The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “brain-soul connection”

22 Sep 2012

RS35: The Calculus of Consciousness

Underlying Principles - TimeCsmall

“Beloved God, please help me find the ways in which my mind can learn from my heart, and my heart can learn from my mind, so my body can find some peace.”

This is the prayer Jesus wrote for me in August 2011 when we started the Realspiritik series of posts, and this is the prayer I’d like to return to today as Jesus and I wrap up this particular body of thought.

As always when I write with Jesus, I’ve learned many new things as we’ve written Realspiritik together, things I didn’t know till my fingers hit the keyboard keys, things that only became clear to me as I asked for — and received — clarification on difficult ideas.

There’s a lot of ancient history in this book — more than I originally expected when we started to talk about science and faith — but there’s a good reason for this.  The full title for Book Five should really be Realspiritik: How the Human Sense of Time Is Changing Your Life.

The greatest issue facing people of faith today boils down to history.  The kind of history you study in school and read about in newspapers and books and online journals.  Not history of religion per se.  Just . . . history.  An ability to work with timelines — past, present, and future.  An ability to see yourself on a timeline.  An ability to see others on a timeline.  An ability to see changes over time and learn from these changes.*  An ability to flow with the tides of time.

It matters what people said, thought, and did in the past.  Learning about the past shapes the present human brain in healthy, holistic ways.  Learning about the past builds the parietal and parieto-temporal regions of the brain so they work smoothly and efficiently with other parts of the brain.

Want to guide the development of advanced mathematical and scientific skills in your children?  Don’t start with math and science.  Start with history.  Start with the history of relationships over time.  Allow the brain to build the connections over several years.  Then add the math and science.  You can’t force math and science skills to grow in a timeless vacuum.  You need to build the sense of time and timing before the math and science will make any sense.

Time is the glue that helps your mind learn from your heart and your heart from your mind.  It takes time for your brain to build important connections and use these connections in synchronized ways.  (Interesting that early researchers decided to call the brain’s connecting cells “glia,” which literally means “glue.”)  The connections — the glial cells — are what matter to overall brain health.  It’s the little white cells, not the little grey cells, that have to be built and maintained.  They are the key to health and happiness (within limits, of course.)  And they don’t grow or do their jobs properly unless they’re programmed (through your choices) to shrink the gaps in the calculus of your own consciousness.

The harder you make your brain work to build connections, the stronger your foundation for lifelong learning and committed relationships.  Since time-based material such as history makes your brain work harder than any other topic, the study of history throughout primary, junior, and middle school makes an excellent foundation for everything else.  Everything else is a piece of cake compared to mastering the human sense of time.

Empathy flows from an ability to work with time.  So does memory.  So does an inner sense of self.  The parts of ourselves that we cherish the most are built on our relationships with time.  If we want to find the peace we long for, we can’t do it by escaping from time (that is, by detaching from our emotions and trying to live in the moment with no regard for past or future).  We can only do it by being part of time, being part of life, by accepting our rights and also our responsibilities as children of God, by being grateful for what the past has taught us, but also being grateful for the life we live today, and the life we will live tomorrow.

Wherever the Spiral Path may take us.

I want to thank the people who have helped me in the past few years as I’ve meandered along my own journey of discovery and healing.  I want to thank my son for his most amazing support in all ways a mother could hope for.  I want to thank my parents, sister, niece, and aunt.  I know my path has been puzzling to you, but thank you for loving me anyway.  I also want to thank my friends Mary Ellen, Keatha, and Janet, who helped me even when they didn’t realize they were helping me.

I dedicate this book to Jamie and to the memory of Iain and Beckie.

Blessings to you all!

*For more details, please see the post entitled The Human Sense of Time & Timing.

 

©2012-2025 Jennifer Thomas

-3
Posted in brain-soul connection, faith, life and death, Realspiritik, sense of time & timing, Soul and tagged , | Leave a Comment
14 Sep 2012

RS33: The Way of the Cross

St. Michael's Mount 02

“For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him (Psalm 22:24). Pictured here is the garden at St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, which for some reason reminds me of the Garden of Gethsemane. Photo credit JAT 1997.

A:  Tell me more about the practice you taught of “taking up the cross.”

J:  We got a little side-tracked last time, didn’t we?

A:  As usual.  No straight lines around here.  Always curves and meandering paths.

J:  Funny how the clearest and truest path to the heart is never straight.

A:  It took me a long time to figure this one out.  But there’s so much freedom, so much peace, in understanding that love isn’t linear and isn’t supposed to be.  It has its own strange rhythms.  But in the end it’s stronger than anything I’ve ever known.  It’s so  . . . so  . . . strong.  It’s so complex.  It’s not a pure strand of anything.  It’s this amazing tapestry, as you’ve described it before.  A tapestry with so many colours and so many songs and so many tears.  All woven together into this picture, this portrait, of life.  Life filled with passion and wonder and awe.  Life where you’re constantly surprised.  But also life where you don’t mind being surprised.

J (nodding):  It’s very important, the idea of being surprised and not minding.  It’s the “not minding” part that sets apart a person who’s listening to his/her soul and a person who’s not.  The soul doesn’t mind surprises.  The brain’s Darwinian Circuitry hates surprises.  You can tell a great deal about a person’s brain health in the small moments when surprise strikes.  The soul takes these unexpected events in stride.  The Darwinian Circuitry seizes up and panics and can’t take swift, wise action.  The soul continues to be able to act during a crisis.  The Darwinian Circuitry comes to a grinding halt.

A puzzling thing happens when the Darwinian Circuitry panics.  Inside the brain there’s a sudden “disconnect” between the decision-making centres and the movement centres.  People literally freeze like a deer in the headlights.  This is when they’re most vulnerable to lies — to words spoken aloud with authority by people who are in a position of trust.  This is when mobs can be persuaded to riot.  But it only works — and I want to emphasize this — it only works when people have already panicked.  It only works when people have stopped listening to their own souls.  You can’t force people who are listening to their own souls to join a mob.  They won’t do it.  They find no pleasure and no safety in the ridiculous idea that’s floating around of “homo duplex.”  Mob mentalities — hive mentalities — are dangerous to the goals of healing, peace, and redemption.  Mob mentalities lead to Crusades.  Crusades are never a positive thing in the eyes of God or God’s angels.

A:  It’s interesting how individuals stop taking personal responsibility for their own actions when they’ve agreed to hand over their own free will to a mob leader.

J:  For those who can’t hear the inner wisdom of their own soul, it’s a relief to hand over their free will to somebody else.

A:  It’s a difficult process, reclaiming your own free will.  (Sighhhhh.)

J:  Yes.  There’s probably no greater challenge for a human being.  Nonetheless, it’s the challenge that all human beings are called to.  They must wrestle with what it means to have free will.  They must question it, be confused by it, be angry at it, reject it, and finally come to terms with it.

A:  What you just said reminds me of the stages of grief.

J:  That’s exactly what the process is.  It’s an experience of working through grief.  And, by god, you need forgiveness to get you through it, because somewhere in the middle of the process you’re going to come face to face with the reality of all the times when you didn’t apply your free will in loving and trusting ways.  You’re going to feel like a shit.  This is where forgiveness sees you through.  Forgiveness is the act of free will that allows you to keep going, to get up the next day and keep going even when you’ve stopped denying the harm you’ve created here on Planet Earth.

A:  This is where you really need a mentor.

J:  Yes.  You need to know that somebody else has already forgiven you so you can find the courage to forgive yourself.

A:  That mentor can be God.

J:  Yes.  If a person trusts that God the Mother and God the Father forgive her even when she’s been a shit, she can lean on their strength as she struggles to learn from her mistakes and forgive herself.  It takes time to learn to forgive, but that’s okay.  People have to believe that God doesn’t expect instant results.  Indeed, instant results aren’t scientifically supportable or biologically possible.  God only expects consistent effort.  God will help you if you’re willing to make a consistent effort to be the best person you’re capable of being.

A:  Warts and all.

J:  God doesn’t mind warts.  Human beings end up covered in warts and scars and cracked bones and broken hearts in their time on Planet Earth.  God forgives you anyway.  I can’t emphasize this enough.  God sees past all the warts and scars and cracked bones and looks straight into your broken heart.  You can’t hide a broken heart from God.  Nor should you want to.

A:  It’s so difficult for regular human beings to believe they’re worthy of God’s daily forgiveness.  I really struggled with this in the beginning.  But I’m glad you persisted!

J:  It changes everything when you’re willing to accept God’s forgiveness.  Everything.  You find the freedom to move — really move.  So instead of being nailed helplessly to the cross, immobile, desperate, unable to flow with the changes and surprises of each day, you begin to be able to move.  Sure, at first you have to drag the damn cross with you, and it’s heavy, and it hurts.  But at least you’re moving!  And you’re starting to reclaim your sense of your own self, your own true potential.  After a while the cross you’re dragging around starts to feel different to you.  It starts to feel less like a heavy burden and more like . . . gravity.  A place where you can feel the weight, the seriousness, the reality of honest truth and not be afraid of it.  A place where honest truth is your ally, your very foundation.  Your centre of gravity.

A person who has chosen to pursue status (“gaining the whole world” at the expense of honest truth) relates strongly to the image of the crucifix — Jesus nailed to the Cross — because this is the way he or she feels in relation to the world and to God.  He feels trapped.  Nailed down.  Impoverished of health and happiness.  Stuck in an endless circle of pain and self-sacrifice.  So he thinks the image of the crucifix is right.

By contrast, a person who has chosen the path of knowing free will, love, forgiveness, healing, and redemption sees the cross in very different terms.  He sees a symbol of freedom from the self-enslavement of status addiction, a symbol of the courage to be yourself and know yourself and trust yourself in a world that tells you this is impossible.

To be disenfranchised from Empire is not necessarily a bad thing.

 

-3
Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain-soul connection, conscience & morality, courage, Divine Love, forgiveness, free will, honesty, Jesus' teachings, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, Realspiritik, relationship with God, Son of Man and tagged | Leave a Comment
02 Jun 2012

TBM40: What Sheldon Cooper Can Teach You

When the writers and producers of the hit TV comedy The Big Bang Theory first envisioned the character of Sheldon Cooper, I’m sure their main goal was to craft a truly funny show.  I’m sure they couldn’t have known their blend of spot-on writing and Jim Parson’s brilliant acting would end up creating an iconic portrait of the human brain’s Darwinian Circuitry.  But just as the writers of The Big Bang Theory are always referencing some of my favourite series — series such as Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Wars — I’m going to reference their Sheldon Cooper character as a way to speak accurately about the realities of the human brain.

Wind Turbines (c) Jamie MacDonald 2009. Used with permission of the artist.

Wind Turbines (c) Jamie MacDonald 2009. Used with permission of the artist. Every time I see a wind turbine, it reminds me of the ruthless logic of the brain’s Darwinian circuitry.

Jim Parson’s portrayal of theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper is hilarious because it’s 100% accurate in scientific terms.  The humour works because the science works.  In this case, the science they’re showing (albeit unwittingly) is the science of a brain that’s operating entirely on its 3D Darwinian Circuitry without benefit of the soul’s gifts of empathy, heart, and dignity.

I know it sounds really hard to believe that a person can function at all without using every part of the brain.  We assume a person can function with only one kidney or one leg, but it never occurs to us to ask whether the same analogy applies to the brain.  We tend to think of the brain as a single organ — either a whole brain that functions wholly and properly or no brain at all — so we give people the benefit of the doubt with regard to their internal thinking processes.   We assume that if they can do all the basics — go to school, get a job, make everyday decisions — then their brains must be operating the way they’re supposed to.

But there’s a problem with this assumption: the basic tasks of going to school, getting a job, and making everyday decisions require the brain to use only one “software suite,” whereas it actually has two.  Basic tasks require the brain to use only its Darwinian Circuitry, a “suite” of software devoted solely to 3D biological survival.  The brain’s Darwinian Circuitry carries the programming for all things related to your body’s biological needs — food, water, clean air, sleep, protection from the elements, protection from predators, procreation (which is more optional than most people think), and relief from pain.  In our culture, school and jobs and money and status are regarded by the Darwinian Circuitry of the brain as essential tools for survival.  So anything to do with money and status are given extremely high priority by the Darwinian Circuitry, even it means pursuing a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, as our character Sheldon Cooper has done.

So efficient is the Darwinian Circuitry that it can carry out important survival tasks without any input at all from the brain’s Soul Circuitry.   Of course, without input from the soul, survival tasks won’t be carried out with empathy.  Or with trust.  Or humbleness.  Or gratitude.  Or humour.  Or anything resembling conscience.  But they’ll be done, by god, and they’ll be done with the viciousness and cold logic of an S.S. death camp commander.

These are the kinds of selfish, conscience-free behaviours that idiot atheists such as Richard Dawkins have promoted as the “truth” about human nature. I see a lot of similarities between Richard Dawkins, philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the Christian Apostle Paul.

Dawkins has coined the phrase “the selfish gene,” and at a certain level the label is accurate.  There are stretches of genetic material in our DNA that are meant to boost our awareness of our individual survival needs.  Otherwise how would we instinctively know how to run away from danger?!  But these are not the only kinds of coding we have in our DNA.  We also have coding for unselfish traits.  We also have coding for traits such as empathy, trust, humbleness, gratitude, humour, and conscience.

In the language of personality theorists (a branch of psychology), we have to be able to account for the five universally observed dimensions of personality — Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness — and we have to be able to account for all five of these dimensions in the face of aggressive arguments from behavioural psychologists and evolutionary biologists that human beings are nothing more than a collection of selfish genes seeking to reproduce themselves in the most efficient way possible.

So here’s how it actually works.  The Darwinian Circuitry of your brain is responsible for expressing traits that fall within two of the five dimensions: Neuroticism and Agreeableness.  The Soul Circuitry of your brain is responsible for expressing the other three dimensions: Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness.

Yeah.  It really is that simple.

Sheldon Cooper is an absolutely perfect representation of what happens to a human being’s behaviour and relationships when he falls into the trap of relying exclusively on choices that score very high on the Neuroticism and Agreeableness scales, and very low on the Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness scales.  He becomes, well, he becomes a Sheldon.

This package of traits is distinctive and highly recognizable.  You get a person who’s highly controlling; perfectionistic; tense around other people; resistant to sudden change; inflexible; always “right”; quick to anger; thorough but lacking in imagination; socially compliant but lacking in genuine empathy; obsessive or obsessive-compulsive; politically conservative or right-wing; and rigidly obedient to the Law (dogmatic).  The latter trait — rigid obedience to the Law — is especially important to understand in its proper context as a Darwinian trait because it’s often wrongly confused by researchers with traits from the Conscientiousness dimension.

The Darwinian Circuitry of the brain is very good at what it does (when it’s in balance with the Soul Circuitry) but on its own it’s very “black and white” in its thinking.  It looks for simplistic “Cause and Effect” patterns.  It looks for rigid “laws” that can be applied quickly and easily in all situations.  The Darwinian parts of the brain “recognize” Materialist philosophy and codified religious texts and scientism (that is, treatment of scientific thought as an infallible religion).  There’s NO capacity in these parts of the brain for processing complex emotions such as empathy, humbleness, courage, and forgiveness.  On the other hand, logic and law are elevated to the status of the divine.  You can see these patterns plain as day in Sheldon Cooper’s self-absorbed devotion to pure logic.

If you’re familiar with the Big Five personality theory, you’re probably saying to yourself that I’ve got the Agreeableness dimension all backwards and I obviously haven’t read the material carefully.  I’ve read the material, and I think the scale for Agreeableness has been written backwards.  High scorers on the Agreeableness dimension are harder to sort out in research studies because status addiction affects this dimension more than it does the other four.  For instance, generosity and altruism may be genuine (in which case they’re coming from the Soul Circuitry and belong on the Extraversion dimension).  On the other hand, generosity and altruism may be nothing more than status-addiction-in-sheep’s-clothing (which means they’re coming from the clever tactical centres of the Darwinian Circuit, and should stay right where they are on the Agreeableness dimension, since Agreeableness  is focussed on social strategies that enhance 3D biological health).

A philanthropist who can’t donate money to a worthy cause without seeing his/her name emblazoned in big letters on the outside of a new research centre is suffering from a severe case of status-addiction-in-sheep’s-clothing.  This behaviour deserves a high score on the “I’m-doing-it-to-survive-on-the-social-ladder” scale.

Giving, of course, is good.  If you’re giving from your heart and soul, you’ll have no trouble giving anonymously and forgoing any credit for your generosity.  It should be fairly obvious, though, that giving to others so you can earn yourself lots of status points is not so good from the soul’s point of view.

Poor Sheldon Cooper.  He can follow the rules of social conventions by rote, but he doesn’t understand them.  He doesn’t understand why he’s not supposed to call his twin sister “inferior genetic material.”  He doesn’t understand why Leonard wants to be with Penny in emotional, intimate, heartfelt ways.  He laughs when it’s socially appropriate, not because he gets the joke, but because he knows at a Darwinian level that he’s supposed to.  He’s a classic Platonic Philosopher-King who believes in his own superiority and not much else.

He’s busted from top to bottom.  But this doesn’t stop him from bossing other people around and using pure logic to abuse the people around him.

Not that Sheldon thinks he’s an abuser.  In his own eyes, he’s a really nice guy.

This is why he reminds me so much of the Apostle Paul.

 

Further Reading:

“The surprising downsides of being clever” by David Robson, BBC Future, April 14, 2015

“Will religion ever disappear” by Rachel Nuwer, BBC Future, December 19, 2014

“Teaching the children: Sharp ideological differences, some common ground,” Pew Research Center, September 18, 2014

 

-3
Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Christ Zone, conscience & morality, dissociation, Law (Nomos), Materialism, Paul vs Jesus, psychopathy (niceness), The Blonde Mystic, the right to be right and tagged , | Leave a Comment
17 May 2012

TBM37: Dreams – The Courage to Trust the Science of Sleep

One thing people on a spiritual path are very curious about is dreams. What are dreams?  Where do they come from?  Why do we have them?  What do they mean?  Does God send us messages in our dreams?

Sint Maarten 2014

Sint Maarten 2014

This is a huge topic, and I can’t answer these questions in a single post, but I’d like to point out a few things you need to know about sleeping and dreaming if you want to stay healthy while you follow the Spiral Path.*

The number one thing you need to know — based not on religious teachings but on a huge body of scientific research — is that you need to get a good night’s sleep (or a good day’s sleep if you’re a shift worker).  If you want to have a healthy brain, you need to set aside a single block of sleep time each day, a single block of uninterrupted time that’s 8 hours long or so.  Your brain requires this time because it does a lot of work for you while you’re sleeping.**

I’ll come back shortly to the question of people who need to get up several times in the night for compassionate reasons — for example, young parents or caregivers who are looking after someone who’s ill.  For the moment, I’m talking only about adolescents and adults who have a choice about their daily schedule and a choice about their nighttime activities.

Chronic sleep deprivation is currently wreaking havoc on the brains of people in our society.  Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating, but this is one of those instances where I have lots and lots of scientific research on my side.  So I don’t have to apologize for my strong statement about sleep deprivation.  It’s the honest truth.

I have no tolerance — absolutely none — for any spiritual or religious teaching that barrels over the realities of sleep health like a tank on a military mission.  I have no tolerance for any religious tradition that requires you to wake up part way through your sleep cycle so you can pray.  I fully understand people’s desire to be in sincere communication with God, but if you really want to be in sincere communication with God, then please respect the way God designed your brain, and please make sure you get the sleep time God wants you to get.

You’ll be able to hear God and God’s angels much more clearly if you honour the teachings that come to you through current brain research (even though such research seems to contradict the wisdom of ancient religious teachings).  There’s a reasonthat so many studies have linked sleep disorders to a whole slew of physical and psychological health disorders.  Chronic sleep deprivation and chronic sleep interruption (eg. sleep apnea) are as toxic to your brain’s health as chewing lead paint off an old wooden spoon.  You may not notice the effects at first, but you sure as heck shouldn’t be surprised when you start having health problems.  Health problems are a biological consequence of your failure to get long blocks of natural sleep.  If you already have a sleep disorder, then you know what I mean. When this major system of your body is “broke,” it ain’t pretty.

I’ve tried to emphasize on this site that everyone on Planet Earth is equal on the Spiral Path.  Everyone has equal access to the wonder of it.  Everyone has — or should have — equal access to the basic tools.  The basic tools — free will, education, self-discipline, courage, empathy, brain health, teamwork — don’t require lots of money.  They don’t require special rituals.  They don’t require obedience to religious laws.  But they do require trust — trust in the scientific realities of God’s good creation.

The need for natural sleep is one of the scientific realities of God’s good creation here on Planet Earth.  It’s a scientific reality that can’t be circumvented by religious or cultural laws, no matter how much we’d like to believe in our own ability to “rise above” such petty biological concerns as sleep.

I know, of course, that many ambitious individuals in this world think sleep is a nuisance, and, even more significantly, that sleep is a sign of weakness, a sign shown only by needy and pathetic underlings unworthy of the right to lead others.

These ambitious Type A individuals (as they used to be called) are the same human beings who have lost all (or most) of the connections between the Darwinian Circuitry and the Soul Circuitry inside their own brains.  Their brains are operating on a steady diet of status addiction, anger, contempt for others, narcissism, and denial.  They no longer need as much sleep as other people because, to be honest, their own brains have less work to do at night.

This isn’t a good thing, by the way.  It’s never a good thing when your own brain stops working the way it’s supposed to.  It’s not a sign of strength or superiority when you only need 4 hours of sleep each night.  It’s a sign that you’ve seriously fucked up your own brain.

Those who don’t sleep well also don’t dream well.  Did you know that many people don’t actually have dreams? Not ones they can remember, anyway.  Yeah, no dreams.  It’s more common than you think.  But most people who suffer from this kind of “dream disorder” don’t want to admit it out loud because they suspect, somewhere deep inside, that it isn’t biologically normal for a person to be “dreamless,” so to speak.

I’ve noticed a pattern over the years in the type of person who’s likely to confess he or she never remembers dreams.  The people I’ve personally known who are “dreamless” are all high-functioning people in their waking lives, people who are meticulous, perfectionistic, highly rational, and bulldog-like in their relationships with others.  These people mistrust sentiment, have little sympathy for the suffering of people they don’t know, hold politically conservative views, and cherish the values of duty, honour, obedience, and denial of pain.  In psychological terms, they would score high on the “Negative Emotionality” or “Neuroticism” dimension of the Big Five Personality scale.  They would also score high on the “Agreeableness” dimension of the Big Five.

These two dimensions — the Neuroticism dimension and the Agreeableness dimension — generate traits that are linked to the brain’s Darwinian Circuitry.  The other three dimensions in the Big Five model — Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness — are linked to the brain’s Soul Circuitry.

A human being whose brain is balanced and healthy will exhibit behaviours that seem, well, balanced across all five dimensions.  Such a person is open to new experiences, but not so open that your brain falls out; conscientious without being obsessive or controlling or perfectionistic; agreeable and willing to compromise with others, but not willing to be an enabler of addictive behaviours; comfortable in relationships with other people, but also comfortable spending some time alone (as when sleeping!); alert to surrounding situations and stressors, but not preoccupied or obsessed by them.

This is a lot to balance, and it’s very hard for your brain to maintain this balance if you refuse to give your brain the time and energy and nutrients it needs so it can sort and label and store and heal the data it receives every day through your many experiences.  Dreams are a significant part of the nightly sorting process.

Human beings are born with the capacity to have three different kinds of dreams.  Each does a different job.  But they all share one thing in common: they activate the primary visual cortex of the occipital lobes.  This is why dreams are accompanied by visual images.

The first kind of dream you can have is purely biological.  It’s the kind of dream nobody remembers clearly.  It’s a sort of visual record that your brain transmits as it’s doing its nightly housecleaning.  It’s a bit like an Excel spreadsheet accompanied by pictures on little Post-It notes.  There’s no coherent story line — it’s really just a bunch of important snapshots taken at different times during the previous day. These dreams aren’t especially memorable, and they don’t have much emotional content.  (Like an Excel spreadsheet with little pictures.)  Important and necessary, but not what you’d call juicy.

Second is the kind of dream that’s more personal, more emotional, and more memorable.  If you can remember your dreams, you’re most often remembering dreams from this category. When you have dreams of this kind, what you’re really doing is talking to yourself.  Your soul is talking “out loud,” so to speak, with pictures and words and actions.  Even more important, your soul is talking about emotions — honest feelings about choices you’ve made.  The soul is nothing if not truthful and honest.  So if your brain has made some choices your soul doesn’t like, your soul will pipe up while you’re asleep and will express feelings such as fear, anxiety, or a desire to do better (i.e. guilt).  (Yes, your own soul can be afraid of choices made by the Darwinian Circuit of your own brain.  This is called conscience.  If you stop listening to the voice of your own soul — and many, many people do — your brain will stop accepting input from the parts of the brain wired to help you express your Openness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion.  Your brain will also stop sending you output in the form of personal dreams.  You won’t have personal dreams anymore until you heal your brain.)

The third kind of dream is the kind of dream that’s experienced least often and is written about most.  The third kind of dream is the message dream — the direct communication that takes place between you and God, or between you and God’s angels.  Message dreams are only possible if you’re in an “open” state.

If you’re never in an open state (because you’ve chosen to reject input from the Soul Circuitry of your brain) you won’t get this kind of dream.  Message dreams can only be received by a brain that’s relatively healthy and balanced.  (Sorry — no exceptions.)  So-called “oracular dreams” that come to you after you’ve used drugs or alcohol or intentionally induced trance states DO NOT COUNT.  If you use outside means to try to receive a dream message from God, you’re likely to hear and see many fantastical things, but none of them will be messages from God.

Just because you can’t receive dream messages from God, it doesn’t mean God has abandoned you.  Far from it.  God never abandons anyone.  But you have to accept the scientific reality that a closed brain can’t receive clear messages — either awake or asleep — and you have to work around this particular form of disability. There are plenty of other ways that God can — and does — communicate with you.  If you can’t dream at present because your brain is in need of some serious healing, please be patient.  Help is all around you.

Last, I’d like to return to the question of sleep deprivation in situations that can’t be helped, such as feeding and caring for an infant at night.

A young infant has strong biological and emotional needs that must be met by the parents or caregivers, and in a case like this — where you’re getting up in the night because someone else needs you and because you care — God and your angels will lend you extra support.  You don’t have to ask for this support (though a prayer of thanks and gratitude is always appreciated!!).  All you have to do is get up in the night because your heart tells you it’s the right thing to do.  As long as you stay “in the zone” of caring and worrying about another person, God will look after the relevant wiring in your brain.

If, on the other hand, you’re getting up at night solely because you “have to” — solely from a sense of duty or obligation or feeling sorry for yourself — you won’t get the angelic support your body needs.  Why not?  Because you’re not being your true self — the loving, emotionally supportive person you’re capable of being.  God has free will, and God does not enable choices or behaviours that snuff out the messages of the soul and replace those message with ideologies of perfectionism, superiority, victimhood, or obedience to religious law.  So if you’re getting up in the middle of the night to recite traditional prayers so God will be properly “assisted and nourished,” you’re shooting yourself not in the foot but in the head.  You’re ruining your own sleep cycles — intentionally and on purpose — because you believe you’re “helping” God, but all you’re doing is making it harder and harder for you to ever hear God’s quiet voice in your life.

God doesn’t need this kind of “help.”  And neither do you.

One great thing about being asleep is the quiet.  Once you’re finally asleep, it’s quiet in the kingdom of your own biological head.  It’s in this place of quiet that God’s voice is most easily heard.

God the Mother and God the Father are very quiet and shy, you see.  They love to laugh and they love to sing, but they’re both very quiet.  They laugh and sing in some places, but in other places they’re the quiet of dew-laden rose petal, the quiet of the morning mist, the quiet of deep waters, the quiet of the sun’s rays silently bearing life to this wondrous planet we live upon.

If you’re very quiet and very open to the Heart of God the Mother and God the Father, you’ll feel the joy and tenderness of their embrace as a deep inner sense of comfort and safety that’s hard to describe.

I invite you to slip into quiet sleep tonight and feel the kindness and shyness of their love.

* Since I first wrote this post, there’s been a tidal wave of articles on the importance of sleep.  Here’s a sample of recent articles that have appeared on the BBC news site:
** For more information on what your brain is doing while you’re asleep, please see “Perchance to Prune” by Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli in the August 2013 issue of Scientific American.
Posted Wednesday, May 9, 2012 on The Blonde Mystic
-1
Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, building your intuition, conscience & morality, healing, Mother and Father God, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment
01 May 2012

TBM36: Fix the Brain, Love the Soul

If you want to fry your brain and turn yourself into a person who’s incapable of living a life filled with empathy, forgiveness, healing, and humbleness, you can choose to follow the instructions given by Neale Donald Walsch in his bestselling Conversations with God series of books.  Although Walsch apparently no longer claims his “dialogues” are channelled, he still maintains they’re “inspired” by God.  A lot of people have read these books and been gravely misled by his claims.  I ought to know.  I was once one of the naive spiritual seekers who trusted his words about non-judgment and re-creating myself and being part of a great Oneness that’s really just God experiencing himself in different ways.

In Book 2 of Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 1997), Walsch is musing on the question of how he should relate to disadvantaged people. His “inspired” dialoguing partner (i.e. God) says this in reply:

“Now, within that context, when you come across a person who appears, in relative terms as observed within your world, to be disadvantaged, the first question you have to ask is: Who am I and who do I choose to be, in relationship to that?

In other words, the first question when you encounter another in any circumstance should always be: What do I want here?

Did you hear that?  Your first question, always, must be: What do I want here? — not: What does the other person want here?

. . . the reason your relationships are in such a mess is that you’re always trying to figure out what the other person wants and what other people want — instead of what you truly want.  Then you have to decide whether to give it to them . . . . In this game of I’ll Trade You, you set up a very delicate balance.  You meet my needs and I’ll meet yours.

. . . [yet] the purpose of your Holy Relationship with every other person, place, or thing is not to figure out what they want or need, but what you require or desire now in order to grow, in order to be Who you want to Be.

That is why I created Relationship to other things.  If it weren’t for this, you could have continued to live in a vacuum, a void, the Eternal Allness whence you came.

Yet in the Allness you simply are and cannot experience your “awareness” as anything in particular because, in the Allness, there is nothing you are not.

So I devised a way for you to create anew, and Know, Who You Are in your experience.  I did this by providing you with:

1. Relativity — a system wherein you could exist as a thing in relationship to something else.

2. Forgetfulness — a process by which you willingly submit to total amnesia, so that you can not know that relativity is a mere trick, and that you are All of It.

3. Consciousness — a state of Being in which you grow until you reach full awareness, then becoming a True and Living God, creating and experiencing your own reality, expanding and exploring that reality, changing and re-creating that reality as you stretch your consciousness to new limits — or shall we say, to no limit (pages 157-158).”

This quote is the essence of what Walsch repeats in a barrage of clever words and cliches spread over many books.  Again and again he insists there’s no “right or wrong,” no objective moral Truth you must obey.  You are a spark of God, says Walsch (though I can’t say for certain that Walsch ever uses the Gnostic term “spark”) and your job is to decide who you want to be and then go into the world and continually re-create yourself without being afraid that you’re doing something wrong or immoral.  In fact, says Walsch, your only real responsibility is to embrace your “right to be right.”

But . . . if Walsch decries the human tendency to decide what’s right and wrong, then surely he would also object to a person who claims “the right to be right.”

Right?

Let me ask you this . . . What does it mean to you that Walsch uses no references to other researchers in his early books?  (I haven’t read his later works, so can’t say for certain there are no such references in his later books.) What does it mean that he offers no back-up for his theories from science?  Or from history?  Or psychodynamic theory?  Or biblical research?  Or archaeology?  Or pedagogical theory?  Or neuroscience?  Or even from the dubious annals of mysticism?

If Walsch isn’t a scientific researcher, and he isn’t a theological or religious scholar, and he says he isn’t even a bona fide channeller, then what the hell is he?  Where did he get his theories, and what is the nature of his own personal meta-choice?

What gave him the right to mislead readers and imply through deliberate repetition (not to mention the titles of his books!) that two consciousnesses are having a dialogue in written form through the medium of his books: the narrator (Walsch) and God?

Did God get a say in these books?  I’m thinkin’ not.  I’m thinkin’ that Walsch likes the sound of his own voice.  I’m thinkin’ that Walsch loves the story he’s created for himself about who God is and who you are.  I’m thinkin’ he’s created an internal fantasy world to explain to himself why he felt “a vacuum, a void” earlier in his life.  He’s come up with an explanation that works for him — an explanation that helps him avoid messy emotional issues like right and wrong, forgiveness, soul blueprint, empathy, and courage — and he’s telling everyone who’ll listen that he’s right about God and everybody else is wrong.

He’s also encouraging his readers to become self-absorbed, self-entitled, narcissistic brats who can be “anything you want to be” because fighting and clawing your way up the ladder of success is really just “the act of God being God . . . Me being Me — through you! (Walsch, page 159).”

A person who is continually redefining himself/herself — continually “re-creating” himself/herself, as Walsch describes it — is a person who has no strong internal sense of self.  From a neuroscience point of view, this is a dangerous thing.

The most recent issue of Scientific American Mind (May/June 2012) has an excellent article by Carrie Arnold called “Inside the Wrong Body.”  Despite the confusing title — the title makes me think of changelings! — it describes recent research into a little known human sense called interoception.  Interoception is the awareness of the internal state of one’s own body — that is, an internal sense of self.  Interoception relies on parts of the brain I’ve written of elsewhere in the context of boundary issues and relationships: the parietal lobes, the insular cortex, and the occipital lobes.  These are the parts of the brain you can see on my own brain scan as being highly active in the normal baseline state of just kinda hangin’ and being relaxed (the so-called default network).  These parts are normally active in my brain because I have a very strong internal sense of who I am and who I’m not. (Please see SPECT Scans of the Author’s Brain.)

When a person has difficulties with interoception (i.e. when the parietal lobes, the insular cortex, and the occipital lobes don’t work together the way they should in the healthy human brain) a number of dyfunctional behaviours arise.  Those who lack a strong inner sense of self are very poor at consciously noticing their own pain, thirst, hunger, body temperature, and emotions.  They don’t notice when they’re shivering with cold.  They don’t notice they should go to bed and get some sleep unless they look at the clock.  They often become obsessive about food and eating.  (Hence a strong link to anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and body dysmorphic disorder).  They don’t look after themselves unless they’re retaught as adults.  (Interestingly, in a strict ascetic religious community, these people would be hailed as heroes and saints for denying the needs of the body — another example of the differences between traditional religion, which I don’t endorse, and the soul-and-science-based faith which I do endorse.) 

Blowing with the Wind (c) JAT 2015

Blowing with the Wind (c) JAT 2015

 

An even more insidious issue arises from interoception difficulties, however.  As author Carrie Arnold reports, “Those who lack a keen awareness of their internal state also seem to be easily swayed by the opinions of others [emphasis added].  They may evaluate their goals and attributes based on how they think others perceive them rather than by their own standards (page 40).”

In other words, if you don’t know who you really are as a soul, if you can’t recognize yourself in a mirror, if you can’t stick to your own soul purpose and your own personal story, if you can’t work from your own inner set of sheet music and be proud of it, if you can’t see your own personal boundaries and your own deeply encoded sense of right and wrong, you’ll blow like a leaf in the wind for your entire adult life.  You’ll never feel safe, you’ll never feel grounded, you’ll never feel proud of who you are because you’ve never allowed yourself to know who you are as a soul.

You have a story.  You have a soul purpose.  It’s not something you can “create” or “invent” as you go along.  It’s hardwired into your DNA, and you can’t change it.  Neither do you want to change it if you’re living your life from the core of your own selfdom — your soul.  Your soul ain’t’ broke.  So why try to fix it?  It’s just your biological brain that ain’t working so hot.  Fix the brain, love the soul.  That’s one of my mottoes.

Neale Donald Walsch wants me to believe that God has given me the gifts of Relativity, Forgetfulness, and becoming a True and Living God.  Thanks very much, Neale, but I’m real happy with my gifts of objective, non-relative, scientific reality, combined with full remembrance of God’s divine love and complete knowledge of my humbleness and courage and worthiness as one unique child of God among trillions and trillions of angelic children.

Panentheistic Oneness is seriously overrated.

 

-4
Posted in boundary issues, brain-soul connection, Gnosticism, intent, interoception, meta-choice, mysticism, soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic, the right to be right and tagged | Leave a Comment
22 Apr 2012

TBM35: "The Right To Be Right?"

Two weeks ago I met with a woman named Linda who had asked me to do a Soul Purpose reading for her.  I spent only 20 minutes talking with her face to face, but I can still feel the knives of anger and righteousness she stuck in my heart.

My meeting with Linda was a timely reminder of what it feels like — emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually — to try to talk to someone who is filled with righteous anger.  You may as well be talking to a brick wall.

Let me describe this brick wall.  It’s a wall that a person, either male or female, chooses to build brick by brick, layer by layer, inside his or her own brain to keep out all data, all memories, and all learning experiences related to empathy.  This brick wall is a conscious construct.  It is not, as so many people would like to insist, an involuntary process or a fluke of nature except where documented major head injury is involved (eg. a car accident, an assault, or a Phineas-Gage-type occurrence).  The brick wall is built on purpose because the person in question has decided he or she doesn’t want to “hear” or “see” any information that would inconveniently contradict an internal set of beliefs.

The brain, as I’ve discussed before, operates like a symphony orchestra that needs both the sheet music (your meta-choice*) and the conductor (you and your conscious will, choices, and actions) to keep everything running smoothly.  The brain cannot hold itself together without a solid set of sheet music for all the parts to follow.  If you don’t give your brain an opportunity to work from the sheet music you were born with (your own Soul Purpose and Soul Blueprint), it will make up a set of sheet music.  It will invent something.  It will pick a story — a set of beliefs, a set of software instructions — and it will cling to that story for the simple scientific reason that any software is better than no software as far as the brain is concerned. 

A brand new CPU loaded with all the latest memory and video card and wireless capability is a useless piece of junk until goal-specific software is loaded.  The software tells the hardware how to handle incoming data, how to assess it and organize it and store it and use it.  Without the software package, there’s no interface between the data and the hardware, no “meta-choice” to guide the processing of huge volumes of data.  There’s no framework.  There’s no sheet music.  There’s no internal cookbook.  There’s nothing to guide the processing.

The brain must have a coherent set of sheet music to follow.  Otherwise, it can’t decide what to do with the vast amounts of data that come into the human brain every day — data from your hearing and your seeing and your movements and your relationships, etc.
  
The brain can’t keep everything.  There just isn’t room.  So it has to “triage” all the incoming data.  It has to rank the data in terms of relevance and usefulness.  It does this by comparing data at almost lightning speed to your internal software package, your internal set of sheet music, your internal set of beliefs.  It compares the data to your meta-choice and then decides what data to keep (and where to store it) and what data to dump with the nightly trash pickup.  (When you sleep, your brain is supposed to do its nightly mopping up of unwanted connections between brain cells — which is why you need a good night’s sleep every night if you want your brain to stay healthy.**)

So you can see why the story you tell yourself inside your own head is so important.  The story you tell yourself about your own life — your meta-choice, your sheet music — is guiding the way in which your brain builds itself.

In other words, inside your own head, “your wish is your command.”

If you say endlessly to yourself that nobody loves you and nobody treats you fairly and nobody listens to you and you have a right to be angry and vengeful, then your own brain will respond at a scientific level to preserve the “truth” of your belief system.  Your brain will do what you’ve told it to do.  It will triage all incoming information.  It will keep all data that seems to “prove” your belief that you’re a victim.  It will dump everything else in the trash bin.  At a scientific level, you literally won’t even “hear” or “see” the neighbour who is treating you with kindness.  You’ll hear and see only what you want to hear and see, instead of what’s actually there. The brick wall you’ve erected around the Soul Circuitry of your own brain has no doors or windows in it through which you can feel another person’s heart.  So you believe your own propaganda, and you walk around telling anyone who’ll listen how unfair life is.  It’s like you’re living in your own little fantasy world.

November 5th Delphinium

I found this lone delphinium blooming away in the garden on November 5, 2014. No self-respecting Ontario delphinium flowers in November when the nights are cold and the leaves have already fallen (as you can see in the background). This perennial blooms in the warm weather of Ontario summers. Right? If you’re determined to be right, you’ll have to conclude that I doctored this photo. After all, delphiniums just don’t do that, right? It’s not normal, right? For the record, I didn’t doctor this photo. Photo (c) JAT 2014

It took me years to understand this simple biological reality.  It took me years to understand that a person who has chosen righteous anger as a personal belief system is impervious to divine love.  It took me years to understand that the last thing a righteous person wants to hear is anything resembling objective Truth or objective reality.  His or her brain simply can’t handle it.

I’ve seen it said again and again by well-meaning (but untrained) spiritual teachers that if you always treat other people with unconditional kindness and never challenge other people’s beliefs (“turning the other cheek”), they’ll feel the truth of your love and they’ll be changed by it because everyone is already trying as hard as they can to be loving.

This.  Is.  Bullshit.

I treat everyone with unconditional forgiveness, but this requires me to be honest about their actual meta-choices.  When I meet someone like Linda, whose meta-choice is righteous anger — in other words, someone who has an entrenched belief that “she has a right to be right” — I stop talking.  I don’t try to persuade.  I don’t try to cajole.  I don’t try to sweet talk.  There is nothing I can say that will penetrate the brick wall.  I will defend myself.  I will speak honestly in my own defence (as I did by e-mail when I got home from my painful meeting with Linda).  I will speak honestly in defence of others.  But I will not tell people such as Linda that all their beliefs are worthy of respect when some of those beliefs are abusive.  Some belief systems really suck.  It’s naive and not very loving for those on a spiritual path to pretend otherwise.

It’s not my job as a spiritual teacher to spare people’s feelings by hiding the Truth.  If you want a teacher who’ll never ask you to wrestle with your own mistakes and your own belief systems, there are plenty of them out there who’ll take your money and never teach you a darned thing.  Learning means change. Learning is only possible when you decide for yourself that you want to take charge of your own brain and your own ability to change.  Learning means you’re willing and able to deal with new data that conflicts with your existing belief system.

No one has “a right to be right.”  No one.  This is why we have bodies of law written over time by large groups of people on a consensus basis (one hopes).  No one is infallible.  Not even famous religious leaders you may be thinking of.  Democracy flourishes wherever individual leaders understand that the road to hell is paved with libertarianism.

As a human being, does God give you any rights?  Of course.  You have a right to be you (the real you, meaning your soul self, with your own individual quirks and traits).  You have a right to use your own free will.  You have a right to learn, change, grow, and love.  You have a right to consider yourself worthy as a child of God.  But you don’t have the right to assume that you have all the answers and that you don’t need anybody else and that you can do whatever the hell you want in this world because you think you’re right and everybody else is wrong.

Right now the newspapers are filled again with stories about Anders Breivik, the Norwegian psychopath who consciously set out to prove his “right to be right” last year by killing 77 strangers in cold blood.  Perhaps you think this example is too extreme.  After all, many people have filled their own heads with righteous anger, but only a few of them have gone out and actually killed someone.

Well, you know, physical assault and homicide aren’t the only ways to bring suffering into the world.  Emotional and spiritual and intellectual assault also bring suffering into the world, and these effects far outlast most physical effects.  Right now, Anders is trying to use his very public trial to continue inflicting harm on others.

People like Anders Breivik don’t turn themselves overnight into mass murderers or serial killers.  They start small with righteous anger, and when they’re not challenged or corrected, their behaviour escalates.  The belief system is allowed to grow like a cacophony of brittle drums inside the brain of “poor little Anders who must never be told he’s made a mistake because it might wound his self esteem.”  Meanwhile poor little Anders never learns how to deal with his own emotions, and, more importantly, his own mistakes.  He never learns he has a much more effective blueprint or set of sheet music inside his own DNA.  He never learns how to use his own brain.  So it runs amok, lost in the fantasy world of righteous anger he himself has created, unable at a scientific level to cope with any “conflicting data” at all.

Note, however, that Anders Breivik is not a stupid man.  He’s fully capable of planning and organizing and getting what he wants.  He knows what he’s doing.   He knows how to deceive. He knows how to use anger.  He knows how to manipulate other people’s guilt.  He knows how to use technology.  He knows how to use geography.  He is not mentally incompetent in a medical sense.

He’s just very, very sure of his own rightness. 

 

* For more on intent and meta-choices, see “Knowledge” versus “Truth” and Pelagius and Personal Responsibility

** For more on the importance of sleep to your brain’s health, please see Jason Castro’s article called “Sleep’s Secret Repairs” in the May/June 2012 issue of Scientific American Mind.  See also “Perchance to Prune” by Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli in the August 2013 issue of Scientific American.

-1
Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, intent, meta-choice, psychopathy (niceness), soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic, the right to be right, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
31 Mar 2012

TBM32: Three Spectrographs of Consciousness

The human brain is sometimes called the 3-pound universe, and for good reason. There’s a lot more going on in there than you realize.

Your brain is a one-of-a-kind creation, the one place in all Creation where you can be you, the one place where you actually get to decide what you want to think, feel, do, and create. It’s the place where you feel love. It’s the place where you feel your tears and your laughter. It’s the place where you experience your relationship with God.

But brains are more than just a bunch of uplifting words and pretty pictures. Brains are hard science. Brains are physics, chemistry, biology, and math. Brains are quantum theory — probability wave functions, conscious observer rights, non-locality, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and all the other forms of quantum weirdness you may have been reading about if you’re a science geek.

Hey, I’m a science geek, and proud of it. Blondes can have fun with quantum theory. Who says you have to be a white male German physicist (or theologian) to understand the real science that lies behind all Creation?

Why am I bringing up the topic of quantum physics? Because there’s one aspect of this field that has deep relevance to your everyday life as a regular person trying to walk the Spiral Path hand in hand with your guardian angels. The aspect I’m interested in is wave theory — the behaviour of probability wave functions. You need to have a basic understanding of wave theory (in a simplified form) so you can understand how your own sense of intuition works and why it sometimes seems to fail you.

Don’t worry — this isn’t going to be as scary as you think.

Take a careful look at the three diagrams below. The first is a schematic of the major kinds of choices made inside the biological brain of a typical adult Status Addict. The second shows the major kinds of choices made by an guardian angel (which would include you, as a person-of-soul, when your time on Planet Earth is complete). The third represents the major kinds of choices made by an adult Whole Brain Thinker — a person who’s relying more on input from his/her soul and less on the purely “Darwinian” kill-or-be-killed choices made by certain parts of the biological brain.


Each of the spikes on these “spectrographs of consciousness” represents two things: (1) a particular “radio channel” that your brain, operating as a wireless Blackberry-type device, can pick up, and (2) the strength of each “radio channel.” A short peak means there’s a signal you can pick up, but it’s not strong. A tall peak means there’s a signal you pick up clearly and consistently with little interference (almost as if the transmission tower is next door). The absence of a peak means your own personal Blackberry-brain can’t pick up this particular station at all, no matter how hard you try.

Compare the diagram of the Status Addict to the diagram of the Guardian Angel. The Status Addict, over time, has chosen to change his brain’s priorities so he can focus on getting more status points. This means he’s had to give up certain other choices. He’s had to give up empathy, forgiveness, and humbleness because these would interfere with his belief that he’s better than other people (i.e. his belief that he deserves more status). He’s decided to use the tools of denial, narcissism, anger, and contempt for others to prevent himself from feeling empathy, forgiveness, or humbleness. He’s practised using these destructive tools a lot. And now he’s so good at it, his biological brain has stopped generating any energy waves that would come across to other people as genuine empathy, etc. So now he can’t give empathy to others, but even importantly, for our purposes here, he can’t receive it, either. He has no channel left inside his biological brain where he can “hear” the intent of empathy. He can’t receive on this channel because he’s told his brain — repeatedly — to stop making this particular wave.

In wave theory, you see, there’s all this interesting stuff about waves being amplified and waves being quenched. If you take two tall empathy peaks and add them together, you get — surprise! — one combined peak that’s tall. If you take one tall empathy peak and add it to an equal-sized “trough” in the empathy spectrum, you get — oops! — invisibility. The trough cancels out the peak. So in the Status Addict’s brain, the trough in the empathy region of his spectrograph spells trouble for his guardian angel. His angel can send him all the empathy waves she wants, but his brain isn’t going to hear them. Because it can’t. There’s no channel there.

Meanwhile, the Whole Brain Thinker above has worked very hard to keep his empathy, forgiveness, and humbleness circuits well exercised. Sure, he still makes mistakes, and he still has some anger, narcissism, and denial to work on, but they aren’t very strong compared to his other choices. So they don’t interfere much with the incoming waves of empathy, etc., from his guardian angel. This man can “hear” his guardian angel loud and clear — NOT in the form of words, of course, because most people who are hearing actual words are suffering from hallucinations and need immediate medical care. But the Whole Brain Thinker can “hear” others (including angels) who speak the language of empathy and forgiveness and humbleness. He can both give and receive on these channels. These are the mysterious feelings of the heart.

In the case of our Status Addict above, his guardian angel doesn’t have much to work with, to be honest. I’ve shown small peaks for courage, self discipline, and service to others on the spectrograph above — as you’d see in the profile of a typical evangelical Christian who has listened to traditional Church teachings on humility. These three channels are the only channels where the guardian angel has any hope of being “heard” — and not very clearly at that. This person can go to church every day, say prayers for hours at a time, memorize the whole Bible verse by verse, and STILL not be able to feel God’s presence because he hasn’t built strong useable soul channels inside his own biological brain.

So who is responsible for this lack of useable channels? The status addict or God?

Well, the status addict is the one who holds the responsibility. Why? Because your consciousness (which includes your brain while you’re here on Planet Earth) is the only part of Creation that belongs entirely to you. It’s your own little Kingdom (as Jesus once called it). It’s your corner in God’s Spiritual Kitchen. It’s yours to cherish, yours to care for. It’s also yours to heal — with help from others, of course.

You may not want to hear this, especially if you’ve got to the point in your life where you’ve lost all control over your own thoughts, feelings, actions, and creativity (as happens to too many people, in my view). But healing follows insight. And insight follows facts. So you need to know the facts so you can figure out what to do with them.

Healing a brain that’s fallen into the destructive patterns of status addiction is no easy task. So unlike most of my theological peers, I promise no easy fixes for you if you decide to go out and look for God. Easy fixes are a favourite food for status addiction. So you can imagine what I think of faith healers’ promises! On the other hand, I can promise permanent emotional healing if you’re willing to slowly and patiently regain control of the parts of your brain that are causing you so much suffering. This may require medical intervention, but such intervention is okay with God and your guardian angels. There’s no shame in needing help. Everyone needs help! Learning to receive help with gratefulness and humbleness is a big part of the journey.

When you compare the spectrographs of the Status Addict and the Whole Brain Thinker, you may be tempted to say it’s impossible for the brain of a Status Addict to ever be transformed to the pattern of the Whole Brain Thinker. You may be tempted (as so many religious teachers have been) to claim the Status Addict was born this way, and nobody can change it, and you may as well resign yourself to it. You may be tempted to say that only a saint who’s specially chosen by God could ever manage to do all that hard stuff like . . . like . . . caring about other people every day.

Fortunately, this miraculous transformation is not restricted to saints. And it’s not restricted to those who seek help from ordained clerics. It’s open to anyone, because all of us are children of God, and all of us are equally worthy of God’s help as we struggle with the difficult challenges we endure as human beings.

Trust in the fact that inside your confused and miswired human brain is your true self — you as a soul — who already lives and breathes everything you see on the chart for the Guardian Angel. You, as a person-of-soul, DO all these cool things like empathy and forgiveness and service and humbleness and self discipline and courage. You DO! You may not remember today, and you may not remember tomorrow, but that’s okay — just hang onto this uplifting divine truth about you as a child of God.

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. The brain science speaks far more loudly here than any religious text that’s ever been written. Science is one of God’s many languages. Don’t be afraid of it. The love and the science go together in one astounding package of wonder and mystery and awe and creativity (not to be confused with creationism, which is bizarre beyond bizarre).

What’s this? Talking about God the Mother and God the Father as if they’re brainiac scientists who know what they’re doing when they bring quantum waves and particles together in new creations that actually work?

Yeah . . . such a kookie idea.

-2
Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Favourite Posts, Kingdom teachings, quantum theory, Soul, status addiction, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
18 Mar 2012

TBM29: Intuition and Whole Brain Thinking: Filling You Up Inside

So what happens when you combine the practices of humbleness, forgiveness, and balance with the idea of a loving God and a loving soul?

You get a really healthy brain and a powerful sense of intuition that works.

In the Spiritual Kitchen, this is the equivalent of sitting down at a four-course meal with appetizer, soup, main course, and dessert. You get to enjoy everything in the company of friends and family, and you absorb most of the nutrients you need in order to stay relatively healthy. Inside, you feel all filled up instead of lost, empty, barren, and abandoned.

The honest truth is that most other religious and spiritual teachings you’ve come across don’t teach you or anyone else how to recognize — let alone enjoy — a four-course meal. Most religious traditions have become rigidly focussed on teaching you how to make just the soup or just the dessert while ignoring the other courses. According to these teachers, you can eat a steady diet of only cream of potato soup or only cream puffs and still feel “full” inside. When you finally notice you never feel full (because you’ve never received all the nutrients you need) your minister/monk/priest will then blame you for not trying hard enough.

Peonies 2013 (c) JAT:

Peonies 2013 (c) JAT: For those who want to enhance their sense of God’s presence, I recommend gratitude and reflection on the beauty and fullness of nature. Reflection on the Eucharist (a man-made ritual) upsets your soul because the original intent of Paul’s Eucharist was so creepy.

I’d like to emphasize — really, really emphasize — that when I use the metaphor of the four-course meal to describe the sensation of feeling full, I’m talking about the spiritual practices themselves as the source of the nutrients you need. I’m not in any way suggesting a cannibalistic ritual of actually eating God to get your nutrients. (If you’re a Christian who believes in the Eucharist, you need to know that Paul instituted this ritual, not Jesus. You also need to know that Paul’s Eucharist was an occult ritual, a cult ritual based on the idea that God could be eaten and thereby controlled. Gross, eh? Yeah, bet they didn’t tell you that in Sunday School class.)

The feeling of being full inside doesn’t come to you because God has entered you and filled up your “empty vessel.” The feeling of being full inside comes from your own brain chemistry, from your own choice to use your whole brain, not just certain parts of your brain. The feeling of being full inside comes when you realize that some parts of your brain work better with the appetizer and some parts work better with the soup and some parts work better with the main course and some parts work better with the dessert. So in order to feed your whole brain, you need to get all the spiritual nutrients, not just some of the nutrients.

This is the way your human brain is designed. You can’t change this reality, despite what you’ve been told by countless spiritual gurus. Your sense of intuition — that is, your ability to reliably and consistently “hear” what your guardian angels are saying to you — depends on the extent to which you’re a Whole Brain Thinker.

At a scientific level, there’s no way for a human being to be highly intuitive if he or she is not a Whole Brain Thinker. There’s no special prayer or ritual or secret vitamin that will boost your intuitive processes while allowing you to keep your less-than-loving habits. God the Mother and God the Father have designed the brain and central nervous system in such a way that all the parts are dependent on each other (as you’d expect from a loving God). You can’t boost one part at the expense of another part. If you try, you’ll trigger biological responses that you won’t like very much — responses such as migraines, pain disorders, immune dysfunction, sleep disorders, eating disorders, addiction disorders.

The medical disorders I’ve listed are just that — medical disorders. Medical disorders are a fact of life for human beings. It’s so difficult for us to find the right balance — the “sweet spot” where the needs of the 4D soul and the needs of the 3D body are perfectly matched — that people’s bodies are always falling out of balance and expressing this imbalance through medical disorders. So of course we get sick. And of course we get autoimmune disorders. And of course we get neurological disorders. But this is no cause for blaming people for their illnesses, for accusing them (falsely, of course!) of being filled with cosmic sin or ancient karma or negative entities.

Medical disorders are not a divine punishment. They’re not a sign of “impurity” or a sign of separation from all that is divine and sacred and good and true. They’re not even a sign that you’re failing to try hard enough. Most often, medical disorders of the type mentioned above indicate there’s something you don’t understand about your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. There’s a lack of knowledge, perhaps, or a lack of insight. Perhaps there’s a lack of help available to you even though you have a partial understanding of what’s troubling you. Goodness knows there’s precious little information available to you at the moment to help you understand the complex interaction between brain chemistry and the soul’s needs.

Most people I’ve spoken with — intelligent, educated, sincere people — have zero idea about the functioning of their own brains. Most people spend far more time worrying about their toes — the health of their toes, the comfort of their toes, the look of their toes — than they ever spend on the most complex system of organs they have: the brain/central nervous system.

I once did a seminar in theology class about the spiritual brain. (This was a novel idea for my classmates.) To begin the seminar, I asked each person in the room to take 30 seconds to make a list of all the body organs they could think of (eg. heart, lungs, liver). I timed them. I then gave them 60 seconds to make a list of all the parts of the brain they could think of (eg. cerebellum, corpus callosum, hypothalamus). I gave them extra time for this exercise because brain names take longer to write. Didn’t matter, though. They couldn’t come up with much. Why not? Because we’re not teaching people how to think about their brains, and we’re especially not teaching people how to think about their brains as an assortment of pots and pans and nutrients and ingredients in our own Spiritual Kitchens. So people continue to feel frustrated and angry and empty inside.

So what do most people do? They get angry with God. And angry at their own guardian angels. They try to pray, but they pray for things God won’t give them, so they get angrier still. This upsets their souls, and the upset triggers chronic levels of stress hormones. The stress hormones damage their brains and immune systems, and make it harder still for people to use their own intuitive circuitry. So they get sick. And they get even angrier. So they pray harder. And nothing happens. And they don’t understand why. So they figure God isn’t listening and God doesn’t care. And then they get so angry they stop trying to listen for God’s small, still voice. And they figure they can go it alone. So they decide to stop believing in God. And they choose some form of atheism or agnosticism or non-theism. Except this really upsets the soul, because the one thing the soul knows for sure is that God the Mother and God the Father are always with us, always loving us, always worrying about us. So now the body’s DNA allows for the release of huge doses of stress hormones, and the body can’t cope, so it looks for biological ways to cope with the stress, and most often these days it stumbles upon the transitory wonders of status addiction as a way to self-medicate. And now you’re totally screwed as far as your intuition goes, because status addiction and intuition mix like oil and water.

Sound familiar?

-1
Posted in brain-soul connection, building your intuition, healing, insight, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | 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.

-3
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 , | Leave a Comment
13 Mar 2012

TBM27: Prayers Your Angels Will Refuse to Answer

Last time I said I’d talk about some of the ways in which your angels can help you. Many readers are not going to like this post.

Before you can understand the ways in which your angels can help you, you need to spend some time thinking about the ways in which your angels cannot help you.

This statement in itself will shock some people, because we’ve all been told again and again that God can do anything for us if we ask in the right way. Hence, the many books and workshops and rituals around prayer. We’ve been conditioned to believe that prayer is a powerful form of mystical energy, as it were, a powerful form of mystical energy that can change the world if properly invoked.

Indeed, so central is prayer to the experience of conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist Christianity that if you were to remove all the prayers from the worship services (e.g. the Anglican Book of Common Prayer), there’d be precious little left.

Which is exactly my point.

In a world where human beings are called upon to juggle the 4D needs of the soul and the 3D needs of the body in a balanced, holistic, seamless way, there’s something wrong with a religious experience that lets you off easy if you say a bunch of prayers. In most cases, you don’t even have to write the prayers yourself. You just have to copy what the prayer leader is saying!

Thutmose III offering two containers of incense to the god Amun. Reproduction from the 18th Dynasty (15th century BCE) original at Deir el-Bahri, Egypt, on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. The idea that you can open the door to God’s blessings by saying the right prayer or offering the right gift is very, very old. As Jesus tried to point out, the fact that a religious idea is old is no guarantee that it’s right.

I’ve taken university theology courses that teach prospective ministry students how to design worship services and write prayers, and believe me, there’s no great mystery involved. Ya just gotta follow the traditional prayer formulas and string together a lot of popular cliches about faith and peace and love, and, presto!, ya got yerself a pretty new prayer to recite on Sunday. Piece of cake.

The real question is, will God or your guardian angels pay any attention to you as you dutifully recite these prayers?

Well, this depends on two things. The first factor is your own personal intent or “meta-choice.”* The second factor is the relationship you already have with God. These two factors are intertwined with each other.

Maybe I should start by explaining that although I’m a practising mystic, I stopped praying to God years ago. In place of traditional prayer, I’ve learned to communicate with God.

But aren’t prayer and communication with God the same thing, you’re saying?

They’re only the same thing if (1) part of your personal meta-choice is to learn each day from your own mistakes and if (2) you have faith that God and God’s angels are going to intervene in your life whether or not you ask for help.

Prayer, as it’s traditionally understood, starts with the assumption that God hears and acts upon the words you say in prayer, but that until you actually “open your heart” by speaking the prayers, God is standing helplessly but hopefully on the other side of the divine door as he waits for you to ask.

In my rather large collection of books that contain what I feel are “toxic teachings,” I have a gem called Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To by Anthony DeStefano (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 2007). On the cover there’s a stamp that says, “Endorsed by the National Day of Prayer,” so right off the bat you can tell I’m going to have a problem with the content.

DeStefano outlines what he sees as the top ten questions people ask in their lives. He then offers a prayer you can use to answer each of these questions in turn.

So for the No. 1 Question — “I Wish I Could Believe” — DeStefano says you should use this prayer — “God, please show me that you exist” — again and again until “God starts to reveal himself to you (page 22).”

Says the author (pages 23-24):

“And it all starts with one simple prayer: God, please show me that you exist.

There is a beautiful nineteenth-century painting that illustrates this point well. It’s called The Light of the World. In it, Christ is shown holding a lantern, standing outside a little cottage on a dark, stormy night. He is knocking on the door of the home, waiting to be let in, but the occupant, unseen behind the door, does nothing. The figure of Christ, bathed in a golden green light, is supremely serene and looks as if he is prepared to stay outside the cottage door knocking forever. It is a striking image because of what it says about the light of truth in a dark world. But the really interesting thing about the painting is that there is a curious detail missing. If you look closely at the door of the home, you will see that there is not a knob or a latch anywhere to be found. Why? It can’t be that the artist forgot to put it in. Rather, he was making a sublime theological point: the door to the human heart can be opened only from the inside. God will never force his way in.”


Oh, let me swoon for the wonder of having a divine father who’ll stand outside knocking on a dark and stormy night because he cares whether or not I’m going to make it into heaven (page 4)! He cares what will happen to me on Judgment Day and doesn’t want me to have to go to Hell! Because he loves me sooooo much that he created all sorts of stupid things he can’t do anything about — things like Judgment Day and Atonement and angels that fall (like Satan) and Original Sin and Hell! I’m just so lucky that he cares enough to stand outside the door knocking, knocking, ever so patiently knocking!

Yeah, this sounds like Divine Love to me . . .

DeStefano thinks that after you open your heart to God, God will step through the door and into your heart. Once this happens, of course, you’ll become an instrument of God — which is Prayer No. 2 in this book. When you say repeatedly that you want God to make you an instrument (i.e. an empty vessel of service and “mercy”), what you’re actually asking for is religious humility. (Just so we’re clear on the intent of the “God, make me an instrument” prayer).

And then, because you’re now an empty vessel through whom God works, you have to use four of your “Top Ten” Prayers just to fill you up with various graces from God: “God, forgive me (No. 5). God, give me peace (No. 6). God, give me courage (no. 7). God, give me wisdom (No. 8).”

If you start your journey on the Spiral Path with the same assumptions that DeStefano advocates, you’re going to have some serious trouble understanding the messages of your own guardian angels. Why? Because angels don’t believe any of this shit. They’re operating from an entirely different set of truths, and they ain’t gonna budge on their truths, no matter how much you think they should.

Your angels know that God never enters your own core being, your own soul (i.e. “entering your heart,” as DeStefano describes it), because to do so would be a terrible violation of your own personal boundaries as a core consciousness and child of God. God is God, and you are you, and ne’er the twain shall meet. God will tap you on the shoulder. God will frequently hold your hand. God will sit beside you and talk to you for hours. God will sometimes pick you up and carry you for a while. But don’t EVER ask God to “come inside and fill you up,” because from God’s point of view this request feels like a creepy and incestuous form of contact. (Sorry to be so blunt, but you need to know what it feels like from God’s perspective, not from your status-addicted preacher’s perspective.) This is one of the few permanent rules you should keep in mind as you move forward on the Spiral Path: always treat God the Mother and God the Father in the respectful manner you’d treat your human parents. They’re your parents, not your lovers.

Your angels also know that it isn’t up to God or God’s angels to give you peace or courage or wisdom. You already have those strengths inside your core self, your own soul. Your job is not to ask to be given those things, but to ask how to remember those things which are already part of you.

(If this sounds like the plot of The Wizard of Oz, it’s because The Wizard of Oz has some timeless things to say about the spiritual journey.)

Third, your angels don’t wait for you to ask before they intervene in your life. They step in whenever and wherever they please. Why? Because they care about you, and they know it’s difficult and confusing to live as a 4D-soul-in-temporary-human-form.

If angels see a problem brewing, they don’t stand there knocking endlessly on the other side of the door (like Sheldon knocking on Penny’s door in The Big Bang Theory). I mean, what would be the good of that? Do you really want a guardian angel who stands there wringing his hands helplessly until you use the “right prayer,” the one with the “right mystical energy” that suddenly opens the door so God can walk in?

In my experience, angels don’t beat around the bush. They come right out and say what they’re thinking — even if (as is usually the case) you don’t want to hear it.

God and God’s angels are always talking. They’re a very chatty bunch, in fact. And they like to talk to each other — you know, pass along information about what you’re actually thinking and feeling instead of what you say you’re thinking and feeling.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, and a few of the people all of the time. But you can never, ever fool a guardian angel.

They always know your true intent. And they always have an opinion on your true intent. Which is a good thing, because this way they can guide you to the people and ideas and books (etc.) that can help you learn more about healing, forgiveness, and redemption.

As I said in an earlier post, angels aren’t wusses.

* For more on intent and meta-choices, see “Knowledge” Versus “Truth” and Pelagius and Personal Responsibility.

 

-2
Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain-soul connection, ethical mysticism, free will, humility, intent, meta-choice, prayer, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic and tagged , | Leave a Comment
10 Mar 2012

TBM25: Awe and Wonder – Gifts of the Soul

There’s a long tradition in all major world religions of teaching people that life on Planet Earth is some sort of cosmic punishment. According to these theories — theories from such esteemed thinkers as Plato and the Buddha and Paul and assorted Gnostic teachers — the very fact that you’re living here on Planet Earth proves that you haven’t advanced very far in your spiritual development as a soul. These thinkers start with the assumption that life as a 3D human being totally sucks from beginning to end. So anything you can do to “escape” from the suffering proves that you’re smarter and faster and better than your “ignorant” and “unworthy” peers, who are too stupid to understand the need for escape.

(C) Image*After

(C) Image*After

Hey, don’t get mad at me. This is what these teachers actually taught!

See, now, I think all these teachers were completely wrong. I think these teachers never understood for a moment what it means to love. I think they saw the world from their own narrow, shrunken, unloving perspective. They failed to see the potential of all creatures on Planet Earth, the potential of all creatures to live lives of great courage and devotion and learning and teamwork. They failed to see the potential for love, which means they lived their own personal lives in a state of depression and blame and victimhood, and then they died without ever understanding why they were here and what they could have done with their human lives, but, you know, that’s their problem. You’re not responsible for their failure to see the “big picture.” You’re not responsible for their limited imagination or their limited faith in God or their limited courage. These teachers had more education and more opportunities than most people on Planet Earth have ever had, and they blew it. They chose not to learn about love. But you don’t have to follow in their footsteps. You can follow a different path — the Spiral Path of learning, love, and wonder.

Incarnating as a human being on Planet Earth, far from proving your inadequacy as a child of God, proves the very opposite. The fact that you’re here says you’re made of incredibly tough stuff — the kind of stuff that makes it possible for you to learn to juggle not only your soul’s needs but also your biological human needs. At the same time. With limited tools and limited resources. And a limited time frame. And a lot of days where you seem to spend more time UNlearning the errors of your past than anything else. And a lot of confusion and frustration. And more questions than you can answer during your life as a human being. And more ways to know your own love and courage than you ever thought possible.

It’s a friggin’ hard juggling act. But also an awe-inspiring juggling act. The people who get it figured out inspire awe and wonder in others. Not worship or blind obedience in others. (I repeat –the goal is not to try to induce worship or blind obedience in others.) It’s just a simple childlike awe and wonder towards others. The same childlike awe and wonder that we, as angels and children of God, feel towards our beloved divine parents, God the Mother and God the Father.

In other words, divine love has a large component of awe and wonder in it. You could also use the words “gratitude” and “humbleness” to describe the feelings of awe and wonder we express towards other souls in Creation, including the two souls who are God.

I often feel awe and wonder in the presence of other people when they’re choosing to bring a sense of balance into the world through their daily actions. These are the people who understand boundaries and appropriate limits, who understand when to say “yes” and when to say “no.” These are the people who know what they’re good at, and work hard to create something meaningful with the talents they have. They’re not threatened by other people’s talents. They know how to play when it’s time to play. They know how to cry when it’s time to cry. Most important, they think their highest spiritual calling is to treat other people with dignity, respect, compassion, politeness, and divine love at every opportunity each day.

Oh, and they’re not afraid to learn new things.

At the other end of the spectrum, I’m not ever inspired to a feeling of awe and wonder in the presence of status addicts. I take no inspiration from the choices of a person who is consciously seeking to climb the ladder of fame, power, or wealth. I feel no awe when I hear the contestants on American Idol trying to out-sing each other. I feel no wonder whatsoever when Donald Trump’s contestants come up with brilliant new business schemes. To be honest, the Olympics leave me cold. The cost of winning a gold medal is simply too high.

I’m all for the pursuit of excellence as long as it’s not confused (as it so often is) with the pursuit of status. I think it can be cogently argued that anyone who makes it into the Olympics has long since passed the threshold of excellence and crossed into the territory of full-blown status addiction. How else to explain the agony of defeat when the margin of loss is measured in mere hundredths of a second? There is nothing in this obsessive pursuit of perfection that I admire.

I do admire individuals who love a sport and actively participate so they can be in respectful, non-competitive relationship with others. I admire the people who use sports as an effective teaching modality. I admire the people who go outside to walk and bike and hike and camp and canoe (etc.) so they can be closer to their families and to God. I don’t have a problem with any of this. In fact, I think these activities are incredibly healthy and beneficial for both the soul and the biological body.

But don’t ask me to care which athlete has the fastest time or the best score. The soul doesn’t care about raw scores compared to other people’s scores. The soul only cares that each person raise his/her own bar as high as possible and keep working consistently to achieve the difficult goal of finding holistic balance between the soul’s 4D needs and the body’s 3D needs.

Please don’t assume from the previous sentence that I make a dualistic distinction between the soul’s 4D needs and the body’s 3D needs. These aren’t simple little boxes (despite what the Materialist philosophers would have you believe.) The three dimensional universe and the four dimensional universe are intertwined within each other — enfolded within the implicate order, as physicist David Bohm described it (or tried to describe it, since it’s so hard to conceptualize our complex reality by using our 3D pea-brains (no offense intended)).

Dimensions don’t have clear-cut dividing lines between them with perimeter signs that say, “Warning, you are now entering 4D Space! All shoes purchased with your credit card must be surrendered at the border!”

The thing is, when you die, you can’t take with you the actual pair of ruby slippers you loved during your human lifetime, but you can take with you the memory and the feeling and the love of your favourite ruby slippers, and strangely, in the mysterious way of this vast Creation we live in, you’ll one day find again a tiny bit of Creation that feels exactly the same way to you. And you’ll love your “4D shoes” just as much then as you love your 3D shoes today.

Such is the wonder of divine love. Spirals within spirals. Love within love. Ever entwined. Ever enfolded. And ever filled with wonder and awe.

Thank you, blessed Mother and Father, for the gift of your amazing love! We love you!

 

Addendum February 7, 2018: Recent research into positive emotions is showing how the emotional experience of awe may help lower the body’s levels of interleukin 6, a cytokine molecule which is a marker for inflammation in the body. Cytokines are important proteins in the immune system, but research has shown an association between high, sustained levels of cytokines and a number of diseases such as type-2 diabetes, major depression, and possibly Alzheimer’s disease. Of the positive emotions included in the study — amusement, awe, compassion, contentment, joy, love, and pride — it was awe that showed the most statistically significant association with lower levels of interleukin 6.

 

-3
Posted in "4 S's", "Escape", boundary issues, brain-soul connection, Buddhism, Divine Love, Gnosticism, gratitude, humbleness, life and death, Mother and Father God, quantum theory, Soul, status addiction, The Blonde Mystic and tagged | Leave a Comment
21 Feb 2012

TBM24: Juggling the Needs of Heart, Mind, Body, and Talent

bouquet On the Spiral Path, you’re always trying to find the “sweet spot” where the needs of your heart match the needs of your mind, the needs of your body, and the needs of your talents. The sweet spot is the place where you feel whole, balanced, calm, and complete.

Too often I’ve read books that tell you how to find the needs of your heart while ignoring the needs of your mind. Or books that tell you how to find the needs of your body while ignoring the needs of your heart. Or books that tell you how to find the needs of your mind while ignoring pretty much everything else. (There are a lot of books about the needs of the mind.)

On the Spiral Path, you need a plan that takes you forward bit by bit in all spheres of your being, not just one or two select spheres. You need a holistic plan, a balanced plan that has a little bit of everything in it.

In the Spiritual Kitchen, you’d soon fall into a rut if you had to make the same ol’ cream of potato soup every day. Not that cream of potato soup is a bad thing in itself. But every day? Three times a day? Wouldn’t that get pretty repetitive, pretty obsessive-compulsive after a while?

The recipe for healthy eating, as Canada’s Food Guide tells us, is to eat something from each food group at each meal, and, furthermore, to switch up the foods that are chosen from each food group. This way we get a wide variety of necessary vitamins, trace elements, amino acids, fats, anti-oxidants, and calorie sources.

This same sensible, balanced approach applies to life on the Spiral Path. There are four main “energy groups” you have to think about each day: (1) your soul’s heart (2) your soul’s mind (3) your soul’s body and (4) your soul’s need to use your own talents and strengths in service to others. All these are equally important to your overall health.

It would be easy to say, “Oh, so our emotional health is linked to our hearts, and our physical health is linked to our soul bodies.”

This would be the easy thing to say, but not the correct thing to say. It’s much more complicated than that because you, as a 4D-angel-temporarily-incarnated-as-a-3D-human-being, are much more complicated than that.

When, for example, you look after the needs of your soul’s heart, this improves your health at all levels: your physical health, your emotional health, your intellectual health, and your spiritual health. Why? Because you’re a holistic organism. You’re a complex biosystem with many interconnected parts. The one thing you are NOT is a bunch of different coloured Lego blocks or widgets or mechanical pieces that can be removed and treated in isolation from all the other parts. You are much, much more than the sum of your individual parts.

One body of spiritual thought I object to in every way possible is the idea that your eternal “energy self” is made up of a bunch of different layers or “astral bodies,” with some layers being “heavier” and therefore less “advanced” and less “enlightened,” while other layers are of a “higher” and “more desirable” vibration that’s closer to the Divine.

This is pure crap. It’s a form of anagogic mysticism, and, if you’ve been reading my other blogs, you know I have no use for either anagogic mysticism (the path of vertical spiritual ascent) or apophatic mysticism (“we are all One” — literally).

Your soul has a lot of different “systems” and “organs,” just as your biological human body has a lot of different systems and organs, and all of them are equally important to your ability to function as a complete and entire angel. Your soul heart and soul mind couldn’t exist if you didn’t have a soul body to hold everything in place. So your soul body is just as important to your overall consciousness as your heart, mind, and talents are. It needs just as much attention and care as your biological human body does.

Keep it simple, keep it sane, as my guardian angel has been telling me for years.

When you make the decision, as an angel-in-angel-form, to undertake the difficult task of incarnating here on Planet Earth, you have to somehow be able to squish your core consciousness — your unique blend of heart, mind, body, and talents — into a small and temporary biological package. This small package is your DNA, which carries in its helix an entire blueprint for constructing your biological body. Your DNA is unique to you because you, as a soul and child of God, are unique in all of Creation. Even identical twins, who are currently thought to have identical genes, are a unique expression of consciousness. (Poorly understood epigenetic factors play a much greater role in development than previously recognized. This is one reason why identical twins, while remarkably similar to each other, even when raised apart, are still very different people. Plus they have different souls!)

You are who you are who you are. You are who you are because you can’t be any other way. Nor do you want to be any other way — not as a soul, at least. As a soul, you’re very happy to be who you are. As a human being . . . well, as a human being you’re also supposed to be happy with who you are. Except that few people are.

Most people I know, and most people I’ve read about, have no idea whatsoever how to be happy with who they are. That’s because they can’t read their own soul blueprint. They don’t know how to interpret the inner whispers of their own heart, mind, body, and talents. Heck, most people don’t even know they have a soul blend of heart, mind, body, and talents. They think they’re just . . . existing.

The soul is not a “single substance,” despite what famous philosophers and theologians of the past have said. Nor is it unchangeable. The soul does change with time, because no one who is learning and loving and giving and creating can stay the same. Even as souls, as children of God, we’re changed by our experiences and our relationships. And this is always a good thing.

One of the great mysteries of consciousness, however, is the fact that although all of us change over the course of time as souls, none of us change in exactly the same way. We’re unique in the way we absorb new experiences and process them. We’re unique in the way we remember them. We’re unique in the way we share them. We’re all different, and at the same time, equally beautiful.

We’re all equally beautiful, but this is not to say we’re all identical or all “One.” We’re as different from each other in the way we grow and flourish as the many different kinds of flowers on Planet Earth. When we’re all put side by side, we make a breathtaking garden of passionate blooms, some short, some tall, some showy, some shy. All different. But all equally wondrous.

In no way does the family of God resemble endless neat rows of identical, unchanging wheat plants ready to be harvested by the master.

Our willingness as souls to be changed by our relationships with other souls is not limited to angels. God the Mother and God the Father are also learning, changing, growing as they live in daily relationship with us, their children. They’re expanding the size of their Spiritual Kitchen to make room for their ever-growing family of angels — core beings, core consciousnesses who reside for most of their existence within the complex folds of space and time that we, as 3D human beings, simply cannot see with our human eyes.

This is not to say, however, that they’re invisible to the heart.

 

-1
Posted in brain-soul connection, building your intuition, Kingdom teachings, Mother and Father God, Soul, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
03 Dec 2011

RS16: Angels in Blue Jeans

(c) Jamie MacDonald. Used with permission of the artist.

(c) Jamie MacDonald. Used with permission of the artist.

A: Some people who are reading this discussion might say it’s unfair of us to suddenly throw brain science onto the same page alongside spirituality, to insist your teachings 2,000 years ago were built around ideas that have only been proven by science in the past few decades. How would you respond to that?

J: Well, the thing about science is that scientific research always lags behind the human mind, the human imagination. Research only evolves because somebody somewhere has had a great idea and wants to push the idea out of the 4D realm of consciousness and into the 3D world of physical reality. So it doesn’t phase me at all to hear people grumbling about the brain science. The honest truth is that I was a pioneer in the deep interconnection between science and faith. Sure, my ideas were rough around the edges, as early theories usually are. But that was the focus of my ministry.

A: I can hear the scornful scoffing from here — the outrage from pious Christians.

J: Well, I wasn’t a Pauline Christian. Never have been, never will be. Nor was I a devout Jew. So pious Christians and pious Jews can be as angry as they like. It won’t change the fact that I tried to found a radically new religious movement based on the most loving values I could find, regardless of where I found them. I was equally happy to gather insights from folk medicine as from Greek philosophy. In fact, I found more truths about God in the medicine chests of Galilean peasants than I ever found in Plato or Aristotle. Philosophers who live their lives inside their heads instead of their hearts have rarely contributed anything of value to the betterment of human lives. If I had a time machine (which I don’t, of course) I’d go back in time and invite Plato to spend a month in the copper mines and then ask him if he’d like to revise his bloody Republic.

A: Just a month?

J: He probably wouldn’t have lasted more than a month. The mines were brutal places.

A: There’s nothing like walking a mile in a slave’s shoes to understand how unjust slavery is.

J: Yes. I never became a slave — not in legal terms — but I went from a life of great privilege to a life of great hardship, and it altered all my ideas of, well, of everything. I wouldn’t have been able to see the truth about the Divine Heart if a lot of very powerful people hadn’t kicked the crap out of me.

A: Tell me more about that.

J: I’d been raised on a lot of insufferable ideas about how “important” I was and how “special” I was. I got it with my morning olives, you could say. “Yeshua, remember who you are. Yeshua, behave according to your station. Yeshua, don’t talk to those . . . those . . . filthy peasants. Yeshua, remember who you are!”

A: So who were you?

J: I was a descendant of the High Priest Onias III. One of many descendants, I should add. He had a lot of fertile children. John the Baptist was also a descendant of his. So technically speaking, John and I were cousins, though so distantly related that it only mattered to fanatical devotees of genealogy.

A: Was anyone keeping track of these things by the time you were born? Did anyone care that your great-great-whatever-grandfather had been High Priest of the Jerusalem Temple?

J: Oh yes. It was a big deal. It carried a lot a cachet. It was like saying today, “I’m a descendant of Queen Victoria.” The children of Queen Victoria married into many of the royal houses of Europe, and her descendants are spread all over the place. My family — on my mother’s side — was kind of like that. Our bloodline was considered “sacred.”

A: Even though your father was Greek.

J: Even then. He was talented and ambitious and indispensable as far as the Romans were concerned. He had a real talent for math. He could do complex calculations in his head, and he had a wonderful eye for architectural design. His name isn’t remembered in the annals of Roman architectural history, but he built some pretty memorable streetscapes in the newly conquered lands of Syria and Palestine.

A: He added to the status and prestige of Augustus.

J: Yes. His acceptance among the Romans made him a good match for my mother as far as my Jewish grandfather was concerned. Strong political connections. But, strange as it may seem, my parents’ marriage was a love match. They loved each other deeply. After my father died, when I was about four and my oldest brother, James, was sixteen, my mother lived as a widow in mourning for the rest of her very long life.

A: She was a widow during the small window of time when Roman marriage laws gave a measure of independence to widows who had at least three living children.

J: Yes. Few people see the significance of the list of my family’s names that Mark includes in his gospel. Mark 6:3 says, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters [plural] here with us?” There’s no mention of my father. There’s no mention of a step-father, either. Mark is clearly telling his audience that Mary had full property rights as a widow under Roman marriage law. It means she was wealthy and well connected, because only wealthy people could afford to provide the physiological needs and safety needs required to raise such a large family, and only well connected women could side-step the economic and cultural pressure on them to marry again. It’s right there in Mark. Plain as day.

A: In an era when infant mortality rates were high and most adults didn’t make it to “middle age” as we define middle age, it was important to note your family’s size and health and economic situation. It told readers something about who you were.

J: I grew up in a family that had enough money and enough prestige to guarantee that I had good nutrition and shelter while I was growing up (i.e. provide for my physiological needs); to protect me from being abused by robbers or slave-holding masters or religious masters (i.e. provide for my safety needs); to provide me with a family setting where I felt loved and respected (i.e. meet my needs for love & belonging); and to insist that I receive a strong education in Greek and Jewish philosophy, law, rhetoric, and geometry (i.e. give me the tools to build my self-esteem).

I may have made a lot of mistakes in my youth, but because of my upbringing I had a healthy brain. This gave me a considerable biological advantage compared to many others in the first century culture I lived in. My healthy brain made it possible for me to learn from my mistakes and ask new, harder questions about our relationship with God the Mother and God the Father. My healthy brain made me tougher and smarter than most of my peers.

A: Because you were using all parts of your brain in a balanced way. A holistic way. Not a rigid, fearful way.

J: When human beings stop being afraid of learning from their own mistakes — when they’re willing to be humble — they can do amazing things in the world.

But first — and this is the big stumbling block for status-addicted pious folk — first they have to get over themselves. They have to let go of every shred of religious chosenness and religious purity and religious salvation. They have to be willing to look God right in the eye. That’s what humbleness is. That’s what true faith is.

A: I love the way young children look their parents right in the eye and tell the truth out loud. That’s the way it should be.

J: That’s the way it actually is for angels-in-angel-form.

A: This morning my angel team shared a fascinating dream with me. They were talking about their own observations on the difference between Pauline Christianity and the kind of faith you tried to teach.

In the dream, they compared Pauline Christianity — orthodox Western Christianity — to a store that insists we each buy a fancy, expensive tuxedo. According to the store, you need to have a tuxedo on hand for that one-time-only day when you come face to face with God. You might never wear it during your lifetime as a human being. But, by golly, you better spend the money to buy it NOW so you can lock it in your closet and keep it safe for “That Day” in the future when God comes calling.

Of course, the store gets your money today . . .

You, on the other hand, would look pretty great in a tuxedo, but I know you well, and you’re no tuxedo-in-the-closet kind of guy. You’re a blue jeans kind of guy. Put on your blue jeans and go out into the world TODAY to see where you can help God TODAY. No standing on ceremony. No false humility. Just a guy with a big heart who knows what’s important in life.

Thanks, big guy. Thanks for saying what you needed to say in the way you needed to say it. We need more of this kind of courage in the world.

And thanks to my angel team, too. Couldn’t do it without you.

 

Food for thought (added March 3, 2015): On February 27, 2015, the National Post offered an article and video about a Canadian man who is a descendant of Queen Victoria. Hermann Leiningen carries a title, but in every other way is a normal Canadian.  His story reminds me of Jesus’ story, right down to the excellent manners, quick mind, and good education.  Please see “The Canadian who would be king: What it’s like to be the great-great-great grandson of Queen Victoria.”

-2
Posted in brain-soul connection, Christ Zone, Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' teachings, Paul vs Jesus, Realspiritik, slavery, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
27 Nov 2011

RS15: The Human Sense of Time & Timing

(C) JAT

Rivers of Time (c) JAT 2013

J: Today I want to talk about the human sense of time and timing.

A: Okay. I’ve had my first coffee, so my typing fingers are warmed up and ready to go.

J: When you were growing up, what were you taught about the human senses?

A: Oh. That’s easy. We were taught there are five senses — sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. I think this is still the conventional wisdom.

J: Right. And if I were to ask a group of people today what the “sixth sense” is, what would people say?

A: Intuition. Second sight. Psychic messages. Something along those lines.

J: Right. People in this culture are taught to think of the “sixth sense” as intuition — as something vague and on the fringe.

A: There’s also the famous movie called Sixth Sense. That’s a bit more than “being on the fringe.” That’s right into the Twilight Zone.

J: The problem — the problem I want to state clearly for the record — is that all human beings are born with an additional physical sense that hasn’t been recognized for what it is. This additional physiological trait is a scientific trait, not a paranormal trait. It’s 100% verifiable and 100% crucial to the healthy functioning of the human brain. It’s so important to the healthy functioning of the human brain that when it isn’t properly supported during the first few years of a child’s life, it causes lifelong problems in most facets of daily living.

A: You’re talking about the sense of time & timing.

J: Yes. This poorly understood aspect of the biological brain is so important that you could almost call it “the missing key” — the aspect of human consciousness that, if properly developed and used throughout life, generates an inner experience of wholeness and completion, an experience that so many people are lacking in their lives today.

A: Can you define the sense of time & timing?

J: It’s the ability of the human brain to correctly place “the self” on a timeline. It’s the ability to distinguish between past, present, and future. It’s the ability — quite literally — to tell time on an analog clock.

A: Ooooh. A lot of younger people today can’t tell time on an analog clock.

J: True. And it’s symptomatic of a much wider issue — the growing choice in Western culture (and other cultures) to stop teaching children about their own sense of time & timing. The parietal lobes of these children are not developing properly in early childhood. The parietal lobes of the brain are not developing the strong interconnections they need with all other parts of the brain. The cost here will be very high. Very high for these children, very high for their communities.

A: You don’t pull your punches, do you? Most people have never even heard of the sense of time or the parietal lobes of the brain, and here you are telling them the high cost of not developing these aspects of themselves. Are you talking about a spiritual cost? Changes in the parieto-temporal regions of the brain have been linked to certain mystical or spiritual experiences. Is this what you’re talking about?

J (shaking his head): It’s not that simple. The sense of time & timing takes six to seven years — years — to develop in a healthy child whose core needs (the core needs of the Christ Zone model) are all being met.

A: Starting when?

J: From the time of birth. The template for the sense of time & timing exists at birth, but it takes six to seven years of consistent exposure to the flow of time for the human brain to finally “get it.” When the brain finally “gets it,” analog clocks suddenly make sense. They make sense because they demonstrate in a mechanical way the forward movement of time. Digital clocks don’t “model” the forward flow of time. Digital clocks show a bunch of numbers in a particular order, but they don’t show time.

A: I can remember clear as day my son’s gradual struggle as a young boy to master the sense of time. He could read a digital clock at the age of four (“You can come and get Mommy when your clock says 7-0-0”) but it didn’t mean anything to him. He was simply memorizing the numbers.

J: You’d be surprised how many adults try to get through life by memorizing the numbers. It’s a scary feeling when you don’t understand the concept of time, but other people think you do.

A: I remember my son’s favourite TV cartoon when he was four. It was Ghostbusters. It was a half-hour show, and he just loved it. He even dressed up as a Ghostbuster for Hallowe’en one year. When he asked how long something would take, his dad and I would frame it in terms of Ghostbusters. “The church service will be two Ghostbusters long.” He seemed to be able to cope with time when we used his favourite show as a yardstick. Finally, when he was about six, he started to be able to use an analog clock without help. At the time, I had no idea how significant this was.

J: His ability to relate in a rudimentary way to time through the yardstick of his favourite TV show is absolutely crucial to what I’m trying to convey about the human sense of time. Healthy human beings don’t read time the way you read a digital clock. Healthy human beings read time as a history of relationships. It’s all about the history — the learning, the memory, the growth, the change. Time is more than just a bunch of numbers. Time is . . . well, it’s almost organic. It moves forward (never backward) but it flows like a river, not like a geometric line of numbers in sequence. Numbers are two dimensional (literally). Time is fourth dimensional. It can’t be thought of in strictly linear terms, because nothing in the fourth dimension of physics is strictly linear.

A: That’s pretty complex.

J: Time is very complex. It’s intertwined with all aspects of consciousness, whether that consciousness exists in angel-form or in angel-as-human form. All of us — God the Mother, God the Father, angels who are God’s children, angels who are temporarily incarnated as human beings — all of us have strands of time woven into our very being. None of us can escape time. And none of us would want to. It’s our ability to remember events in time, to remember moments of love and joy and sorrow, that makes it possible for us to exist. The soul exists precisely because time moves forward, ever forward, like a cosmic river. The river grows, changes its course, develops new tributaries, slows in some places, rages in others, picks up sediment, drops it, creates fertile fields where new crops can grow, breaks its banks, shrinks to a trickle, but always, always flows with sound and beauty and marvels of construction. So it is with time — time as angels know it, time as God knows it.

A: So you really have to be on your toes with time. You never know where it’s going to carry you next.

J: Yes. A person who has mastered the human sense of time is, by definition, a person who is flexible and adaptable. Someone who can cope with change. Someone who isn’t frightened by the thought of learning something new.

A: I know quite a few people who are terrified of change, can’t cope with new ideas or skills, and want their lives to “stay the same.” They get really angry when they’re put in a situation where they might have to admit they don’t know something. They don’t want to say, “Sorry, I don’t know how to do that.”

J: When the parietal lobes haven’t been fully developed, the human brain does what it’s programmed to do — it shifts to its secondary circuits to pick up the slack. This is what redundancy and neuroplasticity in the brain are supposed to do. If one major circuit goes off-line, or is underactive, you temporarily shift the load to a different circuit till you can fix the main problem. Anyone who works with complex electrical engineering systems will know what I mean.

The difficulty here is that the brain shifts the load to secondary circuits (for example, to the anterior cingulate cortex), but the main problem in the parietal lobes never gets fixed. The load stays on the secondary circuits — circuits that aren’t designed to take this kind of load on a long term basis. Eventually, these secondary circuits start to break down, just as you’d expect. The cost of this begins to appear in a person’s thought, mood, and behaviour. In other words, serious mental health issues and serious neurological issues begin to arise. It’s inevitable.

A: Meanwhile, your parietal lobes are still underactive, which means you can’t learn from your own mistakes, and life is endlessly frustrating.

J: It makes you feel as if there’s a big hole inside you, a big void, that goes round and round without beginning or end. It’s feels like a hamster wheel, and you’re trapped on it. It feels awful, but after a while you start to believe it’s normal. Even worse, you start to believe that everyone else must feel the same way inside — empty and trapped and hopeless. But it’s not true. This isn’t the normal state of inner experience human beings are designed for. God is a little smarter than that.

A: Not that the Church has ever said so . . . .

 

-1
Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, building your intuition, Christ Zone, insight, interoception, Realspiritik, sense of time & timing, Soul, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment
07 Nov 2011

RS11: The Christ Zone Model: Introduction

Celtic Cross in Brompton Cemetery, England ((C) tracy from north brookfield, MA, USA, Flickr)

A: In January 2005, you dropped a bombshell on me. That’s when you responded to my persistent questions about human evil by explaining the Christ Zone model to me. I think this would be a good time and place for us to talk about this scientific model and what it can mean for human beings who are trying to heal their hearts and minds and bodies.

J: Sure thing.

A: I want to make sure that readers understand this model is an original model, an original philosophical and scientific model, that arose directly out of my channelling work with you. It’s not a rehash of ancient teachings. It’s not a cut-and-paste job from the writings of mystics, new or old. There’s no attempt in this model to give an answer for every world problem. The model has limits, because it’s just a model, NOT a “Complete Handbook That Will Solve All the World’s Problems.” But it’s a very useful model, and I’d like to make sure that credit is given where credit is due.

J: You sound a bit hot under the collar here.

A: Last time you were expressing your exasperation that people won’t take responsibility for what they put inside their own brains. Today I’m expressing my exasperation at some of the reactions I’ve had from certain Christians about my work as a channeller and mystic. Some people seem to believe that if I actually am talking to you, Jesus, then I ought to be able to get solutions from you for every problem afflicting the world today. Like the cure for cancer. And all I can do is shake my head and repeat what I’ve said before: I’m just one person. I have a human brain. I have limits, like everyone else. I’m not even trying to get all the answers. I’m just trying to understand a few things really well.

J: I think the recent inundation of books and films and TV shows about the almost “limitless” potential of the “evolving human mind” has created a lot of unrealistic expectations. Those who’ve never had an experience of faith or deep connection with God can end up having some very peculiar ideas about what these experiences feel like.

A: I’ve never been skydiving or deep sea diving, so I don’t think it’s right for me to have an opinion about what it feels like to be an actual skydiver or deep sea diver. Yet many Christians I’ve spoken with believe it’s okay for them to have an opinion about what it feels like for me to be a mystic-channeller. They feel they “know” what’s going on inside my head — what my intent is, what my methods are — without ever actually asking me. I don’t like being pigeon-holed like this. I don’t like being told I’m making grandiose claims when I spend a lot of my time making very ordinary, un-grandiose claims (such as the claim that everyone is born with their own powerful intuitive circuitry, circuitry that obeys the same “use it or lose it” imperative as any other part of the human brain).

Anyway . . . now that I’ve had my little rant . . . back to the topic at hand. The Christ Zone. Let’s talk about the Christ Zone.

J: The Christ Zone model is a simplified schematic that helps provide a framework for understanding the complex interaction between the soul and the biological body. Each person who is incarnated in 3D form on Planet Earth (in other words, everybody in the world!) is a marvel of divine engineering. The engineering part is seen in the diverse functions of human biology, from RNA and DNA all the way through stem cells and reproductive functions to, well, life. Life in human form. Consciousness living in temporary form in a 3D body. Soul-and-body temporarily intertwined. Fully intertwined. Not easily intertwined, nor permanently intertwined. But fully intertwined, fully integrated in a holistic way, if all goes well in childhood and adolescence.

A: Which all too often doesn’t happen.

J: Yes. This is the painful reality. Far, far too many children are raised by their families and communities in ways that make it impossible for young people to grow up to become mature, loving human beings.

A: How do you define “mature”?

J: Ah. Thank you for that leading question. I define a mature human being as one who is able to balance in a reasonably consistent way the competing demands of both the Darwinian Circuitry of the brain and the Soul Circuitry of the brain.

You know that diagram you created in Wordperfect of the Christ Zone?

A: The one that would make a PhotoShop artist shudder?

J: Yes. Let’s post that right now so people can see what we’re talking about.

A: Okay. If you think so. (Now our readers will know for sure that I practice what I preach about not living for status points, ’cause this diagram ain’t no brilliant artistic production, that’s for sure!)

Okay. Here it is. Sigh . . .

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs


J: It’s not that bad. It gets the point across. The main point in the first diagram you’ve posted here is that this triangle is not the Christ Zone diagram. This triangle is Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow, a humanist psychologist who had a positive view of human beings and their true potential, proposed this “triangular” model to explain what he perceived as an overall pattern of human behaviour. He noticed that everyone tries to meet the physiological needs that form the base layer of the triangle — needs such as food, oxygen, water, protection from the elements — but only a few people seem able to arrive at the pinnacle of the triangle — the human experience of connection and completion and purpose and transcendence he labelled “self-actualization.”

A: His theories have met with some success, though Maslow couldn’t come up with a rigorous method of testing for self-actualization. He had to rely a lot on self-reporting of these rare human experiences.

J: Yes. These experiences are considered sporadic and hard to quantify by most researchers.

A: Just as mystical experiences of unio mystica are considered sporadic and hard to quantify.

J: Yes. But the peak experiences described by Maslow and others aren’t the same internal experience as unio mystica. They aren’t synonymous. In fact, peak experiences are almost the opposite of mystical experiences of “oneness” with the Divine.

A: In what way?

J: During peak experiences — experiences of self-actualization — the sense of self isn’t lost or dissolved. If anything the sense of self is heightened. Accompanying this heightened sense of self is (paradoxically) a vast awareness of your own humbleness. Not humility (as religious thinkers have defined humility). Just . . . pure humbleness. A sense that you’re very, very important in the universe, and at the same time not important. That is, not more important than anyone else. During a state of self-actualization, you lose all interest in status, chosenness, pessimism, and self-pity. You just really feel connected. Connected to everyone and everything in Creation. But without losing your sense of self. You’re able to handle the truth that it’s okay with the universe for you to be you. You no longer have to hate yourself for being “different.” You’re able to like yourself, perhaps for the first time in your human life. Once you’ve nailed this truth, you can stop worrying about all your so-called “deficiencies” and “imperfections” and get on with the business of living — living with integrity, joy, trust, and courage.

A: You stop sweating the small stuff?

J: Mmmmmmm, well, no, it’s more like you can start focussing on the small stuff that matters.

A: Like eating nutritious food with your family at the dinner table each evening. Talking together, sharing events of the day, working out problems. Spending time together as a family.

J: Yeah, like that. See, eating dinner is an important part of meeting your physiological needs — the essential needs Maslow placed at the foot of the triangle because of their importance to human survival. But getting your daily nutritional needs met isn’t the only thing that’s happening at the dinner table. Hopefully, anyway. If you’re eating dinner at a table with people you love and trust, and who love and trust you, then you’re also meeting your needs for safety and belonging & love.

A: That’s too simple. Too logical.

J: And, if you live in a family where people believe it’s important to lift you up every day instead of slamming you down and constantly criticizing you for your mistakes and imperfections, then the dinner table conversation will probably also help you meet your need for self-esteem.

A: So you can find most of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs at the family dinner table?

J: If it’s a family where individuals are emotionally and spiritually mature, yes. The important point is that the family dinner table isn’t a ladder. It isn’t a vertical ladder of ascent. You don’t meet these diverse needs one at a time by first sitting silently at the table while you eat your fats, carbs, and proteins, then sitting in a self-restrained state to show your trust, then reaching out to give and receive affection and emotional support, then taking turns saying one thing out loud to dole out self-esteem the way you might dole out vitamin pills. The family dinner table is messy. It’s complicated. If you’re all healthy and happy and sane, you’re giving and receiving all these needs at the same time. Without a script. You just do it because it feels right. It’s spontaneous, it’s a bit chaotic at times, but it’s also kind and polite and respectful. Like real life.

A: I hate to say it, but that sequence you’ve described — first you do this, then you do this, and God forbid you should do them all at the same time! — this sequence sounds a lotttttttttt like the Christian worship services I’ve attended.

J: Christian worship does a very poor job of modelling the Christ Zone for anyone. Living in the Christ Zone means you have to balance all your main needs simultaneously, not sequentially. You have to balance your biological needs (physiological and safety needs) with your soul’s emotional needs (belonging & love, plus self-esteem). You have to respect both. You can’t place your body’s biological needs above your soul’s needs; neither can you ignore your body’s legitimate needs as you strive to meet your soul’s needs. God expects you to look after both. At the same time. Throughout your whole life. Until you die.

After you die, your full consciousness returns to its soul state, but even after you return Home to live as an angel-in-angel form, you’ll still have a soul body to look after. So there’s no getting out of the truth that mature, responsible, loving angels have to look after themselves. It’s a way to show God the Mother and God the Father how grateful you are to be you.

A: Here’s the diagram I made in Wordperfect of the actual Christ Zone model:

The Christ Zone Model (non-hierarchical)

It’s pretty self-explanatory. If you want to feel peak experiences, self-actualization, connection to God, or true faith (all pretty much synonymous with each other) you have to live a life of balance.

J: Yup. If you want to enter the Kingdom of God as I taught it, this diagram is the basic roadmap.

A: No wonder the Church doesn’t like you.

 

Addendum August 24, 2017:

I’m including a few links to articles that can help you get started on learning more about the brain and how the brain actually works (as opposed to way most of us assume the brain works). The closest parallel to the Christ Zone model is the theory of mind called Dual Process Theory. I hope that eventually researchers will see the link between Dual Process Theory and Big Five Personality Theory. In the meantime, the links posted here may help you open your mind to, well, the wonders of your own biological brain. God bless.

“Will religion ever disappear?” by Rachel Nuwer

“The Creativity of Dual Process ‘System 1’ Thinking” by Scott Barry Kaufman and Jerome L. Singer

“The Differences Between Happiness and Meaning in Life” by Scott Barry Kaufman

“Openness to Experience: The Gates to the Mind” by Luke Smillie

“Teaching the Children: Sharp Ideological Differences, Some Common Ground” by Pew Research Center

 

 

 

-2
Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Christ Zone, humbleness, Realspiritik, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
07 Sep 2011

RS6: SPECT Scans of the Author’s Brain

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

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

 

amen-scan-concentration-no-date-resized

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

 

amen-scan-channelling-no-date-resized

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.

 

-1
Posted in brain-soul connection, Favourite Posts, mystic, mysticism, Realspiritik, SPECT brain imaging, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
06 Aug 2011

JR63: Jesus Redux: The Forward

Jesus as the author sees him

Jesus as the author sees him

The first will be last, and the last will be first.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist a biblical pun there. If you’re visiting this blog for the first time, this page — the final page in a lengthy conversation between Jesus and me — will be the first thing you’ll see. So it only makes sense for us to write this “afterword” as if it were a “forward.”

If you’ve been following this blog as we’ve been writing it (we have readers in Canada, the U.S., Singapore, Germany, and few other places), you’ve probably figured out that we’ve been writing a book bit by bit. And now we’ve come to the end of this particular body of thought.

There’s a great deal more that can be said about the topics we’ve introduced here, topics such as the nature of the soul, the nature of the soul-body connection, the need for healing, the need to recognize and treat major mental illness (especially as it relates to religious prophecy), and the need for the church to be honest about its doctrines if it wants to find its way back to a full relationship with God the Mother and God the Father in the third millennium. But there’s only so much the human brain can absorb at one time. There’s enough here to make anyone’s head hurt (at least in the beginning).

Our chief goal has always been to spark discussion and encourage people to think for themselves. So if you feel from time to time that we could have given more background information or more references or more detailed explanations, you’ve probably stumbled into one of many spots in the book where we’ve intentionally given you the benefit of the doubt. We assume you’re a rational, capable, tenacious person capable of doing some independent research. There has to be room in a book like this for you to find your own courage and trust. There has to room for you to build your own relationship with God.

This book can be used in a straightforward academic manner (which is why we’re now going back and adding labels so it’s easier for you to find the topics that interest you). But it can also be used in an intuitive manner. I highly recommend this approach if you’re interested in slowly developing the intuitive circuitry of your own brain.

In walking the Spiral Path, there’s always the easy way and the hard way. Several years ago, when I was beginning my own journey, I did everything the hard way. I believed (because I allowed myself to be browbeaten by various gurus) that you can only learn to tap into your natural intuition or “spiritual quotient,” as I’ve called it elsewhere, by using ancient divining tools such as tarot cards or lectio divina. If you’ve ever tried to read a tarot spread, you know there’s a lot of wiggle room in the interpretation. And you’re never quite sure . . .

On the other hand, you can take a book like this, and ask God to guide you to the page you most need to understand (a centering exercise first would help with this), and then let your hand click on the mouse while you’re sort of looking at the archive of posts, but not looking too, too closely at the archive of posts. If you look too closely at the list, you’ll get in the way of your own intuitive process and start second-guessing yourself. So just let the mouse hover somewhere over the archive list, then look away and click before you have too much time to think about it.

It’s no big deal, really. You’re just letting yourself be open to the idea that God knows what you understand least, and what will help you most today. It’s quite possible you’ll end up clicking on the same link several days in a row. If this happens, just accept God’s wisdom. I learned long ago never to argue with God when the book opens up again and again to the same section.

Most of all, don’t expect the journey to be linear. It’s not gonna be. Love isn’t linear. Love lurches along with its own extraordinary surprises and puzzling patterns, but it always gets you there in the end. God’s love is the bedrock of everything you are. That’s why, as Jesus and I love to say to our divine parents . . .

Mother and Father God, you both totally rock! We dedicate this book to you!

Love Jesus and Jen

-2
Posted in brain-soul connection, courage, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, My Spiral Path, relationship with God, spiritual practices, trust | Leave a Comment
01 Aug 2011

JR61: Sixth Step in Healing the Church: Be Honest About the Bible

A: I’ve been reflecting for the past few days on the suffering inflicted by Anders Breivik on everybody everywhere who’s capable of loving their God and loving their neighbours as themselves.

Several news reports have referred to a 1,500 page manifesto that Breivik posted on the Internet shortly before the Norway attacks. Apparently Breivik copied a number of sections almost word from word from the writings of several well-known far-right ideologues. (Which just goes to show, once again, that psychopaths are very good at “cutting and pasting” other people’s ideas, but not capable of coming up with original insights of their own.) Breivik’s manifesto has been compared to the writings of Ted Kaczynski, the U.S. Unabomber. But when I look at excerpts from Breivik’s diary and manifesto, and compare his actions to his beliefs, I don’t see a modern day European political movement. I see a very old ideological movement, one that fills up many pages in the Bible. I see the Book of Jeremiah. I see the Book of Revelation. I see the Book of Numbers.

J: These are all biblical books that give permission to psychopaths to carry out “Just Wars.”

A: I’ve noticed in news reports about Breivik that he readily admits he carried out the Oslo bombing and the camp shootings, but he says he didn’t break the law in doing so because he’s at war with the Norway government.

J: Inside our man Breivik’s head, it all makes perfect sense. Of course, the reason it makes sense to him is that he’s only using certain parts of his biological brain. He’s not using the parts of his brain that deal with empathy or relationship or common sense or compassionate humour or trust or creativity. If he were using those parts, he wouldn’t be capable of planning such a cold, ruthless, legalistic act of violence against others.

A: On the other hand, interviews with some of the camp survivors suggest these young people embody all the best of human potential — empathy and relationship and trust and so on. There was a really good article in Saturday’s Toronto Star: “Norway Tragedy: Inside the nightmare on Utoya” by Michelle Shephard (Toronto Star, Saturday, July 30, 2011). One 20 year old woman, Karoline Bank, is quoted as saying, “Yes, he took many people away from us, and every life lost is a tragedy. But we have gotten so much stronger over this. There’s not much more to say.”

J: Couldn’t have said it better myself.

A: People of faith will wonder why God allowed this to happen.

J: People of faith have to stop listening to people of religious humility. People of faith — by that I mean people who want to be in relationship with God now, TODAY, not at some vague time of future judgment — have to start being more honest, more realistic, about the motivations that drove the authors of many revered religious texts. They have to stop wearing rose-coloured lenses when they read the Bible. They have to stop making excuses for the psychopaths who wrote so many parts of the Old and New Testaments. They have to stop making excuses for the parts of the Bible that were clearly written by those suffering from major mental illness.

A: Like the Book of Revelation.

Christian theologians have long been desperate to endorse the violent imagery of the Book of Revelation as a central justification for orthodox Christian teachings about the End Times. But from the point of view of God’s angels, the prophetic visions recorded in Revelation feel like a psychopathic attack on God and also on the soul who lived as Jesus, an attack no different in intent than Anders Breivik’s systematic rampage against campers trapped on a small island. Like Breivik, who disguised himself as a police officer so he could ensnare more victims, the prophet who penned Revelation pretended to be a faithful follower of Jesus as he took direct aim at Jesus’ teachings about a loving and forgiving God. Shown here are the head and wings of a large 9th century BCE Assyrian human-headed bull found in the North-West palace at Nimrud (on display at the British Museum). Photo credit JAT 2023.

J: This is an issue of trust. People have to decide for themselves whether they’re going to trust what John says about humanity’s relationship with God, or whether they’re going to trust their own hearts, their own heads, and their own experiences about humanity’s relationship with God. Would a loving and forgiving God put a gun in Anders Breivik’s hands and tell him to go out and shoot people to “ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom [will] prevail”?*

A: God didn’t stop him, though.

J: Really? You’re sure about that? Because from where I’m standing, God did a great deal to stop him.

A: Sixty-nine people at the camp are dead, plus several more at the site of the Oslo bombing. They’re dead and they’re not coming back.

J: No, they’re not coming back. And their families and friends will grieve because they — the human survivors — have loving hearts. Their grief is unavoidable and is a measure of their wholeness. Yet one day their family and friends will cross to the Other Side, as all creatures of Planet Earth must do, and they’ll be reunited with their loved ones. So from God’s point of view, the relationships haven’t ceased. The relationships still exist, despite the death of the physical body, because love never dies. The form of the relationships has changed, but not the substance. The substance is real. The love can’t be taken away from any of these souls. Love continues beyond anything the physical body knows. Love is greater than anything the physical body knows. Love is the great mystery. It’s what guides God the Mother and God the Father in their decisions about when people are coming Home. But make no mistake — everyone eventually dies. God has never promised otherwise. This is the natural order of the universe.

A: You wouldn’t know it to listen to an apocalyptic prophet who promises bodily resurrection of the dead.

J: It’s a funny thing about psychopaths. A psychopath has a distinctive pattern to his logic and choices and behaviours, and one of the most distinctive features of psychopathy is the peculiar attitude towards death. They’re unable to trust anyone, of course — since trust is closely related to empathy and love and forgiveness — and this means they’re completely unable to trust in the idea that physical death is a natural, loving part of the soul’s relationship with God. Death without future punishment isn’t logical to a psychopath, just as life with present forgiveness isn’t logical to him. He’s incapable of feeling love, so he’s unable to conceive of a loving death. He’s also incapable of believing that God is smarter than he is, so he’ll spend a great deal of time and energy looking for “escape clauses” in the contract laws about death in the Abrahamic religions. If the clauses he wants aren’t there, he’ll claim to be a divinely-inspired prophet and add them himself. Egyptian attitudes towards death in the pre-Hellenistic period epitomize the psychopath’s fear of death.

A: You’re saying a psychopath’s attitude towards death isn’t unique to a specific religion or culture, but is instead universal because it’s biological. You’re saying that “escape clauses” come out the same way in different cultures because all human beings share the same basic DNA.

J (nodding): A psychopath is, by definition, a person who is cut off from the input of his own brain’s Soul Circuitry. This “cutting off” may have resulted, in rare circumstances, from a head injury or infection or poisoning or oxygen deprivation. But the vast majority of psychopaths are “self made.” High functioning psychopaths such as Anders Breivik are individuals who’ve turned themselves into psychopaths one bad choice at a time. This is why psychopathy doesn’t usually emerge in full-fledged form until adolescence. It takes a long time for a person to consciously undo the healthy connections God builds into the human brain.

A: It’s still amazing to me that human beings have that kind of control over the wiring of their own brains. But history bears out the truth of what you’re saying.

J: You’ll probably be shocked to learn, then, that within the annals of religious history there have been select groups who’ve intentionally incorporated the blueprint for “how to build a psychopath” into their religious doctrines.

A: You mean . . . these groups wanted to create psychopaths? On purpose?

J: It can be very useful, from a utilitarian point of view, to have a man like Anders Breivik on your side if you’re trying to acquire wealth, power, status, and “immortality.”

A: This immortality thing . . . this need to leave behind a human legacy of power and status for future generations to admire and imitate — is this a normal state of mind for a person who feels whole and healed and humble? Because it seems awfully narcissistic to me.

J: It’s normal and natural for a soul-in-human-form to want to create and build and improve the quality of life for his or her community. Persons-of-soul — angels — have a strong sense of purpose and mission and service. So you expect to see a community of Whole Brain Thinkers busily at work devising new ways to dig wells for clean water or improving ways to eliminate toxins from the environment or building new schools and medical clinics in underserved areas. Human beings are at their best when they come together in teams to bring healing to others in the face of suffering.

A: Healing instead of revenge.

J: A large number of people around the world have responded to the Norway tragedy by offering their hope, faith, and love instead of judgment, piety, and revenge. Some have found, for the first time in their lives, the courage of their own faith. The courage of their own trust in God. The courage of their own trust in each other.

A: That’s a powerful insight, to know you have the courage to choose hope, faith, and love.

Forever 1

Jesus said: One person cannot ride two horses at once, nor stretch two bows; nor can a servant serve two masters, as he will respect one and despise the other. No one drinks vintage wine and immediately wants to drink fresh wine; fresh wine is not put into old wineskins because they might burst. Vintage wine is not put into new wineskins because it might be spoiled” (Gospel of Thomas 47a-d). You can choose the path of redemption or you can choose the path of revenge. Pick one because you can’t have both. Photo credit JAT 2014.

J: To find that courage is to know redemption. I send my love to all who are open to the wondrous idea that humans — not just God — are filled to overflowing in their own souls with divine courage and trust and gratitude and devotion.

This courage is yours. It’s not God’s. It’s not your neighbour’s. It’s not your parents’. It’s not your priest’s. It’s yours. It’s part of who you are as a soul.

Claim it and live it. Be the person God knows you really are. Don’t be a bully and coward like Anders Breivik, who hasn’t the courage to love. (Though I forgive him.) Be open to a loving relationship with God, no matter what your religious background. Your neighbour is loved by God as much as you are. All your neighbours.

No other truth is acceptable.

* On July 24, 2011, The Globe and Mail published a Reuter’s article, “Excerpts from Norway attacker’s diary.” An entry from June 11, 2011 said, “I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail.”

-1
Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Bible, Book of Revelation, brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Church of today, Divine Love, forgiveness, free will, Jesus Redux, life and death, psychopathy, redemption, Soul, the right to be right, trust, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
13 Jul 2011

JR57: Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me

A: When I came home from work on Monday, Oprah was rerunning an episode about two twin daughters who had been being sexually assaulted and raped by their father and two brothers until a neighbour called authorities. Towards the end of the episode, Oprah offered the definition of forgiveness that she’s found most helpful. It was something to this effect: “Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been different.” How do you respond to that?

J: Well, I find this definition demeaning and discouraging. Forgiveness is not about “giving up hope.” Forgiveness is about finding hope.

A: Maybe the person who coined this definition was using the word “hope” in a different way than you and I use it.

J: Hope is one of those slippery, hard-to-define spiritual terms. About as easy to explain as forgiveness. And about as complicated. Basically, though, angels use the word hope as a synonym for “trust in God.” It’s a powerfully positive, uplifting emotion. It’s an emotion that expresses an element of uncertainty. Perhaps I could rephrase that. Hope — trust in God — is an experience of emotional continuity in the face of apparent discontinuity in the Materialist laws of Cause and Effect. In other words, you still believe in God’s goodness even when you can’t see an obvious link between actions and the results of those actions.

A: A leap of faith, in other words.

“Jesus said: From Adam to John the Baptizer, among those born of women, there is no one greater than John the Baptizer, so that his eyes should be averted. But I have said that whoever among you becomes a child will know the kingdom and will become greater than John” (Gospel of Thomas 46 a-b). Photo credit JAT 2023.

J: Yes, but not a blind leap of faith. Trust, surprising as it may seem, requires an element of brutal honesty. Brutal honesty about oneself. Trust requires you to know your own limits, your own abilities right down to a “t.” This knowledge allows you to recognize situations where you’ve reached the limits of your own abilities and experience. At this point, you switch over to your knowledge about other people’s abilities and experience. You switch over the decision-making process to somebody who has more knowledge about the topic at hand than you have. You hand over the reins, as it were. Angels do this without an instant of shame or jealousy or regret. They simply accept their limits and gratefully hand over the reins to other angels. This is what humbleness feels like. Not false humility, as the Church teaches it, but divine humbleness.

A: You’re making my head hurt with all these different terms — forgiveness, hope, trust, humbleness.

J: These are all complex divine emotions. Not the same as each other, but interwoven with each other. Holistically. Hopefully, people will like the idea that God the Mother and God the Father are capable of experiencing and expressing the most complex emotions of all.

A: This switching-over thing you’re talking about . . . is this related to the research you’ve been helping me collect about the “gears” in the biological human brain that are supposed to help people switch smoothly from one idea or emotion to another?

J: You mean parts of the human brain such as the anterior cingulate gyrus?

A: Yes. And related “switching centres.”

J: Definitely. Angels don’t have an anterior cingulate gyrus, but souls-in-human-form do. Angels who incarnate as human beings need a biological “toolkit,” and a number of tools in that toolkit relate to the human brain and central nervous system. When those tools aren’t used the way they should be — when, for example, a “hammer” is used when a “screwdriver” is called for, or when the blunt end of the adjustable wrench is used instead of the adjustable claws at the other end, you can’t expect the result to be pretty. The human brain is designed with an entire set of “ball bearings” and “lubricants” to prevent the various gears of the brain from grinding against each other and causing excessive wear. Unfortunately, in many young human beings, the ball bearings and lubricants are the first thing to go. After that, you see the onset of DSM-IV psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, problems with impulse control, problems with anger control, possibly even psychopathy.

A: All because their switching mechanisms aren’t working properly?

J: The human brain is an incredibly complex set of tools and machinery. It uses many different types of switching mechanisms to help it balance incoming data and outgoing choices — outgoing thoughts, feelings, and actions. The operative word here, of course, is balance. The brain has to be able to identify, remember, understand, and fix many different sorts of problems. It has to switch constantly between different spheres of reality, between logical thought and positive emotions and practical actions, between the needs of the self and the needs of the other, between active learning and quiet processing, between past, present, and future. Believe me, human beings need every scrap of brain tissue they can muster for this job of Whole Brain Thinking.

A: So when the switching mechanisms aren’t working properly, people get “stuck.” They get stuck in one or two spheres. For example, a person who gets stuck in the past.

J: Yes. Or a person who gets stuck in logical thought. These are the people who lack empathy, who lack compassion for others. They make all their choices based on logic alone. The Church has had an overflowing cup of bishops who were incapable of feeling empathy.

A: I’ve also known some people — mostly women — who seem stuck in their emotional circuitry and can’t make a decision that’s tough. They don’t forgive other people so much as put blinders on. They try to sweep great harms under the carpet so they don’t have to deal with the fallout of taking a firm stance.

J: Forgiveness is very much about taking a firm stance. The first step in forgiving somebody — whether it’s yourself or someone else — is honesty. There must be an honest assessment of harm. This means you have to take a stance on the question of right and wrong. For the soul — for all souls in Creation, including God the Mother and God the Father — some choices are clearly right and other choices are clearly wrong. The soul knows the difference. The soul feels confident and clear when right choices are made. The soul feels abused when wrong choices are made. This is what many people call . . . conscience.

A: There’s been a trend among some New Age gurus and some Progressive Christians to claim there are no moral absolutes. Hence there is no need for forgiveness. According to these thinkers, all choices are equally acceptable to God because each person is really just a spark of God trying to express itself. Neale Donald Walsch has built a lucrative empire on this idea.

J: Only a person who doesn’t want to face his own life choices would find this theory acceptable.

A: It does leave a lot of wiggle room for people who want to excuse their own behaviour . . .

J: Forgiveness is a clear and conscious decision to call forth and believe in the best that a person can be and the best a person can do. Forgiveness is a refusal to accept excuses. At the same time, it’s a gift of love that has no strings attached. Divine love goes beyond anything a Materialist philosophy of Cause and Effect can imagine. Divine love is an up-front gift, a conscious decision to offer the recipient (whether the self or an another person) a vote of confidence in his or her best self. It’s a leap of faith. It’s a boost-up. A helping hand. A sense of purpose for a person to hang onto. It does not require you to prove yourself before you get the gift of love. If you had to prove yourself first, one proof at a time, as many theologians have taught, you’d be looking at the vertical path of spiritual ascent — anagogic mysticism. Anagogic mysticism is a form of Materialist belief. God the Mother and God the Father are not required to obey Materialist philosophy. They love us because they choose to love us, not because they “owe” us anything for our “obedience” and “piety.” They believe in us, their children, so much that we simply cannot and will not let them down. They inspire us to be our best selves. But they don’t force us to be our best selves — we, as angels, choose to be our best selves. It’s as natural as breathing for all angels.

A: Including the angels who have incarnated on Planet Earth.

J: Yes. Including the angels who have incarnated on Planet Earth. There are no exceptions among God’s children. All angels are filled with trust and devotion and gratitude and courage BECAUSE God the Mother and God the Father believe in our best selves. They have faith in us.

A: So in the case of a father who has raped his own daughters, how would God look at that?

J: God the Mother and God the Father would recognize instantly the selfish, uncourageous intent of the father. They would identify the problem — the father’s dysfunctional brain circuitry — and they would remember this as they worked to help him and those around him recognize the great harm he’s been choosing to create. They would not condone or accept this behaviour as acceptable. They would identify the behaviour as “wrong.” Nonetheless, they would blanket him in divine love. They would whisper to his soul, “We believe in you. We know this isn’t the best you can be. We know you can make loving choices. We won’t abandon you. We’ll stick right with you and show you why your choices have been wrong. You won’t understand at first, and you’re going to be angry and confused and resentful for a while, but that’s okay, because we know that more than anything in the world you want to be able to give love. We believe in you.”

A: And then God sends you through the human court system that’ll cart you off to jail for “X” number of years.

J: Somehow you have to get it through your thick human skull that you made an abusive choice that was very, very wrong. You have to accept that you made a mistake, you have to accept that you can learn from your own mistakes, and you have to accept that you can be a better person who makes right choices. If you receive the right kind of help.

A: Locking up a person and throwing away the key isn’t the right kind of help.

J: Nor is revenge the right kind of help. Usually it takes a whole team to provide the right kind of help to a man who has raped his own daughters. A whole team of well trained professionals. Of course, if the professionals themselves don’t believe in the soul or the power of forgiveness or the mystery of God’s divine love, they’re ill-equipped to provide the kind of mentorship the abuser needs if he’s to have any chance of living up to his best self.

A: In which case the abuser isn’t likely to be healed.

J: Healing follows insight for both the victim and the perpetrator of a crime. Forgiveness, as we’ve said, is a catalyst that speeds and facilitates the healing process. Healing is the path towards Wholeness. Not the path towards Oneness but the path towards Wholeness. Wholeness is the place — the Kingdom, the experience of self — where you know yourself and all your limits and all your strengths and all your quirks and you can be humbly proud of yourself anyway because you’re being the best person you can be.

A: Young children are like this. They have the ability to throw themselves into new relationships and new experiences to the best of their ability without any concern for status or “face.”

J: Yup. That’s what I meant when I said that to enter the Kingdom you must become again like a little child. Humble and guileless, yet full of infectious enthusiasm and intelligence. Many three-year-olds are smarter than the adults around them because they haven’t yet forgotten how to learn.

A: And they still know how to forgive. Young children are born with an amazing ability to forgive.

J: I rest my case.

-2
Posted in anagogic mysticism, brain-soul connection, Cause & Effect, conscience & morality, Divine Love, forgiveness, healing, honesty, humbleness, insight, Jesus Redux, Materialism, mental illness, mentorship, Soul, trust, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
08 Jul 2011

JR56: Forgiveness As a Present Reality

A: Tell me more about forgiveness. The other day you said, “Divine forgiveness is not settlement of a debt. Debt doesn’t enter into the equation. Education, mentorship, and personal responsibility enter into the equation, but not debt” (The Meaning of “the Son of Man”). You and I have talked a lot about forgiveness, but you’ve never linked it to the Peace Sequence before. Can you explain in more detail what you meant?

J: I’m going to introduce a comparison between forgiveness and catalysts (as catalysts are understood by a chemist). At a quantum level, forgiveness acts as an important “biochemical” catalyst for learning.

A: Okay, you’re gonna have to back up the divine truck on this one.

J: In everyday speech, people use the word “catalyst” to mean a person, thing, or event that prompts sudden change. In Western culture it’s often an unexpected tragedy that serves as a catalyst for change. For instance, if a child is killed because a newly designed toy isn’t safe, the people around the child are shocked into action. Chances are good that an inquiry will be held, and healthy and safety regulations will be amended to remove this particular threat. The catalyst for change was a tragic event that jarred people out of their complacency and forced them to be more honest about a quantifiable, measurable threat to children’s safety.

The factual reality of the toy’s dangerous design existed before the tragic death. The threat itself wasn’t new. What was new was the realization of the threat, the objective recognition of the threat, the memory of the threat. In other words, human beings had to learn about the threat. They had to identify the problem, remember the problem, understand the problem, then fix the problem. These are the stages of learning. As it happens, these are also the stages of emotional healing and spiritual transformation. They’re all hopelessly intertwined with each other.

A: Identify, remember, understand, and fix. That’s a pretty logical sequence. What happens if a person tries to skip one of those steps? I’m thinking in particular of the “remember” stage. I’ve met quite a few people who seem to have really bad memories. Important information goes right in one ear and out the other. And these are fairly young people I’m talking about, not elderly people with dementia!

J: Those who can’t remember their own history are doomed to repeat it.

A: I remember a fellow we were corresponding with a few years ago about the spiritual journey. He was quite incensed because you and I had suggested that an understanding of science was important to spiritual growth and transformation. He wrote somewhat angrily, “Do I have to have a degree in physics?” And your reply was, “No, you have to have a degree in history.” He probably thought you were being facetious.

“Jesus said, ‘ I shall give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart’” (Gospel of Thomas 17). The mysterious gift Jesus is talking about here is Divine Forgiveness, a gift freely given by God to all people at all times without any restrictions or covenants placed upon the gift. Shown here is an example of an inuksuk, which reminds me of what forgiveness is actually like (simple, memorable, beautiful, accessible by all, able to be built by all). Inuksuit have long served to aid full remembrance in Canada’s Far North. They’re now found widely throughout Canada. This one sits among flowers and metal artwork at an Ontario public school. Photo credit JAT 2015.

J: I wasn’t. I was speaking the honest truth. Memory — history — is crucial to the core self. Memory is a huge part of learning. By that I don’t mean simple rote memory, such as your multiplication tables. I mean soul memory, which is a combination of several different forms of memory. It’s emotional memory plus factual memory plus habit memory plus talent memory.

A: That’s a lot to keep track of at one time. Sounds like too much work.

J: Soul memory evolves quite naturally when a child is raised in a mature, responsible, loving home. It becomes a natural way of remembering things. You don’t consciously think about the different aspects of your memory. You just . . . live. You live with empathy and laughter and confidence. It’s your soul memory that helps you do that.

A: So you’re linking empathy with memory.

J: Yes. It’s your memory skills that allow you to remember the names of your neighbour’s children so you can ask how the family is doing.

A: Ooooooh. I suddenly can think of a gajillion different ways that memory can help with empathy and relationships. Things like remembering your friend’s favourite music or your mother’s favourite flower. Or the anniversary of a loved one’s death. Or remembering to pick up a carton of milk on the way home, as promised. Or remembering to say “I love you.” And on and on and on.

J: What’s interesting about people with severe narcissism and psychopathy is the way they use memory. They use memory and history in bizarre, abusive ways. They often have excellent memories when it comes to the mistakes that other people have made (though they rarely admit to their own). They remember all the “crimes” that have been committed against them, and they keep detailed lists of rightful punishments that still need to be meted out.

A: They hold grudges.

J: With a capital “G.” They live for the “high” of revenge. Inside their own heads, they’ll return to the scene of another person’s “crime” and relive the unfairness and unjustness of it all. Then they’ll imagine the scene of their revenge. They’ll gloat about it. They’ll gloat about the glory of their future — and rightful — vengeance. There’s no concern at all about collateral damage — about the people and places that will be damaged when vengeance is pursued. The only thing that’s important to a psychopath is the chance to “even the scales.”

A: Sounds like a Mel Gibson movie.

J: Forgiveness, on the other hand, is not about buying back one’s status or paying a debt or “balancing the scales of time” so the past can be forgotten. Forgiveness absolutely requires a memory of the harm that’s being forgiven.

A: You said above that forgiveness is a catalyst. How does this idea relate to what we’ve been discussing about memory and learning and empathy?

J: In chemistry, a catalyst is a substance that’s an essential ingredient in a chemical reaction without itself being changed and without itself being part of the final product or products.

A: Inorganic chemists use elements such as palladium and rhodium as catalysts so they can synthesize complex molecules out of simpler ones.

J: In chemistry, a catalyst works the way a crane works on a large building site. The crane is essential for transporting loads of basic materials to their proper location on the much larger building that’s being constructed. But once the building is completed, the crane is removed from the site. It’s no longer needed. It can be “recycled” — used on another building site because it isn’t part of the final product. Its role is essential but temporary. This is what forgiveness is like.

A: Still not following you. Especially because you’ve said in the past that forgiveness is a permanent choice — a permanent choice to wrap harmful choices within a layer of love.

J: Forgiveness, like the construction crane, is a permanent “substance,” if you will. But like a crane, it moves around. It isn’t glued to one site or one event or one person. It goes in, does its transformative thing, then lets go. Forgiveness allows you to identify, remember, understand, and fix the past without actually having to live in the past. It frees you from the tyranny of rumination on the past. It doesn’t ask you to forget. It asks you to transform. It asks you to take the pain and turn it into something new. Forgiveness isn’t the final product of the transformative process, despite what some theologians have claimed. Forgiveness is the tool — the catalyst — that’s needed so you can take painful experiences and painful choices and turn them into something brand new.

A: The way orthodox Western Christian theologians often describe forgiveness makes it sound like the end goal, the final result of being saved by God.

J: God the Mother and God the Father are always moving the crane of forgiveness. They’re always actively and consciously choosing to forgive their human children for the suffering people create. Forgiveness is a present act — always a present act, not a future one. Just as the Kingdom of the Heavens is supposed to be a present condition, not a future one.

A: I’ve read so many books where teachers of spirituality insist that we “live in the moment.” Is this what you’re getting at? Letting go of the past and the future and focussing only on the present moment?

J: No. Most definitely not. The phrase “living in the moment” all too often means “living in a state of dissociation.” Living in a state of psychological dissociation from one’s emotions, memories, and personal responsibilities. Obviously this doesn’t help individuals or families or communities create peace. To create peace, you have to be willing to learn from the past. You have to be willing to identify the problems of the past, and then marshal all your courage and will power and love to get to the point where you can remember the pain without being overwhelmed and numbed by the pain. In other words, you have to learn from your mistakes.

A: Learning from your own mistakes is very hard. Self forgiveness is very hard.

J: In the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, the man Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to spend all eternity rolling a large stone to the top of a hill, only to watch it roll back down again each day. This aptly describes what it feels like to live without forgiveness. Each day feels like an eternity of repetitive struggle, an endless cycle of guilt and pain you can’t seem to escape from. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is the crane you bring in to build a series of small level shelves or steps on the side of the hill so you can gradually get the stone to the top of the hill and keep it there, where it will no longer torture you. With the boulder of the past safely stowed at the top of the hill, you can get on with the business of planting a nice garden at the base of the hill and inviting all your friends over to share in the beauty. The stone at the top is there to remind you of the mistakes you once made so you ‘re less likely to make them again. The stone isn’t gone. But it’s in a safer place.

A: So in the Kingdom of the Heavens, the past isn’t gone, but it’s in a safer place. This allows you to bring more of your daily energy to the task of living as fully as possible today.

J: You’d be amazed how much energy many people use each day by dwelling in the past, ruminating on past injuries, focussing on revenge, and not paying attention (literally) to the tasks and relationships of today. When I say “energy,” I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that people quite literally expend precious biological resources every day when they choose to focus on the past. They use up proteins and fats and carbs in their bodies. They force their brain cells to hang on to cell-to-cell connections that aren’t productive. They refuse to let their brains empty the “recycle bin,” and as a result, dangerous levels of old proteins and other biological materials can build up inside the brain. Causing medical syndromes such as various forms of dementia.

A: So forgiveness isn’t just a metaphysical aspiration: it’s also a biological reality.

J: As you’d expect it to be in the good Creation of a loving God.

-3
Posted in brain-soul connection, dissociation, Divine Love, empathy, forgiveness, Jesus Redux, narcissism, Peace Sequence, psychopathy, sense of time & timing, Soul, soul blueprint, soul purpose, spiritual practices, theodicy and tagged | Leave a Comment
05 Jul 2011

JR55: Healing: The Easy Way and the Hard Way

A: Apart from the Kingdom sayings and the puzzling Son of Man sayings, you also left behind some curious sayings about protecting the master’s house and making it strong against thievery or attack — especially attack from within. Thomas 21b and Luke 12:37-48 and Mark 3:20-27 all use this theme. The passage in Luke is especially confusing. Luke 12:37-38 is a makarism: “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.”

Now, I know you had nothing nice to say about the custom of slave-owning. So the passage in Luke (12:37-48) must be a parable, an analogy for something else, even though the Oxford NRSV calls these verses a collection of “sayings on watchfulness and faithfulness” rather than a parable.

newburgh - wendy & david's 06 01

“Therefore I say: If a householder knows a thief is coming, he will keep watch and not let him break into his house (of his kingdom) and steal his goods. You must keep watch against the world, preparing yourselves with power so that thieves will not find any way to come upon you” (Gospel of Thomas 21b and 21c, translated by Stevan Davies). Photo credit JAT 2013.

J (grinning): Oh, yes. It’s a parable. One I wrote myself.

A: Ah. And I see that this parable references “the Son of Man” in verse 40: “You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Many commentators have assumed this verse is a reference to an apocalyptic prophecy you made. They assume “the Son of Man” is an actual person — you — who will be coming back on a future day to bring about the prophesied day of judgment. Is this what you meant? Because Matthew 24:36-51 certainly makes it sound as if this is what you meant.

J: Matthew, as we’ve discussed earlier, was no friend of mine and no friend to my teachings. Matthew was like a gardener who sees another’s man field and hates the way the plants are arranged. So he sneaks in with a shovel at night and digs up the other man’s plants and takes them to a new field and replants them in an entirely new garden composition and adds some new plants of his own, then steps back and loudly proclaims he’s done great honour to the other man. Meanwhile, the other man’s garden is a potholed ruin.

A: Always with the parables. You just don’t quit!

J: It’s who I am.

A: Okay. So what were you getting at? Why were you so fond of the image of the master’s house that needs to be protected? Who was “the master”? Was it God?

J: Nope. The master in the parable of the responsible slave (Luke 12:37-48) is the soul of any human being who’s walking around on Planet Earth. Any human being at all.

A: Say what?

J: Although today’s commentators assume I was an idiot who spouted apocalyptic prophecy and hadn’t a drop of common sense in me, I actually had a “method to my madness.” The sayings I left behind all speak to a few internally consistent, common sense teachings about the soul. I said a small number of things a great many times. The things I said all relate to each other in a logical, coherent, heart-based way. If I spoke again and again about the psychological reality of the Kingdom (wholeness and maturity of the self), and the importance of respecting “boundaries of the self” and “boundaries of the other,” and the potential of human beings — all human beings — to seek healing and redemption through the power of forgiveness, then there’s only one person this “master” can be. The master is the self. The master is the core self, the soul that each person is. The true self. This parable is a metaphor about the human brain. It’s an attempt to explain in layman’s terms what’s going on inside a person’s head, and why there’s no such thing as demon possession. It’s an attempt to explain why the path of redemption seems so harsh at times.

A: “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay down his head and rest.” (Thomas 86)

J: Yes. Foxes know who they are and where their “home” is. Birds know who they are and how to build a home for themselves and their children. Human beings, of all God’s creatures on Planet Earth, are the least likely to know who they are and how to build a “home” for their highest potential. For a human being, this home is their brain — their biological brain and central nervous system. This home has to be painstakingly built over many years. Nothing so simple as building a bird’s nest, no sir! The “insides” of a person have to be carefully built to match the “outsides.” This is the holistic path to maturity for all human beings.

A: This goes back to what you were saying a few days ago about Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas (Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas). One thing I love about your teachings on wholeness — on Whole Brain Thinking — is the fairness of it. These teachings apply to all people in all places in all cultures. It’s radically egalitarian. Everyone gets the same basic toolkit for building a garden of peace. But each person’s garden will look different because each soul is different. I just love that part!

J: Yes, but before they can get to the point of being able to admire each other’s gardens — instead of envying and destroying each other’s gardens — they have to get through the healing stage. This is the stage where most people quit, where they run away from the difficulties and challenges of building an inner “home” — a field full of good soil — inside their own heads. This is the stage most people don’t even know IS a stage.

A: The Church has done precious little to help us understand this — even today, when we have so much knowledge about the human brain and its hard-wiring for empathy and change.

J: Two thousand years ago, I certainly had no knowledge of neuroanatomy or neurophysiology or neurotransmitters or the like. But I was a keen observer of human nature, and I was scientifically minded. More to the point, I was a mystic. I had unflinching faith in God’s goodness because of my mystical practice, and I knew there had to be something better than “demon possession” to account for frightening behaviour. So I looked to a scientific model. It wasn’t that hard, really. You work through empirical observation and rudimentary statistical analysis. That’s how all science advanced for thousands of years until recently. You take careful notes, you try to stay objective, you look for patterns, you try to prove you didn’t simply invent the patterns because you wanted to see them. Objectivity is crucial, of course. If you’re determined to find an imaginary Cause X, you’ll find it because you want to. However, this isn’t science. This is narcissism.

A: So your lack of narcissism — or I suppose I should say your eventual lack of narcissism — made you more open to honest fact-finding about the human condition.

J: I was open to the idea that there could be scars on the inside of a person’s body as well as on the outside.

A: In James 1:8, you use the unusual Greek word “dipsychos,” which is usually translated in English as “double-minded.” What were you getting at here?

J: If you read the parts of the Letter of James that I wrote — James 1:2-27; 2:1-8a; and 3:1-18 — you can see me struggling to put into words the problem of understanding the human brain and all its competing “intents.” I used several different metaphors there to try to explain what a lack of inner wholeness results in. Which is tragedy. Pain, suffering, and tragedy.

A: You also express the idea in James 1:8 that “the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord.” This is a pretty tough statement, don’t you think?

J: Many will think so. They’ll assume I’m talking about divine judgment and divine retribution. But I’m not. I’m talking about the scientific reality of the soul-body nexus. I’m talking about the built-in set of checks and balances that exists within the human self to promote mature, loving choices.

I’m going to come at your question from a different direction. If there really is a God, and there really are good souls, and there really are souls who choose to incarnate in a temporary 3D body where they have to struggle to balance the needs of their souls and the needs of their biological bodies . . . would it make sense to you in this context that God would refuse to provide built-in roadmaps and compasses and warning signals and obvious feedback so you could safely navigate all the confusion? Does that make sense to you?

A: No.

J: It didn’t make sense to me, either. So in the parable of the responsible slave, the “house” of the master is — to use you as an example (sorry, hope you don’t mind) — is your entire head, including your skull. The “master” is your soul, and in particular the non-plastic parts of your brain that are controlled by the thoughts and feelings and actions of your soul. The “slaves” are the semi-autonomous regions of your brain that are supposed to be in charge of your physiological needs, but which all too often end up running the show — and doing a very poor job of it, I might add. If you were to let the “slaves” manage your choices, abuses would occur. Abuses of your self and abuses of others. Naturally, your core self — your soul — wouldn’t like this very much, and your core self would have something to say about it. This isn’t punishment “from above.” This is you standing up for your own core integrity! This is you trying to get yourself back in balance!

A: By first recognizing that there’s a problem. With your own choices.

J: Healing begins with insight. Before you can heal, you have to admit there’s a problem. Unfortunately, people can get their heads caught up in some pretty unhealthy thinking patterns. They can become so dysfunctional that they confuse the “slaves” with the “master.” They can’t hear their own inner voice, even though the inner voice never stops talking.

There’s always the easy way and the hard way. You can listen to your own inner voice, and begin to heal, in which case the journey won’t be as difficult.

A: You’ll get a “light beating” (Luke 12:48).

J: The majority of human beings, then and now, however, end up by default on the hard way.

A: So their bodies get a “severe beating” (Luke 12:47) from their own souls.

J: Well, it looks that way from the outside in the beginning.

A: People will say you’re blaming the victims of illness.

J: It’s not that simple. People get ill for a variety of reasons. But ONE of the reasons people get sick is because they opt to make certain very poor choices. This is simply a statement of fact. It’s not a judgment to say that a person who chooses to eat 5,000 calories per day and is morbidly obese (with all the attendant health problems of extreme obesity) bears SOME of the responsibility for his or her state of health.

A: When you put it that way, it seems pretty fair and reasonable. There are lots of intentional human choices that can lead to serious illness and disability. We often don’t want to change the choices we make until we really, really understand the consequences that are involved.

J: Observable consequences are part of each person’s built-in roadmap for living a life of wholeness in accordance with the wishes and needs of the soul. If your biological body is way out of balance, you need to listen to what your soul is saying. It’s only common sense.

0
Posted in boundary issues, brain-soul connection, Gospel of Thomas, healing, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Kingdom teachings, Letter of James, makarism, Matthew's and Luke's intent, parables, Son of Man, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
27 Apr 2011

TBM12: Finding the Words of Your Own Promise

Daisies (c) JAT 2014

Daisies (c) JAT 2014

In my last post (Four Basic Practices to Get You Started), I introduced the idea that every day you need to repeat the promise you’ve written to yourself for yourself. Today I’d like to talk more about the promise part, since it’s the promise part that’s so central to the healing of your brain.

One thing that’s very important to understand so you can get yourself solidly planted on the Spiral Path is this: you’re only being asked to write and repeat one promise. The problem today is that almost everybody has too many ideas and too many lists and too many “shoulds” in their heads. This is a big part of the reason for the brain’s overall lack of coordination and balance — there are too many sets of instructions, and the biological brain can’t make sense of it all.

As I mentioned in the last post, you need to provide your brain (or rather I should say the semi-autonomous sectors of your brain) with some sheet music so your brain as a whole knows where it’s going. Your brain would really appreciate some consistency and simplicity! This is why it’s crucial to choose only one promise for now. After about a year (yes, a year) you can think about changing your promise. But if you’re like almost everyone else walking around on Planet Earth these days, you’ll need at least a year to get your brain committed to the new path you’re choosing. It’s a form of self-discipline to stick to only one promise. It’s also a form of integrity.

The promise you make to yourself for yourself will be the cornerstone of the new foundation you’re building for yourself, and you’ll be returning to it again and again in the way that people return again and again to a favourite prayer or mantra. In fact, your promise to yourself will be a positive, uplifting form of prayer — something for you to hang onto with all your might when the going gets tough.

Your personal promise doesn’t have to be long. In fact, shorter is better.

To give you an example, this is the promise I made to myself in the year 2000, the promise I made and stuck to no matter what: “I want to learn to love unconditionally the way you do.” The “you” I refer to in my promise is my guardian angel, whose intense and perfect love I was (and am) able to feel. I was awed and inspired by his love, by his ability to forgive, by his ability to guide me patiently and devotedly even when I was being a shithead. With his help it finally dawned on me that he actually believed I, too, was capable of remembering how to love and forgive! I had no idea exactly what it would feel like to be a loving and forgiving human being, so I decided the sensible thing to do was copy my guardian angel. I made a promise to myself (not to him, but to myself) that I would keep trying every day as hard as I could to learn how to love. I tenaciously held to this promise. There were days when this promise spoken morning and evening was the only thing I did that made any sense at all. But slowly, gradually, I started to notice some positive changes in my thinking patterns. (And, oh, thank God for that!)

What I didn’t know at the time, but what made a huge difference to my journey, was the focus of my promise. Somewhat accidentally, I made a promise to myself that my own soul could “get on board with.” Although the promise I made was very short in terms of the number of words it contained, it carried a lot of punch. It carried a lot of punch for the following reasons:

  • The promise was focussed on improving my relationships — no talk of status or acquisition of “health and wealth”.
  • The promise was positive and uplifting in tone — no talk of sin, salvation, or unworthiness before God.
  • The promise was honest — I was implicitly acknowledging the honest truth that I wasn’t being as loving and forgiving as I could be, but at the same time I was being honest about my ability to change.
  • The promise was clear and specific — no beating around the bush, no cliches, no vague spiritual talk of enlightenment or raising my vibration.
  • The promise showed that I myself was taking personal responsibility for my own thoughts, feelings, and choices — no victim mentality, no passing the buck to God or God’s guardian angels.
  • The promise was focussed on something “doable” and “learnable,” something realistic and non-magical/non-mystical.
  • The promise was easy to remember — there’s no point in having a 5-page promise you can’t remember in a pinch.

At first glance it’s hard to believe so much stuff could be packed into such a short promise, but when you compare it to some other well known prayers (such as the Lord’s Prayer, which I don’t use at all), you can see the basic underlying differences. The promise I made to myself was built on a rock-solid foundation of trust in God’s love, whereas traditional Christian prayers have been built on a foundation of fear and self-entitlement. (Have you ever noticed that the Lord’s Prayer contains nary a “please” nor a “thank you”?)

The promise you make to yourself for yourself could be something along these lines:

“I want to learn to be the sort of person my children can be proud of.”

Or . . .

“I want to understand the meaning of the Serenity Prayer.”

Or . . .

“I want to understand what it means to be a person of courage, devotion, gratitude, and trust.”

Or . . .

“I want to understand what changes I must make in my own life in order to hear the voice of God in my heart.”

Or . . .

“I believe in myself the way God believes in me.”

Or . . .

“I trust that I am a child of God and that I can make a real difference each day by trying as hard as I can to be kind towards others.”

Or . . .

“I want to learn to let go of my anger and perfectionism.”

These examples are only that — examples to get you started as you try to find the right words for your own promises. However, if one of these examples feels right for you, please embrace it and make it your own. Remember always, though, that your promise is your promise. It isn’t your neighbour’s promise or your child’s promise. Each person must find the words that work best for him or her. There is no single set of sacred words anywhere on the planet that has magical properties of transformation and healing for all people. What matters for you is that you find the words that make your heart light up with hope. These are the words of your heart and soul, your truest vision of yourself in relationship with yourself.

Each of these promises has the potential to gradually change your life and your relationships for the simple reason that each of these promises provides a clear, simple, uplifting, unified set of instructions for all the sectors of your brain to work on together.* It needs to be formulated in words, and it needs to be consciously repeated by yourself for yourself at least once each day (and preferably more often — ideally once when you get up for the day and once before you go to sleep — if possible). The reason it needs to be formulated in words is because a huge portion of your brain is devoted to language and communication. When you formulate your promise clearly and optimistically to yourself in words, it allows you to harness the language and communication centres of your brain to help coordinate the inner rewiring of your brain.

I want to emphasize that this brain-healing process takes a lot of time. Many spiritually-hopeful people have been gravely harmed by so-called faith healers who promise instant healing. I do not promise anyone instant healing, even though I personally believe that healing miracles sometimes take place. However, I do guarantee that your biological brain is not “carved in stone,” and that you have the ability to overcome great psychological and emotional adversity if you receive the right help and if you believe in your own truth as a child of God.

Just take it one day at a time. Stick with the Four Basic Practices for now. Remember that it takes about 42 days to grow a new neuron. If some arrogant religious-know-it-all tries to give you a hard time and tell you you’re “not going fast enough” or “not trying hard enough,” remember that you can only go as fast as your brain can build new brain cells. That’s the scientific reality, and you don’t have to apologize for it.

Take that, you Spirit-intoxicated evangelicals, you!

*(For a more detailed discussion of what’s possible and what’s not possible inside your biological self, please see “Foxes Have Holes, Canadians Have Gloves.”

-2
Posted in brain-soul connection, building your intuition, healing, healing miracles, intent, meta-choice, prayer, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment
21 Apr 2011

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

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

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.

  1. Each day, eat three balanced meals.
  2. Each day, repeat the promise you’ve written to yourself for yourself.
  3. Each day, reflect on three things you’re grateful for.
  4. 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.

-1
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 , | Leave a Comment
02 Apr 2011

TBM 10: Guys, Intuition, and "the Gut"

One of the things I want to emphasize most is that intuition is not a female prerogative. All human beings are born with the faculty of intuition, and all human beings need their intuition in order to live a balanced, holistic, healthy, happy life. In other words, men have intuition, too!

If you don’t like the word intuition, you can call it something else. You can call it your “gut.” You can call it your strength. You can say there’s “something you’ve just gotta do.” Nobody’s saying you have to light smelly candles or write mushy poems in order to be a guy with intuition.

But being a guy with intuition comes in pretty handy in an emergency.

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

Remember those two pilots — Captain Chesley Sullenberger III and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles — who safely brought down US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River with no loss of life to anyone? Yeah, well, if you’re looking for a clear example of male intuition, look no further than these two heroic pilots.

In a moment of crisis, when it really mattered, these two men were able to work in synchrony with God and respond immediately and effectively to the intuitive guidance being offered to them.

It’s really important to note that during this emergency these two men had no time and no attention to spare for anything but the crisis at hand. They had to give 100% of themselves to myriad tasks. They had to use all their senses to quickly and logically analyze the problem, check their instrumentation, advise the control tower, advise the flight crew, come up with a plan, and execute the plan — all within a few short minutes. There was no time for formal prayer. No time for religious ritual. No time for anything but flying. So they did what they do so well — they flew. They threw their hearts and minds and bodies and courage into flying the plane, and because they did, a miracle took place on the Hudson.

Intuition is a sophisticated brain process that involves numerous circuits in the brain. It’s not pure logic. It’s not pure emotion. It’s not pure reflex. It’s not pure genetic instinct. It’s a combination of all these aspects of the human condition. It’s the ability of your biological brain (in conjunction with your soul) to fully assess all the different angles of a problem and respond to the problem without panicking. Intuition is felt most intensely and most memorably during a crisis because that’s when you need it most. Afterwards, people often describe sensations of being “in the zone,” or of having heightened senses, or of having a strong sense in their gut that they should act now and ask questions later. This is what intuition feels like: you just know what you’re supposed to do.

Here’s the clincher: intuition — your ability to work with God during a crisis to achieve a positive outcome for the people you love — requires that your brain be prewired in a reasonably functional way. It has to be wired in a reasonably functional way before the crisis takes place.

The pilots on Flight 1549 had prewired their brains in a number of crucial ways. They had prewired their logic circuitry by willingly undertaking the study of physics and math and meteorology and navigation and aeronautics. They had prewired their physical reflexes by willingly undertaking rigorous flight training. They had prewired their problem-solving skills by willingly practising their emergency drills. They had prewired their empathy circuits by choosing to care about the people who were literally under their wing. Both these men had worked very hard over the years to get their biological brains “in line with” their souls’ intense love of flying. They were doing what they loved to do, but they didn’t learn to fly through sudden revelation or mystical vision. They had to work their asses off.

Fortunately for the passengers and flight crew of Flight 1549, Sullenberger and Skiles were gifted pilots at the soul level who had chosen to integrate their biology with their unique soul talents through hard work. This meant that they were fully equipped in the intuition department when it came time for them to work in full synchrony with God. The circuits were already there. The circuits were already in place and ready to be “pinged” by God. God saw the problem and God acted to help them act.

Note, however, that God wasn’t the only one acting here. God was acting in concert with two of God’s children. You could say it was a team effort.

Of course, it’s only a team effort if you, as a human being, have the same goal, the same intent as God. It’s only a team effort if you want to help other people for the sake of helping other people, not for the sake of acquiring status for yourself or your clan. The intuitive circuitry of your brain will only help you in a crisis if you’ve chosen ahead of time to make balanced choices that reflect your soul’s true nature.

God isn’t going to suddenly swoop in during an emergency and rewire a psychopath’s whole brain so he/she can hear God’s guidance. Many people — including frightened psychopaths (and it takes a lot to scare a psychopath) — have requested such immediate divine intervention during a major emergency, and many have hoped to get it. But most of those who think they got such an intervention — who believe they got a one-time divine intervention so strange and wondrous and different from anything they’ve known before that they become obsessed with it and start chasing after it for the rest of their human lives — probably got something that’s quite scary from a biological viewpoint. They probably gave themselves (albeit unintentionally) a trauma-induced psychotic break.

Many are the mystics who have a psychotic depression in disguise.

In short, intuition is a normal, natural part of everyday human life for both men and women. It’s a product of the everyday choices we make as human beings. At the same time it’s a puzzling and mysterious experience that helps us feel closer to each other and to God. It’s one of the great joys of the human experience.

Intuition makes you want to smile and beam from the inside out with the joy of knowing you’re actually, truly, honestly, and undeniably loved by God.

Intuition helps you find the courage to find redemption. Intuition helps you be your best self — a person you can actually like and trust.

Now wouldn’t that be a miracle?

-1
Posted in brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, building your intuition, Favourite Posts, intent, meta-choice, soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment
27 Mar 2011

TBM9: The Difference Between Intuition & "Psychic Powers"

Photo (c) WordPerfect

Photo (c) WordPerfect

Although the goal of the Spiral Path is for you to gradually feel confident about your soul identity and reclaim your own inner courage, devotion, gratitude, and ability to trust and forgive, you need more than just a goal in order to get you there. You need tools — the tools available to you in your spiritual kitchen.

One of the most potent tools available to human beings is their intuition. So today I’m going to talk about the differences between your own intuition — a natural human faculty that comes pre-wired in your human DNA — compared to the “psychic powers” and “secret laws of attraction” being recommended so widely these days.

In your spiritual kitchen, intuition is like the ability to read the cookbooks on the shelf. It’s no good having lots of cookbooks on the shelf if you can’t read the recipes. Maybe you can look at the pictures, but if you can’t read the words or understand the numbers, then you’re going to have a heck of a time making that scrumptious-looking triple layer chocolate cake on page 42. You’re also probably going to end up feeling very frustrated and ashamed of yourself. Frustration and self-blame make it harder for people to follow the Spiral Path, so you probably don’t want to encourage such feelings.

A lot of people would be tempted to compare intuition to the cookbooks themselves — to the wisdom recorded by other authors in the pages of the books. According to this ancient theory, there’s a special kind of divine key that can unlock the human mind. Once the special key has been found, a hidden door suddenly opens inside the mind. All at once the inner mind can “tap into” vast stores of hidden wisdom, hidden knowledge, all of which can be seen at a glance. It’s like a scene from a fantasy-adventure film — a huge treasury filled with books of knowledge. There are even names for this treasury. Some of the better-known names are Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious,” Edgar Cayce’s “Akashic Records,” and the Bible.

The general idea among teachers who call themselves “psychic” is the idea that anybody — anybody at all — can access these divine books of wisdom with (1) the proper training and (2) the proper attunement to divine energies. If you aren’t already familiar with these ideas, you won’t have any trouble finding them in the nearest bookstore. Even popular alternative therapeutic methods such as Reiki rely on the idea that you can easily “tap into divine wisdom” if you go for a few weekend workshops and learn how to properly access the never-ending tap of divine energy. Oprah is very keen on these ideas.

What makes me uncomfortable about these teachings on “psychic abilities” and “energy healing abilities” is the way they treat God. All these methods start with the assumption that God is more like a vast energy field than two loving divine parents with distinct personalities and distinct thoughts and feelings. Sure, say these spiritual teachers, there’s a Divine Oneness that all beings belong to, but there’s not any difference, really, between you and God, so it’s okay for you to feel free to help yourself at any time to that never-ending tap of divine energy. Go ahead!, they say. Feel free to use it! It’s yours to use in any way you wish as long as you’ve aligned yourself with the universal energies.

This is the prevailing thought in New Age circles. But every time I hear it, I hear the metacommunication behind the words. It goes like this: “Please feel free to mooch off your divine parents. Please feel free to take them for granted. Please feel free to ask for things you can’t do and don’t understand and don’t even want to understand. Please feel free to try to escape all the hard work that comes with the Spiral Path. Please feel free to squeeze the complexity of divine relationships into a Twitter message.”

And nobody takes a bigger hit in most New Age teachings than God’s loving angels do.

In the excerpt for John Edward’s new book Infinite Quest, he talks about the “team” that each person has “at his disposal.” While I agree with the idea that each person has an angelic “team,” I object with all my heart and soul to the idea that any angel anywhere is at anybody’s disposal.

Angels — persons-of-soul — aren’t at anyone’s beck and call. So part of the challenge for people setting out on the spiritual journey of the Spiral Path is for them to process inside their own hearts and minds the nature of their relationship with their own guardian angels.

Yes, Virginia, there is a guardian angel watching over you.

Some of the cookbooks on the shelves of your spiritual kitchen were written by your own team of guardian angels because the angels watching over you are a lot smarter than you are. (That’s one of the realities you’ll have to struggle with). They’re very experienced, very knowledgeable, and very compassionate. That’s why they’re in a position to teach you — to write down the valuable recipes in some of the cookbooks you’ll be using. Their job is to teach and guide — not to obey your desires, wishes, and whims. Your job is to try as hard as you can to learn to read their cookbooks.

In other words, your job is to develop your human faculty of intuition — your ability to understand the “reading, writing, and arithmetic” of your own guardian angels.

And when I say reading, writing, and arithmetic, I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that literally.

The cookbooks on the shelves of your spiritual kitchen have been carefully chosen by your guardian angel team to suit your unique needs and attributes. The books on your shelves aren’t the same books that appear on your neighbour’s shelves. Even more importantly, you don’t get to pick the books. You don’t get to go into the Akashic Records and pull out volumes on “The Great Pyramid” or other ancient mysteries. You get the books your own guardian angels think are best suited to you.

Your angels are trying with all their might to help you understand who you are as a unique soul — as a unique child of God — so naturally this is the focus of their efforts. They know you better than you know yourself. And they want you to know yourself the way they already know you! (That’s a good thing, by the way.)

On my blog Jesus Redux, Jesus gives a good example of a person who thinks she knows herself, but doesn’t. You can check it out at “Why You Need to Know Yourself: Mystical Commentary on Saying 67 of Thomas”.

The main difference between “human intuition” (a verifiable scientific reality) and “psychic powers” (not a verfiable scientific reality) is the dependence of intuition on the everyday choices you make. Intuition only functions properly if your human brain wiring functions properly. God has wired the human brain in such a way that when your brain wiring becomes seriously messed up because of the harmful choices you’ve been making, your intuition shuts down. It’s a logical, loving choice on God’s part to design your brain in this way. Why would a loving God allow you to have full access to the cookbooks in your spiritual kitchen during a time when you’re choosing to be intentionally destructive? You might get hold of the kitchen knives and use them to hurt somebody! So God gives people “time-outs” when they’re choosing to hurt themselves and/or hurt other people. During a divine “time-out,” not only can you not access the books in the Akashic Records (though this is the time you’re most likely to think you can), but you can’t even access the books in your own spiritual kitchen.

Fortunately, God also designed the human brain in such a way that if you put in the effort, and if you make new daily choices, and if you get the help of friends, family, and trained professionals, your human faculty of intuition can gradually come back on line. Your capacity for intuition can be healed.

This is the neuroscientific principle of neuroplasticity. The newly understood and verifiable reality of neuroplasticity states, in a nutshell, that old dogs can learn new tricks.*

On the Spiral Path, you’ll be taking full advantage of the principle of neuroplasticity. That’s not taking advantage of God, though. That’s honouring and being grateful for God’s wisdom in designing the human brain the way they did. That’s accepting God’s wisdom. That’s accepting your angels’ guidance and knowledge.

Why do God and God’s angels insist you do so much of the work yourself instead of handing it to you on a platter?

Because they believe in you.

 

* An excellent and highly readable book about neuroplasticity is Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (New York: Penguin, 2007).

-3
Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain-soul connection, building your intuition, ethical mysticism, interoception, mysticism, relationship with God, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy and tagged , | Leave a Comment
21 Mar 2011

JR25: Getting Close to God: Finding the Kingdom Within

A: Some readers are probably very surprised that a mystic and an angel are spending so much time talking about academic research and academic sources. How would you respond to that?

J: I respond the same way today as I responded 2,000 years ago. My basic attitude is a pretty tough one: you can’t get close to God if you don’t do the work. You can’t get close to God if you separate yourself from the rest of God’s Creation. You can’t get close to God by snubbing everything God is saying to you in the world around you.

A: The idea that you can’t get close to God if you don’t do the work is a pretty universal spiritual idea. Teachers from a number of different faith traditions have said much the same thing. Various schools of Buddhism are all about teaching the correct way to do the work. But the second idea you present — the idea that you can’t get close to God if you separate yourself from the rest of God’s Creation — that’s a much less common idea among spiritual teachers. Tell me more about that.

“A man said to him: Tell my brothers that they have to divide my father’s possessions with me. Jesus said: Man, who made me a divider? He turned to his disciples and said to them: I am not a divider, am I” (Gospel of Thomas 72). Photo credit JAT 2014.

J: Basically it’s the idea that if you want to get close to God, you have to start with the only piece of Creation that God has given you complete control over: your own biology. Your own brain, your own body, your own body-soul nexus. This little piece of Creation is all you get. The rest belongs to other people — to other souls and to God the Mother and God the Father. You get one little piece of Creation to command — one little Kingdom to be in charge of — and it’s your job as a human being and as a soul to look after your little corner of Creation. It’s a big job. Much bigger than most human beings realize. It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes courage. It takes knowledge. More than anything, it takes full acceptance.

A: What do you mean by “acceptance”? Do you mean people have to be resigned to their misery? Do you mean they have to accept the status quo?

J: No. I mean the exact opposite. I mean that if they want to get close to God while living here as human beings, they have to accept that God believes in them. They have to accept that they’re not filled with corruption and sin. They have to accept that they’re not here — here on Planet Earth — as some form of cosmic punishment or karmic journey. They have to stop seeing the glass as “half empty” and start seeing Creation in a positive light. This includes a commitment to seeing themselves — their core selves, their souls — in a positive light. They have to stop feeling so damned sorry for themselves.

A: A lot of pious people I’ve met — mostly Christians, but not exclusively so — remind me a lot of a fictional character from a science fiction/satire mini-series that ran many years ago called “The Hitchhiker`s Guide to the Galaxy. The character was Marvin the Robot. Marvin was always going around feeling sorry for himself. “Oh, poor me!” “Woe is me!” He saw himself as a victim — victim with a capital “V.” I found it hard to like Marvin, to be honest, because all he did was whine.

J: Pauline Christianity encourages people to whine. “Oh, poor me, I’m tainted with original sin, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just a victim. It’s not my fault. It’s Adam’s fault. If Adam hadn’t screwed up and made God so angry, then I wouldn’t have so many problems today. I’ll do my best, Lord — honest! — but please don’t expect too much of me, because, after all, I’m full of inner corruption and sin, and I’m doing the best I can — honest! I promise to go to church every week so you can cleanse me of my sins, but as for the rest of the week . . . please remember that I’m just a frail, weak, ignorant human being who can’t possibly resist temptation and can’t possibly understand your mysteries! You’ve decided to make all life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, so who I am to argue with your wisdom?”

A: Thomas Hobbes.

J: Yes. Thomas Hobbes — the pessimist’s pessimist. Also one of the great Materialist philosophers who rejected outright the relevance of the soul to a functioning, non-chaotic society. He had it all backwards because of his own psychological dysfunction.

A: Progressive Christianity, as this new movement calls itself, is edging in the direction of a Materialist religion — a religion founded on Newtonian science where the words “soul” and “miracle” are considered embarrassing and irrelevant.

J (smiling): Orthodox Western Christianity has in some ways always been a Materialist religion, despite the oxymoron-like quality of this phrase.

A: How so?

J: How often does Paul use the word psyche (soul) in his 7 known letters (8 if you count Colossians, as I do)?

A: Uh, hardly ever. When he does, he describes the soul in an eerie blend of Platonic and Jewish apocalyptic ways.

J: And how often does Paul talk about healing miracles? By that I mean the kind of healing miracles described several times in the Gospel of Mark.

A: Never. Paul doesn’t talk about healing miracles. He talks about sin and salvation and eschatology and Spirit and chosenness for those who believe in Christ. But he doesn’t talk about healing miracles.

J: What about the Roman Catholic Church’s take on healing miracles?

A: Oh, they keep a tight, tight rein on miracles. Nothing can be called an “official miracle” unless the Vatican approves it according to very strict criteria.

J: What’s one of the key criteria?

A: The healing had to take place after somebody prayed directly to a saint. Or a saint-to-be.

J: It’s a closed shop. A closed system. The Vatican has control over all the definitions. It’s not a true miracle unless it goes through the doors of the Church. Which doesn’t happen very often. It therefore forces people to look at the world around them in non-miraculous ways. In Materialist ways.

A: Huh?

J: Think of it this way. Christian orthodoxy has insisted since the beginning that God is to be understood as transcendent — far, far away from this earthly realm, detached from all emotion, detached from day to day concerns with human suffering, distant, serene, uninvolved with the petty concerns of the corrupt material world. This is actually Plato’s idea, but the Church long ago embraced it, and it’s officially part of Church doctrine, so the Church has to take responsibility for this choice. How does this translate for pious Christians? How does it make them feel about the world around them?

A: Well, on the one hand, they’re told by Genesis that they’re in charge of the world and can do whatever they like to it. It’s supposed to be a “good Creation.” On the other hand, they’re told that God isn’t actually “in” this good Creation, but is somewhere else — far, far away in a transcendent realm of pure Mind. I suppose that idea makes it easy for people to make excuses for their behaviour when they mistreat the environment and mistreat other creatures. Something along the lines of “Oh, it’s just a bunch of corrupt, material ‘stuff’ that doesn’t matter to God, so it’s okay for me to take what I want and leave a big mess behind.” . . . Okay, I’m starting to see what you’re getting at. This kind of anthropocentric religious thinking is a form of “state sanctioned Materialism.”

J: Yes. Two thousand years ago, there was no distinction between the political state and the religious state. The two were totally intertwined. So it mattered what religious leaders said about the environment, about the Earth, about the world around us. It mattered that religious leaders told pious followers to ignore all the lessons, all the truths that were being conveyed to them through “the eyes of Nature,” as it were. It mattered then, and it still matters today. God isn’t transcendent. Never was, never will be. God does have feelings. And God feels everything that happens in Creation. Everything.

A: Materialists don’t take God’s feelings into account. They don’t believe God has feelings (many of them don’t even believe that God exists). They don’t ask themselves how God is going to feel when they pour toxic sludge into the groundwaters. Pauline Christianity tells them they don’t have to ask this question.

J: Just as Pauline Christianity tells them they don’t have to take full responsibility for the care, healing, and core integrity of their own little piece of Creation: their biological body.

A: Their Kingdom. Their own Kingdom of the Heavens.

J: Only when you fully understand and respect the core integrity and the core wonder of your own Kingdom will you be able to understand and respect the core integrity of other people, other creatures, and God. That’s what empathy is — the ability to understand that your neighbour’s Kingdom is different but equal to your own. The healing of the Church must begin with a complete overturning of all doctrines that repudiate or undermine the true worth of the soul.

A: The United Church of Canada doesn’t even have an official doctrine of the soul, though the Articles of Faith tell us in one breath that we’re responsible for all our choices (Articles 2.3 and 2.4) and in the next breath tell us that all people are born with a sinful nature (Article 2.5). Talk about a lose-lose situation!

J: My point exactly.

-2
Posted in brain-soul connection, Buddhism, Church of today, empathy, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Materialism, miracles, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus, Plato, relationship with God and tagged , | Leave a Comment
14 Mar 2011

JR22: Why You Need To Know Yourself (Mystical Commentary on Saying 67)

A: Can you please explain as simply as possible WHY it matters that each person has a unique soul blueprint and WHY it’s important for each person on a spiritual journey to uncover the specific details of his or her own unique blueprint?

J: Let’s use an imaginary person as an example to make this simpler. I’m going to call this imaginary person Jane Tamaguchi.

A: Okay.

J: Like all human beings, Jane is a soul. She doesn’t have a soul. She is a soul. She’s an angel — a child of God. Like all angels, she was born as a soul long before she decided to incarnate as a human being. Soul energy isn’t visible in the third dimension — the dimension that human beings live in during their temporary lives as incarnated souls — but soul energy can be felt in the third dimension.

A: Can you give some examples of “feelable” soul energy? (I think I just invented a new word.)

J: Yes. When you feel a deep sense of connection with another person, that’s soul energy. When you feel empathy for other creatures, that’s soul energy. When you feel committed, romantic, monogamous love, that’s soul energy. When you give or receive forgiveness, that’s soul energy. When you’re willing to trust in a loving and compassionate God, that’s soul energy.

Thomas 67: One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing. (Photo credit JAT 2015)

Thomas 67: “One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing.” (Translation by Stevan Davies, photo credit JAT 2015)

 A: Those are all emotions. Positive emotions. Uplifting emotions.

J: Yes. All souls are intensely emotional in positive, uplifting, creative, intuitive, loving ways.

A: So much for Christian angelology, that says angels have no emotions of their own and are simply instruments of God’s work and God’s will.

J: Yes. That’s another Christian doctrine that should go the way of the 8-track recording system.

A: But angels also have minds, as you’ve said previously. They have minds plus emotional hearts.

J: Yes. Christians have long believed — based largely on theories of the soul put forward by Plato, Aristotle, Tertullian, Augustine, and others — that the soul itself consists of a single indivisible substance. Arguments raged as to the exact nature of this substance. But the basic idea was that the soul was made of just one thing because — as the theory went — the soul couldn’t really be a soul if it could be “divided” into two or more substances. It should go without saying that this is a ridiculous supposition. There are no analogies anywhere in nature or in the quantum world for a complex lifeform made of a single element such as pure hydrogen or pure gold. All lifeforms, whether they exist in the third dimension or in higher dimensions, are extremely complex. A soul is a quantum being whose “biology” is far more complex than that of any 3D creature — which is pretty much what you’d expect for children of God who were born in the fourth dimension, and who will spend most of their eternal existence in parts of the “implicate order” that can’t be seen or measured by human beings in the third dimension.

A: So people just have to take it on trust? On blind faith?

J: I wouldn’t say that. Individuals who want to take the time to do intensive research into quantum physics and quantum biology will soon discover that the universe being studied by today’s scientists is extremely complex. This isn’t the cosmology of Plato or Thomas Aquinas. It’s breathtakingly complicated and interconnected. There’s plenty of room in there for a modern doctrine of the soul that doesn’t in any way violate the laws of quantum biology.

A: Okay. So tell me about Jane. Who is she as a soul?

J: Jane is a female angel, and for the purposes of this discussion she’s heterosexual.

A: I know what this means for human beings. But what does this mean for angels?

J: It means exactly what it sounds like. All angels are one of two sexes: male or female. Just as with human beings. There are no “in-between” sexes or alien sexes. All angels are either male (the same sex as God the Father) or female (the same sex as God the Mother). This is pretty much what you’d expect by looking at life on Planet Earth.

A: Some creatures on Earth are able to reproduce without a sexual partner. Komodo Dragons, for instance.

J: There are different modes of reproduction for creatures that live on Planet Earth. Reproduction is part of the 3D biological package. It isn’t part of the 4D soul package. We’ll come back to that at a later time.

A: But sexual orientation is part of the 4D soul package. Why is sexual orientation necessary for angels?

J: Because each angel has a soulmate. One true eternal love partner. A divine spouse. The one partner in all of Creation who’s a perfect match in every way, including intimate, private ways. Each angel in God’s Creation is paired with his or her perfect eternal partner. For many angelic couples, the perfect partner is of the same sex. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.

A: So God the Father and God the Mother are not a same-sex couple themselves, but it’s okay with God if their children choose a same-sex partner to share eternity with.

J: Yes. God’s children are not carbon copies of their divine parents. God’s children come in every size and shape and colour imaginable. Yet every soul couple is blissfully happy, blissfully complete. This is what God the Mother and God the Father want for their children — bliss. Everybody’s different. Yet everybody’s happy. It’s the perfect divine family when you think about it.

A: So Jane has a specific sex — female — and a specific sexual orientation — heterosexual. What else does she have?

J: She has a soul body. Her soul body has a unique size and shape that’s perfect for her. Her soul body probably doesn’t look too much like her current human body, but that’s okay. She’s very happy with the soul body she has.

A: What else?

J: She has a soul mind. As a soul, she’s pure consciousness — by that I mean she has full awareness at all times of her own thoughts and her own feelings and her own choices and her own needs and wishes. Part of her unique mind lies in the way she thinks, the way she learns, the way she remembers, the way she expresses herself. These attributes lie within the soul mind. Jane doesn’t “know” everything. Nor does she want to. She has certain interests that are hard-wired at the very core of her consciousness, and these are the things she learns fastest and remembers best.

A: Can you give an example of what Jane might be interested in as a soul, as an angel?

J: Okay. Let’s say for argument’s sake that Jane is a gifted musician.

A: There are some angels who are more musically gifted than other angels?

J: All angels enjoy music to some extent. But not all angels want to spend most of the day in classes devoted to advanced musical performance and interpretation skills. As with all things in Creation, it’s a continuum. All angels appreciate music. But some angels want to devote most of their time to it. Which means they can’t be devoting their time to other interests, other skills. There’s only so much time in a day, even for an angel.

A: What other interests does our imaginary Jane possess as a soul?

J: Jane likes to be around a lot of other angels. She gets very lonely if she can’t hear other angels singing. She’s happiest when she’s with a big group of noisy, laughing angels.

A: Are there any angels who are more quiet in temperament, who wouldn’t feel comfortable in large groups?

J: Yes, lots. And that’s okay, too. These angels are quiet, but not in any way unfriendly or unloving. They just need more quiet than other angels do. Nothing wrong with that.

A: Let’s give Jane a third unique attribute. What would you suggest.

J: She doesn’t like the colour red.

A: Huh?

J: All angels appreciate the fact that everything in Creation is beautiful and deserving of respect. So Jane respects the colour red, and she’s happy for her friends who love all things red. But angels have their own taste, their own “likes” and “dislikes.” And Jane herself is under no divine obligation to like red. It happens that she doesn’t. God the Mother and God the Father respect the fact that Jane just doesn’t happen to like red. On the other hand, she can’t get enough black. She’s crazy for black.

A (grinning): I know a certain male angel who happens to love black! And a particular shade of charcoal grey.

J: Yeah, I do like those colours. Can’t deny it.

A: Okay. So we have our angel Jane, who’s passionate about music, loves to be around large groups of people, isn’t fond of the colour red, but likes black. Jane decided a while back to incarnate as a human being on Planet Earth (her choice), and right now she’s 35 years old, is working as a nurse, is taking night school courses so she can apply to law school, and lives with a female partner who has painted the bedroom red. Tell me about Jane’s current brain health.

J: All the things we talked about — Jane’s true soul interests — are hardwired into her human DNA. That’s the junk DNA that geneticists are puzzled by. Her soul’s blueprint is hardwired into her brain and central nervous system. Her brain stem, cerebellum, hypothalamus, thalamus, basal ganglia, and glial cells contain coding that’s unique to her, unique to her true soul personality. If Jane were to make conscious choices that “matched” or “lined up with” her core blueprint, her biological brain would function smoothly. It would function the way it’s supposed to. Her mood would remain stable. Her thinking would be logical and coherent. Her memory would be pretty good, especially around music and musical interpretation! She would have excellent social functioning. All in all, she’d be pretty happy, healthy, and well adjusted.

A: Okay. But right now Jane isn’t making conscious choices that “line up with” her own soul’s core identity. She’s working as a nurse, not as a musician. She’s around lots of people, which is good, but the people aren’t singing. She’s in a lesbian love relationship. And every night she has to go to sleep in a room that isn’t healing or calming for her as a soul. What’s happening inside her brain at this point?

J: There’s a software conflict. On the one hand, the so-called “primitive” parts of Jane’s brain are saying “I want to craft music, I want to find a loving male partner, I want to be around the colour black.” Meanwhile, Jane’s forcing the outer cortical layers of her brain to make different choices — choices that seem logical to her peers or to her family, perhaps, but which make no sense to her core self.

A: So how’s Jane doing?

J: Her brain is pretty messed up. There are competing signals from the different regions of her brain and central nervous system. The signals contradict each other. By now she’s feeling confused and upset with her life, and she doesn’t why. Things seem okay on the outside. But on the inside she’s not happy. She may be having trouble with headaches or poor sleep or depression or one of the many other signs of imbalance that can emerge via human biology.

A: A lot of these medical issues would begin to clear up if Jane were to seek professional counselling and appropriate medical care to help her uncover the choices she’s making that aren’t working for her.

J: Yes. Jane has been making choices based on other people’s priorities rather than her own core priorities — the priorities of her soul. Over the long term, her poor choices have begun to affect her health and her happiness.

A: Can she force herself to “be” a nurse and “be” a lawyer if her soul isn’t wired for healing or for case analysis?

J: No. This is what I meant when I said the soul isn’t malleable in the way that clay is malleable. Jane can only be who she is. If she tries to be somebody she’s not — if she tries to be a lesbian nurse-lawyer who wears red power suits — her biological brain will begin to sustain serious damage from the continuous push-and-pull of her internal “software conflict.” She’ll literally fry her own brain from the inside out.

A: Okay. That’s pretty clear. Be yourself — be the person God knows you to be — so your brain and body will function the way God intended.

J: Simple in fact. Simple in reality. But not always easy to implement.

A: At least it gives people a starting place on the journey. At least it helps them understand where they’re going and WHY. It helps so much to understand WHY.

J: Insight is one hell of an amazing miracle.

0
Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Davies (Stevan), gender and sexuality, Gospel of Thomas, insight, interoception, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, orthodox teachings about the soul, Plato, quantum theory, Soul, soul blueprint, soul purpose, Thomas 67 and tagged , | Leave a Comment
24 Jan 2011

JR4: Talking About Psychopathy

A: I notice that human nature hasn’t changed in the past 2,000 years. Families still fight over the same issues.

J: Right. And it’s not surprising from a scientific point of view. Two thousand years is a very short amount of time as far as the human genome is concerned. Human DNA is still the same today as it was then. Most importantly, the DNA involved in mental health issues hasn’t changed. Two thousand years ago, people were just as susceptible to major mental illness as they are today. There’s a bias among scholars who are trying to recreate the cultural mindset that existed in the first century (CE). They seem to want to believe that people’s brains worked differently then, and that people’s mindset was “unique” to the time, and impossible for us to understand today. But that’s not true. If you start with the logical scientific assumption that human brain physiology hasn’t changed in the past 2,000 years because the human DNA that shapes the physiology hasn’t changed, then you have a different starting point. You can look at the issues involved in major mental illness today, and you can assume that the same issues must have existed in the 1st century. This starting point can free historians from the false assumption that we can never understand what people were thinking and feeling in the Roman Empire of the 1st century. On the contrary, you can understand them better by using the new research tools available to you.

A: Tools like brain scans.

J: Exactly. You can’t actually run a brain scan on a skeleton that’s been dead for 2,000 years. But you can use medical forensics to extrapolate backwards. You can make better guesses about the past by using new research data that’s only become available recently.

A: The History Channel has a show based on that idea. It’s called “Ancients Behaving Badly.” Sometimes I wonder, though, about their experts’ understanding of psychopathy.

J: Psychopathy is not well understood by psychologists. There’s a tendency to pretend it isn’t a major mental illness because it’s not treatable. There’s no drug regimen and no effective psychotherapy model that can be patented or copyrighted. So there’s not a lot of good research. Also, people are worried about the legal implications. People are worried that if psychopathy is labelled a major mental illness then it will be used in court cases to prove a lack of responsibility in major crimes. There’s a risk of this because there’s currently such a poor understanding of how the human brain works. However, proof of psychopathy is in no way proof of lack of responsibility or lack of criminal intent. Psychopathy is a class of major mental illness characterized by a complete lack of conscience that is accompanied by a complete preservation of logic, will power, and intent. It’s an illness because a psychopath’s brain is not functioning properly — it’s not wired according to the psychopath’s DNA package. Nonetheless, the psychopath is responsible for his or her actions because he/she is consciously aware of the choices he/she is making. That conscious awareness is the test for criminal intent in a legal proceeding.

“Jesus said: Blessed is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion will become human” (Gospel of Thomas 7). Being a successful psychopath is lot like being a trained pilot who can land near the shore of a frozen lake without crashing through the ice. It takes rigorous training, commitment, logic, and a laser-eye view of where you want to be and what you need to accomplish to get there – even if it means mowing down all the people between you and your goal. Being a successful psychopath is also a lot like being a lion on the hunt. Photo credit JAT 2015.

A: In other words, psychopaths know what they’re doing is wrong, so they shouldn’t be given a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card.

J: Exactly. They should be held accountable for their choices and their actions. At the same time, they should also receive appropriate medical therapy and intervention to assist them to learn how to make better choices.

A: Healing and redemption for serial killers.

J: It’s possible. But not likely in the current climate of Newtonian psychology.

A: Newtonian psychology. That’s an interesting phrase. I’ve never heard it before.

J: By Newtonian psychology I mean the current vogue in neuroscience research. Researchers are examining small little bits of the human brain in isolation as if the brain is nothing more than a complex Lego set. But the brain isn’t like that. It’s much more sophisticated than that. The sum of the parts does not make the whole. The whole is . . . the whole is almost beyond words. It’s not called “the three pound universe” for nothing.

A: I’ve been noticing that researchers themselves get so caught up in the details that they lose sight of the big picture. They can’t see the forest for the trees, as the saying goes. I picked up the current issue of Discover (Jan/Feb 2011) with its list of the 100 Top Stories of 2010. Top Story No. 62 (“Glia: The Other Brain Cells”) breathlessly informs me that glial cells in the brain might actually play an active role in brain function, rather than just a structural role. I’ve known this for years because you told me years ago to keep an eye on glial cell research. And there’s been good research on glia, too. Fascinating stuff. It’s a shame that many other researchers haven’t been paying attention.

J: Well, the neuron is the “fad du jour.” It’s a nice easy-to-understand Lego block, and it’s easier to design experiments with. Researchers are limited by experimental constraints.

A: And funding grants. Research often follows the money. There’s more money in tracking the parts of the brain that can be changed by patented medications. It’s a huge industry.

J: And a very powerful one that has a vested interest in viewing the brain as a collection of fixable Legos.

A: Not much room in there for a doctrine of the soul, is there?

J: That’s the whole idea, actually.

-4
Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain-soul connection, conscience & morality, Jesus Redux, mental illness, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness and tagged | Leave a Comment
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

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.

-1
Posted in brain-soul connection, Gnosticism, My Spiral Path, mystic, orthodox teachings about the soul, Soul, soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic and tagged | Leave a Comment
02 Jan 2011

TBM3: The Five Basic Goals of the Spiral Path

Would it help if I told you that God doesn’t expect you to be perfect?

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. And you can’t progress on the Spiral Path unless you’re willing to make a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes are going to be part of your spiritual journey. Some of these mistakes are gonna make you laugh, and some of these mistakes are gonna make you cry your guts out. But you’re gonna make mistakes. And that’s okay with God. After all, you’re only human. Sort of.

It’s a lot more accurate to say that you’re an angel-in-temporary-human-form. A soul-temporarily-downshifted-into-3D-matter. A child of God. A temporary resident of Planet Earth. Consciousness temporarily experiencing baryonic expression for the purposes of learning. A soul who has temporarily embarked on a learning expedition on Earth with a very small suitcase of supplies (think Lost). A big soul in an itty bitty living space (think Robin Williams’s “Genie” in Aladdin). An angel who has to muddle through for awhile not realizing she has wings (think Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz). A person with a very big heart.

That’s you.

Photo credit JAT 2019

Long before you were born as a human being, you existed as a soul, as an angel, as a child of God. (I use these terms synonymously). It’s the sum total of who you really are. It’s the totality of you as a child of God.

To say that you’re a soul is the same thing as saying that you’re a person. It’s incorrect to say that you have a soul. You don’t have a soul in the way that you have a removeable, detachable, non-essential right thumb or left eye. You are a soul. Everything in you — everything that you are and everything that you know and everything that you feel and everything that you need — is you. You are a person. You are a soul. You are a child of God.

And God don’t make no junk.

Your problems as a human being are not caused by your soul. Neither are your problems caused by your human biology. Your problems are caused by the catastrophic failure of Western culture to teach you how to fully balance and integrate your soul’s identity with your human biology. You haven’t been taught how to read your own personal “owner’s manual.” Heck, you haven’t been taught that you even have an owner’s manual. So you stumble through life in a state of confusion, fear, and yearning, always wanting to understand, but never knowing where to start.

So what is the first step in beginning your spiritual journey? What is the goal of the Spiral Path?

Is the goal for you to try to transcend your humanity and detach from your human thoughts, needs, and feelings so you can feel closer to God? No. The goal is for you to understand and accept your soul’s identity so you can integrate your soul’s needs with your human biology as much as possible. This leads to the feeling of trust.

Is the goal for you to try to attain perfection of action or perfection of result? No. It’s not possible for any human being to attain either perfection of action or perfection of result. The best you can hope for is perfection of intent — the ongoing desire to be the best person you’re capable of being, despite the fact that you’ll continue to make mistakes as a human being. This leads to the feeling of forgiveness.

Is the goal for you to seek gnosis (esoteric wisdom) or secret spiritual knowledge that will raise you to a new, higher level of human consciousness and human evolution? No. The goal is for you to accept that you already have the right DNA package for your own soul. Your goal is to gradually transform all your “lemons” into “lemonade.” This leads to the feeling of courage.

Is the goal for you to receive “gifts of grace” from God by dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s of God’s Law (as dictated by your religious leaders)? No. The goal is for you to use your free will to work side by side with God and God’s angels (despite your human limitations) to create a more compassionate society. This leads to the feeling of devotion.

Is the goal for you to be saved by God? No. The goal is for you to be grateful for the gift of love that God gives to you and to all Creation. Without this love, “the person who is you” would not be possible. Neither would anything good, true, or beautiful be possible. (Sorry — couldn’t resist a dig at Plato and Paul). Not surprisingly, this practice leads to the feeling of gratitude.

You’re trying on the Spiral Path to find your own soul’s feelings of trust, forgiveness, courage, devotion, and gratitude. That’s it. You’re not seeking transcendence. You’re not seeking perfection of ritual. You’re not seeking gnosis (esoteric wisdom). You’re not seeking to earn grace through piety and blind faith. You’re not seeking salvation. What you’re really seeking is your own core self, your own core identity as a soul. You’re seeking to reclaim everything you were born with as a helpless yet incredibly loving and forgiving human child.

Strange as it may seem, it’s in seeking your own true identity as a soul that you’ll begin to recognize God as God really is.

That’s when your heart will explode with wonder. And you’ll feel the way Dr. Seuss’s Grinch feels when he finally “gets it.”

Really. I’m not kidding. This is what it feels like when you ground yourself firmly on the Spiral Path. It feels . . . good. Really, really good. Like Christmas all year round.

It’s awesome.

-3
Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain-soul connection, building your intuition, healing miracles, intent, meta-choice, Soul, The Blonde Mystic and tagged | Leave a Comment
24 Nov 2010

TBM2: The Spiritual Kitchen

Widdicombe-in-the-Moor 2

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!

-1

Posted in brain-soul connection, building your intuition, insight, Mother and Father God, My Spiral Path, mystic, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic and tagged | Leave a Comment
20 Nov 2010

CC43: The Hole-y Bucket of Humility

“There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole.”

“Then fix it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry, then fix it, dear Henry . . . “

“With what shall I fix it, dear Liza, dear Liza . . .”

Hole-y bucket of humility (c) JAT 2014

The hole-y bucket of religious humility. There’s a big hole right in the middle (or worse, the bottom) where the good stuff gushes out. You always feel half-empty in your relationship with God, instead of full to the brim with courage, trust, gratitude, and devotion. Photo credit JAT 2014.

You probably know this song from your childhood. We used to sing it at Brownies and at summer camp. It always made us laugh when we got to the punchline of the song: the bucket that started the song because it had a hole in it was the tool that was needed by Henry and Liza to fix said bucket. Without an un-holey bucket, they couldn’t fix the hole-y bucket. But they only had one bucket — the one with the hole in it. It was a circular argument.

The orthodox Western Church’s teachings on humility are exactly like this childhood song.

Before I talk about the Church’s teachings on humility, though, I want to talk about a different core virtue, one that’s never discussed in the church. This is the core virtue of humbleness. Humbleness is what Jesus taught. By contrast, humility is what Paul taught.

Humbleness is a feeling that sort of settles into the middle of your heart after you find redemption. Humbleness is the natural state of thinking, feeling, behaving, and understanding that you end up with when you accept the redemptive power of God’s forgiveness in your life. Humbleness is your natural soul state. It’s who you really are underneath all the bullshit layers of status addiction. It’s a deep sense of trust in yourself — not a sense of pride or hubris, but a sense of trust. It’s an unshakable sense of acceptance. It’s a sense that God made you to be a particular person, and that’s the only person you can be. So you stop fighting your inner self. And you become free to become your inner self.

That’s what humbleness is. It’s a state of absolute freedom from the tyranny of status addiction. Once you’re free from the constant voice of status addiction in your head — the constant judging of yourself, the constant comparing of yourself to others, the constant criticism of others, the perfectionism, the self-pity, the lack of common sense, the lack of peace, comfort, and safety in your life — once you’re free of all that you can begin to like yourself as a person. (Wouldn’t that be a refreshing change?)

A humble person is free to make choices based on a whole new set of criteria. A humble person isn’t worried about getting more status, so a humble person is free to practise the virtues of common sense. A humble person isn’t trying to be somebody he’s not, so a humble person doesn’t feel guilty about following his calling. A humble person thinks it’s wrong to accuse of God of being too stupid or too lazy to make souls that are all different from each other yet all equally beautiful and worthy. A humble person shows her love and respect for God by trying every day to be who she really is, instead of trying to be somebody she’s not. A humble person knows his limits.

This is not what the Church means when the Church talks about humility.

The traditional orthodox Western position is that no human being (except that Jesus dude) has ever been truly worthy of God’s love and trust. The Church starts with the assumption that you are a bucket (aka “a vessel”) with a big, fat hole in the bottom.

You are a bucket that needs to be fixed. All your courage and your faith have been draining out through the hole. Obviously, the hole needs to be patched. You must use your free will and your self-discipline to patch the hole so “the vessel that is you” can contain the love of Christ. But you must also practise humility. Humility demands that you not consider yourself a bucket at all, because then you’d be able to carry your own portion of courage and faith, which you’re not allowed to have, because that would be presumptuous. Only when you rejoice in the fact that you’re a bucket with a humongous hole in the bottom will you be able to feel Christ’s love flowing through you and out into the world through the hole. You must therefore be a hole-y bucket in order to fix the hole-y bucket that is you.

Catch 22, anyone?

Let’s imagine instead that the hole-y bucket is your biological brain/central nervous system. This bucket admittedly has a few holes in it by the time you’ve grown up. But these holes are fixable. More importantly, the holes are not you. They’re not the real you. They’re damaged biological parts that need to be healed (same as clogged arteries or a broken arm). So you find some qualified people who can help you heal them. Slowly, one by one, the holes begin to heal. You begin to discover somewhat to your surprise that you — you, yourself, and you — are capable of startling feats of compassion. The more healed your bucket, the more love and courage and faith your bucket is able to hold.

Go figure. Who would guess that a bucket without a big hole in it would actually hold more of the good stuff (like love and forgiveness) than a hole-y bucket? Gee whiz, Mother and Father, that’s, like, totally unfair of you to make our reality as humans so logical!

Mother and Father, you rock!

-22

Posted in brain-soul connection, Concinnate Christianity, healing, humbleness, humility, Paul vs Jesus, redemption, Soul, status addiction, trust and tagged , | 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.

-1

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 , | Leave a Comment
15 Oct 2010

CC38: An Ancient Mystery Revealed

I’m old enough to remember the 1984 Wendy’s commercial that featured the three little old ladies and the stick-in-your-head catch phrase, “Where’s the beef?” Sure, the commercial was meant to sell Wendy’s bigger hamburger patties. But the catch phrase went deeper than that. It quickly became a cultural metaphor for something that was “all talk, no action.” Something without real substance.

Many spiritual teachers are interested in selling you books about how to “raise your consciousness” and “seek wisdom” and be “one with all Creation.” These books are full of platitudes and cliches, and they remind me a lot of the big fluffy bun that was being parodied in the Wendy’s commercial. The bun looks impressive on the outside, but when you bite into it, you discover there’s precious little substance inside. There’s just the same old mystery teachings that have been taught by cult leaders for . . . oh . . . for at least five thousand years now.

We are all One. Blah, blah, blah. Your soul is a spark of the Divine. Blah, blah, blah. Your physical body and your physical mind are drenched in evil and must be transcended. Blah, blah, blah. Specially chosen spiritual leaders have consented to descend into this corrupt world to lead the forces of light against the forces of evil. Blah, blah, blah. You can help in this great battle. Blah, blah, blah. The time is at hand when human beings will rise to a new, never before seen level of consciousness and enlightenment. Blah, blah, blah. In order to reach this new level, you must surrender yourself, let go of yourself, live in the moment, let go of attachments, let go of illusion. Blah, blah, blah. Only then can you know the bliss, peace, and joy of oneness with the Divine.

At the beginning of Eckhart Tolle’s bestselling 1997 book The Power of Now (Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 1997), he describes an episode of spiritual awakening that took place after a “dark night of the soul” when he was 29. For five months, he “lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss” (page 2). He then “spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy. But even the most beautiful experiences come and go.”

Really? They come and go? Because that hasn’t been my experience. My experience has been that if you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing on the Spiral Path, and if you ground your spiritual journey in reality instead of in ancient mystical gobbledygook, you can get up every morning and go to bed at night and live every moment of your ordinary, ho-hum day in a state of profound trust and companionship with God.

This makes every ho-hum day anything but ho-hum.

If you see what I’m getting at here.

This amphora, found in Etruria and dated 540-535 BCE, depicts Herakles killing the Nemean lion – the first of the twelve labours of Herakles. The spiritual journey shouldn’t make you feel as if you’re reinventing Herakles’ terrible struggles. (Amphora on display at Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017.)

 Eckhart Tolle and his mystical predecessors are always talking about escape — escape from the body, escape from suffering, escape from illusion, escape from evil forces, and (in the most extreme form) escape from death. They’re missing the point. The Spiral Path has never been about escape. The Spiral Path has always been about forgiveness, healing, and redemption.*

If you want to feel deep peace and joy every day (and this is possible, believe it or not), your ongoing goal is to HEAL yourself, not escape yourself.

In order to heal yourself (and perhaps others, too), you need to understand at a conscious level what’s going on inside your biological body as you struggle to make sense of your spiritual journey. In order to do this, you need more than ancient myths to guide you. You need science.

There are no exceptions to this general statement. Every mystic in every faith tradition in every country of the world needs science. There is no ethical mysticism without ethical scientific exploration.

There is no science in The Power of Now. There’s a great deal of mystical speculation, but there’s no science. Put plain and simple, I don’t trust any spiritual teacher who’s afraid to look science in the eye.

There is no need to postulate, as Tolle does, the existence of a “negative energy field” (called an emotional “pain-body”) whose job it is to control your thoughts and your mind like some sort of “invisible entity” (page 29). This sounds little different than demon-possession as it was formerly understood. It’s an irresponsible and scientifically insupportable claim. It confuses and frightens people.

Furthermore, it relies entirely on the author’s own authority as mystic and prophet. It starts with Tolle’s personal assumptions about the interface between mind, body, soul, and brain. From there, he builds a pyramid of guesswork. My question in response to his thesis is . . . where’s the beef? Where’s the science combined with the heart? Don’t talk to me about a corrupting “pain-body.” Talk to me — scholar to scholar — about neurotransmitters and glial cells and underactive sections of the brain and seizure disorders and over-activation of the pain-pleasure circuitry (to barely scratch the surface of the neurophysiology that’s involved). I don’t mind if you use some analogies and even some mythical archetypes to explain brain chemistry to a lay audience, but if you yourself don’t understand your spiritual journey in scientific terms, then you’re not saying anything different than Plato said to a vulnerable audience 2,400 years ago. It’s pure myth. And it’s pure crap.

I’m sorry, but it’s just not true that human beings can somehow separate the spiritual journey or the spiritual brain from the everyday science of everyday life. You cannot find God by sitting on park benches for two long years. (You’ll find something on those park benches, but it won’t be enlightenment.) You can only find God in a lasting way by making lasting choices in your life — choices that will slowly heal your biological brain and your biological body, and allow you to live each day as an angel-in-human-form. Your spiritual task is not to become less yourself. It’s to become more yourself — more and more like the soul you really are.

This depends, of course, on a belief in the soul. If you don’t believe you were born with a soul — a pure, amazing, unique soul that always is and always will be a pure, amazing, unique soul — then you and I have no common ground for discussion. Everything I’ve learned from God the Mother and God the Father, and everything I’ve learned from the angel who once lived as Jesus, begins with the core integrity of the soul. Everything I’ve learned about healing and redemption revolves around the full integration of your immortal soul with your very mortal human body.

Everything I’ve learned about healing and redemption revolves around the balance of body, mind, soul, and heart. Around the balance (NOT the pyramidal, step-wise hierarchy) of Maslow’s physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, and self esteem needs. Around the balance of physical joy, mental joy, spiritual joy, and emotional joy. Around the balance of work, play, extroverted relationships, and introverted downtime. Around using the whole brain, not just parts of the brain.

Whole Brain Thinking is the only way to find the Spiral Path, understand the Spiral Path, and persevere on the Spiral Path.

There. That’s the Ancient Mystery in a nutshell: you have to use your whole brain — your whole central nervous system — in a consistently balanced, healthy, emotionally mature way. When you do, you can more easily hear God’s voice, because God’s voice is as balanced and emotionally mature as can be.

And guess what? You don’t have to take my word for it! You can research all the ways to have a happy, healthy, fully functioning brain, and you’ll come up with essentially the same ideas I’ve presented here!

Science and spirituality together on the same page. Now we’re cooking with gas.

* On the last text page of The Power of Now, Tolle reveals that “the whole concept of forgiveness then becomes unnecessary (page 193).” Needless to say, Tolle and I couldn’t disagree more.

-4

Posted in "Escape", balance as spiritual practice, brain-soul connection, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, Gnosticism, healing, mysticism, oneness, Plato, prophets, Soul, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment

Post Navigation