» mystic The Spiral Path

19 Aug 2012

RS25: Where Love Goes, Miracles Follow

Detail of Woodpecker tapestry designed by William Morris (1885). (from Wikimedia Commons)

J: I’d like to begin today with a quote from the text you were reading the other day — the scroll fragment that deals with exorcism as it was usually handled in my time (Dead Sea Scroll 4Q560)*:

Col. 1 [. . .] the midwife, the punishment of those who bear children, any evil madness or d[emon . . .] [. . . adjure you, all who en]ter into the body: the male Wasting-demon and female Wasting-demon [. . . I adjure you by the name of the Lord, “He Who re]moves iniquity and transgressions” (Exod. 34:7), O Fever-demon and Chills-demon and Chest Pain-demon [. . . You are forbidden to disturb by night using dreams or by da]y during sleep, O male Shrine-spirit and female Shrine-spirit, O you demons who breach [walls . . . w]icked [. . .] Col. 2 before h[im . . .] before him and [. . .] And I, O spirit, adjure [you against . . .] I adjure you, O spirit, [that you . . . ] On the earth, in clouds [. . .] (Translated by Michael O. Wise)

A lot of words are missing from the fragment, but you get the picture. Illness is ascribed to demons. Cures are ascribed to the power of magical words, words spoken in ritualistic ways by Jewish magicians. The magicians would have used magical amulets, too, and divining tools (though technically these were forbidden by Jewish orthodoxy). Also drugs that were transmitted in the form of incense and smoke. People today forget that opium and other narcotics were well known in my time.

These magicians were experts in chicanery. They worked in teams, with one man acting as the wandering magician desperate to save people from demons, and others seeding themselves into the crowds to look for vulnerable targets. They would listen to the talk of the people around them, scope out the stories that could be copied by the scammers themselves, then mimic the symptoms so they could be dramatically and publicly “saved” by the magician. It’s an old scam.

A: It was the faith healing scam of your day.

J (nodding): People today read the prohibitions in the Jewish Scriptures against magic and divining and later prophecy and other occult practices, and they assume that Jews in the Second Temple period obediently followed these tenets of Judaism. Archaeological finds prove they did not. From the time of the Alexandrian conquest onward, Jews became a rather superstitious lot, just like their Hellenistic neighbours. Regular people carried magic amulets and regularly spoke magic spells and chants. They also believed in the power of curses. When magicians found formulas that seemed to work, they wrote them down. This is why archaeologists have found so many ancient magical codices and scrolls.

A: Biblical Archaeology Review has had some interesting articles on this topic in recent years. There’s also some evidence for Jewish necromancy in the early centuries of the common era — the use of human skulls with inscriptions written on them (though these are pretty rare).

Most practitioners of magic used bowls, it seems. According to BAR, “the largest body of inscriptions from ancient Judaism is the collection of more than 2,000 magic bowls from Talmudic Baylonia (present-day Iraq) from the fifth-eighth centuries C.E. These bowls were inscribed in Aramaic with incantations against demons.”**

I think it just goes to show that within every religious tradition there are always pockets of people who are drawn to the most extreme ways to try to control the Law of Cause and Effect — which is what magic is all about.

J: Not that this has changed . . . There are still plenty of pious religious folk who believe far more in magic (the Law of Cause and Effect taken to its logical, gory extremes) than in compassion or healing or forgiveness.

A: So Paul’s followers — and the John the Baptist’s followers — wouldn’t have seen anything too radical or different in the magical claims made by Paul and John. They would have expected to hear how they themselves could participate in this new way of controlling the Law of Cause and Effect. It wouldn’t have surprised them to hear claims about name magic and power over demons.

J: It would have surprised them to not hear these claims.

A: So you surprised people, then.

J: Once I got to the point in my life where I deeply trusted God’s love, God’s forgiveness, and God’s infinite goodness, there was only one path open to me — the path of girding my loins with science and faith instead of victory and vengeance. It’s pretty hard to keep looking for victory and vengeance when you’re absolutely convinced God loves all people equally. I had no religious books to guide me — not ones I trusted or respected, anyway — so I had to start from scratch. I had to start from first principles.

A: Can you give an example of that?

J: It’s a process of reexamining everything you once believed in, so it’s not simple and it’s certainly not straightforward. It’s like being handed a huge lapful of intertwined yarns and being told you have to untangle all the different threads and sort them by colour and weight before you can do anything else. At first it looks like a gigantic job, an insoluble task. But eventually you realize that if you’re patient and observant and careful in your actions, you can gradually sort out the mess.

A: You mean you’re not supposed to take a hatchet to the ball of yarns and split them apart in one fell swoop?

J: That was the Roman way. Got a mess? Fix it with a sword!

No, this way — the angel way — was much more tedious. The idea was not to fix things by destroying annoying people and places. The idea was to untangle all the threads, examine them individually, see the ways in which each was unique and relevant to healing, then weave them together into something new — into a beautiful tapestry instead of a useless, tangled mess.

A: How very un-Roman of you.

J: It was also un-Jewish. And un-Greek. And un-Egyptian. So I got in everyone’s face with my theories.

A: I’d like to go back to the point you raised about God’s loving all people equally. How did you get to this place of understanding? And how did it affect your ministry?

J: I came to understand the meaning of God’s love through my experiences as a mystic. I didn’t set out to become a mystic, but it turned out that way. My heart kept opening wider and wider to the experience of compassion for others, and I started noticing how much pain regular people were in — the women, the children, the slaves, the poor, the ill, the disadvantaged. I couldn’t not care. I couldn’t turn away from their hearts. I decided I had to do something. This was the “faith” part of my journey.

Once I claimed this knowledge fully, and made it part of the very fibre of my being, part of my core essence, I had the strong foundation I needed to reexamine and reappraise all questions about healing through the lens of my trust in God. I had to take it one question at a time, but the important thing is that I was willing to ask hard questions. I was willing to challenge cultural assumptions. I was willing to accept the evidence of my own senses in place of somebody else’s words.

I’ve always found it bizarre that Christianity has insisted on calling me “the Word” incarnate when I was the person least likely to rely on words or law or philosophical “truth.” I believed in what the world of science and nature taught me. I had little respect for words. Hypocrisy had a way of appearing as a magic cloak of many words.

A: Albert Einstein once said, “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.” (I have this saying on my fridge.)

J: Yes. This relates to the brain’s function. If you tell the brain that only Cause and Effect exist, it will only look for Cause and Effect. If you tell the brain there is Divine Love which interacts in unpredictable and heart-stopping ways with Cause and Effect, the brain will be able to see what’s actually there. It will be able to see the quantum events that are taking place all around life on Planet Earth. It will be able to see miracles.

A: The brain won’t reject the evidence that’s in front of it.

J: Miracles are invisible — literally invisible — to the brain of a person who has staked everything on the Materialist view of Creation. This includes devout Christians who uphold the teachings of Paul. Paul was a Materialist who didn’t believe in the mystery and immensity of Divine Love — its curious blend of order with chaos, linear with non-linear, female with male, mind with heart, logic with passion. Paul couldn’t see love. So he also couldn’t see miracles. Love and miracles go together like two peas in a pod. You can’t have one without the other.

A: Where love goes, miracles follow.

J: As anyone who has ever known real love will tell you.

* Michael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook, trans., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation (New York: HarperCollins–HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), p. 566.

** See the Book Review by Michael D. Swartz on page 70 of the Sept./Oct. 2010 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. Swartz is reviewing an exhibition catalogue called Angels and Demons: Jewish Magic Through the Ages, edited by Filip Vukosavovic (Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 2010).

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Posted in Cause & Effect, Divine Love, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jesus' teachings, Materialism, miracles, mystic, Realspiritik and tagged Paul vs Jesus | Leave a Comment

08 Apr 2012

TBM34: Trekking With God on Planet Earth

Today is Easter Sunday, a day when many people around the world reflect on the mysteries of resurrection, healing, transformation, and new growth. I’d like to join this discussion by sharing with you a powerful moment of insight and poetry that came to me one day last fall when I was poring over a book given to me by my son.

The day he brought the book over, he was coming because I was hosting a birthday lunch for my sister. He showed up with a card and present for my sister, but he also arrived with a gift for me — a book he thought I’d really enjoy. And he was right. (Male intuition at work.) It’s called Across the Tibetan Plateau: Ecosystems, Wildlife, and Conservation by Robert L. Fleming, Jr., Dorje Tsering, and Liu Wulin (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007). It’s filled with beautiful photos and informative text about successful efforts to conserve habitats and animal species in Tibet. Learning about these ecosystems is my idea of good time. I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the wonders found in nature.

The chapter about the wet southeast of Tibet (who knew it wasn’t all mountains and high desert?) caught my attention with the truth it tells about all Creation. This is the experience of life I’d like to share with you.

Through the southeast region of Tibet flows a river called the Yarlung Tsangpo, a river which has carved one of the deepest gorges on Earth. At the bottom of this gorge, the biome is tropical, with wild bananas and bamboo and plentiful rain. At the top of the peaks that lift above the gorge, the zone is perpetual ice and snow. If you start a journey on the Himalayan heights and walk down to the river, you’ll pass through “five biological zones of flora and fauna within a distance of 60 kilometers (37 miles) (page 18).” In a distance that can be hiked in two or three days (if you’re in good shape) you’ll experience mountain-tundra, then cold-temperate, then warm-temperate, then subtropics, and finally the lush tropics of the river valley. Wisely, this experience has been preserved within the Medog Nature Preserve.

Vastly different biomes hover next to each other here in a way we don’t normally experience on Planet Earth. Usually we have to travel hundreds of miles to experience a completely different habitat (at least, in Canada we have to!). But in this mysterious corner of Tibet, we can traverse many of Asia’s natural wonders within a few short miles. It’s deceiving. Where does one biome end and another begin? Where does subtropical turn into warm-temperate? Is there a black-and-white line on the ground, a clear-cut division between one habitat and its neighbouring zone? No. The changes are subtle. The zones blend slowly into each other. All you really notice as you’re descending the path is that eventually certain plants and trees become more and more scarce until they finally disappear; yet the loss is accompanied by change and new growth as they’re replaced by other equally beautiful (but different) plants and trees. As the vegetation changes, so do the resident populations of birds and animals and insects. Each species lives within the ecosystem it’s best suited to. It’s natural and harmonious and perfect.

The universe we live in, with its vast expanses of space and energy and matter, is a lot like the Nature Preserve in the Yarlung Tsangpo River region of southeastern Tibet. Within God’s Creation lie many different ecosystems, many different biomes. But, as a trekker in Tibet would discover in walking the long path, there are few clear dividing lines between these biomes, and no one biome is better than another. All are mutually interdependent. All are equally beautiful — equally beautiful but very different from each other.

When we choose to incarnate here on Planet Earth, we’re choosing to live for a temporary time in one of God’s many biomes. You can take your pick as to which biome you think we’re living in while we’re walking through this 3-dimensional corner of Creation. Some would imagine we’re living in the lush tropical zone. Some would be convinced we’re all at the top of a cold and barren Himalayan mountain. Still others would imagine we’re somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t really matter where you think we are right now. All you really need to know for sure is that all living creatures on Planet Earth are sharing a temporary journey of discovery and growth in a biome that’s different from our usual Home, but no less beautiful and no less important to us than our usual spot in God’s Spiritual Kitchen.

Spring Sky (c) JAT 2014

Life on Planet Earth is filled with beauty and pain and sacredness. But life here doesn’t end when our physical lives reach the end of their temporary measure. Like the trees and plants in the Tibetan gorge, there are limits to the places our physical bodies can reach and grow. A fig tree cannot grow in mountain tundra, while the cool-footed rhododendron sags in tropical heat. This is all right with God. There is no judgment from God in the death of the physical body, a death that must arise when it’s time for the trekker to pass into the biome where he or she more naturally belongs.

Does it hurt when a person makes this trek to another place? Well, that depends. Does it hurt physically to make the trek? Well, no. It doesn’t hurt physically. It feels kind of weird (I’m told by my angels) but the journey doesn’t last long. God the Mother and God the Father swoop us up in their loving arms and carry us Home almost before we know what’s happening. There we’re greeted by the people — the angels — who are closest and dearest to our hearts.

Does it hurt emotionally to make the trek? Well, yes. Of course it hurts to leave behind the people you love. You miss your Earth-time friends as much as they miss you, because the heart is the heart is the heart.

So there’s a lot of crying on both sides of the path when someone makes the journey Home. There’s joy but there’s also a lot of grief — for everyone involved. But the journey has been accomplished and the soul is quietly proud. The soul’s senses are widened, the soul’s mind is broadened, the soul’s heart is filled with the knowledge and memory of love, a love that grows, like rare and precious flowers, in all the nooks and crannies of the strange place we call Planet Earth.

Blessings to you at this time of reflection and regrowth. Always remember you are a true child of God, a person-of-soul filled with a courage and devotion you may scarcely remember in your present life, though God remembers.

God always remembers.

God knows how wonderful you really are.

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Posted in Divine Love, Favourite Posts, Mother and Father God, mystic, relationship with God, Soul, The Blonde Mystic and tagged Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

21 Mar 2012

TBM30: Death, Divine Love, and the Heart

I’d like to make it clear from top to bottom and all points in between that some of the medical disorders we experience are related to the choices we make as human beings and some of our medical disorders are part and parcel of the DNA we’re born with. (Still other medical disorders are caused by external sources, such as car accidents or physical assault or other examples of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but these aren’t the forms of physical suffering I want to talk about today.)

Every day children are born into families around the world, and every day some of those children are born with DNA-related disorders that will bring many challenges into the lives of these children, their families, their medical care-givers, and their communities. There’s nothing wrong with these children as far as God and their guardian angels are concerned. I want to emphasize this point because too often in the past families have been told by religious leaders that any form of medical challenge in a young child is a curse or a sign of God’s displeasure.

Iain 1988: Two months before he was diagnosed with leukemia

My younger son was diagnosed with leukemia (A.L.L.) when he was 2 1/2. Were the seeds of this dread disease present in his genetic structure when he was born? I don’t know. Maybe. I know that in 1989, when he was being treated in hospital, our pediatric oncologist told us they’d done a particular test (don’t ask me what) that showed two bits of genetic material had switched places with each other. The presence of these “jumping genes” was known to be linked to treatment resistance and poor outcomes for children with A.L.L. That’s all I remember now about the test. But they were right about the outcome. My son’s leukemia was highly resistant to treatment. Even a successful bone marrow transplant from his brother wasn’t enough to hold back the cancer for long. My beloved boy died nine months after he was diagnosed.

I can tell you I was some mad with God. Our son hadn’t done anything “wrong,” and it seemed, from our perspective, that God was being cruel and unfair to him and to us. Of course, we were practising Christians at the time (High Anglican) and fellow Christians we spoke with kept telling us to pray and to believe. So we kept praying and believing, and we welcomed visits from the hospital chaplains, and on Easter Sunday of 1989 we took our son to church to be blessed during a brief period when he was released from hospital.

The emotional support we received from our families and neighbours and fellow Christians was deeply important to us then, and remains so to me to this day. We couldn’t have got through this time of agony and fear without the emotional and practical support of our friends, family, and medical caregivers. The casseroles that appeared on our front doorstep were a healing balm for us. The consistent and sincere offers to babysit our older son showed a generosity and compassion that changed us forever. The tears that others shared with us told us more than we’d ever dared know about the people around us — ordinary people who found an extraordinary capacity for courage and love already within them when they recognized the desperate need of one frantic family. The prayers, though . . . the prayers made things worse, not better, for us.

It was a long time (years, in fact) before I could muster the courage to wonder about my relationship with God. But eventually I started to notice I wasn’t the same person I’d once been. My priorities had changed. My internal priorities. The external realities hadn’t changed. We still lived in the same house, still had a stable family income, still cared about raising our older son in a responsible manner. But inside . . . inside I was feeling a lot less arrogant and lot more . . . I don’t know . . . more understanding of other people’s pain and loss.

I was still here, struggling each day to figure out my life as a human being, and my younger son was not. That was a fact. He was dead, and there was nothing I could do to change that. I understood this part. But there were other parts of the grieving process I didn’t get, parts that are still hard to put into words, parts that continue to evolve even after all these years. These parts were — are — the parts that deal with the heart.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you allow yourself to feel your own heart, the journey of trust and discovery and gratitude doesn’t end with a person’s death. It just . . . changes. It changes in the same way a caterpillar changes when he weaves a cocoon and sits there quietly for a while, allowing the transformation to take place. When he emerges, he’s the same caterpillar he was. But he’s changed, and he can’t interact with the world in the same way he once did. His relationships with others have changed. Forever.

Being open to your own heart is like this. Being open to your heart means you’re willing to allow other people to change you. It means you’re willing to be inspired by others, willing to feel awe and wonder in the presence of their courage and abundant gifts. It means you’re willing to feel other people’s pain and then take action to help them relieve their pain. It means you care about your neighbour, even if you don’t know your neighbour.

The heart is a truly mysterious place (which is perhaps why poets and painters and musicians and playwrights have had more success expressing it than prose writers have). You wouldn’t feel full inside if you didn’t have this mysterious place in which to store your memories of wonder and awe, gratitude and divine love. At the same time, the heart is the heart because there’s no limit to its ability to grow. So although it’s full, there’s always room for more. There’s always room for another smile, another hug. (And this is before we get to the weird quantum realities of the heart!)

Last weekend I watched a DVD my son brought over. It’s a film called The Way Back. It blew me away.

The film is loosely based on a book about some prisoners who escape from a Siberian work camp during WWII and walk 4,000 miles together before emerging from the Himalayas in Northern India. (There’s debate about the truthfulness of the original book.) There’s a lot of walking in this film — walking through snowstorms, walking through wild northern forests, walking through deserts, walking through mountains — but really it’s a film about a small group of people who help each other reclaim their broken hearts. I bawled my eyes out at the end.

Did they lose some of their friends on the journey? Yes. Did it make a damn bit of difference to their hearts? No.

Their friends had forever changed them. Their friends had forever inspired them. Their friends had forever healed them, even though their hearts hurt like hell because they missed their cherished ones so much.

Don’t be afraid of medical illness and medical disorders (not at a soul level, anyway). Shit happens to everyone. Take what happens and try your best to meet the unique challenges of your life with the courage and trust you’re capable of. Do the best you can until you can’t do any more, and then accept that God will be there to take you or your loved one Home when it’s time.

To love fearlessly is the best any of us can do. But you know what? It’s a pretty impressive choice in the grand scheme of things, and is probably a big part of the reason we’re here on Planet Earth. So don’t diss it.

Blessings.

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Posted in Divine Love, healing, life and death, mystic, prayer, The Blonde Mystic and tagged Divine Heart | Leave a Comment

14 Mar 2012

TBM28: When You Are Forgiven, You Are Forgiven

Over a year ago, in a post called “More Thoughts on the Soul,” I wrote that it’s better to be confused for a while on the Spiral Path than be caught in a nightmare of perfectionism and Divine Law.

So today I’d like to tell you a bit about the early part of my journey, a period when I felt confused most of the time.

The year 2000 was a challenging time for me. This was the year when I learned to develop my natural channelling skills. This was also the year when I left my husband after 20 years of marriage. Sandwiched between these two major events, I got quite ill. In June 2000, I had an acute episode of gastrointestinal inflammation. At the time, I assumed it was an exacerbation of the chronic ulcerative colitis I’d been suffering from for 20 years. But there were some extra symptoms, too, including intense nausea and vomitting that weren’t part of my normal pattern of G.I. upset. I treated my symptoms at home (apart from one brief visit to the emerg for rehydration), which meant, in the context of my spiritual studies at the time, that I spent a lot of time praying and calling upon Reiki energies and asking my guardian angel, Zak, to help me “clear” the negative energies that I assumed were the cause of my acute illness.

In retrospect, this was a dumb thing to do. But, you know, I was so sure I was right.

Eventually my body managed to heal itself — no thinks to my arrogant spiritual assumptions. There were, of course, no attacks taking place upon me from negative energies (e.g. past life karma) or negative entities (e.g. fallen angels). On the other hand, it seems there were plenty of attacks initiated by me upon me by my very own self.

In other words, I was doing it to myself. I was stressing myself out and didn’t even realize it. I was freaking out my own soul with all my untrusting, unloving, cruel talk about negative energies and negative entities, and my own soul was speaking up — speaking up through the biological medium of stress hormones. It was my own stress hormones that were making me sick in the early summer of 2000.

Many of us these days have accepted the reality that stress hormones are something of a mixed blessing. During times of great external stress, we’d be toast if we didn’t have stress hormones to kick us almost instantly into overdrive. But during times of great internal stress, we can pump out so many stress hormones for such a long period of time that we start to damage our own biology from the inside out. This is why stress has been linked to so many autoimmune disorders (including the one I used to suffer from, ulcerative colitis).

You can read more about the long term effects of chronic stress on learning, memory, immune function, rate of healing, and brain repair (neuroplasticity) by googling the topic. It’s not my intent to go into the medical research here. It is my intent, however, to highlight for you the biological reality — the actual biological effect on your brain — when you insist on accepting as “truth” certain theories that your own soul abhors.

Your own soul doesn’t like it at all when certain parts of your brain and central nervous system (what Jesus has described as your “Darwinian Circuitry”) try to gather “proof” for theories about God and the soul that feed the ongoing cravings of status addiction.

There’s coding in your DNA that’s designed to trigger the release of stress hormones within your own body when the Darwinian Circuitry of your brain tries to “take over” and muscle out the messages of your inner Soul Circuitry.* Naturally, this is an excellent design strategy, because it means you always have access to the natural wisdom of your own soul. Live according to your soul’s needs and you stay relatively healthy; reject your soul’s needs and be prepared to wage war with your own body’s DNA.

In short, you’re always getting feedback about your footing on the Spiral Path from your own biological body. If your immune system is constantly fighting infections and internal inflammatory processes, it means you’re out of balance. It may also mean there are too many stress hormones circulating in your body.

So finding different strategies to help your body reduce its levels of stress hormones will be highly beneficial for your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Many well-established stress-reducing practices make excellent spiritual practices, too — practices such as getting together with friends to play old-fashioned board games or shinny hockey, watching uplifting films that make you laugh and cry, sitting outside in the fresh air and sun with a good book, having an afternoon nap, and giving and receiving hugs each day.

You can try meditation if you like, as long as you keep this practice in balance and don’t exceed the “total of 2 hours per day” rule. I should tell you, though, that I myself don’t meditate. At the stage in my journey when many spiritual masters would have urged me to meditate in earnest, I tried something entirely unexpected at the insistence of my guardian angel, Zak. I tried the practice of forgiveness.

Learning to give and receive forgiveness was the very first spiritual practice I embarked on that Zak actually endorsed, encouraged, and insisted on with unrelenting and exasperating diligence. He just wouldn’t let up on this one. And because I was a channeller by this time, and could hear every word he said on the topic, I had to listen to him go on and on about the importance of forgiveness to, well, to everything I hoped to achieve on my spiritual journey.

Very early on in this series of lessons, Zak had me write out and stick to the fridge this note:

When you are forgiven, you are forgiven.

This simple truth left me in agony for months. But each time I went to the fridge, I had to look at it. And be reminded of it. And struggle with it emotionally and intellectually.

It was a very sneaky tactic on Zak’s part. But it was also extremely effective. I couldn’t get away from the issue. I couldn’t sweep it under the carpet and pretend I hadn’t heard Zak. Several times each day I had to think about forgiveness and what forgiveness might actually mean.

Learning to forgive was not an overnight epiphany, let me tell you. I really had to work at it. I had to question old assumptions. I had to be honest with myself about my own past mistakes. I had to find my own courage. Most of all, I had to be willing to receive forgiveness from Zak and from God and from other human beings, which was the hardest part.

It’s not easy to believe you’re worthy of God’s forgiveness, especially once you start to be deeply honest with yourself about harm you’ve created for yourself and others. In fact, it’s so painful to stare your own mistakes in the eye that you absolutely MUST learn forgiveness FIRST so you have the inner means to cope with your own past, your own history, your own mistakes.

You also need somebody to help you with this part of the journey. You need a mentor, somebody you can talk to in trust and faith, because during this part of the journey a lot of painful questions will rise to the surface. It’s best not to try this alone. A professional counsellor might be appropriate. Or a small group of trusted friends who operate according to the principles of the Twelve Step program. I wish with all my heart that I could recommend your local minister or priest, but I simply can’t, because I have yet to meet an ordained cleric who understands what forgiveness is.

God’s forgiveness is one thing you never have to ask for. God the Mother and God the Father forgive you for the mistakes you make even before you’ve finished making them. There are no words to describe the immensity of this gift. But their forgiveness is a source of great inspiration and a never-ending source of awe and wonder for us all.

Once I understood with every shred of my being that God really did forgive me and wasn’t going to take it back — once I could trust that for God forgiveness is a permanent act instead of a conditional choice dependent on my “perfection” and “obedience” — I found the courage to move forward on the Spiral Path in the absolute certainty that I would continue to make mistakes as I struggled to learn what Divine Love means.

As I also said early on in these posts, God doesn’t expect you to be perfect. God only expects you to try hard each day to be the kind and loving person you really are as a soul.

Knowing God is in the trying.

Finally! After several years of study, I earned my M.T.S. in June 2014. For me, ongoing academic study is an important spiritual practice -- one made easier and more productive because I can forgive myself.

Finally! After several years of study, I finally earned my M.T.S. in June 2014. For me, ongoing academic study is an important spiritual practice — one made easier and more productive because I forgive myself for not being perfect.

* For more on the Darwinian Circuitry and Soul Circuitry of your brain, see The Christ Zone Model: Introduction.

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, forgiveness, healing, meditation, My Spiral Path, mystic, spiritual practices, status addiction, The Blonde Mystic, the right to be right, trust and tagged brain-soul connection, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

20 Feb 2012

TBM23: Beauty in the Home As a Spiritual Practice

Yesterday, in response to Lesson #1 in the Workbook for Students in A Course in Miracles, I got talking about chairs.

Today I’d like to talk more about “chairs,” and, in a broader sense, the importance of living in an environment that matches who you are as a soul.

The importance of living in an environment that matches who you are as a soul has been seriously underestimated by religious authorities as a source of both spiritual practice and spiritual healing.

In other words, the place where you eat and sleep and pray and live matters.

It matters a lot.

I’ve mentioned in my profile that my mother is a well-known Canadian watercolourist. But she wasn’t a watercolourist when I was growing up. When I was growing up, she was a professional interior designer, a graduate of the Ontario College of Art’s Architecture and Interior Design program. Everything in our house and everything in our small summer cottage was expected to work from a design point of view. Even the colour of the Kleenex box had to be right.

So I was raised to appreciate art and art history and fine furniture and also the museums that showcase said topics. Of course, the really expensive stuff could only be admired from afar, as my family was far from wealthy. But window-shopping at fine furniture galleries cost nothing. And if there was a piece my mother really wanted, she was prepared to save her money until she could afford to buy it. Or she would buy a piece of “junk” at an antique store and make my father refinish it, which he did often and well. (Both my parents carried the weight of Depression Era attitudes towards money and buying things.)

Still, for all my mother’s keen interest in art and design, she wasn’t really a spiritual person in a conscious sort of way, and it never occurred to her that her passion for creating balanced, harmonious environments could be considered a spiritual practice.

It was my own guardian angel who introduced me to this concept in 2002. At the time I was struggling mightily with questions about spirituality and money, asceticism and humility. I really believed I was supposed to be letting go of all my attachments to beauty, sentimentality, comfort, and safety in my own environment. Needless to say, as the daughter of an artist, and as an artist, art historian, and art conservator in my own right, I felt I was being asked to give up the very essence of my soul (which, in fact, I was being asked to do by various New Age idiot teachers).

In 2002, my ever-so-wise guardian angel conspired with other guardian angels to keep me in touch with my soul’s need for beauty and art by doing an end-run around my semi-ascetic beliefs. He told me that I would be opening a spiritual healing centre in partnership with my “spiritual mentor” Grace (of whom I’ve spoken before.) In the context of this spiritual healing centre, said he, beautiful and harmonious decor would not only be allowed by God but would be required by God as a necessary way to help put other spiritual seekers at ease.

This is how he talked me into buying the ornate piece of furniture pictured here:

Early 20th century oak cabinet (c) JAT

Now, if ever there were a piece of furniture that would not qualify as ascetic, it’s this piece. It’s made of solid oak (so it weighs a friggin’ ton), and it’s covered in beautiful carving. The foliate carvings are done in a different wood (possibly walnut, which has a much finer grain than oak and is therefore easier to carve). There are also some burled panels (which I find utterly fascinating in pattern and texture). A previous owner of the piece had removed the original dark stain and covered most of the exterior surfaces in a white-wash finish that I just love. Even better, the cabinet has lots of good storage space, making it both practical and, to my eye, strikingly beautiful.

When I first saw this piece in the dark basement of a junk shop in 2002, I’ll admit that in the first few moments my heart literally leapt with joy and excitement. Why? Because this particular piece is a perfect match for me as a soul. (Among my favourite artists are Botticelli, Gustav Klimt, and Vermeer, which explains why I’m attracted to a piece of early 20th century Art Nouveau influenced furniture.)

About five seconds after my heart first leapt with joy, my mind took over. “You need this cabinet like a hole in the head,” said my logical mind. “It’s too big,” said my mind. “It’s too fancy,” said my mind. “What will other people say?” “It’s not modest. It’s . . . it’s too . . . ” My mind stopped to grope for the right word. “Too gorgeous?” supplied my heart before I could stop it from piping up.

“Okay,” said my logical mind. “The ticket price says $600. If we can talk the owner into selling it for $500, with free delivery, we can perhaps consider it. Possibly. Maybe. But only because we need it for the foyer of the spiritual centre we’re buying. Only because it makes sense from a business point of view.”

Yeah, right. From a business point of view.

Anyway, as you can see, the cabinet came home with me, and I love it every bit as much today as I did in the first moment I saw it. It’s an important part of the spiritual space I live in — a spiritual space that helps me live a balanced, holistic life where beauty and practicality and gratitude all blend seamlessly together in a way that’s right for me.

Since 2002, I’ve rarely had this strong a reaction to a piece of furniture, but when I do, I pay attention to the sense of connection that pops into my heart. Most often, this sense of connection is all I’m going to take home with me, because I live in a small apartment and I’m on a tight budget, so there’s no room and no money for more furniture. But the sense of connection tells me more about who I am as a soul. It tells me more about my unique “likes” and “dislikes” as a child of God. It tells me more about how I can live as a human being in full relationship with God and, well, with furniture designers and wood carvers!

Furniture designers and wood carvers are no less worthy of God’s love and devotion than all the saints who’ve ever been named. I thank these artists for the lasting gift they’ve given me. Their talents are much appreciated.

Amen.

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Posted in humility, mystic, Soul, soul blueprint, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic and tagged spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

07 Sep 2011

RS6: SPECT Scans of the Author’s Brain

Day 1: Baseline SPECT scan, 3-D Active View

Day 2: Concentration Task SPECT scan, 3-D Active View

Day 3: Channelling Task SPECT scan, 3-D Active View

In December 2004, I flew to Orange County, California, to participate in an ongoing Normal Brain Study at the Amen Clinic.

Dr. Daniel Amen is a psychiatrist who finds it remarkable that psychiatry is the only field of medicine that doesn’t actually look at the organ it’s treating before starting treatment. He has amassed the world’s largest database of SPECT scans of the brain. Somewhere in this vast database are the 3 pictures of my brain posted above.

I first became familiar with Dr. Amen’s work shortly after the publication of his book Healing the Hardware of the Soul: How Making the Brain-Soul Connection Can Optimize Your Life, Love, and Spiritual Growth (New York: The Free Press, 2002). Dr. Amen has published several other books since then, but the 2002 book continues to be the one I find most helpful. Most recently he’s been working on a project to talk about the dangers of head injury, especially concussion. I think this is very important work.

You can check out the homepage for his clinics at http://www.amenclinics.com. He has tons of information there. He also has an on-line version of his professional SPECT image atlas. If ever there were a place where a picture is worth a thousand words, this would be it. You can check it out at http://www.amenclinics.com/brain-science/spect-image-gallery.

In the summer of 2004, I was scrolling through Dr. Amen’s website when I came across the call for subjects to participate in a Normal Brain Study. I immediately wrote to the Research Director. In the initial e-mail I sent, I was candid about the fact that I’m a channeller. This didn’t seem to phase the Research Director, who promptly wrote back and asked for more information.

Because I was asking to be enrolled in a Normal Brain Study, I had to meet the criteria that applied to all members of the study — no history of head injury, no major mental illness, no family history of major mental illness, and so on. The questionnaires were quite detailed. In addition, psychological assessments were carried out, both by phone interview and by additional written questionnaires (some of which went to a family member and to a non-family member who knew me well). After several weeks, the research team agreed that I could come to California and have my brain scanned as a research subject at no cost to me other than my travel costs.

At that time, the procedure was for research subjects to come to the clinic on two consecutive days. On the first day, a final interview was carried out, then the subject was injected with a radioisotope and asked to lie quietly in the SPECT scanner and “not think about anything in particular.” (In other words, try to rest and relax while staying awake). This was the Baseline scan that gave information about which regions of the person’s brain were most active during a resting but alert state (which tells a great deal about overall brain connections). My Baseline scan is the top series of 3-D Active Views shown above.

On the second day, research subjects would return for a second scan, this one designed to capture the function of the brain while focusing on a concentration task. A computer tossed random symbols onto a screen, and the participant was supposed to press the space bar on the keyboard when one particular symbol appeared. I remember that on the first few tries I was trying to anticipate ahead of time when the right symbol would appear, and naturally I was flubbing the test. So I made a conscious decision to be “present in the moment” and wait patiently for each symbol to appear before I made a decision on how to act. Whatever that conscious decision was, it improved my test scores immensely, and the corresponding brain activity which resulted from that decision is reflected in the second series above, the Concentration Scan.

Normally the testing would have been over at this point, but the research team asked me to come back for a third test. This was done the next day. They wanted to record my brain physiology while I was channelling Jesus. This was no problem for me, because I channel when I’m fully awake and alert, and I need no special preparation or external tools in order to talk to Jesus through my channelling circuitry. They asked me to ask Jesus a specific question and then “listen” for the reply. This process was captured in the third series above, the Channel Scan.

After the team reviewed the results of all three scans, they told me I have a very healthy brain, and my scans would be suitable for inclusion in the database of normal brains (as opposed to the database of dysfunctional brains).

They gave me copies of all the scans, which is what you see posted here. I had my birthdate removed from the information column for privacy reasons. Other than that, these scans appear exactly as they did at the Amen Clinic in December, 2004.

I haven’t yet included any of the surface views (the highly colourful scans posted all over Dr. Amen’s website) for the simple reason that I haven’t got round to scanning them into my computer yet. I’m really not all that comfortable with computer stuff. So first I have to figure out how to use my new scanner. (Not my idea of a good time. I’d much rather go read the latest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.) But for those who already have some familiarity with 3-D Active View SPECT scans, you can see right off that I have full, even, symmetrical activity, and all major parts of the brain are intact and fully interconnected.

Aren’t you already curious why my primary visual cortex is so active in the channelling scan?

And I’m not even a visual channeller.

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Posted in brain-soul connection, Favourite Posts, mystic, mysticism, Realspiritik, SPECT brain imaging, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

21 Jul 2011

TBM14: Parable of the Earring – A Journey on the Spiral Path

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time. It’s a mini-overview of my own spiritual journey, and I call it “the Parable of the Earring,” but it’s really not a parable. It’s more like a fable.

It’s based on something that happened to me in February 2006. At the time, I was packing up my apartment and preparing to move in with my elderly parents. (As an aside, this didn’t work out too well for any of us, and a few months later I was again packing up, but that’s another story.)

My son (aged 22 at the time) and I had agreed to meet for breakfast at Cora’s Restaurant — one of our favourites. I had decided to wear the pair of earrings he’d given me for Christmas in 2004. And it was still cool outside, so I was wearing a camisole underneath my sweater and a designer jacket on top. This is the way I dress in winter, spring, and fall, because, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m a human popsicle. Always have been.

Somehow, between the time we arrived at Cora’s and the time I got home, I lost one of my earrings.

The very earring (c) JAT 2015

Now, if you know me, you’ll also know I’m very sentimental about gifts from my son, and the fact that I’d lost one of the earrings he’d picked out for me upset me greatly. They were handcrafted from two Gerbera Daisy petals that had been coated in some sort of clear resin, and they dangled delicately. (My son knows me well.)

I also happen to be particularly fond of earrings in general, and some very strange things have happened to me over the years involving earrings, so all in all I was determined to try to track down both the lost earring and any meaning that may have been attached to the loss. (I’m about to get to that part.)

See, although I have degrees in Chemistry and Art Conservation, and although I continue to follow advances in science, I’m willing to be open-minded about the nature of reality. Not open-minded as in “brain like a sieve.” Open-minded as in humble about my own ability to understand quantum theory and open to the idea that human scientists can (and do) make plenty of mistakes.

When the laws of Newtonian physics clash head-on with the laws of particle physics and quantum mechanics, I go with the quantum stuff. This means I’m not bothered or troubled or upset when weird shit happens — when things happen that seem to defy the laws of Newton and classical physics. I don’t see these events as “paranormal.” I see them as entirely normal in a universe that’s built on scientific laws too advanced and too interconnected with divine love for us to detect them with Newtonian equipment like the Large Hadron Collider.

(Every time I think of how many hospital beds could have been funded with the money that went into the LHC, I just want to cringe.)

Anyway, what I’m trying to get at here is that I believe — and many other reasonable people also believe — in an interconnected reality where some things happen to us for a reason. Not all things, but some things. Sometimes weird things happen, and they’re meant to draw our attention to a question or a problem or an answer or an issue. You can call these weird things messages. Or signs. Or sychronicities. Or angel hugs. Or the language of God. You can call them whatever you want as long as you’re open to the idea that you’re NOT alone in a vast, uncaring universe governed solely by the cold and heartless laws of classical physics. There’s a God and there’s a whole family of loving angels (persons-of-soul) around us, and they’re always talking to us whether we like it or not.

And trust me — there’s no way in heaven or earth you can make them shut up.

This isn’t the hard part. As I mentioned above, a lot of regular, reasonable, practical people instinctively know that certain events hold a deeper meaning, a deeper significance for them and their families, than the obvious Newtonian one.

The hard part is interpreting the meaning correctly.

Herein lay my difficulty in the early years of my spiritual journey. In the first few years, I naively allowed myself to be convinced that certain well-known New Age interpretations of divine intervention were correct. I created a whole lot of pain and embarrassment for myself and my family as a result.

So allow me to present the Parable of the Earring. In this parable, I offer a series of “yearly vignettes,” each of which describes how I would have reacted to the loss of my beloved earring in each of the early years of my journey. You can see the changes in my belief system from year to year, starting 15 years ago. You can also see how long it took me to accept some of the common sense teachings of my own guardian angel, Zak.

Okay. Let’s start with 1996.
Context: No spiritual interests to speak of. Marriage is on the brink of collapse (husband is having a serious affair with his secretary). Son is 12 years old.

“Crap. I lost my good earring. It’s his fault. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with all our problems, I would have noticed my earring fell out. They should make those earrings with better hoops so they don’t fall out so easily.”

1997
Context: Marriage is shaky but still intact. I now work in mental health administration. Starting to be curious about books in the New Age section.

“Oh! I lost my good earring! I should try to let it go and not be upset. But I feel so guilty about losing it. My son’s feelings will be so hurt. Maybe I can try to find a replacement so he won’t notice.

1998 (The Big 4-0)
Context: Still married, still working, but actively pursuing alternative healing methods to try to deal with health issues. Starting to attend New Age workshops and conferences. First meeting with Reiki healer Grace.

“My good earring is gone! Does this have a meaning? I’ll consult one of the new books I bought and follow the instructions for getting help from an angelic guide. Are you there, angels? Tell me where my lost earring is. Why aren’t you answering, angels?”

1999 (A really, really bad year)
Context: Spending more and more time with the “spiritual” group that has formed around Grace. Now preoccupied with cleansing negative energies, past-life karma, and soul contracts through Reiki and energy healing techniques. Frustrated in attempts to learn to channel.

“Someone has taken my earring! I protected myself with a dome of white light this morning, and the earring has sacred energy, so it must have been taken by a negative entity! I must not be trying hard enough to cleanse myself and my home of negative energies! What am I doing wrong?”

2000
Context: In the autumn I tell my husband I’m leaving. I move into my own apartment. Still have strong ties to Grace. Old mistakes with friends come back to haunt me (metaphorically speaking). I discover I can channel and am good at it. Learn guardian angel’s name is Zak.

“Zak, my good earring is gone. I know you must be trying to tell me something. What are you telling me? What did I do wrong now?”

2001
Context: Intensive work on spiritual learning with Zak. No job. Living off separation settlement. Trying to repair relationship with son. Struggling to understand what forgiveness is and what judgment is.

“[Sigh]. The earring my son gave me is gone. It’s a message, isn’t it? A message about being attached to things, isn’t it? I’ve been too sentimentally attached to the earrings, and you’re telling me I’m not trying hard enough to let go of worldly things, right? Of course that’s right. I’m not worthy of your forgiveness.”

2002
Context: An entire year of trying to live as a semi-ascetic. I stop wearing makeup and nice clothes. I stop eating food that has “unnecessary ingredients” (like taste). I give away a lot of my savings to charities. Grace and I decide to become business partners in a rural “spiritual healing centre.”

“I suppose I should give away this set of earrings. I don’t need them anymore. But I can’t seem to find the courage to give them away. Please forgive me for not trying hard enough to obey your teachings.”

2003
Context: An entire year trapped in a house with a woman who has serious unresolved medical and psychiatric issues. Slowly beginning to realize she has no interest in changing. Springtime epiphany about asceticism (a major turning point).

“Omigod, you mean it’s okay with you, Zak, if I need to feel good about my appearance? You mean other people (like Grace) will treat me like a doormat if I treat myself like a doormat? Why didn’t you tell me this before? Where are those earrings my son gave me? It feels so good to wear them!

2004
Context: The spiritual healing centre idea collapses, and Grace and I sell the property. I move to a different town in June. Zak ramps up the scientific angle on spiritual practice. I start to research neurophysiology. The Amen Clinic in California agrees to include me in their Normal Brain Study despite my up-front claim of being able to channel.

“Shit, I guess I lost my earring. Maybe it’s a good idea not to wear that style of earring when I’m wearing a turtleneck sweater. Oh well, live and learn. As you say, not everything’s a message. Zak, have you seen my car keys?”

2005
Context: Zak explains the Christ Zone model and suddenly the behaviour of spiritual gurus makes perfect scientific sense. I break off all ties with Grace. I start to write a book with Zak’s help.

“What do you mean my angel team could actually move the damn earring if they wanted to!? I thought we were past all that. What do you mean I need to read up on non-locality? How am I going to explain this to regular people? Can’t we just stick with the neurophysiology?”

2006
Context: Agreement early in the year to move in with my parents. Great emotional stress. I move anyway because Zak asks me to trust him. I end up in hospital with a stress-induced G.I. illness. After I recover, I move back to my home. I discover during this time of intense emotion that together Zak and I can speak directly with God the Mother and God the Father. (Didn’t know this was possible.) Immeasurable gratitude.

“Huh. How ’bout that? I’ve lost another earring. Wonder where I’ll find this one? Zak, you and the rest of the team cheer me up so much with your crazy antics. Moving things here, moving things there — just when I need a smile the most. Hey, look at that! There’s my lost flower earring. It’s stuck right to the skin of my stomach. Can’t explain how it got there — how it got past the turtleneck collar of my sweater and past my camisole and past my bra to land on my stomach without my ever feeling it. But I sure am glad to have it back. Thanks, everyone!”

And fast-forwarding to today . . .

The only “mini-dialogue” I didn’t make up here is the very last one. After I realized I’d lost my cherished earring in 2006, I searched my car, I searched the ground outside my apartment, I even went back to the restaurant and asked if anyone had found it. No luck.

Later that day I changed out of my clothes, and that’s when I found my flower earring. Stuck to the skin of my stomach.

As I said above, weird things happen in a universe filled with divine love.

And I still have those earrings!

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), building your intuition, Christ Zone, Divine Love, healing, miracles, My Spiral Path, mystic, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic and tagged building your intuition, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

20 Jul 2011

TBM13: What It Feels Like To Live on the Spiral Path

I think one of the great obstacles for people on the Spiral Path is the widespread lack of understanding of what it actually feels like to be a person who’s living “in the zone.”

Our culture is saturated in images of “superstars” and “superheroes” from films, books, illustrated serials (comic books), music videos, and reality TV shows. These images try to convince you that a few select human beings are somehow “bigger than life,” more talented than you, more successful than you, more tapped into the universal glory of perfection than you. These are the people at the top of the pyramid of humanity, according to the claims of writers and producers. They’re the best of the best, the cream of the crop. And you, poor slob that you are, can’t hope to experience one tenth of the deep satisfaction that comes from living one’s destiny as a superstar.

Do you believe in destiny?

I once did. By that I mean I once fell for the common New Age line that certain people are chosen for special tasks that will set them apart from other people and place them on a spiritual path that regular people could never comprehend.

Gnosticism relies on this idea. Gnosticism has the same kind of “superhero” vibe as a modern-day action-adventure film. Sure, you won’t see any guns or car chases in a Gnostic myth, but you’ll see the same themes of good versus evil, strong versus weak, chosen versus non-chosen, worthy versus unworthy. Gnosticism has been around for thousands of years because myths about superhuman people have been around for thousands of years. Early Christian Gnostics took the man named Jesus and turned him into a superhero character who’s surprisingly similar to the Green Lantern character in this summer’s big action flick. (In the film, one lone human being on Planet Earth — the Green Lantern — is chosen to learn how to use his will and his fearlessness to shape powerful universal energies through thought alone. Plato would be proud.)*

Early on in my journey of healing and redemption, I thought that if I followed the New Age teachings carefully, I would somehow earn new abilities and gifts that would elevate me beyond my ordinary, ho-hum, middle class Canadian life. Even Paul’s teachings in the New Testament backed me up on this one! (You can check out First Corinthians Chapter 14 if you’re remotely interested in seeing what Paul promises his gullible followers.)

If you’re really paying attention to what your guardian angels are saying to you about your spiritual journey, you’ll end up feeling a lot less like the Green Lantern and a lot more like Shrek.

It’s funny. You spend years devoted to intensive study and healing, new ideas, changes, transformation, and ever-deepening connection to God, and you know what? You still fart.

You still have to take a hot shower because you’ll stink if you don’t. You still have to put your pants on one leg at a time. You’re still entirely human. The difference is that you start to like being human. More and more you start to get the hang of it.

You start to figure, “Hey, maybe I should try to learn to use what I’ve got instead of asking for ‘paranormal gifts.'” You start to trust the idea that maybe God wasn’t so stupid after all when they designed your DNA.

So let me tell you some of the things that have gradually changed for me over years because I’ve stuck so stubbornly to my spiritual path.

First, and most importantly, I’ve become a much nicer person. When I was younger, I was impatient. Intellectually arrogant. Unable to admit my own mistakes. Critical of other people’s mistakes and all too quick to voice my criticism in a sharp tone. I didn’t have addiction issues with substances, but I had an unfortunate emotional habit of being a doormat and an enabler. I had little faith in God. I could be insufferably smug at times.

I also had health issues, as most people these days can relate to. Mostly chronic stuff related to stress. In my 20’s and early 30’s I had frequent stress headaches (though no migraines, fortunately). One year I had terrible eczema on my hands, eczema that kept me awake at nights with constant itching. For a few years I suffered all summer and early fall from ragweed allergies (acute itchiness in my eyes plus nasal congestion). I got pneumonia once “out of the blue” without having been sick with a cold or flu beforehand. My sleep and my mood were pretty good, but I had low energy all the time — probably related to stress plus my vulnerable G.I. system. My G.I. system has always been my “weak link.” My “canary in the coal mine.” If I’m stressed out about something, my G.I. system has always been the first part of my body to let me know I’m not a happy camper.

I’m now 53 years old, and I look and feel better than I did at age 43. (And no, I’m not about to launch into an infomercial for Cindy Crawford skin tonics.) Sure, I have grey hair (which I cover with L’Oreal Excellence B3) and I have lots of laugh lines on my face (which I don’t mind at all). My butt has sagged, and my eyes (which used to have better than 20/20 vision) now need a pair of reading glasses from time to time. But almost all of my senses — my hearing, my distance and colour vision, my sense of taste, my sense of smell, and most of all my sense of timing — are all sharper and clearer than they were when I was 43. (I’m not sure, but I think my sense of touch is the same as it’s always been.)

This sharpening and clearing of the senses isn’t an occasional thing. It’s a normal part of my ongoing daily reality. I’ve read reports over the years about individuals who’ve had a sudden sharpening of the senses as part of a brief mystical experience. For these people, the sharpening was breathtaking and wonderful, and it’s something they’ve longed (often fruitlessly) to experience again. Well, if you want to know what it feels like to be dazzled by the diamond clarity of sunlight pouring through new maple leaves each time you look up at a spring sky, I can only say that these changes take place in your biology spontaneously and permanently when you make major changes to your own internal “landscape.” You can’t force these changes to take place. They just seem to happen naturally when you make the decision to be the best person you’re capable of being.

Another exciting change that’s taken place over the past few years is the improved functioning of my immune system. I’m not saying I never get sick, and I’m not saying my body is invulnerable to the effects of excessive stress. What I’m saying is that when I try my hardest to respect my body and live a balanced life, my immune system rewards me by keeping me in good shape health-wise. I rarely get sick these days, and when I do it’s not for long. I do believe, though, that even the most spiritual person will get sick and die at some point. That’s just part of life.

Right now I don’t spend any money — not a single penny — on over-the-counter or prescription medications. It took me a long time to get to this stage, and I do NOT recommend you rush out and try it. I’m just pointing out the honest scientific reality that your own biological body can do some pretty amazing things to keep you healthy if you make the right emotional, intellectual, and spiritual choices.

The biggest bonus of deciding it’s okay to be “Shrek” instead of the “Green Lantern” is the sense of inner peace, calm, freedom, and trust that becomes your normal inner reality. Your eyes start to fill up with laughter. You sleep calmly and deeply. You’re totally free of addictions. You have so much more energy for the tasks of daily living, loving, and learning. You find yourself singing sometimes just . . . well, just because.

This is what it feels like to find healing, redemption, and forgiveness.

I wouldn’t trade any of these treasures for all the status in the world. It’s such a joy to be able to get a refreshing sleep at night. It’s such a relief not to be controlled by weird biological addictions. It’s such a humble pleasure to be able to stay calm and patient when others around you are screaming and yelling and behaving badly. It’s such a source of quiet pride to be able to stand up to abusers with dignity and respect and not be taken advantage of.

I’m just so incredibly grateful that my guardian angels stuck with me while I struggled to learn how to be the best self I’m capable of being. I’ll never get over the wonder of their courage, devotion, and patience. They’re truly awesome.

I encourage you to believe in yourself the way I believe in you. The way your own angels believe in you. The way God believes in you.

You’re so much more loving than you realize.

* P.S. My son took me to see the Green Lantern, and even though I don’t recommend the character as a role model for those on the Spiral Path, what’s not to like about a summer action movie starring Ryan Reynolds? I thought it was lots of fun, and I enjoyed it. Those on the Spiral Path can’t take themselves too seriously, or they’ll miss out on some of the best parts of being human. Like fun movies and popcorn!

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), building your intuition, Christ Zone, Gnosticism, healing, My Spiral Path, mystic, relationship with God, The Blonde Mystic and tagged ethical mysticism, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

16 May 2011

JR40: Recap: Some Reflections From the Author

Today I’m going to post a few of my own thoughts as a sort of recap. I think it’s important for people to stop once in a while and take a deep breath and reflect on all the activity of the previous few weeks — whatever the activity might be.

The path of knowing and loving God is filled with unexpected pathways, bridges of hope, and places of deep and abiding peace. Photo credit JAT.

If you’re new to this site, and you haven’t started reading at the beginning, you’re probably wondering what the heck I’m trying to do here. Am I pretending to write a dialogue with Jesus in the way Plato once pretended to write dialogues with dead people? Or in the way Neale Donald Walsch (he of “Conversations with God” fame) has been pretending to write dialogues with God?

No, actually. I’m exactly who I claim to be. I’m a mother and I’m a science-loving quasi-Christian cataphatic mystic who talks every day to one particular angel who happens to have acquired a lot of fame.

The dialogues I write are exactly what I claim the dialogues are — dialogues with Jesus. You can accept that or not as you wish. It makes no difference to me whether or not you believe me. I’m not trying to convert you. I’m not asking you for money. I’m not asking you to put me on a pedestal and admire me. Heck, if I wanted those things, I’d have posted my name long ago and built up a clever marketing campaign (as many other spiritual gurus have done). I’m trying to share some insights that have been important to me on my journey, insights that may prove helpful to you, too. That’s my goal. That’s my intent. If it feels right to you, great. If not, well, I’m not going to lose any sleep over your rejection. I know who I am and I won’t apologize for it.

I wrote my first 49 posts on Concinnate Christianity without bringing Jesus overtly onto the pages. But Jesus helped me write every one of those posts, just as he’s helping me with this one, even though he’s not speaking out loud today. Maybe you think it’s all baloney, that if I’m not inventing the dialogues or inventing my belief in Jesus’ presence, then there must be something seriously wrong with me. Maybe a split personality or something. If you’re determined to put me in this category, there’s nothing I can do to stop you. I know from harsh experience that all the proof in the world won’t stop a person from believing what he or she is determined to believe. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do, and I’ve gotta do what I’ve gotta do. However, you should know that I’m not the tiniest bit afraid of being assessed by an objective third-party psychiatrist in a normal clinical setting. I have great respect for the field of psychiatry. In fact, I probably have more in common with a psychiatrist of faith (by that I mean a psychiatrist who is also a person of faith) than with any other sort of specialist. (As you may have noticed, I have little regard for most theologians.)

I decided to make this blog different. I wanted people to have the chance to get to know Jesus better as a person, and the only way to do that is to give Jesus a chance to speak in his own voice. Hence the dialogue format. These dialogues aren’t pre-written. I write spontaneously on the date that actually appears at the top of each post. I usually write in the mornings because I happen to be a morning person. I also write in the mornings because I often start work around noon. Today I’m scheduled to start work at 10:00 a.m., though, so I have to type quickly because I need to get ready for work. As usual, I’ll probably leave behind a few typos. I’ll catch them sometime. Maybe later today, maybe not for a few weeks. I’m still finding typos on the Concinnate Christianity site.

Meanwhile, I’m struggling to find the best way to introduce my thoughts on the spiritual journey on the Blonde Mystic site. It’s no easy task to find the right pedagogical approach to a field of inquiry that has barely been touched by anyone because of its complexity. The journey of the soul can’t be reduced to simplistic models — which may be the only point I’ve managed to communicate effectively so far on the Blonde Mystic site.

I didn’t set out to be a channeller of the man who once lived as Jesus, and when I finally realized who it was that I was actually talking to I was some pissed. I was pissed because I understood even then (in 2001) the implications of trying to tell other people I can talk to Jesus. Yeah, right. Like, how bizarre is that? All I can tell you is that he really means it and I really mean it and hopefully you can feel the truth of his — our — words in our posts.

I also hope you can feel how important it is for me to stay within the bounds of respectable science. Have you noticed I never prophesy? I don’t prophesy because I think it’s wrong to invent claims about what will happen. How can I know what will happen? I can make guesses, like everybody else, about what might happen. That’s why I like science-fiction (as opposed to sci-fi, which I don’t much care for, except for Star Wars). But science fiction is story telling. It’s not prophecy (well, not intentionally, anyway). I don’t waste my time trying to predict things. I have enough on my plate just trying to figure out the present. Of course, in order to understand the present, I need to have a grasp on the past, too. This is why I do so much historical research.

The soul I know as Jesus is a real person, a real person with his own personality and his own talents and his own interests. He’s not a clay figure who can be moulded and shaped into anything you want him to be. It’s not right to treat anyone that way, including Jesus. He’s his own person, his own self.

I can tell you right now what you would “see” if he were here on Planet Earth right now in his own body (which he’s not). You’d see a tall, dark-haired man with a tan complexion and dark brown eyes. You’d see a man who smokes (yes, I know what I’m saying here about the smoking thing — and no, I don’t smoke, and never have, except for two or three packs when I was 18). You’d see a man who loves vehicles — sports cars, bikes, planes. You’d see a man who loves hard rock and plays guitar, piano, drums. But you’d also see a polymath — a particularly gifted all-round scholar who can effortlessly handle science, philosophy, history, writing, music, and math. You’d see a man fascinated by medical science. You’d see a man who wants to be in the heart of the action where people need a lot of help. I could easily see him as a surgeon in a war zone. He’s just that kind of guy — brilliant but also a bit wild and reckless.

Oh, and he swears a lot.

This is who Jesus is. This is who he has always been as a soul and angel. It’s who he will always be. He’s gritty and funny. He’s very shy, but he also has a “showy” streak in him, and once you get him going, you can’t get him away from the microphone. He has a huge hole in his heart from the time when his human daughter died in Nazareth. (This sort of grief never goes away, even for angels.) He has terrific fashion sense. He sings like Josh Groban. He’s left handed. He prefers tea over coffee.

These things are hardwired into his soul. I’ve spent so much time with him that I can “feel” these things about him. Sure, I’ve translated them into “humanese” (not really a word, but I hope you get the idea). But everyone’s soul personality gets translated into “humanese” when they choose to incarnate on Planet Earth, and it’s really not that hard to see a person’s true soul personality once you understand that God’s children are always God’s children — no matter where they happen to be living in the space-time continuum.

Gotta go. Time to go to work. Catch you later. Best wishes to you all.

Love Jen

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Posted in cataphatic mysticism, ethical mysticism, faith, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, My Spiral Path, mystic, prophets, Soul, soul blueprint, soul purpose | Leave a Comment

21 Apr 2011

TBM11: Four Basic Practices To Get You Started on the Spiral Path

This is going to sound like an awful thing to say, but some of the least intuitive people you’ll ever meet are the gurus — individual men and women who do nothing all day but focus on spiritual practice.

This applies to gurus from all world religions, all cultures, and all places. Regardless of what you call these gurus — monks, priests, nuns, saints, shamans, masters — you should always bear in mind that people who spend more than two hours per day (day in, day out) on intensive spiritual practice are not living a balanced life. They can’t be, because they don’t have time to be.

Intensive spiritual practices may include fasting, meditation, prayer, journalling, energy healing work, reading sacred texts such as the Bible, chanting, dancing, or (yuck) tantric rituals. There’s a lot of interest at the moment in these topics, and you can find many books about them. You can also find workshops and seminars where like-minded people get together to hone their spiritual skills together. Apart from tantric rituals and voluntary fasting, both of which are harmful to your human brain, there’s nothing wrong with trying these spiritual practices in small doses. The workshops can be especially healing, not so much for the content, but for the chance to spend time with other spiritually-minded people.

You should be very wary of any spiritual guru who insists you have to spend more than two hours per day in total on practices that are specifically spiritual or religious and that have no other purpose. For instance, while you’re engaging in single-point meditation, that’s all you’re doing. You’re giving it your full attention. Obviously, then, if you’re meditating for three hours, you’re not at the same time cleaning your house or cooking your meals or caring for your children or reading the newspaper. You’re making a choice about how to spend your time. And time is the one aspect of Creation you can’t barter with. The clock keeps ticking, even while you’re lost in the Elysian Fields of spiritual bliss. Meanwhile, those dirty dishes keep piling up.

Anything in the human experience can become addictive. Anything at all. Pick a random topic, and with a little research you’ll stumble on the case of somebody who’s totally addicted to that topic, who’s obsessive and waaaaay out of balance around a topic that’s become “the centre of the universe” for him or her. These are the people who can’t hold a steady job, who can’t focus on higher education, and who can’t sustain long-term monogamous relationships. They drive the people around them crazy. Some of them end up on reality TV shows. And some of them end up as religious or spiritual gurus.

I’m a practising mystic, which means I have a daily mystical practice. I spend about an hour in the morning and about an hour in the evening on the intensive “mystical” aspect of my life. In between, I do normal, everyday things. I eat normal, regular food. I spend time on personal appearance and hygiene. I think about the people in my life. I go to work. I read, research, and write. I do my own shopping, my own cleaning, my own baking. I wash and repair my own clothes. I look after my car. I spend time with friends and family. Then I get my minimum of 8 hours of sleep to help me stay healthy. (I insist on a good night’s rest.)

You know how much time this takes?

Yeah, you know. Because you’re a normal person, too, and you’re wondering how the heck you’re supposed to fit time-intensive spiritual practices into your daily life.

Your guardian angels know all this. Their goal is to help you find some balance in your life. They know it’s hard for you to maintain balance when there are so many competing demands on you. They know you won’t be able to find and maintain the balance point unless your intuition is on-line. Therefore, they know it’s in your best interests for your biological brain to be as healthy as possible.

Right now you’re probably thinking, “Oh, no! Now she’s going to give a big long list of rules I have to follow and foods I have to eat and supplements I have to take and exercises I have to do, and I just feel so overwhelmed I think I’m going to barf!”

Actually, though, I’m going to suggest a very simple daily practice for you that even a busy family person can incorporate into the daily routine.

There are only four basic things you need to do each day in order to get your feet fully onto the Spiral Path of spiritual growth, healing, and transformation. These four things are designed to help you heal your brain’s intuitive circuitry as fast as possible. Of course, it should go without saying that this 4-part practice is not meant to replace the treatments your medical doctor has prescribed for you. It’s meant to supplement any treatments you’re receiving. Over time — and I stress that considerable time is needed for all forms of healing, whether allopathic, alternative, or spiritual — you may notice an improvement in your physical health.

Here are the Four Basic Steps — the cornerstone, if you will, of the new foundation you’re building for your brain and soul.

Each day, eat three balanced meals.
Each day, repeat the promise you’ve written to yourself for yourself.
Each day, reflect on three things you’re grateful for.
Each day, learn one new thing (excluding sports scores and entertainment news).

Notice that you can accomplish much of this list simply by reading the newspaper while you’re eating a balanced breakfast that includes protein, fats, and carbs.

Of the four things on this list, the one you’re probably least familiar with is No. 2: “Repeat the promise you’ve written to yourself for yourself.” You’re probably wondering what promise I’m referring to. Well, this is the promise that’s going to help certain important regions of your brain figure out what their job is.

Believe it or not, your brain is not a single organ in the way your heart is a single organ. Your brain and central nervous system actually consist of several different semi-autonomous sectors, each with a specialized job. No one part of the brain is in charge of everything. Each part relies on other parts for feedback and instructions. Other writers have likened the operation of the brain to a symphony orchestra, and I think this analogy is a very good one. All the sections are there and ready to play, but in order to create music that’s filled with balance, harmony, order, and rhythm, they need two important elements: the sheet music (perhaps memorized) and the conductor. The sheet music gives each orchestral section its instructions. The conductor provides the emotional leadership.

In the orchestra that is your brain, the promise you make to yourself each day is the sheet music.

And you yourself are the conductor.

A lot of people understand that they’re the conductor of their own thoughts, feelings, and actions. But not many people realize how crucial the sheet music is to the balanced, holistic functioning of their own brains. Take away the sheet music — the overall set of instructions that coordinates all the sections —- and you get exactly what you’d expect: an overall lack of coordination.

This may sound very simple and very obvious, but you’d be astonished how few medical doctors, neurological researchers, or theologians understand this principle. Neuroplasticity — the ability of the brain to change itself — works most efficiently when you give your own brain some sheet music to follow.

Having sheet music can be a good thing or a bad thing, of course. Neuroplasticity can work in “negative” directions as well as in “positive” directions. If you feed your brain a steady diet of grim, depressing, pessimistic, violent sheet music, the various sections of your brain will conclude that that’s their job, and that’s what they’ll play. They’ll play exactly what you’ve told them to play because that’s what they’re designed to do. Fortunately, these same regions of your brain will start to play a different tune if you give them a whole new folder of sheet music to focus on.

That’s where the promise to yourself comes in.

Your biological brain can and will make changes to its wiring patterns, but only if it’s sure you really, really want the changes. This apparent sluggishness on the part of your brain is intentionally wired into your DNA. After all, you wouldn’t want your entire brain to rewire itself every day on the basis of a whim or a passing fad. That would be counterproductive.

There’s a reason it takes about 6 weeks for a new neuron to grow inside your brain. You can’t speed up this process, but you can make sure your brain gets the message every day that it’s not a waste of precious biological resources to be building a bunch of new neural networks.

And make no mistake — you have to make sure there’s a steady supply of biological ingredients on hand if you want your body to divert resources into the energy-intensive task of building new neurons and glial cells. That’s why you need to eat three balanced meals each day.

This is also why I think voluntary fasting for more than two or three days is harmful to the brain. Put simply, you’re starving the brain of nutrients it needs in order to continually restructure interconnections between brain regions (or sections of the orchestra) for optimal “performance” (including optimal performance of your complex intuition circuitry).

I also find it most interesting that 6 weeks is 42 days — eerily similar to the 40 days of fasting and seclusion that pops up so often in the traditional mystical teachings of different religious movements. Forty days of fasting, prayer, and seclusion is just enough time to harness the power of neuroplasticity in negative ways that diminish the overall functioning of the brain.

Coincidence?

I doubt it.

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Posted in brain-soul connection, building your intuition, gratitude, healing, intent, meta-choice, My Spiral Path, mystic, Soul, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

16 Mar 2011

1 Comment

TBM8: Grief, John Edward, and the Lies "Psychic Mediums" Tell

Okay. I admit it. I’m upset that Dr. Oz’s widely watched TV show featured a half-hour segment on psychic medium John Edward yesterday (March 15, 2011).

I’m upset because John Edward — with Dr. Oz’s tacit approval — told millions of vulnerable people that anyone — anyone at all — can talk with dead people with some basic training.

This is simply not true.

This morning on doctoroz.com I checked the excerpt from John Edward’s newly published book Infinite Quest, and I got even more upset. I got upset because his advice is likely to harm people, not help them.

On yesterday’s show, John Edward used the terms “intuition” and “psychic power” in ways that imply he believes they’re the same thing. He sat in a chair beside Dr. Oz and briefly described three steps people can use to “harness [their] psychic power,” as the shows producers describe it on the website.

I’m upset because I remember clearly how eagerly I embraced the same ideas being put forward by John Edward and many other “spiritual teachers,” and I remember just as clearly how disappointed, frustrated, and unworthy I felt when none of these ideas worked. I remember how much I blamed myself for my failure to connect quickly and simply with my angelic guides (the quick and easy connection that was promised by irresponsible authors). Sure, I was naive. Sure, I didn’t hold these authors to a high enough ethical standard. But I doubt I was alone in being naive. People are desperate for spiritual answers that make sense. So they take chances with these “new ideas” that aren’t new at all. They try the “new ideas.” The “new ideas” don’t work. And people end up blaming themselves.

This kind of spiritual abuse needs to stop.

In my highly trained opinion, John Edward is not a fraud in the way people might assume he is. He’s not a liar or simply a clever mentalist, as some critics have claimed. If he were simply a liar or a clever manipulator (as most self-proclaimed “psychics” are), his behaviour and his choices would be understandable — such as “he’s in it for the money” or “he’s in it for the attention.” In the case of John Edward, I think it’s more complicated than that. I think he actually has a natural, hardwired talent for channelling, and I think he’s misusing it. Grossly misusing it. I think this is more damaging to other people than intentional fraud would be. Why is it more damaging? It’s more damaging because more people are willing to trust him, to give him the benefit of the doubt. He gives off a vibe of legitimacy. Therefore people think he knows what he’s doing.

But he doesn’t.

If he knew what he was doing — if he could explain it in scientific terms, psychological terms, religious terms, and emotional terms — he would never go on TV and tell millions of desperate people that anyone can talk to the dead if they really want to and if they really try hard enough. This is grossly irresponsible. It’s also scientifically invalid and insupportable.

I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to be misled or misguided by this kind of New Age crap. I want you to understand clearly what’s possible and what’s not possible for human beings who are trying to follow the Spiral Path.

One thing I want to make very, very clear is that “human intuition” is not the same thing at all as “psychic power.” Human intuition is a normal, natural human attribute that all human beings are born with. All people are born with it. But many people lose access to this attribute as they reach adolescence and adulthood. Why do they lose it? They lose it because they haven’t “used” it. But this is no different than any other advanced human faculty. The entire brain operates on a “use it or lose it” model. So the fact that many adults have lost access to their intuition is no surprise from a scientific viewpoint. Intuition isn’t a “special” gift or a “gift of grace” or an “advanced” gift or an “enlightened” gift. Intuition is supposed to be a normal part of life for everybody. Except that it rarely is (for reasons I’ll have to come back to at a later time).

When people talk about “psychic power” they’re not talking about intuition. They’re talking about the “ability” to accurately see and hear and understand other people’s thoughts. They’re talking about “abilities” such as telepathy. They’re talking about reading “messages” that have been placed within the collective unconscious. They’re talking about the “ability” to access AT WILL bits and pieces of “hidden knowledge” that’s believed to be unavailable through sight or hearing or taste or touch or smell. They’re talking about tapping into the so-called unified energy field of the universe and extracting information from it in the same way you’d do a Google search on a topic of your choice.

Nobody on the planet has psychic power. Not even a channeller or a mystic. I’m a highly trained channeller, a highly trained mystic, and I’m telling you as honestly and as clearly as I can that God does not give anybody anywhere at any time the “ability” to “telepathically” pluck out somebody else’s thoughts from inside their heads.

To do so would be a violation of their personal boundaries, their personal integrity, their personal “space.”

It doesn’t matter whether the person you’re trying to “psychically read” is alive or dead. A person whose human body has died has a continuing existence as a person-of-soul, a person who’s molecularly challenged, a person who’s currently residing at a 4D address at Home (on the Other Side). The point is that it’s not appropriate for any human being to try to invade the thoughts and feelings of a soul on the Other Side. It’s like showing up at somebody else’s house in the middle of the night and banging on the door without any respect for the other person’s thoughts and feelings. It shows a profound lack of empathy. Don’t do it. John Edward says you can do it. But there’s a difference between something you “can” do and something you “should” do. You certainly can bang on the door if you want to. But, you know, it wouldn’t be the most loving choice you could make.

Maybe you think I’m being unduly harsh. After all, it’s normal for people to wonder how their loved ones are doing after they pass on. It’s normal to want to feel a continuing connection with a loved one who has died.

So let me give you a personal example. My own.

As you may recall if you’ve read my profile, I’m a bereaved mother. My younger son died of leukemia when he was 3 years old (1989). He was a precious, adorable person, and I never doubted that God had taken him Home to care for him. I still don’t doubt for a moment that my son is with God. And I’m a channeller. So I can talk with angels on the Other Side (not all angels, but some angels). And I can “see” and “hear” and “understand” with great clarity what angels choose to convey to me. So you’d probably expect that I’m talking to my deceased son all the time, right?

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

It just wouldn’t be appropriate. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean I’ve received no communications about him. Quite the opposite, in fact. I received some very clear signs — blunt, obvious, visible “signs” — just before he was diagnosed, then again during the course of his treatment, and finally just after he died. These signs were external signs, things that were visible to my human senses. They weren’t channelled, they weren’t psychic, they weren’t intuitive. They were visible signs — such as the pure white peace dove (a bird not found in nature in my area) that landed on the grass outside our kitchen window one morning. The appearance of the dove “felt” like a message. I can’t define exactly why it “felt” like a message. It just did. Anyone who’s had a similar message around an important relationship will know what I mean.

My job as a channeller and mystic is not to go banging on God’s door demanding answers and information when it suits me. My job is to listen patiently and wait for a time that’s mutually conducive for both God and myself (or a time that’s mutually conducive for an angel and myself, if it’s an angel I’m waiting to talk to. When it suits him or her.)

When the time is right for God and I to get together to talk, I’m only able to hear what God wants me to hear. It’s like any other conversation — God talks, I listen and respond, then God responds. It’s guided by mutuality and respect and spontaneity. I don’t pick and choose what to “tap into.” If there’s a question God prefers not to answer at a particular time, then God chooses a different topic. This is fine by me, because I trust that God knows what they’re doing.

What I’m trying to get at here is that I’m not “psychically reading” or “telepathically reading” anybody’s private, internal thoughts and feelings. I can’t hear what you’re thinking right now (nor would I want to!) and I can’t hear what God the Mother and God the Father are thinking right now. I don’t hear thoughts. What I hear is communications that are directed specifically towards me. I hear angelic messages that angels have chosen to “upload” in a form I can hear inside my biological brain. (I do this by using a combination of my natural soul talent plus my vigorous practice of daily brain health.)

A good analogy is cell phones. If you’re a person without profound hearing loss, you can hear what a friend is choosing to say to you over the phone. You can hear the communication that’s directed towards you by your friend, but you can’t hear your friend’s unspoken thoughts. Your friend’s thoughts are private. And they should remain that way.

My talent as a channeller and mystic means I can receive specific communications that specific angels specifically intend me to receive. If you were to ask me today to do a “reading” on a loved one of yours who has passed, I would say no. I don’t have that person’s permission to initiate a “cell phone conversation.” If a particular person-of-soul wants to get in touch with me, they do so through my own guardian angels — sort of like a “forwarded message.” I can’t hear the communications of all angels. I can only hear the communications of specific angels, including, in my case, the soul who once lived as Jesus. But I can’t hear diddly-squat from other “famous” angels, and I don’t even try. I learned a long time ago that every legitimate channeller has limits. Very detailed, specific limits on who they can and can’t hear. These limits are unique to each channeller. Therefore my limits aren’t the same as John Edward’s limits. But we both have limits.

Any “psychic medium” who tells you they can hear anyone who’s passed on, including any famous person you’re interested in connecting with, is lying to you.

Either that or they’re lying to themselves. Which is what I think John Edward is doing — lying to himself.

Lies don’t help grieving people. Faith in a loving God helps grieving people, but lies just make the pain worse.

I think I’m in a pretty strong personal position to have a comment on the topic.

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), boundary issues, building your intuition, life and death, mystic, mysticism, Soul, The Blonde Mystic and tagged ethical mysticism

20 Jan 2011

TBM7: Picturing Your Own Soul

If you’ve decided to try the Spiral Path and see if it works for you, how should you picture your own soul?

The short answer is this: you should picture your own soul as yourself — as the human being you are.

Picturing My Own Soul (c) JAT 2013

For example, if you’re an African-American man, you should picture your soul as an African-American man. If you’re a gay African-American man, you should picture your soul as a gay African-American man (because when souls are created by God, some souls are created homosexual and some souls are created heterosexual). If you’re a man who can’t go outside without your beloved hat, you should picture your soul wearing your favourite hat.

Okay. Now for the long answer.

Over the past few thousand years, many different theories about the soul have been presented in many different cultures and religions. If you read enough books, you eventually start to see some patterns that cut across cultural and religious lines. In other words, there’s a selection of soul theories that seem to pop up everywhere. These theories are not restricted to just one religion or one historical period.

Most devout religious believers, regardless of their faith tradition, don’t know this. They believe there’s only one theory of the soul — the theory they themselves have been taught. But factually speaking, there are many theories about the soul. When you line up these theories beside each other, you quickly see they’re mutually contradictory. They can’t all be true.

For instance, if you accept Plato’s theory that the soul is preexistent, immortal, and indivisible, then theoretically you can’t at the same time accept the Roman Catholic belief that the soul is not preexistent. (Sadly, this contradiction has never stopped most Christian theologians from believing in both theories at the same time. But that’s another story.)

Many people, in their frustration about the lack of church guidance on the matter of the soul, have turned for answers to Eastern traditions about the soul. Here we encounter theories about the chakra system — internal “wheels of light” — along with related theories about astral or auric bodies. The goal here is to cleanse the various energy fields and and raise one’s vibration so enlightenment can be achieved. There is always a sense here — as in Gnosticism — that the chakras and astral bodies are in some way separate from and spiritually superior to your physical biology. The doctrine of karma is central to these energy-field belief systems.

I wasted a lot of time — years, in fact — trying to “raise my vibration” and “release my negative karma” through the methods recommended by these spiritual teachers.

I was eventually saved from further emotional and financial hardship by my kick-ass spiritual mentor — and I mean that quite literally. The soul who once lived as Jesus kicked my ass around the block more times than I can count until I finally got it through my thick skull that I was making things way too complicated.

Keep it simple, keep it sane, was his particular brand of teaching on the matter of the soul. Why look at ancient texts and grandiose teachings, said he, when you have perfectly sound knowledge available to you in the form of neuroscience?

It took me a while to accept his no-nonsense, logical approach, but I couldn’t argue with the compassion and trust that grounded all his insights.

“Look,” said he (his command of English idioms being exceptional), “your body is not just some old lump of clay with a spark of light that belongs to God. That’s just stupid. It’s a lot more complicated, and a lot more miraculous, than that. Your inner spark, your inner wisdom, doesn’t belong to God. It isn’t a piece of God. It’s you. That inner wisdom is you — your true self. Your consciousness. Your selfdom.” (Selfdom? thought I.) “Give God some credit,” continued my molecularly challenged teacher. “This is a scientific question. The question isn’t, ‘Do I have a soul?’ The question is, ‘How the heck is it scientifically possible for God the Mother and God the Father to downshift my soul’s 4D energy blueprint into a 3D body?’ Human science can’t answer that question. Even angels have a hard time grasping the science. But it’s science, not some sort of weird cosmological voodoo. Your DNA holds your soul data — the stuff that’s unique to you. Plus it holds all the biological data you need for human survival. Your DNA is a powerhouse miracle. It allows you to live here temporarily as a biological being. It gives you all the basic tools you need for you to be you. It’s totally fucking amazing.”

(Yes, he really does talk like that.)

This is why I picture my soul as a blond woman of Celtic descent. I know that as a soul — as a child of God — I’m female, not male. I know that as a soul — as a child of God — my sexual orientation is heterosexual. I know that as a soul — as a child of God — I “recognize” myself when my hair is blond. Sure, it’s my Irish and French DNA that dictates my fair complexion, and my eye colour (grey-blue), and my height (5’6″), and my bone structure (slim). But it’s not random. God the Mother and God the Father made sure that when it was time for me to incarnate as a human being I would have the correct DNA package for me. The best match possible between human biology and my unique soul blueprint.

Although like so many people I once judged everything about my body (too skinny, bust too flat, eyes too small, skin too blotchy, blah, blah, blah), I now feel terrific in the body I’m in. I feel grateful for the human form I have. I feel grateful because my body allows me to be me. Not just me as a human, but me as an angel-in-temporary-human-form. It’s the best of both worlds, you might say.

Literally.

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Posted in brain-soul connection, Gnosticism, My Spiral Path, mystic, orthodox teachings about the soul, Soul, soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic and tagged spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

05 Jan 2011

TBM5: Keep It Simple, Keep It Sane

Over the years, I’ve observed that when I read a book about a particular religion or a New Age healing method, the first thing the authors want to explain to me is their cosmology. Each author seems to believe wholeheartedly that if I don’t understand the cosmology behind the religion, I won’t be able to benefit from the religion’s teachings. Hence I’m typically presented with a myth that reveals to poor unenlightened me the “truth” about the origins of the universe, the origins of God, and the origins of evil. I’m given names. Dates. Places. Lists of historical events. Lists of family descendants. Sometimes I’m given prophecies about future events. All this is revealed to me so I’ll better understand why I must follow all the steps required by the religion or the spiritual movement in my quest to connect more deeply with God.

These are all “top down” approaches to spirituality. The “top down” approach to religion, faith, and spirituality can also be described as the “fiction writer’s guide to the universe.” Any speculative fiction writer worth his or her salt can construct an elaborate Creation Myth. One of the best known speculative fiction writers of this ilk is J.R.R. Tolkien, whose lovingly crafted books about Middle Earth could easily be mistaken for religious revelation. The sheer scale of Tolkien’s cosmology is breathtaking, its impact, transformative. Yet it’s pure fiction.

So even though I’m a mystic, and even though I cut my writing teeth as a fiction writer (unpublished), I think it’s wrong for me to use a “top down” approach. It’s wrong for me to present you with a huge Creation Myth and expect you to believe it simply because I say so. That’s what religious leaders such as Christianity’s Apostle Paul once did. These religious leaders expect you to have blind faith.

Like many people today, I think blind faith is exactly what it sounds like — blind. Intentionally and wilfully blind. No different than putting on a blindfold and walking into a busy street in the arrogant belief that God will protect you from injury because of your faith. That’s not faith. That’s narcissistic pride.

I recommend a “bottom up” strategy of spiritual healing. This was the approach taken by the physician-scholar we know as Jesus of Nazareth. (Don’t worry, I’m not going biblical on you. There’s hardly anything in the Bible about Jesus’ actual teachings.)

Try to keep the table in your spiritual kitchen uncluttered. Take things one step at a time. Your brain has to change as you change, so don’t feed it too many new spiritual ideas at one time. Photo credit JAT 2020.

A “bottom up” strategy has many advantages. The first and most obvious advantage is that the “bottom up” strategy is equally available to all people regardless of gender, class, religion, socio-economic status, age, or physical health status. You don’t need special training or special credentials to access this strategy. Most of all, you don’t need pots full of money. (You’ll need some money, but that’s because everyone in the 21st century needs money to buy food, shelter, medicine, and other basic life necessities.) This is what I mean when I say you need to keep it simple.

A second advantage is that you don’t have to “check your brain at the door.” You don’t have to choose blind faith over reason. You don’t have to choose religion over science. On the contrary, you’ll need all the resources available to you inside your own brain and mind. You’ll be working your brain harder than you ever thought you could. This is what I mean when I say you need to keep it sane.

A third advantage is that you’re allowed to have a sense of humour and you’re allowed to make mistakes. (Maybe you take those two things for granted, but trust me when I say that fundamentalist religious leaders — teachers of the “top down” approach — have no tolerance for either humour or mistakes.)

A fourth advantage is that I don’t have to explain to you in gory detail each and every advantage of this strategy. You’ll figure it out for yourself as you go along. You’ll gradually figure it out at such a deep, unshakable, core level that the insights you achieve will be totally yours and nobody will be able to take them away from you. Ever.

Today’s thought is this: Spiritual leaders who insist on the “top down” approach are telling you that they believe in the “ladder of spiritual ascent.” They’re telling you they believe there’s a soul ladder where “bad” souls are at the bottom and “good” souls are at the top. They’re telling you this even if they don’t use the word “soul.” Listen carefully to the words these leaders use. Do they speak often in black-and-white symbols? Do they demand that you believe in black-and-white pairs of polar opposites such as good-versus-evil, male-versus-female, enlightened-versus-unenlightened, corrupt-body-versus-purified-mind? (You can probably think of many other examples.) Use your own experiences and your own common sense to challenge these claims.

Make a list of five pairs of polar opposites that you think might be impeding you personally on your own Spiral Path. Don’t make a list of 50 or 100 pairs, because that’s too much information for you to work with. You can start with a list that has more than 5 pairs on it, but take some time to reflect on your longer list, and whittle it down to 5 pairs (or as close to 5 pairs as you can get). This will be plenty for you to work on.

This is an example of keeping it simple. There’s no point sweating over a huge long list because your biological brain simply CANNOT deal with that much complexity and that much pain at one time. Don’t even try. Just pick 5 pairs (or thereabouts), and post them where you can see them every day. This will help your biological brain remember what your goals are.

Looking back on the beginning of my own spiritual journey, I would have picked these five pairs to work on:

Good souls versus evil souls (because I believed then what many spiritual writers were saying).
Worthy souls versus unworthy souls (because I’d fallen into the trap of believing I wasn’t worthy of God’s love and forgiveness, though I believed other people were worthy).
Humbleness versus humility (though I doubt I could have formulated a distinct definition for these two at the time).
Selflessness versus selfishness (at the time, I thought these two were polar opposites, and as a result, I allowed myself to become a co-dependent doormat in more than one relationship).
Perfectionism versus forgiveness (this pair kept me occupied for several years).

See why you should only pick 5 pairs? Just being honest with yourself about 5 pairs is enough to make anyone throw up.

Even one pair is pretty intimidating in the beginning. But you have to start somewhere on the Spiral Path of learning who you are as a soul, and this is as good a place as any.

As we shall see, this examination of your own polar opposites has a biological purpose, a definable, quantifiable biological purpose that will help you heal your biological brain. That’s what “bottom up” teaching is all about — it’s about starting with the tools you currently have (i.e. your biology) and maximizing the DNA you were born with so you can be the best person you’re capable of being. It’s about starting with the foundation God has given you (that’s the “bottom”) and strengthening that foundation through your own spiritual initiatives and your own hard work. Building outward rather than upward. Building outward changes and connections in your family, community, and workplace rather than building castles in the sky. Building outward with roads and schools and hospitals until you can touch the hand of your neighbour.

Maybe you think this sounds too simple, too sane, not very mysterious, and even kind of boring. All I can say to that is . . . the Spiral Path is anything but predictable.

(Chortle, chortle).

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, dualism, faith, healing, My Spiral Path, mystic, Soul, soul blueprint, spiritual ascent, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy and tagged spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

24 Nov 2010

TBM2: The Spiritual Kitchen

Widdicombe-in-the-Moor (c) JAT 1997

To embark on a spiritual journey is to make a major commitment to oneself and to God. It’s a decision to be made in full consciousness and in good faith because it’s a decision that will change your life. You may not want it to change your life, but it will. That’s why it’s best for you and your family if you take your time on this journey of change. No need to rush things. Be kind and patient with yourself. The Spiral Path unfolds in its own way and in its own time. This is the way it’s meant to be.

Each person’s journey is unique. Therefore, it’s difficult to say with any assurance how the Spiral Path “should” unfold. There’s no one correct way to proceed. I could lie to you (as many faith leaders have done) and tell you there’s a strict set of rules you can follow that will get you where you want to go. That would be easy. But it would not be truthful. And it would not be fair to you as a child of God.

Having said that, there are some general guidelines that can assist all people, whether male or female, old or young, fully able or disabled, in ill health or good. The guidelines I suggest here are not biblically based, so if you’re looking for a biblically-based approach to spiritual living, you’ll need to look elsewhere; this is not the site for you.

The guidelines I suggest here have been generated through the lens of my own experience. There’s a lot of “me” in what I say here because I can only be me. You may find what I say here to be helpful to you on your journey. Or you may not. Everyone’s different. This, too, is the way it’s meant to be.

If I were to describe what it feels like to step onto the Spiral Path with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your body, and all your soul, I would say this:

I would say that it feels as if you’re stepping into a kitchen for the first time and learning how to cook. When you first step into the kitchen, you don’t know anything at all. You don’t know how the stove works (though the stove is in perfect working order). You don’t know the purpose of all the gadgets, dishes, pots, and measuring cups. You open the pantry cupboard and see a wall of wonderful ingredients, but they’re meaningless to you. You look with horror at all the cookbooks and profess sincerely that you’ll never be able to read and understand all those books. Your first instinct is to flee.

With time, patience, practice, and a sense of humour, you fumble your way through your first few recipes. You make mistakes. (No biggy.) Your casseroles never look the way they look in the recipe book photographs. You keep confusing baking soda and baking powder. You discover the hard way that too much salt or too little salt can ruin a whole recipe. At first, you’re very self-conscious and aware of all your mistakes. After a while, though, you gain a little confidence. After a while, you start to feel comfortable in the kitchen. You’re no longer intimidated as soon as you walk into the room. You start to feel kind of cozy there.

After you’ve tried a number of different kinds of recipes, you begin to get a feel for the ones you like, the ones you enjoy making, the ones you want to try again. You find your niche in the kitchen — the recipes that are “you.” The recipes you’re not afraid to take to a potluck dinner. The recipes you’re proud of, in a humble sort of way.

But before you can get to that stage, you have to survive the hardest part: the beginning. The beginning is the hardest part because you don’t know a darned thing. You don’t know what anything does or what anything means. It’s just a big, frightening, overwhelming mess as far as you’re concerned. It makes you want to scream and run away before you even get started.

The goal of this blog, therefore, is to talk about the beginning of the journey. I want to talk to you about the basic tools that are in your “spiritual kitchen” so you’re not afraid to use them. I want to walk you through the basics so you can find the confidence to become your own “spiritual chef.” Once you have the basic tools and the confidence you need, you can slowly find your own unique recipes for living a spiritual life of joy and faith and courage and love.

Many of the things I say here will be things you won’t find elsewhere. Not yet, anyway. I’m not experimenting with you, though. Everything I recommend here is something I’ve done myself at the suggestion of my faithful guardian angels. Twelve years ago, I was that person standing in the doorway of my own spiritual kitchen with no idea where to begin. Yet my angels took me by the hand and patiently led me step by step through all the cupboards and all the recipe books to show me how they worked. I cannot begin to express my gratitude for my angels’ persistence and devotion.

Now it’s my turn to “pay it forward,” to share with you what my angels have shared with me.

Yes, I believe in angels (though not in demons!), and I’ll be speaking often of guardian angels and how you can begin to interpret their ongoing messages to you.

Don’t be afraid of peeking into your own spiritual kitchen. Just take it a day at a time. It’s the best any of us can do.

Blessings to you today and always!

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Posted in brain-soul connection, building your intuition, insight, Mother and Father God, My Spiral Path, mystic, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic and tagged spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

23 Nov 2010

TBM1: My Mission Statement

I decided to start this blog as a place to talk about the everyday questions that everybody has when they’re on a spiritual journey. Practical questions. Realistic questions. Normal questions.

Yeah, sure, I’m a practising mystic, and yeah, I think a lot about philosophical questions (as you can tell from my blog Concinnate Christianity). But I’m also a normal middle-aged Canadian woman, and my everyday concerns are the same as everybody else’s. I’m part of a family where sometimes we all get along and sometimes we don’t. I have a job that’s good on some days, not so good on others. I have bills to pay, a car to keep on the road. I have friends I try to connect with. I have a few people I prefer not to spend time with. I have a reading list that’s hard to keep up with, and a “to do” list where certain things are more likely to get done than others. If you met me in one of the normal places where I hang out (such as my workplace), you wouldn’t guess that when I go home I plunge into an intense mystical practice of learning, researching, and channelling. You wouldn’t guess this about me because I’m a pretty normal person.

It’s my conviction that many normal people would like to be more spiritual in their lives, but they don’t know where to start. I remember this feeling of confusion. I had no idea where to start or what to do when I began my journey in 1998. The books I read didn’t help me much. In particular, the books I read didn’t tell me that my spiritual growth had to develop in tandem with the healing of my brain and central nervous system. It would have been nice to know, 12 years ago, that I would seriously obstruct my own spiritual growth if I insisted on ignoring the needs of my biological brain.

So this blog is devoted to practical ideas that will help you find ways to pursue your own spiritual path even as you continue to respect the needs of your human body and brain — and the needs of your everyday life.

You won’t find here a series of Divine Laws that you’re required to follow. On the other hand, you also won’t find a lot of wishy-washy cliches about world peace or spiritual ascension or “Secrets.” Divine Laws and wishy-washy cliches are a dime a dozen on the spiritual circuit. This blog aims for the unclaimed middle ground — the middle ground of balance, of intuition, of boundaries, of personal responsibility, and, of course, a life lived with joy and faith and courage and love.

Actually, it’s wrong for me to say this middle ground is unclaimed. Two thousand years ago, Jesus tried to stake it out for his followers. But, as we know, this didn’t turn out too well for him. It would be more accurate to say that the middle ground has been claimed from time to time over the centuries, but not often.

This blog is not intended to teach you how to be a mystic. This blog is intended to help you figure out who YOU are as a child of God.

Questions are welcome at realspiritik@gmail.com.

Thank you to everyone who has helped me on this sometimes crazy journey of life as a human being and a child of God. Thank you, blessed Mother God and Father God! You’re my heroes and my inspiration!

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Posted in ethical mysticism, healing, Kingdom teachings, My Spiral Path, mystic, relationship with God, The Blonde Mystic | Leave a Comment

08 Nov 2010

CC39: Confessions of a Blonde Mystic

When I was growing up, I had no inkling that one day I’d become a mystic.

I was pretty geeky, but not that geeky. When I was 10, I wanted to become an archaeologist. By the time I was 12, I was sure I was going to be a writer. By age 18, I wanted more than anything to fall madly in love and focus my whole being on the love of my life (whoever the heck that was!). By age 22, I was married and enrolled in graduate studies in art conservation. By age 25, I had settled down as a stay-at-home mom.

Nothing very mystical about that.

Where there hints about my mysticism-to-be? Did I have unexplained episodes of “transcendence” as a child? Did I “see” things that weren’t there? Or “hear” things that weren’t there?

Nope. I was a normal kid. I was a bookworm, and I wasn’t good at sports, and I was way too mouthy for my own good. (Still am.) But I didn’t have any unusual “episodes” when I was growing up; nor would I have received any encouragement for such from my famil. There was no enthusiasm in my family for religiosity. My family were nominal Christians, which meant we went to United Church services at Christmas and Easter. Sometimes my sister and I were sent to Sunday School, but these church experiences left little impression on me. The word “spirituality” was never mentioned.

Both my parents were eminently practical (having grown up during the Great Depression) and quite liberal and inclusive in terms of their values. So there was no talk around the dinner table about God’s true nature, or salvation, or apocalypticism. Acceptable topics of discussion included business and politics and law-abiding citizenship. I was a teenager in the early 1970’s, so, of course, there were numerous lectures about staying away from drugs, lectures which I took very seriously. To this day, I’ve never used street drugs, and I’m one of the few people I know who’s never tried pot. Not even once.

Yup. Still a geek, and proud of it.

The thing about genuine mysticism — the Real McCoy, as opposed to verifiable states of psychiatric dysfunction — is that genuine mysticism is not about random and unpredictable “transcendent episodes” sprinkled like chili peppers into an everyday bowl of bland and tasteless cream of potato soup. A genuine mystic (and frankly there aren’t a whole lot of them out there) is somebody who’s hardwired with a particular package of traits, learning styles, and talents. When these particular traits, learning styles, and talents are examined as a whole, a discernible pattern emerges, and if this pattern can be shown to be consistent over many years, then, and only then, can you say that a particular man or woman is a true mystic.

In other words, you can’t call somebody a mystic because he or she reports one or two unusual “episodes” of seeing or hearing or feeling the presence of the Divine.

This is just common sense. You wouldn’t call someone a professional artist on the basis of one or two beginner’s paintings. You wouldn’t call someone a professional mechanic on the basis of one flat tire correctly changed. Similarly, you shouldn’t call someone a mystic on the basis of one or two self-reported “events.” There should be a long track record of professional development and committed endeavour for practising mystics, as in any other field. This is the only way to prevent charlatans and fraud artists from ruining other people’s lives with their “predictions” and “divine assurances.”

What makes me a mystic (or a contemporary channeller, as I sometimes call myself), as opposed to a spiritual person or a person of deep faith?

Well, to turn it around a bit, is it possible for a spiritual person or a person of deep faith to also be a professional artist? Or a mechanic? Or a farmer? Or a teacher?

Of course! In fact, many people would suggest that if you hope to be a really gifted teacher (or mechanic or whatever), you need to bring all your faith and all your spirituality into your calling in a holistic way so you’ll be able to teach (or fix engines) from the heart. This, too, is just common sense.

For me, it’s the same thing. I’m a spiritual person and a person of deep faith, which makes me no different than the mechanic who starts and ends his day as a spiritual person and a person of deep faith. But where the mechanic delights in working on engines, and the teacher delights in guiding the minds of growing children, I delight in the work of a mystic, which is so philosophical and intellectual and esoteric that it would bore the living crap out of 99.9% of the people I know.

It’s my passion to delve each and every day into the deepest mysteries of Creation — questions about God, about the soul, about quantum biology, about who we are at both the quantum level and the emotional/creative level. My passion is to ask annoying questions, and my skill is to be able to hear the answers when they come down the quantum pipeline from God the Mother and God the Father. (And from Jesus, but that’s another story.)

Make no mistake — I both see and hear God. But it’s not random, and it’s not occasional. It’s an everyday part of my life as a mystic. It’s an everyday part of my life because I practised and practised and practised until I’d fully developed the talent I was born with. Through a combination of natural soul hardwiring plus committed human effort, I gradually “came into” my calling. It’s an unusual calling, to be sure, but it’s a genuine calling.

Everyone is born with natural intuition. I’m NOT saying I’m one of the few people who has intuition. Just the opposite, in fact. I think everyone can more fully develop their intuitive faculties and incorporate that aspect of their being into their daily lives. But intuition isn’t the same thing as mysticism. I want to be clear on that point. Like everybody else, I have normal intuition. But alongside that normal intuition I have another skill, a different skill, that not everyone is born with. I have what might be called, for lack of better terminology, an ability to accurately and consistently tap into the space-time continuum while in a fully conscious non-hypnotic non-drug-induced mystical state of connection to God.

One way to find a true mystic is to ask about favourite stories and films. True mystics always a special fondness for speculative fiction. Solar Sailor (c) Jamie MacDonald 2013. Used with permission of the artist.

One way to find a true mystic is to ask about favourite stories and films. True mystics always have a special fondness for well-crafted speculative fiction. Painting “Solar Sailor” (c) Jamie MacDonald 2013. Used with permission of the artist.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Space-time continuum . . . it sounds like something you’d hear on Star Trek. The original Star Trek. And you’d be right. You’re going to have to forgive me, though, because I can’t think of any other way to describe it. And besides, where would the Blackberry be today if not for the inspiration of Captain Kirk’s flip-phone communicator to urge inventors onward?

Did I mention I love the original Star Trek series? And TNG ain’t half bad, either? (I may like designer clothes, but, as you can tell, I’m still a geek at heart.)

P.S. I’m not a medium or a psychic, and I don’t believe in ghosts. So don’t ask me if my life is like “Medium” or “Ghost Whisperer” or “The Listener” or “Rescue Mediums” on TV, because the answer is NO.

My life is way more exciting than that.

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Posted in apophatic mysticism, brain-soul connection, building your intuition, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, faith, Mother God, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, relationship with God, religion and mental Illness and tagged cataphatic mysticism, ethical mysticism | Leave a Comment

06 Oct 2010

CC36: No Room in the Inn . . . or on the Spiral Path

I was reminded again today how much the spiritual journey for human beings can be likened to a spiral path.

Well, maybe less a spiral, and more a helix. Like a Slinky — from one direction (end-on) it looks like a simple circle, yet from the side you can see it’s actually a long, continuous, spiralling wire. Another good analogy is a DNA helix — long, complex, and spiralling, with no two points exactly the same. Both the Slinky and the DNA helix capture the idea that the spiritual path can sometimes feel like a circle (as in “I seem to going round and round in circles”), yet a closer examination of your experiences from the side angle will reveal you’ve also made some forward progress.

But, you know, from a strictly artistic point of view it sucks to call the spiritual path “the helical path.” Like, you can’t even doodle a helix on a pad of paper and have it make any sense to somebody who doesn’t know what a DNA helix is. But when you draw a spiral on a piece of paper, everybody can recognize the idea of going round and round in circles, while at the same time never being in precisely the same place. That’s why the image of the spiral path has been used in many periods and in many places to represent the spiritual path. Don’t mess with a perfectly good symbol, I say. So I’m sticking with the image of “the spiral path.” But, really, it feels more like a Slinky.

I got on this train of thought today because I suddenly decided to revisit Tom Harpur’s book The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2004). I bought this book when it was first published because I’d been reading Tom Harpur’s column on religion in the Toronto Star and I was curious to know more about his theories. The book was attracting a lot of attention from Progressive Christians in Canada because it seemed to offer a way out of the dangers of dogmatic, literalistic Christianity. It didn’t hurt, either, that before Harpur turned to journalism, he’d been a professor of Greek and New Testament at the University of Toronto. The guy had credentials. He had credibility.

When I’m reading any book, no matter what the topic, I read at two levels. I pay attention with as much objectivity as I can to the flow of the factual argument — what facts are being stated, what facts are being left out, what inconsistencies exist. But I also pay attention with my intuition, with my mystical side. Sometimes when I’m reading an alarm goes off in my intuitive circuitry, and I know there’s something fundamentally wrong with the author’s argument.

I may not know at a factual level what’s wrong, but I’ve learned to trust the kernel of insight I receive from my mystical side. My task at this point is to accept the challenge of closing the gap between the factual reading and the intuitive reading — to do more research on the factual side so I can understand in an objective, logical way why my “gut” is reacting the way it’s reacting to a particular author.

It often takes me years — years! — to do enough academic research to get to the point where I can close the gap between the factual reading and the intuitive reading of a book.

To give a specific example, it’s taken me 6 years to close the gap between my factual reading of The Pagan Christ and my intuitive reading of The Pagan Christ. It’s taken me 6 years on the spiral path of spiritual (and academic) learning to figure out why I was so incensed at an intuitive level when I first read Tom Harpur’s book.

The information I needed didn’t appear to me in the form of a “revelation,” a “vision,” or a “prophecy.” I had to slog through sixteen half-courses in topics such as New Testament, Old Testament, early church history, and church liturgy, plus I had to research and write a long academic research paper (also called a short thesis or a cognate) on the topic of early doctrines of the soul. I had to work my ass off.

My goal in taking those courses wasn’t to challenge Harpur’s book. By the time I enrolled in graduate studies, I was focussed on other questions, other challenges, that occupied my time, energy, and enthusiasm. Nonetheless, with the hallmark unpredictability of all spiritual journeys, I accidentally discovered this morning that I now have the tools to challenge Harpur’s thesis. The tools didn’t come to me accidentally — but the realization of what I could do with the tools kind of snuck up on me.

Somehow the spiral path has brought me back to a book, an author, and a thesis that has been quite influential in the past few years.

Just for the record, I’m NOT going to do an about-face, and I’m NOT going to claim that upon revisiting Harpur’s book I’ve suddenly “seen the light” (pun intended). No way, Jose. To be ultra-clear, I don’t agree with Harpur’s thesis AT ALL — in fact, I’m more incensed today with the ideas in his book than I was when I first read them in 2004. The difference between then and now is that I’ve moved forward on my spiral path. I’ve added to my knowledge. I’ve added to my experience. I’ve added to my healing. I’ve changed, learned, grown. Most of all, I’ve worked hard.

God helped me at every turn (and I could never have accomplished what I’ve accomplished without God’s loving guidance), but the knowledge base I’ve built has come through conventional means — such as university courses, academic journals, and interdisciplinary research. Even though I’m a mystic, I did not acquire this new knowledge through revelation. I had to use the brain God gave me. What’s more, I had to use the free will God gave me. And I had to look after my body and my brain (i.e. choose a healthy lifestyle) so I could learn effectively. Just like any other person on Planet Earth. God did not make special rules for me.

Even though I’m a mystic, I have to follow the rules of healthy living and healthy learning that God wants everybody to respect. I’m able to communicate clearly with God the Mother and God the Father BECAUSE I use my free will to respect my body, my soul, my mind, and my heart in a balanced, holistic way. This life of balance lies at the core of the teachings of the man who once lived as Jesus son of Joseph.

I can’t emphasize enough how radically different this claim is when compared to the claims of traditional, ascetic, cloistered Christian mystics.

Or when compared to the claims made by Tom Harpur in his book.

Near the end of The Pagan Christ, Harpur says:

“So [Alvin Boyd] Kuhn can argue that you and I, in a profound sense, are never going to be more “dead” than we are right at this moment. He says, ‘Right now our deific souls are at the very bottom of the arc of death and can never be as dead again as they are now and have been.’ As we live our lives here, immersed in matter, we are gaining experience and expanding consciousness. But we are, in a deep sense, alienated from, or ‘dead’ to, the spiritual realm whence we originally came and to which we shall one day return (page 192).”

All I can say to this is . . . speak for yourself, buddy.

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, free will, Gnosticism, Jesus' teachings, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism and tagged religion + mental illness, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

03 Sep 2010

CC31: How God Listens To Your Soul and Not To Your Idiocy

I remember the day when I finally accepted the fact that God could hear all the nasty thoughts I was thinking. I wanted to throw up.

Up until then, I’d been trying hard to convince myself that “what happens in my head, stays in my head.” I was sure that my nasty, judgmental thoughts about other people were my own little secret. Sure, I felt guilty about those unkind thoughts. But as long as I didn’t express them out loud, nobody would know about them but me.

But then I decided I wanted to learn to be a mystic. It was a conscious decision. Nobody forced me to become a mystic. Nor did I have any big epiphanies or any life-altering visions or any sudden calls from God (i.e. conversion experiences). I simply thought it would be cool.

Photo credit JAT 2018.

I confess now, with the full benefit of 20/20 hindsight, that ten years ago, when I made this decision to learn to be a mystic, my motivation reeked of status addiction. This was not the best of motivations, as I’ve pointed out in earlier posts. I wanted to be “special,” and it seemed to me that “the mystical path” would be a good way for me to become “better” than others. I admit now that this was my motivation at the time, but ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been willing to admit this to myself. I desperately wanted to believe that I was becoming a mystic “for the benefit of others.” I wanted to believe that I was only a humble servant of God — a humble vessel of God’s will. Really, though, what I wanted at the time was the status that comes with being a mystic.

I wasn’t entirely devoted to my own selfishness, however. There was a part of me that genuinely yearned for a deep sense of connection with God. There was a part of me that was very . . . lonely. Very sad. There was a part of me that felt small and quiet and vulnerable, that wanted to reach out to God, but didn’t know how. This part, of course, was my soul. But I didn’t know that at the time. I was too busy filling up my head with New Age idiocy to recognize the voice of my own soul.

Good news, though. God was much smarter than I was, and God didn’t pay any attention to my ridiculously vain and selfish New Age/devout Christian prayers. God listened only to my soul. My soul was saying, “I want to remember how to love,” and that’s the only choice I made that God was willing to help me with. I must have offered up 20 selfish prayer requests for every time I asked God to help me learn how to love. God ignored the many selfish demands I made (thank heaven we have a God with common sense!), then God put my nose to grindstone on the one prayer I’d asked that was worth asking.

I had no idea that this one sincere prayer would be such hard work for me, my family, and God. I had no idea that I was literally asking God to help me rewire my entire biological brain.*

You would assume, naturally, that the process of rewiring a person’s entire biological brain would take a great deal of time. (It did). And a great deal of experienced help. (It did). And a great many changes in daily lifestyle. (It did). And a great many conscious changes in attitude. (It did). And many moments of painful insight. Plus setbacks. And moments of quiet healing. And tears along with great joy.

It did.

How I Felt At First - Photo credit JAT 2014

How I Felt At First. Although most of the time my brain felt rigid and full of selfish weeds, God saw the spring flowers waiting to bloom. My sincere wish to remember how to love was the trillium God saw and nurtured. Photo credit JAT 2014.

That’s what it felt like, and many spiritual seekers have described similar feelings. But inside my biological body, at a neurophysiological level, changes were taking place. My neurons and glial cells were changing, adapting, making new connections, breaking old connections. My immune system was changing along with my central nervous system (CNS). I was getting a gradual “internal CNS makeover.” This happened because my body was rewiring itself to accommodate my new regimen — my new regimen of remembering how to love.

If I’ve learned anything about the spiritual journey, it’s this: no human being anywhere on Planet Earth at any time in Earth’s history has ever been exempt from this biological reality. You are a package deal. You have a soul intertwined with your biological body, and you can’t find spiritual enlightenment if you’re abusing your physical body. It’s a scientific reality that nobody can escape (though most mystics want to pretend they’re exempt from these rules).

Eventually I realized that I was — am — a package deal, and that as part of this package deal, my thoughts and feelings are not hidden from God. My thoughts and feelings are an open book. I can try to fight this reality, or I can work with this reality. It’s my choice. If I try to fight it, I hurt myself, and I end up hurting the people I love. If I decide to work within this paradigm, and trust that God forgives me even when I make a mistake, then I’m using my free will in the fullest way possible. I’m using my free will to trust in God’s love and forgiveness. I’m using my free will to be in full connection and relationship with God. I’m using my free will to be open to their observations and suggestions for constructive change.

Of course, this paradigm pretty much implies that change is part of the healing process.

So . . . this also pretty much implies that religious leaders who reject change in favour of the status quo (status addiction) are not part of the healing process.

I’m very grateful to God the Mother and God the Father, plus the soul who once lived as Jesus son of Joseph, for being so patient and so firm and so consistent with me. They got me on track — the track I’d chosen of remembering how to love — and they never gave up on me. They stuck right with me, and they put up with a lot of abuse from me, until I got it through my thick head that my soul was — is — okay.

As for those nasty thoughts I used to have . . . I don’t have them anymore. Eventually I learned that those nasty thoughts were the “voice” (as it were) of status addiction. I was looking for a way to raise myself up inside my own head by putting other people down. (Yeah, it really is that simple!) When I confronted my own issues with status addiction, and stopped denying the harm I was creating for myself and others, I no longer needed the “high” of thinking nasty thoughts.

So I stopped.

It’s a great cure for that feeling of wanting to throw up because you’re carrying so much guilt, remorse, and embarrassment about your own nastiness.

* Only recently have neuroscientists come to understood how malleable and changeable the human brain is. This new field of research is known as “neuroplasticity.”

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, free will, healing, humility, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, prayer, Soul, status addiction and tagged ethical mysticism | Leave a Comment

09 Jun 2010

CC19: The Life of a Mystic: Welcome to Groundhog Day!

In 1993, Columbia Pictures released a modest film billed as a “romantic comedy fantasy” that stars Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. “Groundhog Day” continues to be a favourite for many people. It’s a feel-good movie, a tale of redemption. Bill Murray is in top form as TV weatherman Phil Connors, a man who starts out arrogant, nasty, judgmental, angry, impatient, and not especially talented or competent (although he thinks he’s quite brilliant). In short, he’s a typical middle-aged North American. By the end of the movie, he’s kind, empathetic, polite, patient, and very talented. At the beginning, he has no heart. At the end, he finds his true heart. Only then does the universe consent to release him from the time warp he’s caught in.

The film Groundhog Day is set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania on Groundhog Day (February 2). Photo credit: “Marmota monax UL 04” by Cephas – Own work, Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This film is about the the universe’s refusal to accept Phil Connor’s excuses for his nasty behaviour. As Phil gradually comes to understand he’s part of a bizarre karmic “catch and release” program, it’s apparent the universe also refuses to accept his initial handling of the situation. The universe steadfastly ignores his denial stage, his angry stage, and his depressed stage. Only when Phil decides he wants to be a kind, empathetic, polite, patient, talented person, and only when he decides that he likes being such a person, does time start to move forward again. The message is clear: Phil can’t control the environment the universe has chosen for him — the time warp reality of Groundhog Day — but he can control his own thoughts and feelings about the situation.

This film is the best representation I’ve seen of what it feels like to have a mystical connection with God.

That’s why I put it at the top of my list of “best spiritual films.” By way of contrast, I don’t have a spot for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” on my list of helpful spiritual films. To my way of thinking, “The Passion of the Christ” is a propaganda film, not a spiritual film.

“Groundhog Day” makes a number of powerful claims:

The universe (God) pulls out all the stops for everyone, not just for specially chosen Messiahs or the specially chosen sons of kings, presidents, and CEO’s. Phil Connors is a regular guy with a regular job, not a person at the top of the fame chart.
The universe (God) knows Phil isn’t choosing to be the best person he’s capable of being. The universe has an opinion on this.
The universe (God) never gives up on Phil. Despite Phil’s initial resistance, and despite the length of time it takes for Phil to decide he wants to be his best self, the universe is consistent and steadfast towards him. (This can be called God’s Tough Love.)
The universe (God) sets up the painful learning environment. God is in charge of this part, and no human can control it.
The universe (God) gives each person free will.
People can change.
People won’t change unless they want to (free will).
People are capable of amazing transformation once they decide they want to change.
It takes lots of time for changes to unfold. Redemption isn’t an instant process!
It takes lots of sincerity for changes to become permanent. You can fake out your neighbours, but you can’t fake out the universe. The universe (G0d) always knows your true intent, so you have to mean it when you say you want to change.
It takes hard work and consistent effort on the part of a person who wants to find redemption.
People need help from others as they struggle to change! They can’t do it on their own. They need help from people who care about them.
People make mistakes on the journey of change and redemption. That’s okay!
Engaging in active learning helps the process of change. (In the film, Phil starts to take courses — piano lessons and medical training, for example.)
Engaging in active service in the community helps the process of change. (Phil develops a Good Samaritan routine in the timeloop community where he’s living.)
The more Phil learns and the more genuinely empathetic he becomes, the more humble he becomes.
The more Phil learns and the more genuinely empathetic he becomes, the more dedicated he becomes to serving his community . . . and bonus — the help he offers is actually needed!
Phil finds his heart when he finds himself.
Once he’s found his heart, he’s still a regular guy. But now he’s able to trust himself. And he’s finally able to like himself. He feels inner peace at last.

This is the process I had to go through, so I can really relate to it. My “Groundhog Day” initiation into the journey of redemption lasted for years. I had no idea at first what I was trying to do, and I made the same mistakes over and over again, but — thank goodness for me and my family — my angelic guide refused to give up on me.

And the 19 point summary I’ve posted here is the work I had to complete BEFORE I could begin to call myself a practising mystic!

I tell ya’ — those angelic guides are tough sons of bitches. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Posted in cataphatic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, free will, healing, humbleness, My Spiral Path, mystic, Peace Sequence, redemption, trust and tagged cataphatic mysticism | Leave a Comment

08 Jun 2010

CC18: "Oneness" — The Great Bait and Switch

There’s something particularly insidious about the idea that “We Are All One.”

Yeah, I know, I know . . . it sounds wonderfully spiritual and enlightened to say “we are all One.” It sounds, oh, so inclusive, so un-American, so gentle and loving and soothing and healing. It sounds like the very opposite of our society’s social isolation and lack of love. It sounds like something the soul would say, doesn’t it?

These ripple patterns in a still lake were formed as single water droplets fell from the trees after a heavy rain. As souls, each of us affects the universe in the way these small water droplets bring wavelets to the lake. From a distance, it may look as if the waters of the lake are “all One.” But up close, each droplet affects the lake in unique ways. Christian mystics have too often looked at Creation from a distance and chosen to see it as “all One.” In fact, Creation is a marvel of diversity and uniqueness. It’s Divine Love that creates the background of calmness and beauty against which each soul — each droplet — can paint a small picture that says, “I’m here! I may be small, but I matter!” Together, countless small droplets flow and dance and weave together to create infinite wonders. Photo credit JAT 2015.

Millions of spiritual seekers think so. They’re out there trying to become “one” with God, “one” with Creation, “one” with each other. They’re trying with all their might to “let go.” They’ve been told by religious and spiritual teachers that they have to dissolve themselves and let go of their wants and needs in order to experience transcendence — a blissful sense of union with the oneness of all life, a sense that all boundaries have vanished, a sense that they’re finally free of all longing and suffering.

This, my friends, is not what mystical union feels like. This is what dissociation from your thoughts, feelings, and inner wisdom feels like. This is what the major mental illness called Atypical Dissociative Disorder feels like. Sometimes the dissociation is so extreme that the person can be said to exhibit psychopathy (also called sociopathy).

Many people will be furious with me for saying this. But it needs to be said. And it needs to be fully researched. There’s no excuse for the church — or anyone else, for that matter — to be teaching people to dissociate from their thoughts, feelings, and needs. This is reckless, dangerous, and abusive. It scars people’s central nervous systems, typically for life. It’s no different than driving a steel rod through their skulls, and turning them all into Phineas-Gage-lookalikes. (Phineas Gage was a 19th century worker who underwent a dramatic personality change after an industrial accident propelled a steel rod through his left cheek, into the orbitofrontal cortex of his brain, and out the top of his head.)

I am a practising mystic. I’m NOT a mystical wannabee who wants to be counted as a mystic but has never actually had a genuine mystical experience. Thomas Merton, famed 20th century Christian monk, contemplative, and writer on mysticism, died in his 50’s without ever having experienced a transformative mystical connection with God. Yet he wrote many books on the topic. I think he was a very sincere man, but I don’t think it was right for him to claim to be an expert on something he’d never figured out for himself.

Me, I don’t keep track of the many mystical experiences I’ve had in the past few years, because mystical experiences are now a normal part of my normal, everyday, Canadian life.

I live a normal Canadian life in most ways. I don’t live in a religious community, and I don’t live according to traditional Christian monastic rules. I have an apartment, a car, and a job. I take courses at the university. I get together with friends and family. I like to listen to pop music, and I love to watch TV (certain shows only, though).

Yet woven all around and within this daily life is a deep spiritual practice that yields a tremendous harvest of mystical connection with God. How have I managed to do this when dedicated, highly religious people like Thomas Merton have failed? I’ve managed to do this because I’ve discarded all spiritual teachings that insist “we are all One.”

We are not all One. To say that we should have empathy for other people is NOT the same as saying we are all One. Of course I believe we should have empathy for others. Of course I believe there’d be a whole lot less suffering in the world if more people had empathy for others. Of course I believe that to cultivate empathy is to walk the walk of a spiritual life.

But this isn’t what spiritual leaders mean when they say to you that “we’re all One.” They mean it literally — they mean there’s literally no real distinction, no real boundary, between you and your God. They mean that boundaries between you and other people are “illusion.” They try to use some of the recent findings from physics to “prove” that everything in the universe is really only a manifestation of one big blob of energy in the sky. (Yes, I’m being facetious).

When they say you’re One with God, they mean that if you try hard enough to shed all your humanness (like a snake shedding its old skin), you’ll be able to merge with that big blob of energy called Creator. In effect, you’ll become God, because you’ll be able to “remember” that your “inner spark” is God. Once you’ve achieved this wondrous state of perfection, you’ll no longer have to struggle with annoying human challenges such as forgiveness. You’ll be above illusory things such as forgiveness. What’s to forgive, after all, if the neighbour who harmed you is really just “you” in a different snake suit?

Isn’t it an interesting coincidence that when you fully embrace the idea that “we’re all One,” you don’t have to do any spiritual work anymore?

It’s a good life, being “One with the All.” You don’t have to struggle with messy feelings, because you’ve dissociated yourself from your healthy human emotions. You don’t have to feel guilt or shame about your choices, because all choices are illusory anyway. You can smile when other people are crying, because you’ve detached yourself from all that pain and grief stuff. You can go around pretending you understand what unconditional love is, because words are cheap when you’re disconnected from your own inner wisdom, disconnected from your own soul.

The true path of the soul — a path that has rarely been described in the history of Christian mysticism — is a path of finding yourself rather than losing yourself. It’s a path of finding out who you really are as the soul God made you to be. (Needless to say, everyone’s soul is amazingly awesome.) It’s a path of finding out what makes you a unique individual in a vast angelic family of other unique individuals (none of whom are better than you — they’re just different from you). It’s a path of learning how to deal with powerful, divine emotions such as love, gratitude, courage, devotion, and trust. It’s a path of honouring and respecting the differences between you and others (i.e. gender, race, age, talents, quirks, and “blind spots”), and at the same time rejoicing in what makes you the same (i.e. our innate ability to love, to learn, to change, to forgive). It’s a path of knowing who you are so you can know who other people are. It’s a path of respecting boundaries between you and other people. It’s a path of respecting boundaries between you and God.

Only then will you be able to enter into a mature and humble relationship with God the Mother and God the Father while you’re living your human life.

This is the path that Jesus has taught me.

I highly recommend it.

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Posted in apophatic mysticism, boundary issues, Concinnate Christianity, dissociation, empathy, ethical mysticism, My Spiral Path, mystic, oneness, psychopathy, Soul and tagged ethical mysticism, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

31 May 2010

CC16: The Difference Between Mystics and Prophets

Washing the windows of the entrance pyramid at the Royal Ontario Museum is no easy task, and you shouldn’t try it unless you’re an expert and have the all the proper equipment. Teaching about the soul, the brain-soul nexus, and ethical mysticism is no different – it takes proper training. Going to a weekend energy-healing workshop doesn’t qualify you as an expert. Be patient, be humble, and take the time to overcome your own status addiction issues before you seek to become a mentor to others. Photo credit JAT 2017.

This morning, I happened to hear a radio interview with Mike Holmes, Canada’s famed “make it right” building contractor, teacher, and advocate for families in distress. Mike Holmes had been asked to speak about the home inspection business, and he was lamenting two current realities. First, many home inspectors have little or no hands-on experience in the contracting industry (so they don’t know what they’re talking about), and second, many home inspectors simply don’t care. The practical and ethical standards aren’t high enough, in Mike Holmes’s view, and this means that home buyers who rely on shoddy home inspection reports will end up with “lemons” — houses with major structural problems.

Anyone who has ever lived in such a house knows how stressful, how exhausting, how infuriating it is to be told there’s nothing wrong with your house, even as you watch your basement fill up with water after every rainstorm.

This is exactly how I feel about the “mysticism business.” Practical and ethical standards are pretty much non-existent in this field. And I’m not talking here about the charlatans and the New Age preachers who knowingly take advantage of vulnerable people. I’m talking here about the church.

The orthodox Western church has given itself prime credentials as THE “home inspectors of the soul” without having any solid knowledge, experience, or compassion to back this up. They hung out their shingle centuries ago, and it’s been hanging there for so long that most Christians just assume the church must know what it’s doing when it comes to “home inspections of the soul.”

But it doesn’t. When it comes to matters of the soul, the church is no different than the slipshod home inspector who tells you that a nice new coat of paint on your outside walls will fix your leaking basement. Just because a home inspector gives this advice loudly and often to all his clients doesn’t make it right. You can paint the upper walls as often as you like, and it won’t make a damn bit of difference to your crumbling foundations. The only way to fix the basement, of course, is to dig up all the soil around your house (even though it makes an ugly mess of your gardens for a while) and methodically repair the hidden cracks. It’s a lot of work. But in the end it’s worth it.

If you’re an earnest spiritual seeker who wants to know more about your soul, don’t bother asking the United Church of Canada for guidance. They have no official answers for you. They would prefer that you not embarrass them with your questions about the soul. The soul, you see, is perilously close to being a four-letter word in the United Church lexicon. It’s no longer uttered in polite company. Polite company — which includes professors of theology and United Church ministers and policy makers — wants you to speak about grace and Spirit and God’s justice breaking in proleptically.* But they don’t want you to speak about the soul. They want you to be part of a soulless church — at least, that’s what they’re implying.

Mike Holmes worked as a hands-on contractor for many years before he signed on to do his first TV show. (If I remember correctly, he grew up in a home where his father worked in the building industry. Mike Holmes’s children, now grown, have also been learning the ins and outs of home contracting and home renovation.) People who watch Mike Holmes’s TV shows trust him. They trust him because they can tell he’s not an actor — he’s a real contractor who knows what he’s doing. People learn a lot from watching his shows, because he’s also a good teacher and a dedicated advocate. He puts his money where his mouth is.

I’m not a home renovator (even though I wield a pretty mean paint brush!), but I do have a particular talent, and I’m trained in what I do. My particular talent is mysticism. My talent isn’t better than anyone else’s talent. It’s different, but it’s not better. Like Mike Holmes, I have a set of professional tools, and I know how to use them. I also insist that these tools be used according to the highest ethical standards.

In my view, few Christian mystics in the history of the church have used their talents ethically.

Furthermore, many of the men and women who’ve been traditionally revered as Christian mystics have not, in my opinion, been mystics at all. Rather, they’ve been apocalyptic prophets.

There’s a big difference between a mystic and an apocalyptic prophet. I know this because of my experience, training, and academic research. The church, however, often doesn’t make a distinction between mystics and apocalyptic prophets. The church tends to conflate them — which is kind of like saying there’s no difference between a real contractor and a TV actor who doesn’t know which end of a hammer is up.

This is why the church’s doctrinal garden is filled with the weeds of teachings based on mental illness (i.e. apocalyptic prophecy). This is why the church’s doctrinal garden is filled with ancient traditions from Plato, from apocalyptic literature, from Paul, and from later theologians such as Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo, all of which have choked out the original teachings of Jesus.

The church’s teachings on the soul are filled with weeds (as on the left). Many people seem afraid that, if they pull out the weeds, they’ll have no tangible mystery teachings left to sustain the spiritual roots of the church. In fact, when the weeds are pulled, what remains is the beautiful underlying structure of the soul’s courage and goodness. Gardens (and churches) are always healthier and stronger when the weeds are pulled. Photo credit JAT 2014.

Jesus was a mystic — a mentally healthy person capable of holistic thought, empathy, intuition, creative learning, logical thought, industrious actions, and advanced philosophical inquiry. Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet — a mentally dysfunctional person demonstrating a consistent pattern of dissociation, dualistic thinking, narcissistic entitlement, anti-social behaviour, and a need to gain attention from admirers by making “divinely inspired” prophetic claims about the future.

Mystics are content to TRUST God, and have no need to make predictions about the future. Mystics know that God will do what God needs to do when God needs to do it. Mystics make no claim to having the keys to the future. Only those who don’t trust God insist on guarantees about what will happen and when it will happen. Bullies and narcissists are drawn to prophecy. Jesus was not a bully or a DSM-IV narcissist.

Mystics believe in the eternal soul in a positive, uplifting, holistic way, and they don’t try to scare the crap out of other people by making dire predictions about what will happen to somebody else’s soul. They believe that all souls are good because “God don’t make no junk.” Bullies and narcissists enjoy making threats about the fate of your soul because it gives them a twisted kind of high. It’s an addiction — not a very pretty one, but an addiction nonetheless — just like any other DSM-IV addiction problem.

Mystics (the real ones, anyway) are emotionally mature. They understand boundary issues. They understand that other people ARE other people. (Seriously dysfunctional people don’t see you as “real” in your own right, with your own distinctive personality — they see you merely as an extension of their own self-entitled needs, which is why they try to force you to comply with their wishes at the expense of yours.) Prophets love to give other people big, long lists of laws — required thoughts, required behaviours, which you’re expected to follow. Prophets tell you that their laws are divine laws. But most often the laws are designed to provide some sort of psychological relief to the prophet himself or herself. Usually, the laws entrench the “divine authority” of the prophet, and place the prophet in an elevated position. This is just narcissistic bullying in a more sophisticated form.

Mystics don’t talk about fearing God. Mystics talk about having a positive, mature relationship with God. Mystics don’t fear death. Mystics don’t believe in cosmic evil. Mystics don’t believe that human beings are more important to God than God’s other creatures. Mystics don’t believe that human laws are infallible. Mystics know that God is always listening and always acting in the world whether we pray for help or not.

Mystics trust in the fantastic goodness of God.

Apocalyptic prophets believe in their own power and their own status. They don’t trust anybody, especially not God.

Jesus was a mystic. He trusted God the Mother and God the Father. It’s time for the church to let Jesus’ teachings about God re-enter the hearts and minds of our community of faith in the twenty-first century.

It’s time for us to learn to trust our beloved God.

* If you don’t know what “prolepsis” means, then I’d like to suggest you’re a lucky person. You’ll sleep much better at night if you’re not wasting your time trying to embrace the scientifically impossible feat of time-travel.

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, boundary issues, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, historical Jesus, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, orthodox teachings about the soul, prophecy, prophets, religion and mental Illness, Soul and tagged ethical mysticism, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

17 May 2010

CC11: Okay, I’m a Heretic. But So Is Jesus!

Okay, I admit it . . . I’m a heretic.

I refuse to accept the teachings of orthodox Western Christianity on a whole bunch of topics.

I refuse to accept that God is “One.”

I refuse to accept that God is a “Trinitarian One.”

I refuse to believe that a cosmic evil force (called Satan, among other names) exists.

I refuse to accept that the sacrament of baptism has any magical powers to save people.

I refuse to accept that the sacrament of communion has any magical powers to save people.

I refuse to believe that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God or is the Saviour.

I refuse to believe that God’s children are unworthy of God’s love or incapable of having a relationship of integrity with God.

You might think this puts me in the camp of Progressive Christianity or Unitarianism. But wait! I’m not finished yet!

I also refuse to believe in a world where God the Mother and God the Father don’t intervene.

I also refuse to believe in a world where angels don’t exist.

I also refuse to believe in a world where miracles don’t exist.

I also refuse to believe in a Newtonian world-view. I’m a quantum gal all the way.

The church of today reminds me a lot of this porcelain lamp that belonged to my great aunt. The functioning parts that once held the light source have long since been lost. Only the forms and traditions of the base have been retained. The base is quite lovely, but without the truth of Jesus’ original teachings, the forms aren’t able to shed the full light of God’s love on our lives.

I’m a heretic as far as the United Church of Canada is concerned because I don’t believe that Jesus is our Saviour. And I’m a heretic as far as Progressive Christianity and UU adherents are concerned because I’m a mystic who believes in miracles.

But here’s the thing . . . (and you’re probably not going to like this part) . . . everything I currently understand about God, all my heretical ideas — I got them from the angel who once lived as the man named Jesus. This is what my mystical life has entailed: listening to Jesus. Just listening to what he has to say about God. Just listening with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind and all my strength to Jesus’ own take on what he said and what he did and what he was trying to accomplish in his life.

What Jesus has told me during thousands of hours of contemplative work over the past 10 years is radically different from what the United Church and the Anglican church taught me. It’s also radically different from what my theology professors have been teaching me. But what Jesus has been telling me isn’t “new.” It’s not a bunch of newly invented hot-off-the-press New Age hooey.* The evidence for what he’s been telling me is right in the Bible. It’s been there all along, sitting in plain sight for everyone to see.

The problem for readers is that the Bible doesn’t contain just one truth. The Bible contains a lot of competing storylines and a lot of competing agendas. It’s hard to sort them all out. It’s hard to figure out who said what, and, more importantly, why they said what they said.

Jesus has expended a lot of time and patience to help me understand the why. It took me years to understand the “why,” but once I did, I began to see that certain passages of the Bible resonate strongly with Jesus’ continuing message, and other passages sound like the opposite of Jesus’ teachings.

In my time working with Jesus, he has always insisted on rigorous scholarship. Therefore, as part of my mystical journey, I’ve had to learn the tools of biblical exegesis as they’re currently taught in a modern university setting. I’ve had to learn the basic grammar and vocabulary of Koine Greek. I’ve had to learn about church history, about the development of church doctrine over the centuries. I’ve had to read translations of Paul, Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo and the like. I’ve had to read the polity manual of the United Church of Canada from cover to cover (including the appendices). On the basis of my mystical work in combination with my ongoing academic training, I’m totally confident in saying that what Jesus taught his followers 2,000 years ago is not what the church has been teaching.

I’m a heretic because I’ve listened carefully to what Jesus has taught me about God, and I think Jesus is right.

So I’m a heretic because I think Jesus was (and still is) right when he says that the best model for understanding who God is is for us to think of the most wonderful set of parents possible, and go from there. (This would not exclude two wonderful homosexual parents!!)

I’m a heretic because I think Jesus was (and still is) right when he says that no single ritual such as baptism or communion can replace the need for people to take responsibility for their own choices towards other people, themselves, and God.

I’m a heretic because I think Jesus was (and still is) right when he says that institutionalized religion has never taught the faithful what forgiveness is.

I’m a heretic because I think Jesus was (and still is) right when he says that the true journey of faith is one of redemption, not one of salvation.

I’m a heretic because I think Jesus was (and still is) right when he says that the core consciousness of a human being — the soul — is beautiful, worthy, and amazing. The problem of suffering is not created by sinful souls. The problem of suffering is damage caused in the biological brain, damage that induces people to behave in abusive ways that make their own souls cringe.

I think Jesus is a pretty smart guy.

* If you want to see an example of what I mean by “newly invented hot-off-the-press New Age hooey,” I invite you to read a copy of The Mystical Life of Jesus by psychic Sylvia Brown.

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Posted in Bible, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, gender and sexuality, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Mother God, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism and tagged Jesus vs Paul, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

31 Mar 2010

CC6: Why I’m Hard On Scholars Who Study Mystics

One thing you’re bound to notice as you read my posts is that I’m very hard on mystics.

I’m also very hard on scholars and academicians who write about mystics.

Let me put it this way: in one of my recent theology classes, a senior professor recommended that we read Evelyn Underhill’s book Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness if we wanted to understand more about the nature of Christian mysticism. The problem I have with this book is twofold: (1) Evelyn Underhill was not a practising mystic herself, and was writing from an academic perspective, and (2) Evelyn Underhill first published her book in 1911. That’s one hundred years ago, folks. I can’t imagine in all honesty that I would be urged to study a 100 year old textbook in any other field. (Can you imagine what that would be like in a field like chemistry?) Yet this book is still in print, and is still available on the bookshelves of regular bookstores. (I bought a spanking new softcover copy at an Anglican bookstore in 2009). This kind of stubborn denial in the world of theology makes me want to metaphorically pull my hair out by its little grey roots.

For the sake of scholarly balance, a much more recent book that is well researched is The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, edited by Bernard McGinn (New York: Modern Library-Random House, 2006).

McGinn’s book is a collection of short pieces written by well-known and lesser-known Christian mystics over the past two millennia. He provides a short introduction to each mystic, but he allows the reader to hear the mystics speak in their own words. His approach is in sharp contrast to Underhill’s approach. Underhill, in my view, does not show an understanding of her own limits, and seems to believe she is within her rights to make factual claims about the characteristics and interior experiences of Christian mystics.

Thank you kindly, Ms. Underhill, but some of the mystical experiences you describe in your book sound to me an awful lot like various forms of serious mental illness, and I wouldn’t be recommending those pursuits to anybody who cares about their mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional health.

Of course, I understand that Underhill was writing her book at a time when research in the fields of psychiatry and psychology was still young, and advanced investigations in neurophysiology and neuroplasticity hadn’t yet been contemplated. I get that. What I don’t get is the church’s refusal to revise its theological understanding of mysticism in light of new neuro-psychiatric research. What I don’t get is the desire to shield the church from the realities of science, especially in the tricky areas of prophecy and mysticism. The Christian church was founded on prophecy (revelation) and mysticism. There would be no church without the claims made by early prophets and mystics. You’d think the church would desperately want to know how to use modern scientific advances to help them better understand what makes prophets and mystics tick.

Mystics who take themselves too seriously will be reminded by God to be more humble and more aware of their personal limitations. Mystics are no more important to God than any other human beings.

But, of course, if the church took the bold step of researching its closetful of prophets and mystics, some of its traditional heroes might not look so good anymore. And then the church would have to start rethinking some of its doctrinal positions.

You know, stuff like . . . oh, Original Sin. Adam and Eve and the Fall. The Devil. Judgment Day. All that kind of paranoid, obsessive-compulsive, DSM-IV-TR Axis I and II stuff. The kind of thinking that responds really well to a properly managed treatment course with olanzapine.*

Yeah, well, call me a cynic, but when you’ve had five years of experience working in a lay capacity in the field of psychiatry, it’s pretty hard not to think in psychiatric terms when you read some of the things that Christian mystics have written over the centuries.

As a practising mystic, I would never say that mystical experiences don’t exist or can’t exist. I would never say that all reported mystical experiences are the result of mental illness. I would never say that all reported mystical experiences are pure fabrication, either. But some reported experiences are caused by mental illness, and some reported experiences are pure fabrication.

The trick is to be able to sort out the genuine mystics from both the tragically mentally ill and the enthusiastic fakers. We need science on our side to do this.

That’s why I would like to see an introductory course on neuroscience as a requirement in the theological curriculum.

* olanzapine is the generic name for an atypical antipsychotic medication that is particularly useful in the treatment of schizophrenia and psychotic depression.

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, HDM Myths, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, prophecy, prophets, religion and mental Illness and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

24 Mar 2010

CC5: My Big Fat Idiot Stage

If you had asked me when I was ten years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said unhesitatingly, “An archaeologist!” I was in grade 5 when this fancy first came upon me. It seemed like a pipe dream then. I didn’t know any archaeologists. Up until then, an occasional summer’s day spent rock-hounding was the closest I’d come to the somewhat strange avocation of carefully sifting through ancient layers of dirt to uncover their buried stories. But when I was 10, I fell in love with the idea of archaeology. If the Indiana Jones movies had existed at that time, I’m sure they would have been my favourite films.

The house where we lived until I was about 5.

I wasn’t that far off, as it turns out. When I was in Grade 13, I was invited to participate in a 2-week archaeological dig at an historical site in Toronto. When I was an undergraduate university student, I worked for three summers at a Toronto area museum. Then a dream come true . . . graduate school in the field of art conservation, with the chance to work on museum objects. I knew that if I had the chance, I’d like to work on site as an archaeological conservator. So I was pretty close to my childhood fascination.

But, you know, the universe had other ideas about what I ought to be doing, and a week after I finished the research paper for my graduate degree, I was pregnant. By the time I was 25 years old, I was a full-time married stay-at-home mom (a choice I was very happy with).

Not that I left behind my interests — I took them in new directions. By the time I was in my early 40’s, ready to start my full-blown mid-life crisis, I found some new layers of dirt with buried secrets to dig in. That’s when I began my spiritual journey.

You have to understand that until I hit age 40, I was the most ordinary middle-class Canadian you can imagine. My spiritual experiences had been modest, to say the least, even when my younger son had died of leukemia when he was 3 years old (and I was 31). This had changed me, of course, but it had changed me at an emotional level rather than at a spiritual level. I had become less harsh and less judgmental towards others as a result of our family’s terrible trauma. But I can’t honestly say I understood God any better when my son went through the hell of cancer treatments, and I can’t say I liked God any better when my son died. My then-husband, who was a devout Baptist-High Anglican (go figure) seemed to have some pretty old fashioned fears about divine punishment being visited upon the sons, although he wisely didn’t express such thoughts in front of our older son. I basically thought God was being pretty mean. I don’t think that now, but that’s what I thought in 1989.

Some years later, in 1998, I started to ask spiritual questions. I didn’t know what I was looking for — I just felt an inner impulse to search for, well, to search for answers. The fact that I didn’t understand the questions was no impediment to my search for answers. This is how I led myself down the garden path. This is how I spent several years of my life — right up until mid-2003, in fact — in my Big Fat Idiot Stage.

In my Big Fat Idiot Stage, I read tons of New Age material. I read most of the “big names” in the New Age field. I started with Brian Weiss (Many Lives, Many Masters) and Elizabeth Stratton. I took Reiki classes (this turned out to be a huge part of my Idiot Stage), and I avidly read books by Barbara Ann Brennan (Hands of Light) and many others. When I read Neale Donald Walsch’s first book in the “Conversations With God” series, I thought I’d struck spiritual gold. And when I first read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, I thought I’d finally found the “answers.”

I still own copies of these books in case I need to transcribe exact quotes from them, but I now keep these books in my “Toxic Book” section. I also keep a copy of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret in my “Toxic Book” section. I tell you this so you’ll know ahead of time that you won’t see me promoting any of the ideas put forward by these New Age writers.

Some of these New Age ideas, interestingly, are not new at all, but in fact are very old — much older than the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible. So you also won’t see me promoting the sections in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament that promote these damaging “New Age” teachings. These teachings should come with a warning tag on them: Warning: Insistence on Scrupulously Following These Teachings Will Turn You Into A Big Fat Idiot, And Cause You to Embarrass Yourself And Your Family In Ways You Never Thought Possible.

Yes, I have no one but myself to blame for the time in my life when I embarrassed myself and my family by naively embracing the messages of these books.

During my Big Fat Idiot Stage, I foolishly co-purchased this humongous country house with a Reiki master who prophesied that our spiritual healing centre would be a huge success. It wasn’t.

As it turned out, I eventually found redemption in the teachings of Jesus, although how this happened, and why, is not the usual story.

My journey of redemption began when I realized that I hadn’t lost the scholarly skills of my younger years, that I could bring that process of methodically digging away at different layers — each with its own story to tell — to the mysterious journey of spiritual healing.

That’s when my work really began as a scientifically oriented, liberal, blond mystic.

That’s when I turned to my background in hard science, especially chemistry, and to my five years’ of work experience in the mental health field to help me begin to ask what the questions were.

That’s when I finally started to grow up.

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Posted in cataphatic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, My Spiral Path, mystic, New Age, redemption, relationship with God and tagged ethical mysticism, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

14 Mar 2010

CC4: The Blonde Mystic

June 2014

Okay, so I’m a blonde mystic. What’s the big deal about that?

It’s not a big deal at all if you believe, as I do, that the call to be a mystic is no better than — and no more extraordinary than — the call to be a teacher or a police officer or a nurse or whatever. I have a job to do, and I try to do the best job I can. I’m no different than anybody else who feels drawn to a particular path. My path is a bit uncommon, but I take it seriously, just as teachers and police officers and nurses take their paths seriously.

I do not subscribe to the orthodox Christian view that says contemplatives and mystics have a “higher calling” than other Christians. This is the view that puts monks and nuns in a special category compared to other people.* It says this select group of people is closer to God, higher on the ladder of ascent, or chosen — take your pick. I think this traditional view of “spiritual ascent” is a big part of the problem with orthodox Christianity.

I usually don’t tell educated Christians about my daily mystical practice. I keep my practice to myself because I’m kind of tired of having other Christians make the false assumption that I think I’m better than they are. I don’t think that. I think we’re all in this life together, walking side by side, rather than trying to scramble up some sort of spiritual ladder (and mashing each other’s spiritual fingers in the process.) “Different” shouldn’t be a synonym for “better,” although the history of Christianity is in some ways the history of certain groups of people believing they are both different and better than everybody else.

Police officers have a different path from nurses, but police officers aren’t “better” than nurses. Same thing with mystics. Mystics have a different path from most people, but they aren’t “better” than other people. I just want to be clear about that.

I am no longer a natural blond. I was blond as a child, but later my hair darkened, and after that my hair turned grey. I am a blond thanks to chemical intervention from L’Oreal. I am a blond because I’m not an ascetic.

I’m not an ascetic because I live according to a “mystical rule” of moderation, balance, common sense, and brain health.

These four “rules,”especially the rule about brain health, put me far outside the traditional understanding of how Christian mystics live. But I’m a person of science as well as a person of mystical inclination, and recent advances in neurophysiology have convinced me that many traditional mystical practices are dangerous and have no place whatsoever in the modern church.

This is why I don’t fast as part of my spiritual practice. Intentional, long-term fasting for “spiritual” reasons will damage anyone’s brain. (Naturally, I’m not talking about short-term occasions of fasting that may arise, which your body can handle.) I’m a mystic who believes in eating balanced foods in moderation because God seems to have designed the brain with a balanced lifestyle in mind for everyone, including mystics.

Crazy ol’ me, thinkin’ my brain and body are a natural, beautiful part of God’s creation!

As I said above, I am NOT a Gnostic. I’m a mystic who thinks we should be listening more to what God is saying through science, and less to what Christian tradition is saying through, well, tradition, when it comes to healthy spiritual practices.

I’m a fully practising mystic who thinks it is irresponsible and naive for church leaders to ignore the serious health risks that arise when traditional ascetic practices are embraced.

If I didn’t know better, I might think the church was more interested in preserving its traditions than in protecting and enhancing the mental, physical, and spiritual health of its congregants!

Gosh . . . where would I get such an idea?

* If you want to read more about this tradition, you can check out the chapter called “The Monk Who Rules the World” in Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1985).

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Posted in asceticism, cataphatic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, spiritual ascent, spiritual practices and tagged cataphatic mysticism, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

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