Another Way To Live: Discovering Lessons Crucial to the Survival of the Human Race by Separating Religion from the Bible.

By Darrel Forrest

Ancient wisdom that tells us how to live optimally on Earth has been hijacked. Contorted and wrapped in ritual and dogma, the wisdom of the ancients now sits within stories told by religion to support religion and not the people within. Possibly an unintended outcome, nevertheless, the opportunity to learn how best to express our humanness can only be accessed by removing religious overtones from sacred texts. When we do this with the Bible, the lessons stand out clearly and, if understood and acted upon, can lead us away from the self-inflicted demise the human race is currently on track to meet.

Objectively, the Bible is a story structured in the three act paradigm. Another Way to Live, applies this paradigm to the Bible, identifying the elements necessary to complete that paradigm. From within these elements, the lessons for optimal living become clear once again. When we apply these lessons for the benefit of our species, instead of preserving the institutions who hold these texts as their own, the way forward becomes clear. Highlighting these lessons suggests there are different ways the human race could have chosen to live. Ways that would have us approaching a more positive future. Those ways are not beyond us.

Heaven and hell are states of mind chosen by each of us. They are here and now, not destinations in the afterlife. Another Way to Live, deconstructs the Bible into the three acts, identifying the all important plot points and inciting incident, explaining how we have come to the crossroad our species now stands at. Understanding why, shows how we have chosen to live in hell and avoid heaven. Thankfully it also shows us how we can all dwell in heaven on earth once again as our forefathers did.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darrel Forrest
• Release date: Feb 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995433205

Darrel Forrest

Darrel Forrest is an ex-banker who became disillusioned with the greed and egos dominating finance and, so it seemed, the world. Convinced life consisted of more than participation in the endless material pursuits and the satisfaction of ego, he has spent much of his life investigating the truths hidden by the clouds of ego.

Book preview

Another Way to Live

Another Way to Live

Discovering Lessons Crucial to the Survival of the Human Race by Separating Religion from the Bible

Darrel Forrest

1st Edition

Published by Darrel Forrest at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 by Darrel Forrest

Scriptures taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION Copyright  1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission.

Cover design by Renee Barratt, TheCoverCounts.com

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Let the Journey Back into Time Begin.

Chapter 2 – Religion and Science – Two Sides of a Coin or Two Stages of Evolution?

Chapter 3 – Some House Keeping.

Chapter 4 – Cycles.

Chapter 5 – The 3 Act Play.

Chapter 6 – Is It Time for Plain Speaking?

Chapter 7 – Setting Up Act 1.

Chapter 8 – Act 2 – Has Anyone Seen Plot Point 2?

Chapter 9 – Act 3 – Wipe the Slate Clean and Choose a Better Future – or Not.

Chapter 10 – The Inciting Incident – The Choice was and Still is Ours.

Chapter 11 – The Midpoint – I Guess This is Part 2.

Chapter 12 – Feeding of the 5000 – Abundance – It’s Already Here.

Chapter 13 – Heaven – You Just Can’t Tell Them!

Chapter 14 – Today You Will Be with Me in Paradise.

Chapter 15 – The Parable of the Sower.

Chapter 16 – Prepare our Soil and the Seed Will Grow.

Chapter 17 – Hidden Treasure – The Heaven Within.

Chapter 18 – Peace is a Choice, Nothing More, Nothing Less.

Chapter 19 – Calming the Storms in our lives.

Chapter 20 – Judgement – Can We Chose Another Way to Live?

Chapter 21 – The Universal Law of You Get What You Give.

Chapter 22 – There’s a Speck in Your Eye – Mind our Own Business.

Chapter 23 – Equality, is it Out of Our Reach? No! That’s the Spirit.

Chapter 24 – When the Student is Ready the Teacher Will Appear.

Chapter 25 – Part 3 – Let’s Start to Wrap This Up.

Chapter 26 – Ego is Not a Dirty Word.

Chapter 27 – Old Habits Die hard.

Chapter 28 – We’re Nearly Finished.

Acknowledgements

For one of us, for all of us.

Introduction

I am not a theologian neither am I a scientist. That being said I have an interest in both of those arenas. I am passionate learning about particular periods of our history and possess an intense fascination for all things cosmologically related. Above everything though, I am a human being. One who is even more interested in using what appears to be unique to us humans to understand as much as is possible and necessary. The combination and extent of our ability to know, think, question, ponder, understand, and decide is - as far as we know - not found anywhere else in the natural world. The way in which we have used those abilities has brought us to the brink of our destruction. These same abilities can save us from what must come next, unless we fail to use them to work out what has gone wrong.

I am not religious and this is not a religious book, however, I will refer to the Christian Bible extensively, particularly the story surrounding the life of Jesus, but, very importantly, you need to know that I do not have a belief about whether or not Jesus was a real person. That point it is mostly irrelevant. Personally, I would like to think he was because that means we have a practical example of how to best live; if he was not, all we have is theory. At times I will write as if he was real and at others as if he were a fictional character. Do not read anything into this as it is done for simplicity of writing alone - to save me time.

Chapter 1

Let the Journey Back in Time Begin.

In the beginning, God said, BANG! It was a Big Bang! And all the ingredients to create the heavens and the earth were sent forth to interact with each other until such a time that a place that was conducive to the emergence of life, as we know it, was created. And here we are.

By focussing on how we came into being, 

We are forever stuck in the past trying to divine the future,

When we accept we are here and look to live optimally,

We are grounded in the present.

There are some things that no matter how hard we try, we simply cannot disagree about. One of those things is that we came from something. None can rationally disagree with the statement that something happened once upon a time that was the initial catalyst for our existence. Where we obviously disagree is what that something was. It may have been a divine entity, a committee of ethereal beings enacting a decision, an explosion; it may have been a mathematical formula taking on a life. I don’t know and neither does anyone else. Science and religion can continue to disagree about what they believe is real, but the fact remains; neither can prove their theories. While the world is full of subjective anecdotes about the evidence of a god, there is not a scrap of irrefutable evidence for the existence of the omniscient, omnipotent creator god upon which many religions base their foundation. Neither is there anything explicit that denies the existence of such a god. Science claims it can create the conditions that existed to within a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang, but they cannot reach the big bang itself nor any time prior. Notwithstanding the effort science has gone to, the big bang is still just a general theory based on "intelligent" speculation. The theory of evolution may well explain how species adapt to the conditions they are faced with, but it does not, no matter how hard one tries, explain how life came into existence in the first place.

What if the big bang for our universe was not so? What if we are simply the other side of a black hole that is a recycling facility, which reaches for things with its immense gravitational force, disassembles it all and shoots it out the other side as raw materials to start a new universe? What if there is an entity that is responsible for humans alone? What if such an entity also has no idea how the universe started, but is inherently aware of how things within the universe function and uses that information to create or find a race to watch over? What if everything is simply the result of chance? The permutations are conceivably endless, however that is not the point of my writing. I, just like you do not know how it all started and I choose not to use faith in something unseen to fortify an emotional belief and neither do I look at the many theories we have from science with anything more than curiosity and a keen interest.

None of it matters. What does matter is that something happened and here we are. Within the context of that something, observations can be made about how to live optimally, that is, in harmony with the unwritten and, in many cases, forgotten ways of the universe. Those observations have been handed down to us and, as I will show you in due course, the time has come to speak plainly about them.

Imparting the truth of how we can best perform on Earth does not mean that we will do so. Our free will can never be entirely negated; that seems a fundamental element of our existence and, from my subjective and tiny platform, appears to be universal in its reach. And it would appear from the investigations and interpretations I have made, that this must always be the case.

Instead of attempting to understand life and its apparent complexities, we have spent our entire history, at least since the dawn of civilisation, trying to assert an understanding of life that is proprietary to each group who thought about the concept. Each system of belief is fortified not by any evidence of its actuality, but by the conviction of those within its folds. This is evidence enough of the need for a reality check. The human race is in a mess, a chaotic state of disrepair and a single issue lies at the foundation of this condition.

In conversations, of which there have been too many to count, I have presented one of my many theses about the human condition. Which is, in as few words as possible, we have available to us lessons to live optimally and while that remains the case there is a chance we will avoid extinction at our own hands. Almost without exception the response has been one of two. The non-religious say we will not save ourselves, even if we are given instructions how to. The religious say we are not capable of it and therefore a god must intervene as told by their texts.

Just think for a moment about how sad those responses are. They tell us we are doomed; that this pinnacle of evolution is unable to save itself from itself. We are capable of such incredible deeds, able to produce such immense beauty. We can understand many things about life and nature and all that goes into making us who we are. Yet as a species we believe ourselves incapable of creating the utopias we imagine. The utopias we do imagine are only possible because of our capacity to think of other ways to live. We simply call them utopian because of the perceived divide between our current behaviour, which takes us away from them, and the behaviour required to get us there. The amount of work required seems too daunting so we accept the way things are and close ourselves off to the plight of others and our race, creating borders between us to ensure we, at the individual level, remain okay. We rationalise the way things are and continue on, supporting those ways via our concurrent behaviour. My life has been spent wondering why this has been the case. I personally refuse to accept that I cannot change the world by finding out how to be a conduit for universal creative energy, a term that will be explained throughout this work, and finding more ways for it to flow through me instead of being a receptacle and waiting for it to come to me. This work is the culmination of that process.

Should you choose to read on, I intend to show how the wise over the ages have attempted to tell us what is at the root of our ills. I will reveal the lessons we have been given, which if adopted can amend what we have done and rewrite our future to more closely match what is supremely possible. We have failed to see these lessons despite us looking at them squarely for millennia; and here is the tricky part. We have, instead, created stories around the lessons due to a lack of comprehension of them in the first place. The issue facing humanity has been obscured by those actions and thoughts that arise due to the issue. Yes, we live in a vicious cycle, but it is possible to see the forest for the trees if we stand far enough back from it. While it may be exceedingly difficult to objectively observe ourselves, some say impossible, it is very possible. It requires an intensely conscious effort to stand back from ourselves and view our lives from an entirely new perspective. To do this we must remove all understanding we currently have. We must accept, just for a moment, that everything we believe may in fact be in error. To use the word many of us do not like to use to describe ourselves - we might be wrong. We must become vulnerable and open to completely new interpretations of life. We may need to change everything we do. It is easy to see why many would find it difficult to confront these truths, as they seem to attack our very identity.

In a practical sense, the opportunities to see our lives and ourselves come in a number of different forms. Crises are often the way in which we receive a jolt to our way of living. Life has said, No! Wrong! There is another way to live. The people who we come in contact with often throw us information we would rather not hear in the form of critiques that eventually have us self-assessing. Sometimes the information is as benign as a thought we have about another person, which may be a clue to our own behaviour. Many times, we are so unfamiliar with who we are, what we do and how we express life, that it takes the observation of another to get us to see. A good metaphor for this is the brake lights on our car. It is almost impossible for us to know if our brake lights are working or not without someone telling us.

I invite you to read on and see how you could possibly apply these lessons to your life, not because they are right and will produce a better world, but because you freely choose to live in constant connection with the creative energy that is responsible for everything - the better world is an intended side effect of doing so.

Chapter 2

Religion and Science.

Two Sides of a Coin or Two Stages of Evolution?

Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued

With the aspiration toward truth and understanding.

This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion.

Albert Einstein wrote those words in an essay and his sentiment has been misconstrued ever since. I wish to offer an opinion that runs in tune with a lot of my writing. It also forms the springboard for looking ahead to how we can reach our intended state of existence. I offer the following statement as a teaser, maybe a prod to the complacent. It may sound counterintuitive or even nonsensical. Whatever it is, it is sure to rile some people.

Religion and science are different evolutionary stages of the same human process and not contradictory or conflicting aspects of life.

It is clear to me that the divide between the intangible or possibly esoteric element of humans