the timboucher experience

The thousand-yard stare or two-thousand-yard stare is the unfocused gaze of a battle-weary soldier. The stare is a characteristic combat stress reaction which may be a precursor to, or symptom of, post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the opening to his Heaven & Hell, Swedenborg damns Trinitarians to an after-life outside of Heaven. Well, that’s what the angels told him anyway:

They have further said that church people coming from the world with the idea of three “Divines” cannot be let into heaven, since their thought wanders from one to another, and since in heaven they may not think “three” and say “one.”

This is because everyone in heaven speaks from his thought, for they have thoughtful speech there, or vocal thought.

I don’t believe Swedenborg here is attempting to make some kind of dogmatic and untestable theological statement here. He seems to be making an important point about the focus of one’s intention. Because what you intend is what occurs. I talked recently about how the universe is a giant computer whose sole purpose is to parse down the conflicting sets of commands you are constantly giving it so that it can provide you with an abundance of what it is that it perceives you as really wanting.

Swedenborg’s point then about understand God as a unitive entity then is an important one because it talks about single-pointed consciousness. Basically the ability to reduce all these sets of false and conflicting beliefs down to one single unshakeable thought, feeling and intention. That, to me, is what he seems to be saying that God and Heaven consist of: absolute concentration on a single point: the Unending Glory and Impossible Love of God Most High™.

As long as you are able to focus yourself fully on that, then you are able to stay in Heaven. When your concentration wavers, even for a second, you are thrust back into the ordinary world of everyday perception. As long as we have physical bodies, of course, we have drives and impulses which push us this way and that, and prevent us from that type of single-minded worshipful intent. Meditation is one path to stilling those drives and focusing yourself on the literal experience of Heaven Here On Earth™, but so too could be the Right Celebration of the joys of this body, for this body is a Creation of that same God who dwells in this single-pointed Heaven.

The only other way I have found to develop this single-minded concentration on the Joys of Heaven is through what to me seems to be the devotional pathways of love. But I keep getting bumped out of heaven whenever I try to approach it. I can maintain focus on it for a while, but something always comes up. Something always happens and I find myself back here once again, turned away from God, away from “The Good”, swimming in my own turbulent backwaters. And I guess that is the human condition: to know there is something out there, something “more better” available, but to go through the unending torture of being unable to quite attain it and hold onto it. Maybe some people don’t ever even get that far though. Maybe I am lucky simply to even know the name of the goal and its face.

• Casting the nets of Religion
• Fish fighter
• Symbolic ties between religions and nets
• Queer Eye for the asleep guy
• Schools Are For Fish