Short Stories by Dan Rosenhagen   Click on any underlined title in the list below to be linked to that story: “The Book of Knowledge” “The Light of Constant Expansion” “Passion and Desire” “Living in the Univeral Organism” “Waiting to be Embraced” “Beyond Our Shape” “Perspectives”   “The Book of Knowledge” A man received a book of knowledge as a gift from a sage, for the man desired to become wise. When the man opened the book he found that it had one chapter titled; "Birth," and the rest of the pages were blank. The man was confused, hanging his head, thinking the sage played a trick on him. He approached the sage and asked why he had given him an empty book? The sage looked at him with concern in his eyes, "There are many knowledgable men who are not wise. Knowledge is a great vessel on a turbulent sea. But it shall be in danger along the rocky shoals 'less the ship finds a course to navigate its emotional currents. You can be educated and taught how to do these things, but you must till the vessel with a lion's heart equal to the rapture of the sea, and the hands of a plowman who carves his furrows into the earth straight and true. Know that to become wise, you must fill the empty pages in your book with grief and joy, the beauty of love and the weight of love, compassion for the murdered and for the murderer, the pauper and the king, the atheist and the priest. when you do these things, then you must suffer the sorrow of a thousand deaths. Then and only then will the door of your house be open to wisdom's wondering.  And if wisdom comes to you, it is because you have cleansed your soul with the soiled towel of humility. Realize that wisdom is not yours, for one cannot own the sun but only to bask in its heat and light. Wisdom is the breath of the elements, from yet a greater breath, and its clouds fashion keys to free doves from their cages. share bread to feed the hungry, and offer wine to enhance the dreams of humanity. Wisdom has always been there, and will always be, and sits higher than the top of the oldest and highest mountain. And when you are noble enough to stand in its shadow down in its deepest valley, it may then be known only to your heart, finally unveiled in your tears." And the sage turned his gentle weather beaten face toward the man and held out his hand, giving him a quill in which to write the pages of his book, then he smiled, turned again, and walked away.   “The Light of Constant Expansion” Thoughts of natural order must be evoked from within. These thoughts can fuel the concepts of progressive reason. Beginning with the idea that we all exist in the dimension of life. All things in this arena have relative functions of natural order. The foundation of this order unfolds in the prophesy that all things living have the same internal instincts, to survive and reproduce in the light of constant expansion. The never-ending expansion returns in a river of energy flowing back to its source, thus creating growth in God or the center of life. Our seed manifests from a fragment of God's self that flows perpetually back into himself after its life in the physical and the presence of time, the one place where energy realized from our inner self can accumulate growth. Our presences on earth, in the physical dimension of time is magical in that the growth of energy is expedited. The speed of human realization and mankind’s struggle to interact with others and himself allows us to understand and accept love and pain, thus expanding the souls insight, knowledge, awareness and energy. Where there is light, the existence of time unfolds outside of its center, in that perpetual evolution creates the light or essence. Like all living things, light is created from an incomplete fragment of itself growing to become that from which it came. The spirit in congruence with its original essence, the soul, and its manifestation, are the beginning of spiritual evolution among humankind. This evolution within itself is perpetual, as is the river of energy expanding and flowing back to its source. The soul and spirit are married during physical conception and a parallel birth of the spirit and soul creates consciousness as it coincides with the event of our earthly manifestation. Although the soul and spirit are as one, they are separate in purpose. The soul holds the individual knowledge of itself in eternal karmic expression. The spirit is the skin of the soul’s eternal body and the face of what the soul has discovered and grown to become throughout time. The nature of mankind is the combined sum of the soul and spirit inside ourselves. The nature of God is the combined sum of the soul and spirit of humanity, inside himself.   “Passion and Desire” I asked myself; are the passions and desires that I have fostered for places and things that I want, a friend to me? And am I worthy unto myself for following their callings? And I thought, as I searched for my own passions and desires so that I could confront their purpose. Suddenly in view of my mind’s eye stood the image of a man dressed in a robe of lavender, not a real man but an entity of some sort and next to him stood another dressed in a robe of fuchsia. Behind their presence moved yet another, similar in sight but divineness surrounded it in an orb of brightness. Then I asked; why is it that you are here before me? The divine one spoke; we are not as we appear and you have found the place where we dwell. At that moment I was humble as to the place that I had entered. And I asked; where is the place you have come from? The divine one spoke again; we are from the color white. I began to be mystified at what was before me. I do not understand, I said. The glowing entity peered into my direction and proclaimed. I am the Sentinel of your life’s order and the master of your mortal instincts. And these are my sons, Desire and Passion. You may know who they are, but you do not know them. You surely have seen the beauty of the lavender gown of desire but should never trust its intention. And you have tasted the fuchsia laden nectar from passions emanating fountain, but could never fill your cup. I then said to the entity of brightness; you are the father of passion and desire, then why do they become unruly? He answered and tears poured from where his face and saddened eyes would be, as would a mother cry for her children upon the day of their departure. Yes it is true of their unruliness. Before the moment of your manifestation on earth, they were not as they now are. Now they have been set free to influence your movements and create contemplation for your soul to gain the wisdom and the strength it must have to progress. Desire and passion are like the forces that pull a tree upward towards the sun or summon a bird in flight back to its nest to aid Its fledglings. And their influences are part of your life, but whose dominant powers must never be unchained to become that which rules your destiny. For that purpose, I alone am your presence of mind, body and soul. You must then know that before your time here and after you are gone, your passion and desire, just as you and I, will drift from the tributary of physical’ness into the essence of life invisible, a vast and sacred ocean of tranquil harmony. Nay, you will not be in the path of destiny, but expand into what is life itself, which is.......thy true self, a place where time does not look ahead or behind and does not cast it’s shadow. For the eternal ocean does not reflect that which is not its own self. As time is a part of our life here, but it’s echoing sound is not heard in the heart of the life eternal. And in this place from where you have come and in your progression will then go back to, your passion and desire will find comfort in the bosom of your soul as you then find comfort in the bosom of life’s infinite ocean.   “Living in the Universal Organism” I cannot feel the movement of life on the inside of my body. I can only feel alive. I know within my breath, my lungs offer the air’ s sweetness to my blood, and in the flow of its streams it nourishes the most delicate tissue, being the life line to my heart. All of this I cannot see. A forest has many examples of life in all of its trees, in all of its glens, in all of its ferns and streams. Although the honeysuckle do not feel the weight of an oak’ s acorns, and the fauna that scurry on the forest floor cannot see the flight of the doves against the backdrop of the forest’ s canopy, they are the life of the forest, as the stream nourishes all of its creatures and offers the drink of life to all of its thirsty roots reaching outward for its nectar. Within the deepest realm of space, planets cannot know of black holes and quasars, but only their own movements from the forces that govern what they do, as they rotate and orbit in their cosmic ballet. We may realize the rivers of energy throughout the cosmos that bring to the planets and stars discipline of movement and function throughout their evolution and throughout ours as well. It is easy to see the likenesses between all of these things. When we see their differences, it may be that these are the things that we still do not understand about ourselves. Then maybe there are those of us that will be able to understand that their differences are alike. For we are all a part of everything we can and cannot see. Every part of life is a fragment of the entire sum of life, as we live in the universal organism. As we liberate our-selves through self realization the universe then realizes itself through the eyes of our conscious state. From all the eyes that have ever witnessed the infinite sky and all of its beautiful life it has then been viewed with the eyes of consciousness and the infinite imaginations of mankind. Infinite imaginations witnessing the infinite 84 heavens, and through our emotions within their infancy of love, we are then connected to the mirror to our souls. In a stream we may possibly see evidence of how our emotions fashion the movements that we feel. The natural truth of commitment in the power and direction of the current’s desires, the uncertainty of the unknown seen in the tide’s passionately swirling whirlpools and undertows, as well as the curiosity of life’s mysteries that lay in the calmness and depth of its silent eddies. Upon consideration of this observation we may then find comparisons between the living stream and our emotions, understanding how the movements of the stream parallel the movements of our passions, compassions and desires. We may say that all things realize themselves from our conscious state. If we were to look into the mirror offered to us in the sparkling liquid of a stream, we could see the same passionate emotion in the heaven’ s cosmic movements reflecting back into the stream, for they are the same. Our passion could be seen in the burning stars that emanate their heat and light, as do we all. We see our living turmoil in the swirling of black holes, and the compassion of living things in the directional forces of gravitational and centrifugal influence, which is the will of life inside of all living things. If we look deeply into the center of all these living things we can see our own soul as it dances in the melting colors of the setting sun, in the opening of a blossom, or in the liberating stream flowing freely into the calmness of the ocean’ s bosom. For our passion to understand the movements of love grace our living will and are the forces seen in all of life, which is the nature of life itself. Understanding and accepting what we feel from being in touch with the movements of our emotions are the keys to our ascension connecting us to movements of the living universe. As does the stream realize its own potential upon its liberation into the river and then into the great ocean, the movement of our emotions when realized are then liberated and ascend to become what they have always been, the infinite light of love.   “Waiting to be Embraced” Once upon a time not so long ago, her newly born eyes witnessed entire galaxies of stars, and from her prospective for the first time they somehow then knew that they were in existence. From morning until the evening the sun blushed bursting radiantly in its liberating light of being realized. Born to the earth was a special one. In her eyes the story of love emanated from their ocean blue centers. To look into the sky colored depth of her gaze, ones image would be reflected back into their own eyes, only now dressed in the realization of their own selves, a testament of divine beauty. In the event of the universe becoming realized through her eyes, its reflection shined back at her. She felt its passion in her heart. From the miracle of consciousness, life itself was realized, then so from its reflection, she then realized her own precious self. Throughout her life the wisdom of this gloriously divine event expressed upon her birth was suppressed. Like one who is in bondage and imprisoned physically, it was coupled with a methodically mental torment orchestrated by demons of the underworld, and men of weakness that walk freely on the surface of the earth. In a land at the edge of the horizon, in a cave beneath its bosom, she slowly became conscious of her situation. In the same instant of her turmoil, somewhere else, the velvet peddle of a flower wilted from the sun’ s heat and the absence of rain, and in another place unknown to her, a small bird fell from a tree and had broken its wing. She seemed destined to exist within her current state of captivity, from what it reflected back at her she knew that its ugliness existed inside herself along with all the beautiful things she already knew to be. The conflict of these two contrasting aspects raged inside of her. She looked at the totality of their tempest, and in her witnessing of their entirety she looked at them with compassion, then seeing them as a complete thing. Complete in their love and complete in their denial. Her concept of their interaction although seemingly conflicting, was the defining evolution of unity, a unity still trying to understand that it was different only because the two perspectives didn’t yet know that they were ideas of the same thing, only on opposite ends of the spectrum. She saw the whole sphere of understanding in that the negative experience added depth within the knowledge of what it was, and added to what she instinctively knew to be true, which was the wisdom within the event of her view of the universe at the time of her birth. She knew she had to liberate herself and become the wisdom of her own existence, through accepting the futility of those who see the heavens with only one eye, making the cosmos incomplete. She then thought that to accept this burden of understanding her wisdom must not be hidden like a smile expressed behind a veil of silk and not seen, as the sun would be never able to shed its light or offer its heat to living things. “If I cannot express the wisdom that I possess then my flower will never fully bloom and my broken wing could not mend. I shall never then take flight but only to flutter, and the beauty of the universe will not unfold like a blossom thus never realized in its entirety.” “Allthewhile” the heavens slowly expanded, and the sun cast its light’ s life onto the earth from behind a cloud, just laying in wait to be set free. Waiting to be embraced forever. ©Dan Rosenhagen All Rights Reserved   “Beyond Our Shape”   A young man passionate for understanding felt compelled to approach a sage and ask; when I look into a mirror I see my own shape and when I look into space I see the shapes of the planets and stars. I now look across the landscape and see the outline of the mountains and the forests that lead to their foothills. I must conclude that separation defines each individual thing. Then so, how are we all connected to all of these separate wonders? The sage turned and looked at the young man. Each of his eyes were strangely different. His left eye shone with an exciting soft glow of life and love. Around his right eye were weathered groves outlining an expression of seemingly painful experiences, and in some way displayed a lonely sadness. Then the sage spoke with an unwavering tone tempered by the wisdom of his emotions. When looking at each eye as one, the sum of his experiences could be realized within the depth of his stare. And he said; many times in the darkness you have made a fire. You have seen its shape and its movement. And you know that its light and heat move past the shape that you see, as you see its brightness and bask in its heat. Looking at the mountains and trees, planets and stars; you see their individual images that appear to be separate within themselves, but they are like the fire. As you smell the scent of the trees, and see the beauty and boldness of the mountains, and when laying witness to the shape of the stars and planets, you feel the forces that move the moons around their planets and the planets around their suns and the suns within their universe. Then so, through our feelings, which are our emotions, we are connected to all things beyond their shapes and beyond our physical lives. And if you can see our connection with all these things, your soul 36will passionately embrace the essence of life. And life will fold its arms around you with beauty, and your heart will then know love. Understand that it is our realization of our emotion that touches all living things, and it is their passionate expressions that touch us, as our connection to all things flows infinitely beyond the shapes of mountains or trees or even one another. As all living things burst with expression beyond their images and connect to everything that stands in their heat, and witness the light of their beauty. ©Dan Rosenhagen All Rights Reserved   “Perspectives”   ~From my book, Sand and Soul Emotional Universe~ When looking at the life we see around us at this moment, what we see is like a natural motion picture filmed in real time, now showing on the cinema screen of time’s dimension, everywhere. In this story there is a past and an uncertain future. We may even venture to say that this present moment writes the script of future. Everything in this movie is part of the entire movie living under the title of; well in this case it may be appropriate to call it “Eternal Life”. We could of course have the notion to say that it has a cast of everything because each time we view it we see something else, something more, and this goes on forever. It is never boring because in each milli-second everything in the movie changes except for the title. Time and the physical dimension are interesting concepts here. The essence of life, God, the Light, Love or what ever you choose to call it, like the title of our movie, it still remains the same. We might believe that “God,” tends to surround the physical dimension of time thus surrounding us, and is not physical. But it really does not surround the physical dimension of time because it is all the same thing. We tend to think of ourselves as being here on the spot where we stand, and God is there in the place where God dwells. It’s like thinking of a wave as being different than the ocean, or separating the view of a wing from the view of the tail feathers from that which is the entire bird. The dimension of time and the physical dimension are like left and right wings, as one works with the other and are in many ways like appendages to the total organism. They have a position that they occupy as being part of the whole bird. This position is relative in perspective to the entire bird, just as time and the physical dimension are in a position relative to the purest point or the essence of life. It is difficult to proceed with this explanation if every time I speak of the Essence of Life or the Light or God or love, I have to call it all of these names, so I will take the first letter from each of them and make a word. Realize that I have only chosen these words to exemplify our creator, and God is meant to stand for all of the God names in all of the religions across the globe throughout time. I have used the “Essence of Life” for the more natural minded liberal thinker. “The Light” is used as a median seen in religions and newer age philosophies. This leaves “Love,” not a new concept but one that I feel in its totality, is Light or God or the Essence of Life. We as human beings spend our lives here trying to understand love from a fragment of it, which are our undeveloped emotions, love in its infancy if you will. And we are more in touch with the infinite whole through our emotions than anything else because it is something we feel directly and can always be in touch with in every moment. So then the name we get and will use that includes the first letter of all of these names is GEoLLL! It is the practice of comparisons that helps us understand the similarities in things when we sometimes assume them to be different because of their appearance. When we look at a river we see its media or water flowing in a direction and the water nourishes the plant life along its banks, as the plants could not live without this occurrence. This is very similar to the function of our blood as it travels in our veins supplying food to tissue and providing oxygen to the brain sustaining life. Upon a close view of the structure of a leaf we see veins imbedded in its foliage feeding the entire leaf. Without the foliage the tree could not survive and without the tree there would be no leaves. All living systems that we can think of have an organized structured pattern built inside of them that feeds that which is directly relative to it. So then life appears to be similar in its patterns of structure seen in living things that may look different but fundamentally are the same in their function. You wouldn’t say; “my arms are not part of me” or “my brain is more complicated than my toe so it is separate from the rest of my body.” Just as a wave is to an ocean or wings are to a bird, they are part of the entire organism. Time and the physical dimension occupy a place that is less perfect than life’s center. This is why we are here in the garden of life, to grow and ascend toward life’s center. As all living things grow toward the sun, our soul’s plight is to grow toward the center of life, because our soul is a living thing. The place we occupy is at a distance from the purity of life’s center to which there are imperfections, but it is unique in that it allows time and physicalness to exist and affords opportunity for mankind to develop spiritually from what we learn as we interact with time and shapes. For those of us who draw comparisons between living things, then we may understand that GEoLLL functions in the same manner as does the entire dimension of life. When observing the functions of life an important aspect to all of this is GEoLLL and everything else are the same thing, only everything else has different relative perspectives from GEoLLL’s center. That is to say, in comparison to our bodies, different parts of our body occupy different positions in relationship to the brain. There is no separation and no difference: all of the individual parts are what makes the body complete. When adding time and physicalness to the equation we get what appears to be separation because shape then creates distance. To view two separate things for instance a mountain and a valley, the physical dimension allows us to realize that they are apart from each other. The space between the two objects becomes the place where time is involved if we move from one of the objects to the other. In the time it takes to do this we then learn what ever it is we learn that is relative to that journey. Without shape and time we would not be able to grow from knowledge gathered along the way. When we look at a fractal we see that when looking close to its edges, there are more fractals. And when we look closely at the edges of those fractals, we see even more fractals. We can repeat this process an infinite amount of times. The only difference to each reiteration is that the farther you get from the source or original view, slight subtle distortions can be observed compared to the previous iteration. So then the position of time and the physical dimension serve their purpose to the whole organism of life from the position they occupy in relation to the center. We have to wonder about the purity of thought we maintain throughout our everyday lives. Many great thinkers use the practice of meditation to become closer to thoughts that are said to be in the deepest parts of our souls. This implies that the closer you get to something and the more you dwell on it that you start to absorb its qualities. If this is true then the more we ascend towards life’s center from our current position the more we become like the center. On one hand we are looking at our perspective from our position relative to the essence of life, and on the other hand we are looking at our perspective from our position relative to the center of ourselves. Are they not both the same thing? In the spiritual realm there is no shape nor is there distance that can be discerned in absence of the physical dimension of time. The naturally occurring perspective of our souls to the center of life, demands time and shape to ascend at a rate of growth suitable for reproduction of life’s center; a place that we cannot go to unless we become like the center itself. Our limited ability to perceive the totality of life places us at a distance to the center of divine truth. During our change into the spiritual realm we will then share an affinity with souls or energy of the same accumulative understanding. A comparison of this can be made when we study the stratification of the earth’s soils. Layers are formed as each type of soil lies within its own likeness: grains of sand amongst more grains of sand, silt amongst silt, clay amongst clay, showing us what we will do spiritually in the order of eternal law. We can also see this stratification in our atmosphere. Each layer, the Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere, Thermosphere, and the Exosphere, are a part of the atmosphere but are different within their individual characteristics. This whole idea of comparisons also can be applied to social groups being formed because people like to be with other people with the same interests. But like salmon that relentlessly swim up the stream of their origin, in time we will navigate toward the essence of life through understanding and acceptance of what we see and what we feel from our living experience in the physical dimension of time. For the center is a place that sees all, feels all, understands all, accepts all, and loves all. We have no concept whatsoever what “all” even consists of. Through our living process step by step we may eventually find ourselves at the threshold of purity. Religions throughout time have made the claim that if you are “good” then you may go to heaven, but how could we even imagine ourselves to be ready to dwell in a place of divinity at this time of our soul’s evolution without understanding it? Just as a star emanates from its center, the pattern of this event can be seen in all living things. Not all of “GEoLLL is the center, just as not all of our body is the brain. In the center of “GEoLLL” there is no need for time or the physical dimension as this place is so pure we can only compare it to what we perceive as pure. It may be like a love that has no boundaries, wishes, hopes, desires, only the magnificent passion of what it is, reflecting perpetually back to itself in explosions of life. And somewhere along a beam of its light, away from its source, the dimensions of physicalness and time occupy a position in relation to the center, existing as a part of the whole. To explain the reproduction of GEoLLL we can use some constants. The constant that stands out to me the most is that GEoLLL is everything. This does not mean that GEoLLL does anything it wants, but instead follows the laws of physics it has created which in turn, and at the same time created it, like two things making up the whole of it. We see it everywhere, light/dark, positive/negative, good/bad, mountain peak and valley; the tree’s canopy, the tree’s roots and on and on and on it goes, the contrast making up the totality of the object, as one could never be complete without the other. We can look at the endless ways that life births itself reproducing the different elements of itself. Dying in nature only means change. As a tree falls back onto the ground from where it came, its seeds bear its heritage of hardiness and beauty, and will become more than the tree before it, in strength and bounty. As humans grow their evolution is seen through shapes of the body and concepts of the mind. As our souls evolve and progress towards the center of life, their growth is a function of living things nurtured through the cultivation of our emotions. The closer we get to the essence of life the more we can see ourselves, and we do this through our understanding of it from embracing change. This liberates us from the past and enlightens us in our realization, as we ascend toward the center. When we are born our minds’ energy or our emotions are like seeds in a garden that grow through experiences. The hardship of living in view of separation and the time it takes to understand ourselves is like being in the garden of GEoLLL. At any time after we are born we would have ascended or gained energy through our living experience, and GEoLLL then would have reproduced. Only in this place, in this position it seems, GEoLLL could reproduce itself. That may be why we are here. As we become more than we were from our beginning, GEoLLL then becomes more as we are harvested. And from our living experience we will continue to ascend/descend/evolve/de-evolve, until we finally realize that we are all that there ever was. Just as a seed is the tree before it realizes itself to be. ©Dan Rosenhagen All Rights Reserved   Dan’s Poetry Page Epic Poetry by Dan Website Home Page