Our Order Tripled in Sie today

OUR ORDER TRIPLEDIN SIZE TODAY
PLEASE CONSIDER JOINING US: THE RULES ARE SIMPLE

Hi!  This is Astral Monk James, founder of the Astral Monks Center for Cosmic Peace, and I am delighted to announce we are now three times bigger than we were a month ago.  Yes, for nearly three months I was the only member of the Order.  Yesterday, two wonderful people join, so there are now three members of AMCCP, and indeed, they are wonderful recruits.  I’m so proud of them.  They are a married couple totally devoted to peace through kindness, mysticism and love.

       We came together through another friend who lives in Cyber Space and is a frequent correspondent whom I have know since arriving in Bangkok in 2005.  I’ll call our mutual friend “John” to protect his privacy.  He lives in the Middle East, where he is a professor of English.  John is a gifted writer, and his work is being published with the help of our new Astral Brother, “Jack.”  Jack and his wife “Terrie” sponsor all sorts of human endeavors and fortunately for all humanity, they have helped John with his publications.

       I hope to continue welcoming new people to the Center for Cosmic Peace.  It’s easy to become a monk or a nun, a “Brother” or “Sister,” for the sole requirement is that you must practice the Golden Rule and be kind to people. 

       The Catholic Order I once belonged to was a teaching brotherhood.  We were not allowed to aspire for the priesthood, for the founder, St. John Baptist de la Salle, knew that priests like him were apt to be distracted from teaching, especially if they were ambitious and became interested in moving to higher positions within the clergy.  He was a “Canon” of the Cathedral of Rhimes, France, and enjoyed a modest stipend as one of the parish officials.  His work with fellowship he founded was misunderstood, and for a time he was denied permission to exercise his full priestly powers.  Moreover, because he was a Catholic clergyman, he was expected to remain a staunch believer and supporter of Catholic faith and doctrine, and keep all the rules of the Church.

       I don’t require my Astral Monks and Nuns to believe any doctrines at all. For me, doctrines are just ways of expressing certain ideas about how the universe and humans in it came into existence, and how they are supposed to operate.  Since those matters are constantly developing as time passes, doctrines are forever evolving.  I allow people in my Order to study whatever they please, come to whatever conclusions their experiences lead them to, and proclaim whatever they wish, as long as they are kindly, open minded, and considerate of other people’s feelings and beliefs. Thus if their readings or proclamations lead them into negative or unkind behaviors, they must resign or change their readings and proclamations.

       It is important that we have some nails in our intellectual walls where we can hang our mental hats.  That little analogy is one of Father Michael Faraon, O.P., Ph.D.’s expressions, and it was people like him and many other wonderful teachers I had that make me glad a had a Catholic education from grade 2 through my first bachelor’s and master’s degrees.  There were plenty of nails in my walls where I could hang various ideas I brought home. However, as I aged, traveled and dared to challenge the doctrines and rules, I drifted farther and farther from the Roman Catholic system of belief and practice.  Fortunately, I withdrew from the brotherhood founded by St. LaSalle before I became terribly scandalous.  I still consider myself “Catholic,” by my origins, but I prefer the term “Cosmic Catholic” to “Roman Catholic” especially in view of the hard time the Vatican is giving the “Nuns on the Bus” and other Catholics, and the shame our bishops and cardinals have brought to the Church by their sheltering of predatory priests. 

       I don’t believe one is saved by proclaiming oneself a “true believer” or feeling like you are “born again,” though both phrases have profound meanings; it is much more important to do things like Jesus did, and like the saints and the mystics and holy people in every culture do and have always done:  Be kind, be forgiving, be understanding, be simple and pure of heart, and do to others as you would have them do to you.  You can believe the world is flat and the moon is made of plastic, if you want to.  Your worth as a human is based on what you do, not what words you say, sing, read or write.

       So if you are a kindly and positive minded person, open to truth wherever it lurks, and generous in your daily life, willing to give your time to helping people and willing to forego self-promotion in favor of doing good for the needy, then you are qualified to be a monk or nun, a Sister or Brother, in the Astral Monks Center for Cosmic Peace.

       Now for my death-defying act:  I hereby proclaim, knowing that some will be offended and may “black-list” me and scorn my science education materials because I say this, but “I believe that intelligent beings are keeping an eye on us and have visited our planet and some of America’s missile silos and nuclear weapons storage areas in the UK.  I say this after inquiring about UFOs with pilots with impeccable credentials and no axe to grind.  One was a WWII Marine Corps ace who was awarded the Medal of Honor, and another was an electrical engineer whom I knew from childhood, and who was part of the team that developed the reconnaissance drones used in the Desert Storm war. Both witnessed unearthly things in the sky.  The Marine was commanded not to      discuss his experience, which happened as he flew his Corsair around the huge invasion fleet off the coast of the main Island in Japan. Of course, the atomic bomb eliminated the need for a violent invasion of Japan, but my friend wrote about his encounter with a “bogey” in his modest autobiography, and received a stern warning not to mention it again. 

We met several times when I was coordinator of the LSU/NSF physical science educational program in 1995-1997.  He was able to share his experience with me after I read his book, for the event was fifty years in the past, and he was no longer a threat.

       I have seen two objects I could not explain in the Texas sky in the past year, and thousands of other people have seen unearthly things all over America.  A neighbor in my complex saw a very large metal object outside we West Texas home when she was a young adult.  So I have good reason to be a believer in extraterrestrial visitors. 

       I have also heard first hand from a woman in the program I coordinated at LSU about her out-of-body, near death experience.

       I suddenly recalled in the past month discussing my own strange experiences that I reported to my spiritual director when I was a novice monk for a year after my high school graduation.  My consciousness seemed to be up where the wall of the chapel met the ceiling, and I was watching myself turn the pages of my missal or my prayer book as we performed some of our religious services in the cloistered Novitiate in Lafayette, Louisiana.

       The term “out of body experience” was not in vogue in 1956, so I did not have it in my vocabulary, but recently I realized that what the popular writer Richard Feynman described as deliberately sending his consciousness away from his physical body

produced the came kind of “viewing” that I experienced in the chapel in 1956.

       We live in a world where being belligerent may help a candidate win the White House, and where people proclaim themselves Christians and even Catholics while running for high office on a platform dedicated to drastically reducing the support poor people, old people and sick people receive from the government.  I an poor, old and ill, and I don’t feel like I’m being a parasite after contributing to Social Security and Medicare and my US and Louisiana retirement insurance funds for nearly fifty years.  I was expecting high officials to treat me, as they would like to b treated.  I was just being naïve.

       There is no doubt the US as a nation has been a major contributor to Global Warming, and among the least ethical in our response to the problem.  We are also no longer the richest nation on earth.  Our whole economy is based of borrowing money that we will be incapable of paying back.  After my divorce in 2005, I found it impossible to pay off the debts I had run up when I was a very well off civilian employee of the Defense Department and later, when employed by Louisiana schools. 

       I have outlived the statute of limitations on most of the debts, but still regret that I lived with so much unpaid credit for so long.  I am not proud of all that. But the USA is borrowing half of the money it is currently spending, and yet politicians are vowing to continue to keep taxes too low to

pay the debts. 

       Everything in our current world looks scary.  The planet’s seas, lands and skies are polluted and growing worse.  Animal species are dying out because their environments are inhospitable. Nations are seriously considering nuclear attacks on one another.  Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved pointless and the cost in human suffering there and at home has been cosmic in scope. People are convinced their holy books are better than other people’s holy books, and thus they should kill people who cling to “bad” holy books. They are not looking to compromise or be tolerant, but to take over and impose one comprehensive belief system on everyone.  People are seeing their mosques, shrines, temples and churches torched, the worshipers murdered, because their religion conflicts with the norms of other “religious” people.  It’s enough to give religion itself a bad name.

       So that’s why I refer to Cosmic Peace.  Our world is being studied by intelligent beings from elsewhere in the Cosmos, or perhaps from other universes or unimaginable multidimensional “places” and obviously, we are in serious trouble.

I hope people who see things like I’m describing will join me and our new Brother and Sister “Jack” and “Terrie” and use some silent, wordless, eyes-closed prayer to pry open a door through which we can communicate with our Cosmic neighbors and use some of their exotic and superhuman understanding and technology to solve our petty problems and childish misbehaviors and take a responsible role in the management of our human and planetary affairs. I pray that if our movement grows thanks to humanity’s newfound social communications networks we may somehow create the ability for all of us to actually live positive and fully human, fully adult lives. Love must triumph over selfishness, wisdom must replace madness, and hope must triumph over despair. It has to happen soon, for we have but one, two, maybe three decades before we either obliterate one another with super bombs, or choke, starve or drown ourselves in a world that has simply had enough of us and will do away with us.  It’s too bad that perhaps 85% of the rest of living species will have to perish as well.  Which kinds of creatures survived the cataclysmic collision with a large asteroid that killed the dinosaurs?  How about roaches and ants?

Is that the end of the story?  Well, no, for it’s been 65 million years since that event and mammals evolved and eventually became highly intelligent, like dolphins and whales, and multi-talented, like humans.  Sadly, the current civilizations will never be seen again. Or is that sad?  I feel we are too darned clever.   Birds and spiders can build great nests and webs, but are not able to write a play or dance on ice skates.  Too bad we are so good with our fingers and brains, but so mean, selfish and short sighted. 

       Planetary scientists say collisions and the resulting cataclysms occur about every 65 million years. They talk about the “snowball earth,” when oceans were frozen top to bottom, and glaciers covered all the land.  We are just a couple lines in the Book of Earth.  Join me in peaceful, mystical love.  Who knows? Maybe some Cosmic Good Guys and Gals will feel our warmth and lend a hand.  Even if nobody is listening, hovering or visiting, living a human life based on love and selfless service, kindness and tolerance is a lot healthier than being selfish and hardhearted.  Mystical or wannabe Mystical people who aren’t mystical yet are still welcome to join the Order of the Astral Monks and Nuns and become “Brothers” and “Sisters” in our Cyber Center.  This has been excessively long for a blog, but when I’m on a roll, it’s hard to stop.

James P Louviere, founder, AMCCP, the Astral Monks Center for Cosmic Peace.