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01 Apr 2012

TBM33: The Need for Dignity

Last week I wrote about small miracles like buying groceries with the help of your guardian angel because I figured, hey, people should know what it feels like to be “in the zone” even when there’s no emergency or sudden crisis.

So, of course, soon after I wrote the Miracles post I had to deal with an emergency . . .

“As he taught, he said, ‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation'” (Mark 12: 38 – 40). Photo credit Image*After.

I work at a business where there often are only two staff members on duty. The business is owned by an older couple who don’t believe in spending money on surveillance systems or up to date phone equipment, but usually it’s not a problem for us because our clients are honest, above board, and old-fashioned.

A few days ago, while I was working with only one co-worker, Janet, a man entered and asked if he could use our phone to call his dad for a ride. Janet said okay. It went downhill from there.

Michael (whose name we know because he introduced himself right away) is an immense mountain of a man, the sort of fellow they might cast as Paul Bunyan for a film. He’s at least 6’4″ and packs a huge number of pounds on a hefty frame. His eyes are intelligent and piercing, his voice, booming. To say that Michael is physically intimidating would be an understatement.

And Michael decided that while he was waiting for his dad, he’d like to spend some time interrogating Janet and me.

I worked in the mental health field in a clinical setting for almost five years, so my alarm bells instantly went off. Michael was clearly mentally ill. But he was also trying very hard to intimidate Janet and me through verbal means, and we both felt threatened. We could have tried calling the police, but I’m not keen to involve the police in cases of mental illness unless there’s an imminent threat. My instincts — my intuition — told me he could be persuaded to leave the store voluntarily if he was treated correctly.

For the next fifteen minutes, I used every ounce of my training, experience, and intuitive capacity to stay “in the zone” while I tried to make a link at a heart level with Michael. I had no time to stop and ask my angels what to do. I had to trust in the fact that they were right beside me, guiding me. And I had to trust in the fact that Michael’s angels were right there, guiding me. My job was to focus 100% on Michael — on his face, on his voice, on his body language, on his emotional intent. The angels’ job was to fling “quantum packets” at me that would come out of my mouth as the words Michael most needed to hear.

I’ve seen people’s behaviour when they’re suffering from major depression. And the manic phase of bipolar disorder. And the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia. And OCD. And narcissistic rage reactions. But I’ve never seen anyone whose pattern is quite like Michael’s.

Michael informed me every chance he got that he has autism. I seriously doubt the accuracy of this diagnosis. In my humble opinion, Michael is suffering from an obsessive compulsive personality disorder, though I didn’t come to this conclusion until I’d had a chance to review his behaviour after he’d left. (He had plenty of narcissistic features.)

Michael is a person who’s absolutely desperate to feel some sort of real connection with other people, some sort of real empathy. His need is genuine. His method of trying to get it is dysfunctional and dangerous. He’s been going around confronting people, demanding to know whether they care or not that he has autism. When people are rude to him (as they usually are) he responds by leaving nasty messages on their answering machines. He told us he’s also considering the idea of death threats to make people pay for being mean to him.

Yeah. Scary stuff.

So Michael tried his schtick on me. He expected the usual response — somebody trying to placate him with soothing lies so he’ll just go away. (It’s not like you can use brute force to tell this guy to leave.) What he got from me, though, was different. What he got from me was the truth.

It’s very easy to tell the truth and not get trapped by lies when you already have a habit of speaking the truth from the heart. So I told the truth, which is what my angels were urging me to do. (I could “feel” this guidance deep in my gut.)

Michael tried and tried to find a way to trap me in a lie. Maybe you think I’m “interpreting” his intent in a way that’s convenient for me, but I’m not. His goal was to interrogate me and trap me in a lie so he could prove to himself that, once again, he had not found anyone who cares. He revealed this himself when the content of his interrogation shifted. Suddenly he seemed less confident in his verbal attack. He started to say things such as, “So you think I shouldn’t leave nasty messages anymore,” and the real kicker, “So you’re telling me the truth.”

Near the end, our conversation went something like this:

“So you’re telling me the truth.”
“Yes, I’m telling you the truth.”
“I don’t like this truth.” (I had told him a minute before that he’s responsible for the way he treats other people despite the fact he has autism.)
“I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
“Can you change the truth?”
“No, I can’t change it.”
“But I don’t like it.”
“There’s nothing I can do about that. Other people have difficult things to deal with, too.”
“You’re an honest person.”
“Yes, I’m an honest person.”
“And you’re telling me the truth.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever meet an honest person” (as he was going out the door).

He actually said that out loud (surreal as it may seem) and I immediately thought of Diogenes travelling around ancient Greece in search of one honest man. (My son called the whole thing a Socratic nightmare.)

Michael’s problem, you see, is that he has an uncanny ability to sniff out the difference between truth and lies. He wants someone to tell him the truth from the heart — that is, truth spoken from a place of empathy and forgiveness, not anger and denial. Truth that gives him dignity and helps him believe in his own ability to make more loving choices. Truth that he can feel in his own battered heart. But people are afraid of him because he’s so big. So they don’t tell him the truth.

While he was standing there, I wasn’t afraid. (He could probably feel that, too.) I looked him in the eye and told him he’s a human being and a child of God and he can do better. The expression on his face was one of surprise. I don’t think anyone in his life has told him this before. But I believe it. So I said it.

Dignity is a powerful need for all human beings. Giving someone dignity is not the same thing as giving someone worship. Giving bows to the queen or the pope or your boss at work is a form of worship. Looking a mentally ill person in the eye and conveying with your whole heart your belief in his or her worthiness as a human being is dignity.

Telling someone that you care, while inside your own head you’re thinking they’re damned or weak or corrupt or full of sin or in need of true salvation or marked with the mark of Cain, is NOT giving dignity. It’s giving a friggin’ lie. Even if you don’t speak your judgmental thoughts out loud, your angels can hear them, and so can people like Michael.

Dignity comes from the heart. Dignity is received by the heart. Dignity is only possible where one soul says to another, “You and I are loved equally by God. Right now. In this moment. Together. We are both forgiven.”

When you are forgiven, you are forgiven.

God bless you, Michael.

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), empathy, ethical mysticism, forgiveness, mental illness, miracles, My Spiral Path, religion and mental Illness, The Blonde Mystic, the right to be right, trust and tagged ethical mysticism, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

14 Mar 2012

TBM28: When You Are Forgiven, You Are Forgiven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you are forgiven, you are forgiven.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knowing God is in the trying.

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

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

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

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

06 Aug 2011

JR63: Jesus Redux: The Forward

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

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

21 Jul 2011

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

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

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

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

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

The very earring (c) JAT 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hard part is interpreting the meaning correctly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And fast-forwarding to today . . .

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

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

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

And I still have those earrings!

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

20 Jul 2011

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

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

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

Do you believe in destiny?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re so much more loving than you realize.

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

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

05 Jun 2011

JR47: "Knowledge" Versus "Truth"

A: Tell me how you would explain the difference between “knowledge” and “truth.” There seem to be a lot of different theories floating around.

J: Here’s one of the problems with relying too heavily on words. One person’s “knowledge” is another person’s “truth.” One person’s “knowledge” is another person’s “wisdom.” One person’s “knowledge” is another person’s “fact.” Words can be very messy, very sloppy. It’s important for individuals to be clear about their use of abstract words like these.

A: Okay. How do you, as a soul-in-angel-form and speaker of the English language, use the word “knowledge”?

J: I use the word “knowledge” to mean an accumulation of facts. Lots of raw facts. These facts may or may not be connected to each other. But there are lots of them. Lots of different facts that can be accessed from memory or from sources such as books or computers to answer specific questions of fact.

A: Like the question and answer pairs on Jeopardy.

J: Exactly. These question and answer pairs rely on logic and reason. But there’s usually little emotional content. And there’s no need for “insight” or “understanding” or “truth.” The facts speak for themselves. Of course, as human Jeopardy contenders recently discovered, a honkin’ big computer can access raw facts — “knowledge” — faster than most human brains can.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear(respect) the Lord, and turn away from evil. It will be a healing for your flesh and a refreshment for your body” (Proverbs 3:5-8). If you really want to heal your relationship with God, try humbly accepting you probably have a lot of old beliefs that are messing up the way your brain works. Certain beliefs about God can “freeze up” your neural networks and prevent your brain from being able to process Divine guidance. Without easy access to your Divine guidance, you’re limited to the ideas inside your own brain. And let’s face it, some of those ideas are probably pretty stupid (like Young Earth Creationism). The Truth about you and God (a wonderful Truth!) is already deep within you, but first you have to melt the ice that’s keeping you from feeling your Soul pathways. Photo credit JAT 2022.

J (Cont): Having said that, I want to make it clear that I’m not dissing the importance of “knowledge.” It’s important to be able to remember and access facts. Facts give information about things that are already known, already certain — things that are “a done deal.” Facts help ground the learning process. In fact, learning can’t take place at all in the absence of facts. This is true even in fields such as philosophy and theology. The universe isn’t reinventing itself every few seconds like some big relativistic, existential “symbol” in the sky (as some religious philosophers would have you believe). There are fixed facts, fixed historical realities that guide all choices made by God and God’s angels. The universe has a history — a factual history — that can’t be changed. The universe’s past has a measurable effect on its present. The past matters. And the past is fact — not fiction. The past can’t be altered. Time is linear. Even for God.

A: This will come as a great disappointment to fans of time travel stories. And to theologians who insist that All Time has been known to God since the very beginning. God’s foreknowledge of all that will happen in the future is the basis of Christian “predestination” — the doctrine that says God already knows ahead of time who will be saved in the End Times.

J: Another example of old lies begetting new lies, as you put it. The first lie, of course, was the lie that souls desperately need to be saved from hell and judgment and damnation. But souls don’t need to be saved. Why would God create billions of defective souls that need to be saved by . . . televangelists? Salvation-of-the-soul is a goofy idea from start to finish.

A: But a very profitable one.

J: It’s an interesting fact of neurophysiology that certain forms of serious psychological dysfunction in human beings are accompanied by damage to the parietal lobes of the brain — parts of the brain which are crucial to a person’s ability to relate to time and space. When the volume of the parietal lobes is reduced, and when the density of glial cells is diminished in the parietal-temporal regions, an individual will experience problems understanding boundaries (i.e. his or her location in space) and problems with empathy (i.e his or her location in both time and space — also called boundary issues). These are the individuals who can’t learn from their own mistakes, who can’t empathize with other people’s feelings, who constantly invade other people’s “time and space.”

A: The narcissists.

J: Yes. A narcissist is someone who’s become inwardly focussed to the point of selfishness and self-absorption because he or she has no “brain health” in the areas of time and space — no ability to accurately identify the factual boundaries that surround each soul. She literally can’t see where she ends and another person begins. She can’t see that she’s a separate entity — a separate consciousness — from her neighbour. The boundaries between her and her neighbour exist and are real and are factual. But she can’t see them. It’s all blurry to her. The boundaries exist, but she behaves as if they don’t exist. She behaves as if she and her neighbour “are all one,” as if the neighbour is merely an extension of her own core consciousness. The neighbour, of course, is expected to “behave” — to obey her needs and wishes without question and to reinforce her image of herself as a wonderful person. There’s a perfect analogy for this mindset in the realm of science fiction: Star Trek’s hive queen of the Borg.

A: See, I knew there was good reason for me to be watching the Space Channel.

J: The great thing about the way the Borg Queen character is written is her calm, serene, elevated disposition. She believes her own propaganda about making life better for all the individuals she incorporates into her collective. She goes around telling everyone “we’re all one, we’re all equal.” But what she actually means is, “I’m the only one who really exists, and all you drones are merely inferior beings who were put here to serve me” . . . which brings us to the question of “truth.”

A: The way you’ve just described the Borg Queen reminds me — none too pleasantly — of the modern apocalyptic prophet I spent too much time with a few years ago: Grace. She was always speaking “the truth” that “we’re all one, we’re all equal.” She had the same calm, serene detachment as the Borg Queen. It gave her such an air of believability — even wisdom. She seemed to have let go of all her worries about the past. Very appealing to somebody like me who was dogged by feelings of guilt and shame.

She seemed so believable — until you challenged her. When you challenged Grace’s superiority, her infallibility, it was like a switch went off in her brain. She switched instantly from calm, affable charm to vicious, vengeful violence. The smallest thing could set her off. I still remember the murderous look in her eye one day when I told her that she herself had caused an electrical short in a lighting fixture by twisting the fan/light combo while it was still attached on one side to the ceiling. I could see that she wanted to throw me down the stairs because I’d pointed out her obvious error. The mistake was entirely hers. But she didn’t want to hear about it. She couldn’t handle responsibility for her own mistakes.

J: Good example — though painful. Grace was a person with significant impairment of her biological brain function, as you know. She was able to process “knowledge” — facts — well enough to function in society. She could remember that gas needed to be put in the car, that food had to be bought and prepared. But as for “truth” . . . “truth” was beyond her capacity to grasp because of damage to her biological brain from early, unhealed, profound childhood abuse. Physical, emotional, sexual, and psychological abuse. As a result of the abuse, and the biological damage caused by it, Grace couldn’t read “intent.” She couldn’t understand or be honest about her own inner intent. Her intent was to prove to other people that she was better than they were. That’s the honest truth. The truth is that everything Grace did — all her choices — were shaped by her narcissistic intent. Her words about “oneness” and “equality” meant nothing because her actual intent said something different.

A: So you’re drawing a strong link between “intent” and “truth.”

J: Very much so. Facts by themselves are not “truth,” though “truth” is not “truth” without a foundation of facts. Truth — as I’m defining it — is an observation or insight about the way in which seemingly random facts are linked together by underlying strands of intent. The intent is like the subfloor of the factual foundation. The facts lie on top of the intent. The truth builds on both the intent and the facts. For something to be “true” in a philosophical way, it must objectively assess both a collection of facts AND the underlying intent underneath those facts.

A: Are you saying that a person’s “intent” and his/her “starting assumptions” are the same thing?

J (shaking his head): No. A person’s inner intent is more like his inner “purpose” or “goal.” Your intent speaks to the principle of time — where you were in the past, where you are now, and where you want to go. It’s more like conscious motivation. It’s the motivation that gets you out of bed in the morning and keeps you going, even when things aren’t going well.

A: So it’s teleology?

J: Again, no. Teleology implies there’s a finite, definable end goal or a purpose shaped by the Law of Cause and Effect. “Intent” is not as simple as teleological purpose. “Intent” goes to the very heart of consciousness — what it means to exist as a living consciousness who is separate from (though connected to) other living consciousnesses. Intent can be thought of as a cohesive set of interconnected choices — a series of small choices that, when put together, create one big “meta-choice.” That “meta-choice” is your intent. At a quantum level, “meta-choices” shape the way in which certain energies can and will flow.

A: Can you give us an analogy for that?

J: Sure. I’ll use an analogy I’ve used before — the sower of seeds.

A: I think I see where this is headed . . .

J: In the parable of the sower [Thomas 9; Mark 4], the person — the soul — is the sower of seeds. The seeds represent the person’s potential, the person’s ability to learn, grow, change, and create. But the sower doesn’t create out of thin air. He must plant the seeds — the seeds of potential — in the right place if he wants them to grow. His decision on where to sow the seeds is his intent — his “meta-choice.” The meta-choice is what determines which seeds can and will grow. The seeds don’t grow equally well in all intents. Where seeds fall on a “ground” or “subfloor” of rock, they fail to root and they produce no harvest. Where seeds fall on patches of thorny weeds, they don’t grow and they’re eaten by grubs and caterpillars. There’s nothing wrong with the seeds themselves. The problem lies in the choice of where to plant them. The problem lies with the intent.

A: So a narcissist’s true intent is like the choice to sow seeds on rocky ground or in thorny patches.

J: Or in a bed of fire, as the church likes to recommend.

Seeds don’t grow easily on this rocky ground. “Jesus said: Look, there was a man who came out to sow seed. He filled his hand with seed and threw it about. Some fell onto the road, and birds ate it. Some fell onto rocks and could not root and produced no grain. Some fell into patches of thorny weeds that kept it from growing, and grubs ate it. Some seed fell upon good soil and grew and produced good grain. It was 60 units per measure and 120 units per measure (Gospel of Thomas 9).” Photo credit JAT 2023.

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Posted in "4 S's", boundary issues, empathy, End Times, Gospel of Mark, insight, intent, Jesus Redux, meta-choice, monism, My Spiral Path, narcissism, parables, sense of time & timing, Truth and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

16 May 2011

JR40: Recap: Some Reflections From the Author

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and he swears a lot.

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

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

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

Love Jen

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

08 May 2011

JR37: Mother’s Day

Landscape by Jamie MacDonald (c) 2015.When children are raised according to the four steps of the Peace Sequence – education, mentorship, personal responsibility, and finally peace – they’re able to tap into the unique soul talents wired into their DNA.

A: Today is Mother’s Day — a very special day, and a nice time to talk about motherhood.

J: Happy Mother’s Day to you.

A: Thanks. I celebrated yesterday with my son and my sister and niece. My son brought me a pot of white mums and a very funny card. He rolled into the driveway on his new-to-him 2008 Kawasaki bike, took off his backpack, and extracted the carefully wrapped mums, which didn’t look too happy (between you and me) about having been transported by motorcycle on a cool spring day, but I grinned and took them inside and put them on the warm windowsill, where they’re starting to perk up.

J: You’re always very mushy when you talk about your son.

A (sighing): Yes. Most of the time. There’s the odd day here and there where I have to do the Mom-being-stern thing, but I couldn’t be prouder of him. He’s being “who he is” in a good way, and that’s all I can ask. I love being a mom.

J: Tell me more about that.

A: When he was born (in 1984), I was terrified. I didn’t know anything about babies. I was a bookworm, an egghead, and I’d never even changed a diaper before he was born. But I was determined to be a good mom, a stay-at-home mom by choice. I had the most wonderful book that gave me answers to all my practical questions. I can’t remember the title, but the author was Penelope Leach. Best book ever on parenting, in my view.

J: What about your own mom. Did you ask her for advice?

A: Sometimes. But she lived 3 hours away in a different city, and she was focussed on establishing her new career as an artist. My mother-in-law lived very close by, and she was keen to be helpful without being interfering, so she tried hard not to say anything critical to my face. She was a big believer in the Dr. Spock method of raising children, and she thought I should be putting my son in a big perambulator on the front porch every morning to get fresh air and sunshine. That’s what she’d done with her two boys. When I refused to buy an old fashioned pram, she found a used one that she kept at her house for times when she was babysitting. She seemed okay with that as a compromise.

J: You had an unusual idea about child rearing. Tell me about that.

A: In her book, Penelope Leach emphasized the idea of teaching your baby about boundary issues and personal space. She said you should put baby in his own crib when it was time for napping and sleeping, and you should always be consistent about this. No sleeping in mom and dad’s bed, she said. On the other hand, cribs were to be used only for sleeping, she said. Once nap time or sleep time was over, baby should be fully included in all family activities — not parked in the crib to keep him out of mom’s way while she was busy with household chores. This idea made a lot of sense to me at an intuitive level. It felt right to me. From the very beginning, I got into the habit of carting my son everywhere in my left arm while I did chores with my right hand. My left arm got very strong.

J: Why did you do that?

A: He seemed to have terrible separation anxiety. Each time I tried to put him in a baby seat, his little face turned beet red and he howled in outrage. In retrospect, I can see that I was making him feel unimportant and un-included. And you know what? He was right. He was telling me I wasn’t trying hard enough to be in full relationship with him. On the other hand, he didn’t give me a hard time about going into his crib for naps and bedtime because he quickly associated his crib with being warm and cozy and sleepy. Both my mother and mother-in-law told me I would spoil him if I didn’t put him in a baby seat while I was doing chores, but they were both wrong. Until he learned to walk (at about 11 months), he needed to be “up” where I could talk to him “person-to-person,” where he could see what was going on, where he could learn by watching and “participating.” He’s always been a fearless learner.

J: You and he are very close.

A: We’re close in a respectful way. We give each other space, but when we talk on the phone or get together for coffee or whatever, we listen to each other in an honest way. We try to listen to what’s important to each other. Our relationship has evolved into a mature adult friendship.

J: Many young adults would have no idea what you mean by that.

A: I have several acquaintances my age who don’t seem to like their adult children let alone love them. The relationships are deeply strained, and there’s a lot of mistrust. There’s also a recent trend in journalism for women to come out of the closet and admit they don’t like being mothers and never have. It may be true that for many women motherhood has felt more like a curse than a blessing, but it’s not universally true. Some women, such as myself, can’t believe how lucky they are to have had the privilege of guiding and mentoring a soul on the journey towards maturity.

J: Without being overly enmeshed.

A: Yes. I think many women fall into the trap of enmeshment — of being too involved and too protective and too fearful of mistakes (their own and their children’s). You have to give a child some room to make mistakes. Then you have to help them learn how to handle their own mistakes. It’s what mature parents do.

J: Just like our own divine parents — God the Mother and God the Father.

A: I have no sympathy at all for the idea that we shouldn’t use “parenting” metaphors about God in church anymore because we might offend some of the church members who’ve had abusive human parents. I totally get the reality that many human beings have never known what true parental love is because their own caregivers were such jerks. But the fact that some parents (or foster parents) are abusive doesn’t mean that all parents are abusive. You can’t stop talking about meaningful parenting just because somebody out there might have a panic attack. The person having the panic attack needs to receive appropriate medical care, of course. Meanwhile, the discussion about parenting has to continue so mistakes can be uncovered and changes can be made for the benefit of the wider community — and for individual children.

J: You mentioned the Mother’s Day card your son got you. What was funny about it?

A: It’s a card that’s really honest. On the front it reads, “Mom, I thought about you today while playing with my food . . . after spoiling my appetite with cookies . . . before leaving my stuff on the floor . . . to go blindly follow my friends in whatever they were doing.” Then you open up the card and it says, “God, I love being a grown-up.” And this is hilarious, because my son is 27 years old and he does still pig out on cookies before dinner (if they’re homemade) and he does leave his stuff all over the floor of his apartment (unless he has guests coming over), and he’s been this way his whole life. This is who he is, and he’s never going to change, and you know what? That’s okay, because he understands how to love and respect other people, and he knows how to take responsibility for his own choices, and that’s more important than finding some cookie crumbs on the floor.

J: So he’s not perfect? He makes mistakes?

A: Yeah, he’s not perfect and he makes mistakes and I really like him anyway. He’s doing the best he can. That’s why I’m so happy to be a mom today and always. [Thanks, hon! Your Mom, 😉 ) ].

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Posted in boundary issues, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, My Spiral Path, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, soul blueprint, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged The Peace Sequence | Leave a Comment

21 Apr 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know how much time this takes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you yourself are the conductor.

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

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

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

That’s where the promise to yourself comes in.

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

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

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

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

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

Coincidence?

I doubt it.

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

02 Feb 2011

JR6: John and the Gospel of Thomas

A: I had a letter from a reader in the U.S. who’s curious about the Gospel of Thomas, so I thought we could switch gears a bit and talk about the manuscript known as the Gospel of Thomas.

J: Okay. Where do you want to start?

A: Well, for readers who aren’t familiar with it, maybe we could start with some background.

J: I happen to know you already have a book on your desk with the relevant facts, so perhaps you’d like to talk about the history of it.

Papyrus fragment from Wikimedia Commons: Gospel of Jesus' Wife (author unknown)

Papyrus fragment: Gospel of Jesus’ Wife (sourced from Wikimedia Commons, author unknown). This fragment is not from the Nag Hammadi collection, but is a good example of an early Christian text written in Coptic on papyrus. This fragment has itself been the source of much recent controversy.

A (referring to textbook): The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas was one of those serendipitous finds, so extraordinary that you’d expect to see it in an Indiana Jones movie. But the history isn’t disputed. Late in 1945, two Egyptian men discovered a large sealed pottery jar hidden beneath a large boulder near the village of Nag Hammadi in southern Egypt. They smashed the jar and found 13 leather-bound volumes inside, which were later sold. These volumes, which date from the mid-4th century CE and contain more than 50 texts, soon attracted the attention of scholars. The collection is called the Nag Hammadi library, and it’s proven to be a goldmine for scholars of early church doctrine. The texts are considered to be Gnostic Christian rather than orthodox Christian, and some scholars have suggested the texts were hidden to protect them from a wave of persecution against Gnostics. The most famous of the books is the collection of Jesus’ sayings — your sayings — called the Gospel of Thomas. There’s disagreement among scholars as to whether the Gospel of Thomas should be considered a Gnostic text. Some believe it should instead be considered a text originating in a different but very early school of Christianity — not quite Gnostic but not orthodox, either. Anyway, it’s unique because it doesn’t follow the narrative format of the four gospels we know from the Bible. Instead, it’s a collection of sayings. Some of those sayings have sparked renewed mystical and creative interest in Jesus’ original teachings. The movie Stigmata is an example of that interest.

J: And don’t forget all those Da Vinci Code type books.

A: Those, too. You don’t want to be learning your history from these books and films, but it’s fun to sit down with a cup of hot tea and an entertaining novel on a cold snowy day.

J: Like today.

A: Yes. That’s quite the storm out there today. A storm front all the way from Texas to Nova Scotia. I hope my boss calls to say we’re closed today. Then maybe I could do a little reading. Catch up on the Gospel of Thomas — which, to be honest, I haven’t looked at in about two years. Last time I read it, I hadn’t figured out the Gospel of Mark. But I think it’s time to revisit the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas and try to figure out how they relate to Mark. All I really know at this point is what you’ve told me in the past about the authorship of the Gospel of Thomas.

J: You mean the fact that the apostle John wrote the Gospel of Thomas.

A: It’s so confusing. Who wrote the Gospel of Mark? Oh, that would be Matthew. But not the Matthew who wrote the Gospel of Matthew, because that author would be Paul’s disciple Barnabas. And don’t forget that Luke and Acts weren’t written by a physician named Luke. And the newly discovered Gospel of Thomas wasn’t written by Thomas, but was actually written by John. It’s enough to give a person a headache.

J: It’s interesting, isn’t it, that John’s name is actually on his other writings — the Gospel of John, the letters of John, and Revelation.

A: Yes. How is it that John’s name got preserved in so many places, and Paul’s name got preserved in so many places, and your name didn’t get preserved on any writings at all? We have texts we call “Pauline,” and we have texts we call “Johannine,” but we don’t have any “Yeshuan” texts. In fact, we don’t even have an adjective in English that corresponds to the name Jesus, so I have to use an adjective based on the Aramaic form of your name, Yeshua. Yet I know you did a lot of writing. So what happened? What happened to your name? And what happened to your writings?

J: Long story. It’s complicated. It makes more sense if you understand the cast of characters, the people I actually lived with and worked with. It makes more sense if you understand the personal motivations for each person involved.

A: Including your own motivation.

J. Yes. Mine, too.

A: Okay. Let’s start with your motivation, then. Can you describe briefly the core of your motivation?

J: To bring healing to disadvantaged children so they didn’t have to go through what my daughter had to go through.

A: Oh.

J: Theologians have been pontificating for centuries about who I was and what I was trying to do. But nobody’s taken the time or trouble to ask me. They all want me to be a reflection of themselves — somebody who’s more interested in how many angels can fit on the head of a pin than somebody who’s interested in the core questions about humanity. Life and love. Healing. But after my daughter died, I couldn’t have cared less about the Covenant or the Law. The Covenant did nothing to help my daughter. In fact, I’d say the Covenant was partly to blame for her death. After you’ve had a child die — a child you care deeply about — your life changes. It’s no great mystery. I embarked on a journey of spiritual questioning and spiritual agony because I felt I owed it to my beloved child. It’s as simple as that.

A: I understand.

J: Yes, because you’ve gone through the same thing. Nobody but a bereaved parent can completely understand. To lose a beloved child is to have your heart ripped out. Except that you don’t lose your heart. If you accept the grief and you accept the loss, you end up finding your heart. It bleeds a lot, but it’s there.

A: Many of the theologians who’ve written about you over the centuries have been neither parents nor bereaved parents.

J: Augustine of Hippo was a bereaved parent. This didn’t help him find his heart, unfortunately.

A: Perhaps he was in denial. It’s not uncommon for bereaved parents to withdraw completely from their emotions because it’s too painful. They retreat into logic and end up focussing on the “mind” and “reason” so they don’t have to feel anything anymore.

J: Exactly. Unfortunately, the orthodox Church is riddled with the immature “victim” psychology that comes with being emotionally crippled, with abandoning healthy, mature relationships with each other and with God.

A: Explain what you mean by “emotionally crippled.”

J: I mean men and women who are emotionally immature, emotionally stunted, emotionally dissociated. Adults who don’t have the courage of their own hearts and souls. It’s hard work to deal with grief. And love. And Pauline Christians aren’t good at it because they haven’t been taught how. Whenever I hear the phrase “one body in Christ,” I think of a zombie — a lifeless corpse walking around with no heart and no capacity for empathy or deep compassion. There’s lots and lots of talk in the Church about free will and reason and blind faith, but if you look closely, you’ll see there’s little talk about emotional maturity or emotional healing or faith based on empathy rather than on pure logic. That’s why the Church doesn’t teach people about forgiveness. Forgiveness is part of a messy package that includes love and grief and pain. Forgiveness is very hard work at an emotional and spiritual and psychological level. It has no appeal for people who are emotionally immature.

A: People like Paul.

J: And people like John the Baptist.

A: Hey — that’s a non sequitur.

J: Not when you know that John the Baptist and John the Evangelist were one and the same person.

A: I take it that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated?

J: There are always wars and rumours of wars. Always deaths and rumours of deaths. Sometimes the one prevents the other.

Update on August 9, 2015: For an interesting commentary on the Gospel of Thomas, please see the article called “The Gospel of Thomas: Jesus Said What?” by Simon Gathercole in the July/August 2015 Biblical Archaeology Review. In this article, Dr. Gathercole talks about the history of the Gospel of Thomas’s discovery, discusses theories for its date, and reviews some the Gospel’s major theological themes.

On the question of whether the Gospel of Thomas can be understood as a Gnostic work, he says this:

“Nevertheless, it has always been something of an embarrassment for the “Gnostic” view of Thomas that there is no talk of an evil demiurge, a creation that is intrinsically evil, or of other familiar themes such as “aeons” (a technical term for the divine realms in the heavens). Properly Gnostic gospels such as the Gospel of Judas and the Nag Hammadi Gospel of the Egyptians, have very complicated accounts of how multitudes of deities and aeons come into existence from a demonic power before the birth of the world. There is nothing of this in Thomas, though.”

Update on February 26, 2018: Over the past few months, starting in mid-2017, I’ve been adding verses from the Gospel of Thomas to the photo captions of the Jesus Redux posts. Since I don’t read Coptic, I must rely on translations into English from a number of reputable scholars (though occasionally I piece together my own translation based on information that’s arisen through my mystical conversations with Jesus). Here’s a list of some of the sources I’ve been using throughout this process:

Davies, Stevan. The Gospel of Thomas: Translation and Annotation by Stevan Davies. Boston & London: Shambhala, 2004.

Ehrman, Bart D.. Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It Into the New Testament. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Grondin, Michael W.. “An Interlinear Coptic-English Translation of the Gospel of Thomas.” 1997-2015. http://gospel-thomas.net/x_transl.htm. (I find Grondin’s site incredibly helpful.)

Meyer, Marvin, ed.. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures. 1st Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Pagels, Elaine. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New York: Random House, 2003.

Patterson, Stephen J.. The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus. Salem, Oregon: Polebridge Press, 1993.

Skinner, Christopher W.. What Are They Saying About The Gospel of Thomas? Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2012.

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Posted in forgiveness, Gnosticism, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Thomas, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' original writings, John the Baptist, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Matthew's and Luke's intent, My Spiral Path and tagged historical Jesus, Kingdom teachings | 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 (c) JAT 2013

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

Okay. Now for the long answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Yes, he really does talk like that.)

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

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

Literally.

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

18 Jan 2011

TBM6: Why This Is NOT Gnosticism (Gnostics Need Not Apply)

I was raised in a household where respect for the law was paramount. We were expected to obey a whole host of rules and guidelines for civil living. My paternal grandmother, who lived in close promixity to us, was exceedingly formal. I have no memories of sitting on her lap and reading a cozy children’s book, but I have many memories of her correcting my grammar and my table manners.

Grandma believed in education and she believed in hard work. She also believed firmly in the advancement of women’s rights. (Not bad for a woman born in 1899). She read the politics and business sections of the newspaper each day. She kept a tight rein on immediate family members.

All her life, my grandmother was a devout Anglican. The form and function of the Anglican church in Canada shaped many of her attitudes. One of these attitudes was her attitude towards God. She was raised to believe she was a lowly human being unworthy of close relationship with God. She would have been shocked — shaken to her core — to hear me speak of having a close and kind and loving relationship with God. To her, this would have been blasphemy. Hubris. An outrageous and presumptuous claim. To her way of thinking, the only possible — the only correct — way for a person to be in right relationship with God was to uphold the values of law: duty, honour, and obedience. She was a true Victorian matriarch in a post-Victorian age.

Grandma had a “top down” understanding of God, faith, and the soul (which is what the Anglican church had taught her), and she viewed duty, honour, and obedience as the only viable defences against the breakdown of civil society. She trusted reason, and greatly distrusted sentimentality, since the latter could only lead to weakness and impoverished will. Rigorous application of reason and respect for the law would in turn breed the required self discipline and personal responsibility so necessary to a person’s adult life.

Or so she thought.

She was right about the need for self discipline and personal responsibility. Unfortunately, she was completely and utterly wrong about the method for guiding the development of self discipline and personal responsibility in a growing child.

Spiritual teachers of great renown, regardless of their faith tradition, usually agree on one universal feature of the spiritual path: the need for self discipline. Many traditional spiritual practices that have evolved over the centuries have one main goal — the goal of teaching self discipline among disciples and adherents. Meditation and fasting are frequently cited as key methods for building and enhancing self discipline in religious seekers. If this works for you, then by all means stick with it. But you probably won’t find this site helpful to you.

This is because I recommend an altogether different way for people on the Spiral Path to gradually restore the sense of self discipline and personal responsibility they were born with.

I recommend a path of healing the damaged parts of the biological brain that are interfering with your ability to live a life filled with purpose, gratitude, and meaningful relationships.

I recommend this approach — in contrast to the traditional approaches of rigid spiritual practice — because it’s my contention that if you work to achieve balance and healing in your life, if you choose emotional integration and ongoing learning in your daily life, one of the by-products of this pursuit will be a growing inner core of trust in your own self discipline and your own commitment to personal responsibility. You’ll discover, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, that you’ve been walking along the Road without realizing you’ve been wearing the “the truth” the whole time. You just have to get to the point where you can recognize that truth for yourself.

What am I saying? I’m saying (contrary to the teachings of most spiritual teachers) that you won’t succeed in staying on the Spiral Path if you try to impose self discipline on yourself from the outside by engaging in strict, mechanistic, often obsessive religious rituals or practices. I’m saying you have to start from the inside. You have to start with your very own soul.

This part of what I’m teaching is non-negotiable. Everything I’ve learned from my angels and from the soul who once lived as Jesus is based on a doctrine of the soul that’s positive, that’s uplifting, that’s holistic, AND THAT’S
NOT GNOSTIC.

(I hope my inclusion of some very large letters will persuade you that I mean it when I say the doctrine of the soul I’m teaching is NOT Gnostic in any way, shape, or form.)

If you prefer a spiritual path where (1) you’re not asked to believe at all in the existence of the soul, or (2) where you can let yourself off the hook by believing in Gnostic teachings about the soul, then I invite you to look elsewhere. I have nothing to teach you if you choose to believe you’re a lost widget in a vast, uncaring universe, or (even worse) if you choose to believe you’re a “spark of the Divine” trapped in an evil body as part of a great cosmological battle between good and evil (i.e. Gnosticism).

How Gnostics see the world. Photo (c) JAT 2014

How a Gnostic sees the world. Photo (c) JAT 2014

There’s no point looking for God’s love in your life if you’re determined at every turn to reject your identity as a loving child of God. You may as well go out and join a secular charity devoted to good causes. It’s useful and worthwhile and important to society.

But it ain’t no spiritual path.

You’re either on the Spiral Path with all your heart and all your mind and all your courage and all your soul, or you’re not on it at all. You may be somewhere, but it’s not the Spiral Path.

Fish or cut bait, as my son’s Maritime relatives would say.

Either throw yourself into the idea that you have a soul and that it’s a good soul, or take up a new hobby that demands less courage.

It’s all I’m asking of you — that you believe in a loving God and that you believe you’re a loving child of God (aka “a soul”).

How a cataphatic nature mystic sees the world. Photo (c) JAT 2014

Yes, I know it’s a lot to ask of you. I’m not asking anything of you that wasn’t asked of me. We’re all in this together, and we need each other’s insights.

In other words, it’s pretty much a Twelve Step Programme for the human brain.

That’s why I think the Serenity Prayer is so terrific.

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Posted in building your intuition, cataphatic mysticism, Gnosticism, gratitude, healing, humbleness, Law (Nomos), My Spiral Path, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, relationship with God, Soul, The Blonde Mystic, trust and tagged building your intuition, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

05 Jan 2011

TBM5: Keep It Simple, Keep It Sane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Chortle, chortle).

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

24 Nov 2010

TBM2: The Spiritual Kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blessings to you today and always!

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

23 Nov 2010

TBM1: My Mission Statement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions are welcome at realspiritik@gmail.com.

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

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

17 Nov 2010

JR1: Grab a Coffee, Sit Down, and Join Us

Jesus as the author sees him

A*: Jesus, since I’ve promised this blog will be a real-time discussion with you, what do you think of the idea of getting started right away?

J*: It’s 7:00 o’clock in the morning. You’ve only had one cup of coffee. You sure you want to begin this discussion right now?

A: I’m a morning person. I’m good. Besides, if I know you, we’re going to be continuing this discussion for a long time.

J: I’m a bit rusty. We haven’t done this whole “I talk, you type” thing in a while.

A: I’m more worried about the typos. I always miss some typos when I’m first typing.

J: Well, think on the bright side. You have fingers to type with. Me, not so much.

A: Okay. Let’s talk about that. That’s a good place to start. Can you put into words for readers exactly where you are right now? Where are you actually located?

J: Hmmm. That’s a hard one to explain. You sure aren’t starting with the easy questions!

A: Let’s try a biblical metaphor, then. Are you seated at the right hand of God?

J (much chuckling): No! I’m not at God’s right hand. Not now. Not ever. God doesn’t really have a right hand. Not literally, not metaphorically. You have to remember that God’s essence isn’t made in humankind’s image. So there’s no old guy with a white beard sitting on a throne. There’s an old guy, all right — that’s our beloved father, God the Father. But there’s also an old gal — God the Mother. They’re our divine parents. Their essence is intertwined in and around all Creation. They were here long, long before any of the rest of us. You could say they’re the Alpha and Beta of everything.

A: Rather than the Alpha and Omega.

J: Right. They’re the first two letters of Creation’s alphabet, and everything else that exists has been made possible by their love and commitment. But they’re not the only beings in Creation. They’re literally our parents. So there are many souls, many angels, many children in God’s family. The Divine Family started with Two — our blessed Mother and Father — but the family has been growing and growing and growing. I don’t think there’s going to be an “Omega” in Creation — a final, definitive end to things. I think the alphabet is just going to keep growing.

A: So you’re saying you’re one of God’s children, a child of God, not God himself, as in “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.”

J: That’s what I’m saying. I’m not God the Father, and I’m not God the Mother. I’m me — an angel who goes by the name of Jesus. I’m one of bajillions of sons in God’s loving family. I’m not the only son.

A: And there are also bajillions of daughters?

J (smiling): Yes, bajillions of daughers, too.

A: So where are all these bajillions of angelic sons and daughters? Where are they? Where are you? Why can’t we see you?

J: Well, to answer that question, I’ll have to turn to science. The question can’t be answered without the latest thinking in science. Not Newtonian science, of course. Quantum theory can help, but even quantum theory is in its infancy. Scientists have only begun to scratch the surface of the scientific realities that hold together all Creation. And within the vast universe we all live in, only a tiny fraction of all matter and all energy is visible to the human eye. So, without trying to be mean, I would have to say in all honesty that one of the least reliable measures for judging what’s real and what’s not real is the human eye.

A: That makes me think of Plato and his rejection of the human senses as a valid way to know God.

J: Plato rejected the human senses because he didn’t want his followers to see for themselves that God the Mother and God the Father are visible everywhere in the material, practical, earthly world that human beings are living in. I’m saying the opposite of what Plato said. I’m saying that the human senses are good, but limited. Once you understand and respect those limitations, you’re less troubled about the fact that some things just aren’t visible within the narrow detection range of the human eye. The EMF frequencies that power wireless phones aren’t less real because you can’t see them. Same with the microwaves that cook your frozen dinners. Real, though not visible to the human eye.

A: Okay. So angels are real, then, but we can’t see them with the human eye because angels have an energy signature that falls outside the range of the human eye?

J: Sort of. But it’s more that angels exist as matter in the fourth dimension, whereas the human eye only draws information from matter that exists in the third dimension. But even most physicists agree the universe has more than three dimensions. That’s not science fiction. That’s science fact.

A: In other words, there’s nothing within our current understanding of quantum theory that absolutely prohibits the idea of angels existing “where we can’t see them.”

J: That’s what I’m saying. It’s a darned big universe out there, and one of the biggest mistakes people can make is to insist that “what you see if what you get.” Creation isn’t founded on the WISIWYG principle — as anyone born without sight will tell you.

Nature provides us with many examples of a single creature going through stages of transformation that so radically change the outer form we wouldn’t believe, without the help of science, that they’re still the same creature on the inside. The process of incarnating as a human being involves a similar repackaging of a soul’s imaginal discs into a temporary physical form. We go from butterfly form (angel) to caterpillar form (human) then back to butterfly form (angel) when we die. If you want to learn more about the imaginal discs involved in a biological caterpillar’s transformation into a gorgeous butterfly, you can check out this 2012 Scientific American post by Ferris Jabr (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/caterpillar-butterfly-metamorphosis-explainer/)

* A=Author (Jennifer Thomas) and J=Jesus

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Posted in afterlife, angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), Divine Love, faith, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, My Spiral Path, Plato, quantum theory, Soul and tagged historical Jesus, science & faith | Leave a Comment

12 Nov 2010

CC41: It Takes a Village — A Non-HDM Village, That Is

What does HDM mean? It’s short for Hierarchy-Dualism-Monism (hence the need for a simpler moniker that people can actually remember and pronounce). But I’ll come back to that in a minute.

2017 marks the 150th anniversary of Canada’s founding as a nation. I found this Canadian maple leaf, a “mosaic” created from waxy leaf begonias, at one of Toronto’s soul-healing public gardens. It reminds me of what Canada is all about. Photo credit JAT 2017.

First I want to say thank you to the people of my village — Canada. I want to say how grateful I am to the people here. I’m totally aware that I wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being a practising ethical mystic if I didn’t live in a community of people who just blow me away with their compassion, common sense, and high ethical standards.

It’s been common for the mystics of history to thank God for the blessings of their journey, and sometimes there’s also been praise for specific religious mentors or spiritual teachers who have guided the initiate along the way.

But I think it’s bigger than that. A mystic doesn’t sprout up from nowhere. I think it’s important to look at the whole context of a person’s upbringing before you can understand his or her spiritual context. If each person is, metaphorically speaking, a plant growing within a much larger garden, you need to know what kind of garden that person grew up in. Not just the immediate family environment (although that’s very important, of course), but the wider community environment. You need to know about the village which raised the child. What lessons did the village teach the child as he or she was growing up?

The village I grew up in — Canada, and more specifically the province of Ontario — was a place where people didn’t always agree, where political arguments were fought on major issues, where the painful lessons of recent history were still being processed and incorporated into both the law books and the daily lives of Canadians (lessons that stemmed from two World Wars and the Great Depression). The tension between French Canadian and English Canadian interests created several political and cultural firestorms as I was growing up. More recently, First Nations interests have reminded us that we all have to try harder to be a more inclusive, respectful society.

But we’ve got a few things right here. We have a pretty workable balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the community, the responsibilities of the individual and the responsibilities of the community. We make mistakes, to be sure, but we’re open to the idea that we’ve made mistakes, and we’re open to the idea that mistakes can be fixed. So together we try to fix them.

We have publicly funded education and publicly funded health care that’s accessible to most Canadians. (I’m not going to say “accessible to all Canadians” because the truth is that some people are slipping through the cracks. But slow progress is being made.)

As a woman, I can attest to the fact that I’ve had the kind of opportunities that few women have had throughout the course of history or culture. Like many Canadian women, I’ve had two major blessings: the blessing of choice and the blessing of safety. Because my village was saying it was okay for me to choose, I was able to choose my own life path — my own education, my own husband, my own family size, my own career. Because my village was saying it was NOT okay for me, as a woman, to be abused, I was able to feel safe (most of the time) as I walked (literally and figuratively) down the streets of my community.

I didn’t create these blessings for myself. My village (including my family of origin) created the environment that allowed these blessings to flourish for me and for others. My role, as an individual, is to appreciate these blessings, to give back to others what I myself have received, and to teach those who follow (i.e. the younger generation) how to live with compassion, common sense, and high ethical standards.

Only after I began to explore philosophy — a necessary part of being a true mystic — did I come to understand that Canada is one of a small number of countries in the world whose culture is not bound together by one of the HDM myths that have plagued civilization since the get-go.

You can have a reasonable, balanced dialogue with a typical Canadian on just about any inflammatory topic such as homosexuality, refugee rights, gay marriage, gun registration, and access to health care, and you won’t come away from the discussion in fear of your life (not usually, anyway). You don’t have to worry that a religious or military death squad will show up in the middle of the night and take you away. (Unfortunately, advocates for social justice in other parts of the world still face these profoundly inhumane threats on an ongoing basis, as a perusal of any Amnesty International newsletter will quickly reveal.)

There are several reasons why Canada is a safer place, on the whole, in comparison to many other countries. One important reason is that most Canadians don’t get up each day and volunteer to put their brains through a meat grinder.

Yes, a meat grinder. HDM myths act like a meat grinder on your biological brain. You put a perfectly good holistically balanced brain/body/heart/soul into one end of the grinder, and out comes status-addicted mincemeat at the other end.

Ooo, yummy.

Sure, this kind of damage doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years, years of being told that you and your village are “better” than other people and other villages, and have therefore been chosen by God to save everybody else (i.e. Hierarchy). Or years of being told you and your village are “good/right,” whereas all other people and all other villages are “evil/wrong” (i.e. Dualism). Or years of being told that there’s actually only one village in the entire world, and all people are required to belong to it (i.e. Monism). These myths are abusive — spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically abusive. Eventually, they also become physically abusive.

Where’s my proof?

Here’s my proof.

In the early to mid-20th century, a group of Germans got it into their heads that they (“Aryans”) were “better” than other people and other villages, and they also got into their heads that they were God’s chosen people who deserved to rule. This myth of Hierarchy led to the European Holocaust.

In 1994, a group of Hutus in Rwanda got it into their heads that Hutus were “good/right” and Tutsis, along with peaceful Hutus, were “evil/wrong” people who deserved to die. This myth of Dualism led to the Rwandan Genocide.

In the 1970’s, a group of Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge Communist Party got it into their heads that it was okay to execute, starve, and more or less enslave anyone who was unsympathetic to the new ideals of “radical equality.” This myth of Monism led to the Cambodian Holocaust.

These examples are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Unfortunately, our history books contain all too many examples of mass suffering and oppression created by human leaders whose brains were/are totally addicted to the status that comes from these myths. It explains why these leaders seem to us to be psychopaths. They are psychopaths. They’re psychopaths because they’ve stopped listening to their own inner wisdom — their own soul — and instead have started listening to the “voice” of status addiction.

For status addicts, the very idea of balance in a political system is anathema.

In contrast, there’s no hierarchy to be “proven” in a social democracy where people willingly pay taxes (within reason, of course) to cover the cost of roads, schools, and hospitals. There’s no dualism to be “justified” in a social democracy that embraces a multi-party system of government held to account through transparency, checks and balances, ethics commissioners, and law courts. There’s no room for monism to even be considered in a social democracy that builds its laws and conventions on that sturdiest of all foundations: human rights legislation that respects and values the differences among people of different ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

It’s true that within Canada there are some smaller HDM villages, some places and some groups and even some religious communities that have fallen prey to the HDM myths. But, as a whole, we seem to want to work together as a team to build a non-hierarchical, non-dualistic, non-monistic society. And that’s a good thing.

See you at Tim’s!

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, dualism, ethical mysticism, HDM Myths, My Spiral Path, mysticism, psychopathy, status addiction and tagged The Peace Sequence | Leave a Comment

10 Nov 2010

CC40: How My Experience as a Chemist Has Influenced My Mysticism

Theology at its best is a language — a language that helps individuals understand their relationship with God while not contradicting or denying one of God’s other important languages: science.

It’s important for God’s children to have access to the language of uplifting theology. This is because not all of God’s children can easily understand or relate to the language of science. This is okay with God. In fact, it’s more than okay. God’s children (one of whom would be you) are not all the same. God’s children are all different from each other, although we share some traits in common, such as the ability to love and forgive.

Your soul wasn’t created by God the Mother and God the Father with a batch of dirt and a cookie cutter (Genesis 2:7 notwithstanding). In all of Creation (and it’s a pretty darned big Creation!), there’s no other soul quite like you. There’s no other soul who thinks exactly the way you think, no other soul who expresses love exactly the way you express love. You’re one of a kind.

This means you “get” some languages better than you get other languages.

Maybe you totally get music, which means you feel the rhythms and harmonies deep in your bones without anyone ever really teaching you how to do it. You just “get” it so deeply that your whole life is transformed by it, each and every day.

Maybe you totally get poetry. That’s a language, too. It’s not the same as prose. Somehow it triggers different feelings and different responses in you than prose. You read a few verses of exquisite poetry and BAM — powerful insights descend upon your soul and you’re forever changed.

Now don’t laugh, but I react to chemistry the way many people react to music and poetry. It’s not that I don’t like music or poetry, it’s just that, well, I really, really “get” the language of chemistry.

“Tremble, O Earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water” (Psalm 114: 7-8). Photo credit JAT 2017.

If you’ve studied a lot of chemistry, you know that chemists don’t think in quite the same way as physicists, or biologists, or computer scientists, or mathematicians. Physicists get excited about field theory. Biologists get excited about energy transfer in living organisms and ecosystems. Computer scientists can think in binary code (an amazing skill!). And mathematicians live and breathe for the wonder of tautologies (showing how two sides of an equation are actually equal).

But chemists spend most of their time dealing with bonding. Molecular bonding. They want to know what holds atoms together into molecules. They want to understand the relationships between the constituent parts of both atoms and molecules. They spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to coax one little ion or electron from one spot to a different spot so it can do a different job. A chemist’s stock in trade is the probability wave functions of electrons, those tiny little negatively charged particles that are so much smaller than an atomic “nucleus” and are so damned fussy about where they’re willing to be located at any one time. Yet where would our material world be without them?

Even though physicists now estimate that “ordinary matter” (that is, atoms and molecules) accounts for no more than 4-5% of all known energy in the known universe (they call this ordinary matter “baryonic matter”), baryonic matter has a lot to tell us about the nature of God. And this baryonic matter is what chemists really “get.”

A number of physicists these days are pulling out all the stops to try to find a unified theory of nature. (Hence the construction of the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider). But, you know, for my part, as a chemist and as a mystic, I’m wary of anyone in any field who starts to look for a simple unified theory about anything. This smacks of monism, the longstanding religious belief that when you get to the very heart of Creation, there exists only a singular, undifferentiated, divine “oneness.” Plato’s middle writings, such as Phaedrus (247c), speak of this colourless, shapeless, all-inclusive oneness, and many neo-Platonic Christian mystics have followed suit in the monism department.

Needless to say, I’m not a monistic or apophatic mystic.

Me, I think it’s okay for us to listen to what God is saying to us through the language of chemistry. Even though baryonic matter (including the ordinary atoms and molecules that make up Planet Earth’s waters, lands, and atmosphere, plus all life on Planet Earth) represents only 4-5% of the universe’s energy, it’s the only part of Creation we can directly access as human beings, and it’s the only part of Creation that God seems to think we need while we’re living here as angels-in-temporary-human-form, so I figure it’s worth paying attention to!

And as I said above, chemistry is all about bonding.

It’s all about the relationship and balance between the tiny negatively charged particles we call electrons and the much larger positively charged particles we call protons. It’s all about the relationship and balance between certain probability wave functions and certain forces such as gravity, etc.. (I’m simplifying here, and am purposely skipping the whole subatomic particle thing, as it would needlessly complicate the discussion at this point).

When you think about a molecule such as sodium chloride (table salt), you probably think about it as salt. Me, I think of God the Father’s negatively charged electrons dancing a beautiful electron orbital dance of harmony, balance, intentional cooperation, and divine love with God the Mother to help her unite her much larger sodium ions with her equally large chloride ions in a very specific and useful scientific way that helps them together, as God, create the necessary biological building blocks used by the many forms of individual life that have lived here at one time or another over the past 3.85 billions years or so.

There you have it — my one-sentence rebuke of Creationism.

In my opinion, Creationism is an example of the language of theology at its worst.

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Posted in apophatic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, Creationism, ethical mysticism, HDM Myths, monism, Mother and Father God, Mother God, My Spiral Path, oneness, Plato, Soul and tagged science & faith | Leave a Comment

08 Nov 2010

CC39: Confessions of a Blonde Mystic

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

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

Nothing very mystical about that.

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

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

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

Yup. Still a geek, and proud of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My life is way more exciting than that.

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

06 Oct 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Near the end of The Pagan Christ, Harpur says:

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

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

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

03 Sep 2010

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

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

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

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

Photo credit JAT 2018.

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

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

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

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

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

It did.

How I Felt At First - Photo credit JAT 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I stopped.

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

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

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

09 Jun 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Groundhog Day” makes a number of powerful claims:

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

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

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

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

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

08 Jun 2010

CC18: "Oneness" — The Great Bait and Switch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the path that Jesus has taught me.

I highly recommend it.

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

06 Jun 2010

CC17: My Firsthand Experience With a Modern Apocalyptic Prophet

That’s me in the red shirt during my Big Fat Idiot Stage in 2003. That’s Grace on the right in the light blue shirt (though she wasn’t looking particularly beatific during this shot).

Even to this day, I can’t believe I missed the signs of Grace’s major mental illness.

At the time I first met Grace in 1998, I was working in the mental health field. Every day at the office I met and spoke with people whose lives had been torn apart by major depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, and Axis II issues such narcissistic personality disorder. I’d seen people suffering from psychotic depression, and I’d seen some of those psychotic patients undergo miraculous recovery after proper treatment. So it’s not like I could claim ignorance.

Ignorance, no. But naivete . . . yes, I admit to a heaping dose of that. And compartmentalization. I made the near-fatal mistake of compartmentalizing spirituality, of separating spirituality from everyday life, of trying to place my spirituality — and Grace’s — on some sort of special pedestal.

In my naivete, I was trying to climb the ladder of spiritual ascent. At the time, I thought that was a good thing. Only later did I realize that the path of holy ascent can be likened to a Boston Marathon of spiritual narcissists all scrambling to beat each other to the top of the special pinnacle where only a few special people are chosen to be especially close to God.

Like Plato. And Paul. And my spiritual teacher Grace. Apocalyptic prophets, all. Supremely confident. Absolutely convincing in their sincerity. Charming and persuasive. Endlessly energetic and enthusiastic. Psychopathic as hell.

I met Grace when I went for my very first Reiki healing. A mutual friend, Francesca, had arranged the Reiki healing for me. I knew very little at this point about New Age spirituality, and even less about traditional Christian mysticism. But I was eager to embark on a more spiritual path in my life (not so surprising for a 40 year old woman), and I’d suddenly found a bona fide Reiki master in my own community! It seemed too good to be true.

Grace had a beatific face. True, she was obese, but that was only because she so enjoyed cooking for other people to make them happy. True, she could knock back 5 ounces of vodka in half an hour, but that was only because she had a high threshold for alcohol (and she never drank the day before a Reiki healing). True, her two adult sons used alcohol and cannabis heavily, but that was only because they were so friendly and sociable and couldn’t say no to their friends, and in any event they were loved unconditionally by their parents, regardless of their behaviour. True, she became heavily addicted to pornography, but that was only in the context of a loving, monogamous relationship. True, she had a violent temper, but that was only because . . . well, that was only because she was right and other people were wrong, and she needed to clearly express to other people that she wouldn’t tolerate their unfair criticisms of her.

What mattered most to Grace was her spiritual path. She had trained as a certified Usui lineage Reiki Master. She revelled in the language, the symbolism, of it. Handpainted symbols covered the walls of the room in her home where she carried out her Reiki healings. She lit scented candles, played gentle, reassuring instrumental music, spoke in a reassuring tone. She talked the talk of divine love from beginning to end.

She talked endlessly and sincerely about divine love. She talked about the wondrous gift of divine healing that could come to people through hands-on healing. She said loudly and often that “we are all One, we are all equal.” She constantly strove to update her knowledge through New Age books, Internet sites, and spiritual workshops. She took new courses. She taught new courses. She seemed like “the real deal.”

But Grace was all talk. That’s all she did — talk. She did not practise empathy in her own life. In fact, she was one of the most vindictive, most unempathetic, most controlling, most self-entitled people I’ve ever met.

That’s why I have to thank her. I have to thank her for teaching me so consistently and so painfully that you can’t trust a spiritual teacher on the basis of words alone. You can’t trust the teachings of a dysfunctional spiritual teacher. Everything Grace did was focussed on Grace. She said she cared about her students and her Reiki patients, but she didn’t. She cared about herself. She only taught spiritual teachings that made her feel superior to other people. She needed to be “the Master.” She needed to be one of God’s specially chosen messengers. She needed to make prophetic claims. She needed to be in charge of other people’s spirituality. This was how she coped with her dissociative disorder.

Don’t get me wrong — Grace was highly dysfunctional for a damned good reason, and I know that. She’s a survivor of an abusive childhood home, where an alcoholic father sexually abused his daughters, and an alcoholic mother humiliated the children. It’s to Grace’s credit that as an adult she managed to hold down a respectable job and stay in a stable marriage for as long as she did. But Grace was unable to accept that she had addiction problems and needed professional assistance. By the time I met her, she was a mess. And her “commitment” to her path of spiritual ascent made life worse — both for herself and for her vulnerable students.

I didn’t break off ties with Grace until 2005. I hope that in the past few years she has received the care she needed. Somewhere underneath all her vitriol was the kind and loving person God knew she could be.

Unfortunately, I never got the chance to know that person.

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, apocalyptic prophecy, apophatic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, My Spiral Path, prophets, religion and mental Illness, spiritual ascent and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

31 May 2010

CC16: The Difference Between Mystics and Prophets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mystics trust in the fantastic goodness of God.

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

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

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

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

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

17 May 2010

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

Okay, I admit it . . . I’m a heretic.

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

I refuse to accept that God is “One.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think Jesus is a pretty smart guy.

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

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

31 Mar 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24 Mar 2010

CC5: My Big Fat Idiot Stage

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

The house where we lived until I was about 5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s when I finally started to grow up.

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

14 Mar 2010

CC4: The Blonde Mystic

June 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

06 Mar 2010

CC3: Some Reference Books I Read & Recommend

I think it’s important that readers have a chance to assess a writer based on the writer’s own influences. The contents of a writer’s own bookshelves tell you something about the core perspectives of the person.

(Notice how I made the assumption that writers have more than one bookshelf!)

The books related to Christianity that I resonate most strongly with are books that are written for a lay audience by highly respected academic researchers who are not afraid to ask difficult questions, and are not afraid to cross the tightly drawn lines that artificially separate academic disciplines from each other. (As one example, biblical scholars and systematic theologians and religious studies scholars often won’t speak to each other.)

In other words, I like books that are clearly written, well researched, and inter-disciplinary.

I write notes all over my books, which is why I try to buy books rather than borrow them from the library. I’m on a budget, though, so I look for good reference material in used bookstores, etc. I’ve never met a dictionary I didn’t like.

A lot of today’s progressive Christians are reading books by Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and John Shelby Spong. I have books by these authors on my bookshelves, but these aren’t the books I go back to, and these aren’t the books I would recommend. These well-respected scholars are trying to reenvision Christianity, and I respect their motives, but I disagree with their suggestions about how to do it. I don’t think they’re asking the right questions.

Some favourite books (c) JAT 2015

One book I really like is York University professor Barrie Wilson’s How Jesus Became Christian (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008). Don’t be put off by the cover, which is really, really dreadful (sorry Dr. Wilson!), and is a good example of why authors should try to get “veto rights” in their publishing contract for the title and the book design. Interestingly, Wilson says he was raised Episcopalian, but converted to Judaism because of the latter’s emphasis on praxis rather than “belief.” I’ve been wondering if the word he was really looking for was “fideism” (blind faith) rather than “belief.”

I also like Bart Ehrman’s books. He has written a lot of material for lay audiences, and some of it has enraged conservative and evangelical Christians. (After his 2005 book Misquoting Jesus became a hot seller, angry rebuttals in book form began to appear.) I don’t agree with Ehrman’s interpretation of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, but at least he’s not afraid to boldly outline the many inconsistencies and competing agendas of the biblical authors and their early Christian followers. Ehrman, like Wilson, has allowed his research to affect his personal life. In his youth, Ehrman was a devout evangelical Christian. He is now an agnostic.

I enjoyed Elaine Pagels’s 1988 book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1988). Her historical synthesis was daring for the time, and her conclusions were controversial. (She dared to suggest that Christianity ought to reappraise Augustine’s “singular dominance” in Western Christianity.) Pagels is better known, though, for her work on the Nag Hammadi texts, and the Gospel of Thomas in particular. I would like to emphasize here — strongly, and in bold letters — that I, personally, am not a Gnostic. As I continue to post in the future on this blog, it will become clear why I feel I must clearly state that I do not hold Gnostic beliefs. (I guess I’m a little touchy because some Christians I’ve encountered who ought to know better, because they’re experts in their fields, have an unfortunate tendency to conflate Gnosticism with anything non-Newtonian. I don’t think this is an acceptable scholarly attitude in the new era of quantum entanglement/non-locality.)

I also really enjoy reading the bimonthly magazine Biblical Archaeology Review, which is available on good newsstands, including Chapters/Indigo. Ya gotta love editor Herschel Shanks’s pluckiness. Plus the photographs and maps that accompany the articles add an interesting dimension to the material. (As I mentioned in my profile, I come from a family of teachers and artists, so I’m drawn to educational materials that have a strong visual component.)

One last reference source I should mention is the Bible. In my research, I mostly use The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha and The Jewish Study Bible: Featuring the Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation. Both these Bibles include extensive footnotes and scholarly articles. The translations are based on the most current and most comprehensive translation methods. No translation of the Bible is written in stone. I use the Bible as historical source material, not as “inviolable truth” or the literal “Word of God.” There’s good stuff in the Bible, but there’s also some stuff that’s gotta go. When I say it’s “gotta go,” I don’t mean it should be physically removed from the Bible, because that would be the same thing as burning books, and burning books is too close to fascism, if you ask me. I mean there are parts of the Bible that need to be reappraised in light of what they actually say about our relationship with God. We need to be honest about what some parts say, and we need to decide whether or not those parts can be “redeemed.”

That was kind of long and boring, but I’m trying to show that I hold the methods of historical research and scientific research in high regard.

This is why it may come as a shock to you to learn that my first calling (well, my second calling, actually — beginning in 1983, when I became pregnant with my first child, my highest calling has always been motherhood) . . . my primary spiritual calling is my ongoing commitment as a Christian mystic.

Yup. I’m a scientifically oriented, liberal, blond, United Church mystic.

Now there’s an oxymoron for you.

Have a great day!

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Posted in Bible, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, Gnosticism, My Spiral Path and tagged ethical mysticism | Leave a Comment

The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

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