This Is Paper

By R.P. Brannan

This is a collection of essays on the meaning of life, death, the Universe, quantum physics, and a cross cultural look at the perspective of mystics, shamans, and eastern philosophy. Its quite amazing that anything exists at all, and in this way, in such exquisite strange beauty. Using archaic techniques and imagery, the reader is given tools to take a direct look at God, Self, and other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329090033

Book preview

This Is Paper

THIS IS PAPER

R.P.BRANNAN

©2015 Lulu R.P.Brannan. All rights reserved.

Third Edition    ISBN #: 978-1-329-09003-3

TO ALL THE FINGERS THAT POINT THE WAY

Rev Shar

Alan Watts

Ramana Maharshi

Nisargadata Maharaj

Mooji

Ram Dass

Neem Karoli Baba

Keith Wilson

Ken Wilber

Terrence McKenna

CONTENTS

Preface

Self Inquiry

The Meaning of Life

On Death

The Shamans Guide to Traditional Plant Medicine

Trip Summary

Temple Burning

Psychedelics and the Law

To the Atheist

Quantum Physics     Mind

Cosmic Consciousness

Hindu Cosmology

The Weighing of The Hearts                      

Absolute, Causal, Subtle, Gross,                     

Awareness

Practice

Kabbalah

The Tree of Life

Epilogue

Definitions

Bibliography

PREFACE

You are Free.  You are completely and totally Spirit pretending to be the entire cosmos.  It’s all a big act, a cosmic moment, a bang, a flash, a ripple, an echo.  And the entire manifest world, all time, space, matter, and energy, is created-destroyed-superseeded by it.  The moment of the Big Bang; the moment God said Let there be light, all time, space, matter, and energy for THIS Universe was simultaneously created through one pulse or ripple through Brahman.  The entire Kosmos is one breath on one day of Brahman-Eternity-Existence.

The Theory of Relativity shows us that as light itself moves towards light speed, that time slows to zero (the number that contains all other numbers).  This implies that from the first ray of light in existence, all beginnings and ends were already complete, whole, total, and timeless.  You ARE light dancing as matter, energy, time, and space.  You ARE your ego; you are your body, your mind, the dirt, the grass, the stars, all your brothers and sisters throughout the cosmos, every river, every stream, every bug, Heaven, Hell, eternity.  You are not lost or found, saved or damned, bad or good, right or wrong.  You are ALL of it, and you are Free.

So why worry?  Why fear?  Why hate?  Don’t you see you’ve created it all?  There’s no reason not to love it, it IS love, it is you.

So why write this book?  If you are indeed eternity dancing with itself, then you see that I have nothing that I can offer you that you don’t already have.  My words are grains of dust in the ocean of cosmos. 

My best advice to you is to stop right now, go outside (with proper safety and supervision), and burn this book.  It will not serve you.  If you’re up for it go ahead and burn all your books.  There are no words in the cosmos that can save you from yourself. 

SELF INQUIRY

The thought ‘who am I?’ will destroy all other thoughts, and like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get destroyed.  Then there will arise Self-Realization.

-BHAGAVAN SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI

The method of Self inquiry as described in the short book Who Am I? is the direct method of self realization.  It is said to be like facing an army of 10,000 men all alone.  And yet when realized, it is noticed to have been there all along, in timeless peace, always present, as the Self. 

The interesting thing, especially for the western mind, when you start practicing self inquiry is that the repetitive thought patterns that circle to make up our identity begin to fall away, sometimes one by one, sometimes all at once.  It becomes certainly obvious that you yourself, the subject, are not and cannot ever be the objects that arise in awareness.  You can notice even right now as you read these words that everything you are perceiving is happening in your awareness; your body, the paper, your thoughts, memories, emotions, associations, and perceptions. (S. Swolenski)

You can see that while everything in your environment is happening in your awareness, you are simultaneously happening inside your environment.  Like in a dream, during REM sleep, everything in your dream IS you.  Every creature, place and thing is a creation of your dream state.  You simultaneously create your dreamscape while you remain aware of it.  The fabric of the dreamscape is radiated out of your being and instantly reflected back to you in 3 dimensional (or more) space.  The characters, archetypes, and stories that unfold are reflections of you, Spirit, reflected back through form, an endless dance of light and shadow. 

The waking state is a collective projection and has many illusions as well.  In India the entire manifest world is called Maya or in the west illusion.  The essence of Maya is the false belief in the appearance of duality.  Like backs do not exist without fronts, nothing happens separate from creation.  All the many forms are but a kaleidoscopic image of oneness.  Just like in the children’s toy, the image seen when you look in the little eye piece is not a false image.  It is whatever image that the other end of the tube is staring at in complete wholeness and totality; it’s