Thomas Daniel Nehrer

The New Age is not one of bells and whistles and mystical special effects. It is not a fantasy state driven by the alignments of planets or the power of crystals, nor a metaphysical rising to higher plains of consciousness by virtue of chanting esoteric mantras. It will not feature the arrival of a thunderbolt-wielding god, ready to set up a final judgment by reviving hordes of old, decayed corpses. The real New Age is a simple, but stunningly profound, awareness that one__ Self and all that one encounters are two aspects of the same, singular Essence.

I write these pieces, not to convince you of anything, nor to argue points for the purpose of proposing a new standard or a new philosophy _ and certainly not to create yet another religious movement. Rather, my purpose is simple: to communicate a new and clean perspective of life that I often refer to as Clear Awareness.

So life does flow, but not from left to right on a time scale, rather frominside out.

One always has to wonder anew how anyone could imagine a god, who, so overwhelmingly intelligent and powerful as to have been able to create this enormously complex world and the vast universe it floats around in, would populate it with a bunch of humans whose primary purpose consisted of bowing subserviently in worship.

Clear Awareness is not a magical state to be attained by secret rituals, chants, pleading to some external source or emergence into astral planes, nor a status bestowed by a certified master. Nor is it a capability of yours that needs to be developed, strengthened or discovered. Awareness is the core attribute of your existence; it only needs to be freed from all the synthetic definitions, beliefs, misconceptions, fears and other hindering fallacies your mind has absorbed through the course of your life.

As it is, the vital question you should be asking is not what I am, but what you yourself are.

The concept of a Miracle, that is, an event that takes place somehow beyond the scope of functional Reality, is absurd. . . There cannot be a true miracle. There can only be events that appear miraculous when you don__ really understand How Life Works.

There exists only a mechanism by which meaning flows from intangible mind element into real event _ and when you see that, all the postulated structures and cosmologies, built only of concepts, dissipate like yesterday__ weather.

The Flow in life is not a temporal displacement of moving objects, from a past into a future via a present. Theessential, ongoing Flow to this Reality is an emergence from the value set of your inner nature into the outer realm of events and relationships, where it is then experienced by you in a Now moment.

So, am I some sort of Savior? Not hardly. Save yourself the worry about needing to be saved from anything.

If you find that you __isagree_ with something I__e written, then you missed the point!!

However, science, by its very nature, forms its own inherent boundaries to man__ progress. . . Focused as it is on the world out there, categorizing and measuring, theorizing and concluding all things based on external evidence and proof, science misses the core of life: the consciousness doing the experiencing.

But Lao Tzu__ teaching suffers from the major problem endemic to such visionaries. In the intervening two and a half millennia, his words have been misinterpreted and distorted by generations of adherents until his message is riddled with meaningless ritual and dogma. Taoism contracted the conceptual plague: it became a religion.

Since the effects of your life that lead to pain and annoyance are always consequences of inner elements, what you commonly regard as __roblems_ are more accurately seen as outer symptoms of inner, causal problems. The practical approach is to begin looking at those specific aspects of your life that are not as you desire to find their source, rooted in your mindset.

The only difference between holding one god as exclusive or supreme and believing in many gods specialized in function is the number.

The real Journey is a personal venture into your own mind content. Nobody, not the greatest mystic, the most vaunted guru, the most hailed psychologist, though they might shuttle you along the trail for a ways, will get you there. Only you yourself can do that.

Visionaries have two principal means to immediately communicate insights beyond people__ mundane, common mindset. They can liken awareness to equivalent situations in life to which the listener can relate _ using metaphor, analogy and other grammatical tools to picture points. Or they can illustrate how listeners can gain such awareness _ a path to proceed on, techniques to engage, what to look for within.

Had the common man in (first century) Palestine thought about it at all, he would have considered the world flat, with land riding on and surrounded by water below and above. Keeping water up there was the __irmament_ _ a great, canopy-like dome not too far beyond where birds could fly. Indeed, the firmament had gates for the sun and moon to go through, and through which water fell as rain from the waters above.