An article by Sha'Tara - local writer and friend.

     The Greatest Silence

[thoughts from   ~burning woman~   Sha'Tara]
 
When I speak of the greatest silence, I don't mean that I have not been writing.  True, writing does not bring me the pleasure it once did and it is much more of a challenge.  Lately I've been questioning my purpose in writing some of my thoughts through this medium.  I have experienced a growing reticence to share my most recent 'encounters' with certain types of awareness not common to this world; with wisdom and insight not readily found here.  I suppose that is what happens if one lives in between worlds long enough.  You capture ideas from alien thinking patterns and see that such do not, as yet, fit the pattern of your own world.  But sometimes you have to share it anyway.  If there is ever to be a kind of 'spiritual' evolution, how else is it supposed to happen if everyone is as silent as the gods?
 
On the surface the following will seem to some quite inconsequential.  People live their lives, and so it seems do the gods and at this juncture in time, the two appear to have seriously diverged.  The peoples' agenda is increasingly earth-centered and the gods' agenda, I'd say that is past knowing.  Yet I feel it is proper to address the issue of people and their gods, or God, because most people believe in divinities or a divinity in some form or other and also believe that how they approach that can have very serious repercussions on their future so the subject remains apt for the day. 
 
I have been listening to, and intently watching, a series of strange and disturbing dreams and been troubled by what I would call the great silence of God.  And why should I care?  I care because I was raised in a time, place and social milieu that defined itself by the certainty of God's omnipresence and like it or not that remains a central part of who I am.  I care because belief in such a God remains the norm for a vast majority of Earth's people.  I care because from what I see in my dreams, and what I observe of this world today the only voice remaining to God is religion and that has become a meaningless babble of lying platitudes, misleading interpretations of ancient writings, a tawdry, tiresome and expensive business wisely left to its sad demise in time.
 
In my youth I learned that God does not speak through religion; that they are in fact bitter enemies.  Simple logic states without an iota of doubt that any 'god' who stoops to using religion as his voice, is a false god, an idol.  Why can I say that?  Because no religion has ever, or ever will, expect its adherents to be faithful to the central tenets that once were the foundations of that religion.  The other part of the proof is that idols do not speak for themselves, they need 'priests' to speak for them, and to interpret them.  Real gods speak directly to real people.  Those with a modicum of Sunday school know what the Bible itself had to say of any god who spoke through hired guns.
 
In the beginning of the war with Troy, the great Greek hero Achilles (an unbeliever) deliberately desecrates the Troy temple to the sun god Apollo.  When confronted with his act of vandalism and disrespect for the god, his answer was straightforward: if Apollo takes exception to my acts, let him come forth and confront me with it.  To further prove his point, he had the priests of Apollo slaughtered, so only Apollo could now speak for Apollo.  And as the story goes, nothing happened to Achilles at that point.  And the sun rose in the morning and passed below the horizon at night regardless.  The sun shone on Greek and Trojan alike, alive or dead and Apollo said nothing, did nothing. 
 
Of Apollo, the same can be said of the God of the Jews and Christians, Yahweh, or of Allah, or of any other Earthian god.  They are conspicuous only by their complete absence and even more so by their great silence.  What amazes me the most though is not this divine absenteeism, but the fact that it seems not to bother those who spend time and money supporting the various institutions that claim to speak for these gods.  They read questionable translations of ancient manuscripts written by people who obviously had personal, flesh and blood interactions with their gods and never once question why, if the gods could walk and speak with man 2, 3, 6, 10 or more thousands of years ago, they no longer do so.  They seem to accept that in a time when divine intervention would be most appropriate; when it seems most needed, they and their leaders are bereft of such input. 
 
But my questions are not, "Where is God?  Why doesn't God speak to men today?  Why have believers been given over to the sharks and wolves in sheepskins who pass themselves off as pastors, or priests or imams who are for the most part ignorant, lazy and self-seeking individuals who couldn't hack it in the real world?
 
That's not my concern.  My concern is, what does one individual do, having a rudiment of truth, some wisdom and enough compassion to care about the condition of life on planet earth?  Do we need 'God' to come to each of us individually and impart basic morality; basic requirements of human to human caring and sharing or giving?  Of course not.  Everyone knows how to behave towards others; how to treat the poor, the infirm, the weak.  Everyone knows the necessity to give of ones surplus to help others.  Everyone knows of love.  Everyone knows the divine law (now of necessity having become a human law) to love one's enemy even to the giving up of one's life for such a character.  And everyone not in complete denial knows to do the opposite is to be dead wrong.
 
That may be the key to understanding the Great Silence.  In our beginnings God, the gods, the angels, the messengers were all over the place, guiding, teachings, explaining, training the Earthians into becoming human.  Seems to me they did what they could, perhaps even all they could.  Having given writing to man they left the clues, the hints, of what was expected from ISSA beings.  Then we have the examples of those who were truly faithful to the greater law (as we have the history of how our ancestors by and large treated such individuals).  Because of such, no one could ever plead ignorance of the 'law' as given to us.  We know, we just choose not to adhere to it.  And why is that? 
 
Well it would seem that in order to gain something, something has to be given up.  If we would be avatars, we have to give up our Earthian lusts; our pettiness, our jealousies, greed, need to control and have power over.  We need to give up our love of gratuitous violence, or the doing of violence to others for our personal profit or pleasure.  We need to give up our innate competitiveness and become compassionate givers instead of selfish takers.  And that goes against the system that we (or was it really us?) invented and put over ourselves as the true god of the age, a god that even religions worship—and little wonder for they too are a part of that system.
 
So in this scenario, my contention is that the great silence of God is a test for humanity as a whole.  If it becomes wise and accepts its responsibilities as it was designed to do, it will enter into some kind of 'golden age' as promised, an age it will have formed from its own struggles and therefore can never lose.  If it remains as selfishly ignorant and crassly stupid as it continually expresses itself this day, then the horror it already senses it has set in motion will descend upon it and crush it out of existence.  None of the good things it has ever done will be recorded or remembered because its evil will outweigh all of that.  It will be classed as a failed experiment and the slate wiped clean.
 
These are the thoughts and the dreams that are so difficult to put into words, all the much more difficult to share.  Yet there is hope in these thoughts.  Earthians do possess the wherewithal to save themselves.  They are not doomed.  I think the 'divine spark' that animates all of us is ultimately good, not evil.  We can help ourselves.
 
To seek to change things because you think something is wrong is to act out of need—to live your life reactively. To seek to change things because you want something different is to act out of desire—to live your life creatively. [Ben Dench on OpEdNews]