On Love and God (That Tension in Your Soul)

" In you is an endless well of Love. The tension you feel is the backpressure of your limitless love being stifled as you attempt to pour it into one shallow vessel after another."

There is a tension in your soul. It’s so permanent you might have lost sensitivity to it. But most likely, you feel it all the time. Every day, all day. There are a few distractions here and there, where the tension subsides, or relents momentarily, but it can quickly resume and consume you.

The human soul is a very deep well. Bottomless. And we exist in a temporal realm, where everything around us is, well, temporary. The language we can sometimes use is indicative of our needs. We might say of someone who is clearly committed to a goal, that they are “pouring their heart into their work.” This is more than an idiom.

The human soul is one thing above all. The human soul is the capacity for love. The human capacity for love, to be loved, to love, is infinite. There is no maximum capacity for love in the human soul, whether receiving or sending out. We are capable of love beyond our wildest imaginations, and many of us feel sparks of this at different times in life, with loved ones and friends, in times of ecstatic joy, we can feel love, if we let ourselves, we can feel love well up inside us and even bust out of the borders of our flesh and seemingly glow outward into the universe around us, outward and ever expanding, as if it were capable of filling all of time and space itself, infinitely and forever. Love is that infinite. Your ability to feel and project love is infinite. You are capable of infinite projections of love and beauty and joy.

But our daily lives are not generally lived to this capacity. We fill our days with menial tasks, chores, jobs that we maintain so we can pay a mortgage or rent, feed ourselves without having to plow fields, and burn our free time on whatever trivial distraction we can access moment to moment, subconsciously avoiding the consideration of why this tension keeps building up inside.

We have built up a society that can fool us into thinking we are seeking satisfaction in our actions and in our behaviors, even our possessions. We feel we are working towards something, a goal, a completion, a satisfaction that should come, but it never does. Or, if we do achieve a brief satisfaction from achieving an earthly goal, it is just that, brief and fleeting. We maybe enjoy a single beat, or maybe an entire evening before the tension and need to perform re-establishes its permanent seat in our psyche, and another vain attempt at satisfaction will begin. There is nothing on this earth that will satisfy you. It isn’t possible. You can immerse yourself in sport, song, hobbies, you can strive to accomplish the earthly goals of finance, you can cross off goals along the way and compare yourself to others, you can decide at some point that you are successful. But all you have and all the accoutrements of your success are temporary. Furthermore, it’s hard to see in youth, but becomes clearer with age, these material goals, these earthly goals, ultimately do not provide satisfaction, the tension never ceases. This is because these earthly goals are too shallow.

In you is an endless well of Love. The tension you feel is the backpressure of your limitless love being stifled as you attempt to pour it into one shallow vessel after another. We have structured our society to encourage this, the hunt for monetary wealth, power, prestige in the earthly realm, these are all temporal and shallow, entirely incapable of receiving the full measure of love that you possess. If you go about your days pouring your infinite heart into shallow vessels, the tension you feel will ultimately become immense and could bring you down under the sheer weight of the built-up pressure; you can become mentally and physically wore down.

There is only one vessel that can possibly contain the infinite love you are capable of. There is only one infinite being capable of receiving and reciprocating infinite love. God. You will not find peace until you find God. There is no earthly pleasure, process, or power that is deep enough, that has the infinite potential to fully accept your infinite love. Your attempts to pour your heart into shallow earthly vessels is causing the tension you feel. If instead, you pour your love into God, you begin to feel the infinite nature of love well up within you, you feel the tension actually dissipate, the pressure behind the dam is finally released, God can take it all! Let it out, send it out. You will begin to feel the love emanate from your soul out into the universe around you, the warmth of it will begin to bump into those around you. Tell them, tell them what you have done, when they feel it and look at you with wonder, tell them. Tell them you’ve woken up, you are no longer busy pouring your energy into shallow earthly affairs, you have allowed your love to bloom outward into the infinite space of God, and that they too can let go, and let their love flow outward. And your love can join with theirs. And the next person, and the next. Let your infinite love pour outward, filling the voids and gaps that distance you from those that have not yet seen the fate of a shallow existence. Let your love awaken them, let it penetrate their tunnel vision. Let it spark the love within them to overflow their shallow concerns and join with your expanding love into the heavens above.

Imagine the love of all souls on earth, growing outward from each individual, expanding outward and dissolving into each other, expanding further and upward into a heavenly harmonic song, ringing through the molecules of space and every instance of time, feel your love join together with the souls of eternity, the souls of the ages, in one singular vibration of harmonic ecstasy.

This and only this will heal the tension within you. Alleviate your fears of the future, your shallow concerns about daily affairs. These are merely distracting you from your purpose. Ring out love with every ounce of your being, pour out your heart, pour it out through time and space, through cell walls and planetary dust, send it out faster than the winds, pour it out in full into the endless reservoir of God. It is the only way. As fraught with conflict as our earthly realm is, the state of tension so high, with solutions seemingly so harsh yet the lack of solution even worse, and the trade-offs becoming increasingly unpalatable; the act of pouring your love into God, letting it expand ever outward, and allowing your love to infect the existence of those around you, that is likely the only Good that can be done.

Tax Fixed Income! Bonuses for Bankers!

 

There’s a distinct feeling of being fleeced that one gets each year around mid-April. I’m not one to think the Federal Government can or should be funded without the common and general support of the population, but it’s pretty hard to go through the income tax ritual every year without having some pretty dark feelings about the state of that Federal government and our collective finances as a society.

When we see the Federal government losing track of $15 billion dollars on occasion, just losing it, it’s difficult to sit for hours and diligently record the income and expenses of a middle-class family, dealing in the 10’s and 100’s of thousands of dollars, trying to sort out your declared share of the financial burden of the country, without feeling like a total rube. I mean, seriously? I need to report these hundred and low-thousand-dollar expenses, I need to classify each three and four figure interest statement? I need to send a check for an amount of money that is substantial in relation to my income and savings, but entirely invisible when compared to the frivolous outlays and outright loss and corruption, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, at the hands of our federal government? It’s asinine.

The four to five figure tax burden paid yearly by those in the middle class is a pittance in the face of our national expenses, even though they would be life changing amounts of money to the family forced to remit it. To truly add insult to injury, the taxes collected from everyone each year doesn’t cover the overall expenses of the government. It starts to feel preposterous that we have to continue the charade of paying taxes to support our government for our mutual societal interest when the funding of the government is done entirely through debt cycling, with very connected individuals profiting in the 8-9 figure range for managing the charade through various security and debt instruments.

Don’t forget the tax preparation industry raking a cool $104 billion dollars a year right off the top and the bankers that manage the slush fund of debt who reap seven figure bonuses. Meanwhile, a 72-year-old pensioner on a $3000 per month fixed income is sending $4000 a year to the IRS to “fund the activities of the government.”

This is not a system for the people. Those inclined to argue for higher taxes for the rich have good intentions, I think. They see there is an unfairness in the system and believe the culprit is tax cheating rich people. The mythology surrounding what rich people pay is pretty far off base from reality. The top one percent do pay the largest share of taxes, and that number is higher than most “tax-the-rich” folks would advocate for once they learn the actual number. The problem isn’t the tax rate at any given level per se. The problem is bigger than that, and there are myriad angles that could be discussed here, but I’ll focus on these two. One part of the problem is debt fueled spending that drives inflation, wiping out the monthly buying power of the citizenry, and then still demanding 8-15% of their income to finance that very same debt driven spending. The second part of the problem is the method and implementation of the tax system itself, and the expense of that implementation and enforcement.

The problem is not disparity in taxing the rich vs the poor, the problem is in the expenses of the government and whether or not the expenses that system requires is bringing fair value to the citizenry. As long as our overall governmental expenses are greater than the income collected through taxation, inflation will secretly steal away value from everyone. Changes in tax rate, at any tier, won’t cure this. At current spending levels, no amount of taxation would cover the expenses of operating our government in any one year.

Eliminating hundreds of billions worth of expenses that are incurred due to the methods and implementation of our tax code would go a long way to getting those overall general expenses under control, allowing for less overall spending, lowering inflationary pressure, and lowering the tax burden on everyone, especially those most vulnerable who are on a fixed income.

Paying taxes is never an exciting and happy feeling thing to do. But it is a necessary evil in a cohesive and generally organized society. However, the taxes aren’t currently paying for the orderly execution of social needs. In fact, they barely cover the interest on the debt, so bankers managing that debt can profit billions, and CPA’s can profit billions, while fixed income pensioners send four figure checks to the IRS in some sort of financial sacrificial ritual. Being able to keep that $4000 would change that pensioner’s life for that quarter, but instead, it becomes barely a molecule of debt service once paid into the banker’s slush fund.

At this micro level, we have to be able to see how letting the citizen keep the money is the only answer. The citizen would need less assistance, cutting down on the need for social services, lowering the need for ever larger tax receipts, and allowing us to reduce the cost of government further, bringing inflation under control so that buying power in the middle and lower classes could stabilize, allowing low-income and fixed income citizens to maintain a basic living standard without further eroding their ability to provide for themselves.

We need to see that first laundering a citizen’s money through the accounting, banking, and federal bureaucracy to then provide that citizen with the “help they need” is preposterous. In no system, imaginary or otherwise, can that be a more efficient and cost-effective way of getting services to a citizen. Stop taking their money and they won’t need so much help. Stop deficit-spending our dollar into oblivion and the citizen won’t need so much help.

And for goodness’ sake, quit taxing the pensioners. It’s just payola to the CPA industry and an obvious Ponzi triangle of financial shell games between CPAs, federal bankers, and the government bureaucrats that protect them, and who profit alongside them at our expense. If those who profit from this system can keep the rubes distracted by arguing over marginal rates, the entire charade can continue unchecked, profiting the connected to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, and fleecing the public, like sheep, every April.