Well, bugger me...

So I google - "coin flip to prove God's existence" and get:

"Now, say you flip the coin ten times and it comes up tails every time. "Surely this is evidence that God doesn't exist", some atheist idiot might claim. "At this point, this is not about your faith being tested, but the fact that there's no God that can make it land heads!"

Well, what I got to say may surprise you: In this case, God made it land tails on purpose. And that proves God. But how?

Did you know the odds of a coin landing tails ten times is astronomically impossible? For you to witness such a rare and unlikely event could only be explained as a miracle! Only God could make a coin land tails ten times in a row! Don't believe me? Start flipping again. See if you can make it land tails tens times again. Go ahead and try it....you'll be there all day.

In conclusion, all an unbeliever has to do is take out a coin and flip it to see in front of their very eyes that God is indeed real and that Jesus Christ died for their sins on the cross." (http://www.landoverbaptist.net/showthread.php?t=68343)

So, of course I'm thinking this is nuts, so I go to my favorite random.org/coins/ and flip 10 and get:

So, I'm thinking "Well, bugger me..."

Then of course you do the math and realize that the odds of a coin landing ten times in a row = 1/1024. Not particularly staggering considering how often people win the lottery.

What is unchanging?

PIt seems that the physical world is. It also seems that every aspect of the physical world is in flux. It's all changing and all passing away. Then there is the experience of the mystic of the apparent unchangeable and in unchanging ground - consciousness itself - in which the world arises. 

Experiencing the unchanging ground now, I seem to have the same experience of the same thing that I experienced two days ago, or two decades ago for that matter. I recognize it instantly as the same - seemingly in a different way from recognizing an old friend I haven't seen for two decades - my friend seems familiar, but I have to struggle to recognize the face, to bridge the physical changes over the passage of time.

Then there's another friend who has changed little, but they've changed. You fall back into an easy familiarity and its as if the years between have never happened.

And the friend I saw yesterday. Had a haircut and changed his clothes, but has not changed in any essential way since then.

In the longer term cases, given enough exposure now, the memory of the old part of the old friend is gradually altered so that it becomes difficult to remember the two decades past version and you need a photo or video to bring that one to mind.

So is the unchanging ground so unchanging? Nothing seems to happen there, nothing in my experience has apparently changed. But how reliable are my experiences in this? I recognize it immediately and unconditionally as the same consciousness I experienced before, but how complete is my experience of it now, and my memory of the experience of it then, that I can build an entire cosmology on its unchanging nature? What I experience now, I immediately remember experiencing then, and it seems that nothing has changed. But all I can say with certainty is that I haven't noticed any change.

Essence or alignment

All these years I've been transfixed by the question of whether humans are essentially good (divine) or essentially bad (fallen and cut off from God). It's a question defined by the traditions - eastern, esoteric, and new agey vs the abrahamic monotheisms. 

It's kind of the wrong question though. For all practical purposes it's a question of how are you aligned now? Where is your attention and focus? What is your intention (in the fullest sense if will and inclination/leaning)? What fruits are you manifesting?

Jesus and Paul said that all you have to do is believe (I.e. put your attention on, turn towards, intend) and you will be saved. That turning in belief is enough to open to spirit - it's irrelevant if before that you were fallen or ignorant. The effect after that is the same. And Jesus and Paul both insist that the truly important thing is what you do on a continuing basis - there will be a judgement (the true will be retained in the kingdom, the false discarded). So what fruit is your intention bearing? Just inner bliss that is more dissociation than transformation? Or inner transformation expressed as external transformation of the effect you have in and on the world?

Andrew's apology

Another year gone…a year of processing the AC experience…a year of struggling and fighting with Christianity, EE, AA…all the totalizing thought systems that I’ve been engrossed in and possessed by my entire life (or at least since 74 and the exorcism).

And now AC himself is gone. Literally gone, resigned as guru, apologized for his ego and wandered off for a bit of a sabbatical. That short apology (on June 26th): "I’m fifty-seven years old and currently find myself facing the biggest challenge of my life. I’ve been a teacher of spiritual enlightenment for twenty-seven years. Enlightenment has always been and always will be about transcending the ego. Over the last several years, some of my closest students have tried to make it apparent to me that in spite of the depth of my awakening, my ego is still alive and well.

"I’ve understood this simple truth—that we all have egos no matter how enlightened we may be—and even taught it to thousands of people all over the world throughout my career. But when I was being asked to face my own ego by those who were nearest and dearest to me, I resisted. And I often made their lives difficult as a result.

"I’m aware that many of my students over the years have also been affected by my lack of awareness of this part of myself. And for those of you who are reading this, I apologize. As time passes I intend to reach out and engage in a process of dialogue with those of you who would like to.

"In light of all this, for the sake of my own integrity as a spiritual teacher and as a human being, I’ve decided that I need to take some time off so I can make the effort to develop in many of the ways that I’ve asked other people to. Starting this fall, once I’ve fulfilled some prior commitments, I’m going to embark upon a sabbatical for an extended period of time. During this hiatus, I will be stepping down from the leadership of my organization, I won’t be publishing anything here on my blog, and will not be doing any public teaching. My intention is to become a better teacher, and more importantly, a better man.

"One of the most beautiful fruits of my work over the years has been the international network of people who have studied, collaborated, and trained with me for so long. They are all examples of Evolutionary Enlightenment in their own right, and I couldn’t imagine a greater community of people to carry forward this movement. I’m looking forward to working with them in a very different way in the future."

Looks like the students finally grew up and saw him for what he is, and called him to account. The recognition and impulse that caused so many of us to up and leave over the years (the recognition that Andrew was teaching not enlightenment but obedience and servitude to his ego) has finally got a hold of enough of the senior students that he could no longer stand against it.

And strangely, AC’s apology is a vindication that I saw the truth about him. That it was not a failure in me that led me to leave, but a failure in him as a teacher. His words were not true – he said he was teaching freedom, but in fact was teaching slavery to the guru.

So that leaves me with the experience itself. That profound recognition that there is a dimension of reality that grounds everything. Dress it up in a thousand concepts and religions and all you do is hide it. The advaitinis can’t see anything but the ground. The materialists can’t see the ground at all. In the middle are the religionists who know there’s a ground, who know there’s a ground, and know there’s a manifest world, and have a million explanations of how you get from ground to manifestation and back again. Some of the explanations are truer that others, but none is complete. Because all explanations are only explanations and not the experience itself. EE does not explain it all. Christianity does not explain it all. But both perspectives give ways of beginning to conceptualize what we're going through in living, and of conceptualizing the relationship between the ground of being and being.

So where does it leave me after all this drama (mostly in my mind drama)? Blown open again. No longer standing on solid ground, but grounded in the experience of consciousness that is primary and primordial and evolving and already complete.

Yesterday walking in the sunshine on 1st avenue of all places, barriers seemed to dissolve. That initial opening that happened when I heard AC’s apology, opened even more. The dynamic inherent in the way I approach spirituality became clear: the constant drive to classify, confirm, constrict, confine – to arrive at TRUTH and remain. Whereas everything that is manifest is in flux. Becoming and dissolving. The mistake of advaita is to see everything that is in flux as illusory. It is as real as the unchanging ground, but the manifest is that aspect of the ground which is relational. It is ultimately as indivisible from the ground as that aspect which is all sufficient. The ground is complete, eternal, unchanging, empty, still. The ground is loving, evolving, changing, relating, full, overflowing, moving, manifesting. The ground constantly creates other, brings it into relationship and unites with it. The ground is ultimate simplicity and oneness, but ultimately complexifying and unifying. Religion is the attempt to set all this in stone, is the attempt to make tomorrow predictable. And tomorrow can never be predictable, because the complexity that it the manifest cosmos, constantly inter-reacts/relates to produce the next moment – no human mind can contain that/comprehend. God itself cannot predict tomorrow, because it is the nature of God/ground to manifest as other – it is in the nature of God/ground to introduce unpredictability – that is the essence of creativity.