're not.  Live, die, million-year nap.  Permanent dirt nap or whatever.  Is that so?  I guess this is a part of it.  I have this sense that I'm immortal, that all living things are.  Comes with the property.  This is further complicated by my having known you invisible folks for so many years now.  We talk with each other, we create, some of us make love, and yet by materialist standards this can't be.  It means I'm crazy, or that I have a very skewed perception of things at the least.  I at this point can't help but believe in all of it.  It's how I've lived for a long time.  I read books like Rational Mysticism and Spook to see what options I have for having a credible belief.  I value the debunkers, the Mike Dashes, the John Horgans, the Mary Roaches.  Yet their scientific approach, while valuable, I have a sense it's barking up the wrong tree somehow.  It is a very good thing that the lying thieving SOBs in, say, New Age groups - or cults - are exposed for money-grubbing shams.  For two grand we'll teach you how to go out of your body!  For the mere cost of an expensive four days at a top-line hotel you can attend seminars at great cost and find out how translucent you are - or aren't.  We've made a good beginning on teaching the rudiments of telepathy for free, and our work shows that it, like all communication, has an ultimately emotional basis.  And throughout all of this, I ask, do we REALLY need God?

LLAM:  Given, the universe.  A place full of energy.  Finite?  Infinite?  Not known.  And asking a quantum physicist will not get you the answer to that.  Within this universe there is an awful lot of activity.  This activity is not random.  True, pure randomness doesn't exist, at least as far as has been shown by mathematicians.  No matter how long a string of numbers, a pattern will eventually emerge and repeat.  To my mind, this has a lot to do with you human folks having an inborn notion of deity.  The information is organized, it is not random - not ultimately - and this prejudice for non-randomness, methinks, is at the root of ideas that there is some sort of guiding principle, some deity.  "Order emerges from chaos." It is in the asking "why?" that the fun begins.  Eliminate the question, it has null value!  And in examining the universe it is evident that more order emerges from chaos "here" than it does "there."  Things wind down - entropy - "here," while elsewhere things are organizing at blinding speed, things are coming into existence.  Again, I think to ask "why?" at this point is premature.  It assumes causality, for one thing.

ROY:  Causality is okay within certain domains, certain perceptions - I hit a ball with a bat, it flies over second base.

LLAM:  Beg pardon?

ROY:  I was taking the game of baseball as an example.  I do this, something else does that because I did this.  Causality is fine for most of the local universe.  But in macro - say, galactic dimensions - and quantum, causality does not necessarily apply.  It doesn't even make sense sometimes to think in causal terms.

LLAM:  Yet most people, even quantum physicists, think that way most of the time.  Richard Feyneman may have been the exception - seems he didn't take traffic laws too seriously, as if he didn't understand that doing 110 miles per hour would attract the police.  But even this exception - regardless of how true it may be - would prove the general rules of what I say, most pople live as if causality is the governing standard of the universe.  To me, it is from this that the idea of a deity emerged.  Some years back certain people referred to the "First Cause."  They didn't want to say "God" because of the emotional and linguistic trappings associated with the word, but it implied pretty much the same - something that ordered, and probably created, wittingly or unwittingly, the universe as it now is.  There is at the universal level no need to assign a causitive agent to the universe - it just is, as it is.  I think it would be more profitable at this point that scientists work on how the universe does what it does - any attempt at "why?' is, as I said, at the least very premature - and there very well may not be a "why?"

ROY:  There is a more fundamental problem here.  I'm beginning to think that mixing science and spirituality doesn't work.  I don't mean "a bad fit" or "a poor mix," I don't think they work together at all.  Scientific descriptors may be useful for organizing the intuitive or visionary output of spiritual imagination, but a mistake is often made by spiritual people who organize their ideas this way:  they feel that they've become scientific, or have gained scientific credibility when they haven't.  Calling the outputs of  a prophet or visionary by scientific names doesn't make them science.  When the Outlands Community began we used the Neo-Pythagorean model of the universe, the one which states that there are many worlds, each separated from the other by a basic vibrationary rate.  This is antiquated science, if you go back the 2500 years or whatever to Pythagoras himself, it's that old, or to the Greaco-Roman theorists who came after, 2000 years old.  I would not want a doctor who practiced 2000 year old medicine to treat me!  It made sense to us at the time, because we were able to say that you, Sara, Mike existed in a dimension or plane that existed at a higher vibrationary rate than that of we solid folks.  This seemed scientifically plausible as we've read various reports that the earth, or the universe, vibrates at 7.8 Hz.  It was but a jump to say that you guys lived in a world that was an harmonic compliment to ours.  This is simple math, it is basic Neo-Pythagorean theory, but it is not science and it is not true.  Among many other things it gives materialists more reason to discount our claims.  And although I have the greatest respect for the late Evan Harris Walker, I think it is a mistake of similar kind to combine spirituality with quantum physics.  You may define one by the other a certain distance, you may note similarities but they are not complimentary.  Not at all.

LLAM:  Where does this leave Jackie Tennant's candle experiment, where she stuck her OOB finger through a candle flame and changed the color of the flame?

ROY:  One of the things which has dogged parapsychology from the early days of the SPR (Society for Psychical Research) is that so little of the material they've amassed has been done under rigorous scientific protocols.  Yvgeny's explanation may be true but as it is,  Jackie's little OOB with the candle remains an anecdote.  The professional Associate with whom we consulted [*] told us that he found the report intriguing but to gain scientific credibility it must be repeatable by others.  Seeing that OOB is usually spontaneous - as was Jackie's little voyage - that's a bit much to ask, and of course it can't be duplicated at will.

LLAM:  So in a nutshell you're saying that because science cannot prove the existence of God that God does not exist?

ROY:  Not at all and you certainly know better! [Llam laughs]  Proving the existence of God by means of some scientific protocol just will not happen.  What do you put in as a descriptor?  Everything?  The idea is not within scientific observation or testing, it is at best a philosophic or visionary experience which is propoerly and best worked out in philosphic terms or, perhaps better, in poetic language.  The best we can do in scientific language is to approach the idea, the experience of some sort of deity as a kind of meme, an idea that is a thought-virus or mental virus.  It got planted into us at an early stage of our evolution and has lived on in our minds generation to generation.

LLAM:  Doesn't that leave myself, Sara Jane and the rest vulnerable to the same sort of criticism?  You claim to be in a mildly altered state when you are in contact with us - as you and I are right now - and that's a pretty subjective state with little scientific credibility in its own right.

ROY:  I can be accused of hiding behind my being too close to the experience - perhaps of willfully embracing a delusion - but in all honesty, my experience with all of you is ongoing and every day.  It is as real as the PC I'm typing these words on, as real as the screen upon which they are appearing.  My experiences with what I thought at the time was a deity are a mere handful, and it was the last I'd had, we all shared that one night shortly before you and the others showed up.  We seemed to slam into a wall which said, in poetic terms, you can't go any further.  At that time we felt that "God must be beyond that wall."  Today most of us would agree that the "wall" was the limit of what we could experience, any of us, and that beyond that wall was nothing.  I would add that enough people have had experience with Sara Jane, Shifa and Terrence - and you yourself - to warrant my personal conclusion that I'm not deluded or willfully embracing a fantasy.  Ultimately that is a judgement to be passed by others.

LLAM:  All of what you say is valid up to a point.  And I agree with you that science and spirituality do not mix, they are two distinct and unrelated languages.  But I must ask you, which do you value more?

ROY: [glares at Llam]  The question doesn't quite make it!  I value both.  I have said many times that I am not an analytical thinker, that there is much about logic which escapes me.  I am much more an intuitive thinker......if that's not an oxymoron.  Yet I seem to have an internal bull***t detector which is logic-based, if I didn't I would still be a Baptist Sunday School teacher, or the Outlands Community would be one more money grubbing cult with me as semidivine narcissistic figurehead, kind like Gurdjieff or Jim Jones.  It took a very long time, almost two years, but I got myself out of that church largely by analytical thought.  Yet it was my intuition that kept saying, "There is something terribly wrong here" and I had to keep after this.  It was between them both that I did it.

LLAM:  Do you not feel that you are mixing science and spirituality?  If "intuition" may be called a kind of spirituality.

ROY:  We're talking about two different sides of the human brain when it comes to intuition.  To me, "spirituality" arise from intuition, or perhaps what Blake calls the "imaginal quality."  You know, "yE Imagination is yE Christ of God."  But spirituality is not intuition.  A series of related intuitions, perhaps, but it is not intuition itself.  The Outlands Community as I understand it is a series of intuitions in that sense.

LLAM:  Very well.  I would like to bring Joan of Arc and SonShon in on this little chat of ours.

ROY:  Okay!  Let's do it!

LLAM:  Thank you both for joining us.  Joan, what are your thoughts about all of this?

IEHANNE:  O shining messenger, my poor words may not convey what it is that I feel and know.  But I shall give voice to my heart.  There is that which by others which is misunderstood about me.  In my life and in my time there were two singular dreads, the fear of death and the fear of our heavenly Father, God.  We were told there was mediation, there was mercy in our Lord Jesus Christ, and were that not sufficient the Mother of God, mary; and to them we might tote all of the blessed saints in glory with their intercessory prayers and all angels.  We were told these things, but none believed them.  Instead were our hearts filled with great terror, as if in dying one passed directly into eternal damnation, as if all were certain to perdition.  The passage to the tomb was but once and in one direction, and the sure condemnation by God the Father was expected.  It was the marvel of my revealtion on my last day as I lay in prision awaiting the flames, that in death itself was no fear and that should God or Christ take it upon themselves to condemn even one soul they would perforce condemn their own selves for having made us in their image.  From this final encouragement from Elixe arose this vision that any conception of the evil god of the church was an abomination, and I saw that were there a God, were there a Christ, they would be opposed to every thought instilled in my heart since a babe.

[silence for about thirty seconds]

ROY:  [very quietly}  Do you believe in God, Joan?

IEHANNE:  Monsieur, I have no choice but to believe, it is what is in my heart and therein burns with a bright flame.  But the dark crystal prison of my former fears shattered into a million splinters on that day, and having known what God there is as my lover,  what God there is must only be love.

LLAM:  That was beautiful.  I am......speechless.....almost.  umm, SonShon?

SonShon:  I am from a time in humanity long before any of you - Iehanne, Roy.

[*]  We can't tell you who it is because we've promised all of our professional Associates that we'd preserve their anonymity and not capitalize on our knowing them

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