The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “free will”

19 Sep 2012

RS34: Walking on Water

St. Paul's Harbour, Rhodes 3

St. Paul’s Harbour, Rhodes (c) JAT 2001

Jen has reminded me I haven’t written a solo post here, so I’m going to do that today.  I’m going to talk about what it feels like to walk on water.

I don’t mean that I or any human being has ever been able to literally walk on water.  When my great-nephew wrote about “walking on water” in the Gospel of Mark, he didn’t mean it literally.  He meant it metaphorically.  He was trying to describe what it feels like when a person has entered into the Kingdom state of fullness of heart.

He chose the image of water carefully.  In Second Temple Judaism, water was a powerful and frequent symbol in Jewish texts.  Often it meant blessings from God.  In an arid region, rainfall is a blessing, and most of ancient Judea was arid.  But there was a parallel understanding of water, too, as the primal force of chaos, the place where uncontrollable monsters lived. Where female monsters lived.

The Book of Genesis starts out with the assumption that water has to be pushed back by God and held in place before the Garden of Eden can be planted.  The sea is seen as a dangerous place.  An unpredictable place.  A deep place which is formless and dark, with no knowledge in it.  God fixes this problem by first bringing light (knowledge of order and symmetry) onto the scene.  He calls the light Day and the darkness Night, but he hasn’t created the Sun or the Moon yet, so the light he brings to Planet Earth isn’t sunlight.  It’s the light of knowledge.

The men who wrote the Book of Genesis emphasize again and again that you should want to have order in your life.  Order is good.  Chaos is bad.  There’s knowledge, and God saw that it was good.  There’s careful separation of all major “elements” into their proper places, and God saw that it was good.  There’s careful naming of all creations, large and small, and God saw that it was good.  The earth itself (adam in Hebrew) is separated into two aspects — male and female — and given the breath of life.  The resulting creations, man and woman, who are made in the image of God, are God’s representatives on Earth and through them God can impose the law of hierarchy upon all other kingdoms in creation (kingdoms in a biological sense, that is).  And God saw that it was good.  By the seventh “day,” God has put a big, fat leash on all that watery chaos stuff and firmly imposed the Law of Cause and Effect upon Planet Earth, and it’s so darned good that God calls for a day of rest to honour his accomplishments.

And what is Elohim’s greatest accomplishment?  The greatest accomplishment of Elohim (“the gods” in Hebrew) is to whip that dark, watery, feminine principle into shape and force it to obey the male principles of order, knowledge, law, and hierarchy.  When Elohim creates humankind — adam — he creates adam entirely out of strong, orderly, procreative, male earth.  No water in sight.  Elohim adds the breath of life (by inference from Gen. 1:30) to his new creations, but he’s very careful not to include any of that chaotic water stuff in his perfect new creations.  Water’s okay when it’s in its proper place, but let it loose, and there’s no describing the destruction that will occur.

Oh wait!  There is a description!  Let me see now . . . of yes, that would be the Great Flood story.  The Great Flood story reminds you (just in case you need reminding) what happens when bits and pieces of the Divine Order fall out of their proper places and start to misbehave (Gen. 6:1-7) and why God’s creation of order and hierarchy is a good thing!  A good thing you really, really want!

Still, even the bad behaviour of the Nephilim was nothing compared to the fall of the Feminine Principle.  When the Feminine Principle fell out of her proper place in the heavens and coalesced into the dark, formless, watery depths that existed before God came to rescue her with his light of knowledge an’ all  . . . well, that was a real mess.  A mess that still needs fixing.  Occasionally, if things get really bad on Earth, God unleashes her and lets the monsters out, which is exactly why you need to put a Molten Sea in front of your big temple (1 Kings 7:23-26).  You need to remind your people that God has given you power over the forces of chaos by proxy.

This power by proxy comes in the form of ritual bathing in water that has been tamed.  Fresh water — including rainfall — is water that has been properly tamed by God.  Restored to its true state of purity.  Immersion in purified water allows you to share in God’s purification process.  (It also happens to make you cleaner, and therefore healthier and happier, but this is a separate question.)

Mark, a trained scholar, had all these traditions about water in mind when he chose to show me “walking on water” in the middle of his Parable of the Idol Bread (Mark 6:47-51).  He’s turned the traditional meaning of water on its head.  It’s a new relationship with water.  Nobody commands the waters of Lake Tiberias to part so Jesus can walk across on dry land.  Nobody immerses themselves in the waters in baptism.  Nobody puts the waters in big jars or little jars or cauldrons or ritual baths.  The lake is the lake, the way it’s always been the lake.  And Jesus is Jesus, the way he’s always been Jesus.  And the lake and Jesus seem to be getting along!  No fighting with the lake, no thrashing with monsters in the lake, no prayer rituals to calm the lake.  Jesus starts walking towards his companions (who are struggling with questions of understanding and true faith) and the lake suddenly calms down as if maybe the waters (the Feminine Principle) and Jesus are working together and aren’t in conflict with each other.  As if maybe the waters are comfortable supporting Jesus because he has already “taken heart and stopped being afraid.”  As if maybe the waters are not and never have been the problem.

The problem is written down in black and white as plain as you can get in Chapter 7 of Mark.  The problem is not what you touch on the outside of your body.  The problem is not the water itself or what you do with the water.  The problem is what you choose to do on the inside of your body.  The problem is what you choose to do with your own free will.

The journey to know your own free will, as I said last time in conversation with Jen, is very much a journey that resembles the stages of grief.  All people must wrestle with what it means to have free will.  They must question it, be confused by it, be angry at it, reject it, and finally come to terms with it.  As the character Job once did.  As I did as Jesus son of Joseph two millennia ago.

There’s a reason for this, a reason that has nothing to do with sin or salvation or sacraments or separation from God.  The reason for this painful journey is that God trusts you.

Human beings often wonder why they’re here and why it has to hurt so much.  Many reasons have been offered over the centuries by different religious leaders.  In the tradition of Occam’s razor, I offer this: you are here to learn how God the Mother and God the Father discovered together how to walk on water.  You’re here so you can experience firsthand what it means to use your free will in every permutation possible in the service of Divine Love.

Put that way, it sounds simple, doesn’t it?  But it’s not.  You know that and I know that.  It’s damned hard to work your way through the stages of knowing what free will means.  Not what you, as a human being, think it means, but what God the Mother and God the Father think it means.

To live from a place of pure free will is, as you may imagine, the very opposite of living in a world of pure cause and effect.  But once, long ago, long before the event called the Big Bang took place, the universe was not as we know it today, and the laws of cause and effect held much more sway than they do today.  This is hard — beyond hard — for most angels to understand, so some of us decide to incarnate here to see what this kind of existence must have felt like.  Our Divine Parents let us do this because they trust us.

When souls decide to incarnate here as human beings, they know it’s going to be hard, but when they get here they find out it’s even harder than they could have imagined.  They do it anyway, though, because they’re experiencing something important, something that’s part of their history, their past.  They want to understand their relationships with everyone at a much deeper level, and this crazy journey called “life as a human being” helps them do it.

Not every soul chooses to do this.  But the ones who do, do so voluntarily.  These are the souls who are primarily kinesthetic learners at a deep soul level.  They learn best by experiencing something firsthand, by walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes so they really “get” what it feels like.

If you’re reading this, it means you wanted to come to Planet Earth for a while so you can walk in your Divine Parents’ shoes and see for yourself what it felt like for them to work together to overturn the rule of “cause and effect” and replace it with something infinitely more powerful and mysterious: Divine Love (a.k.a. quantum physics).

The human brain (unlike other mammalian brains) has an annoying habit of trying to shed its own emotions and slip into the unloving habits of cause and effect.  (As your cats and dogs like to remind you.)  So the human brain is ideally suited to this particular journey of discovery.  It has both a great potential for learning and a great potential for unlearning.  So to state your brain gives you the option to explore every possible nook and cranny of free will would be an understatement.

I know you can think of a thousand examples of people who didn’t use their free will in loving and trusting ways.  But what about the people who have come to terms with their own free will?  Who are they and what do their lives look like?  More important, are these people “special,” or can anyone on Planet Earth find this experience of redemption?

We’ve often used the term “redemption” on this site in contradistinction to religious salvation, and I’d like to talk about this a bit more.  Any human being — regardless of gender, sexual orientation, age, culture, time, place, or religion — who has worked through the grief stages of free will is a person who has experienced redemption in the way that I experienced it.  Redemption is the emotional insight that fills up a person’s entire heart and mind with the knowledge that it’s okay to never fear the Truth.

There’s Truth in the universe and there’s Divine Love.  They’re not the same thing.  Truth exists in the absence of consciousness.  Divine Love is the choice of consciousness to never hide from the Truth, to always be transparent to the Truth, to fully embrace whatever is true about another being without losing the truth of oneself.  What does this mean?  It means that Divine Love always respects the right of another person to be another person and not a mere extension of one vast cloud of self.

A human being who understands that free will holds the key to Divine Love, forgiveness, passionate creativity, and committed relationships (devotion) is a human being who has found redemption.

Such a person can be found anywhere.  And, indeed, such individuals are found in all cultures.  They are the people who simply won’t back down from the idea that all beings are worthy of respect, fair treatment, compassion, kindness, and encouragement.  They are the people who believe in social justice and due process, in democracies rather than republics or empires, in transparency in government and accountability for intentional harms.  They are the people who treat women with as much respect as men, who treat the planet with as much respect as they treat other human beings.  They are the people who treat their children as souls in need of education, guidance, mentorship, and respect instead of as property to be bartered for status or personal gratification.  They are the people who don’t whine and complain and blame God for all the travails they’ve chosen themselves.  Most of all, they’re the people who have the courage to see their neighbours as worthy human beings, not as objects of hatred, contempt, and violence.

When you really “get it” — when you understand that your ability to choose your path does not make you separate from the rest of Creation but is in the fact the very glue that holds God’s family together as a loving, trusting group — the world no longer feels to you like a place where good is fighting evil or light is fighting dark or order is fighting chaos.   It doesn’t feel like a fight any longer, but neither does it feel like mere acceptance of the way things are (which is often just resignation in disguise).  It’s not obedience.  It’s not piety.  It’s not subjugation.  It’s not anomie.  It’s not cynicism.  It’s not apathy.  It’s not depression.  It’s not escapism.  It’s just  . . . honesty.  The heart’s honesty.  The heart’s willingness to see things as they really are and, despite that, to dig deeper, ever deeper — or maybe higher, ever higher — into empathy for another person’s Truth.

There is no adequate word for this emotion in English.  “Trust” would come closest.

When you have this sense of trust, it feels as if you’re holding God’s hand and God is guiding you through the storms and worries of daily life.

It feels as if you’re walking on water.

Blessings to all,

Love Jesus

September 19, 2012

 

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Posted in "4 S's", Bible, Cause & Effect, Divine Love, Favourite Posts, free will, Jesus' teachings, Law (Nomos), Mother God, Realspiritik, redemption, theodicy, trust and tagged | Leave a Comment
14 Sep 2012

RS33: The Way of the Cross

St. Michael's Mount 02

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A:  This is where you really need a mentor.

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

A:  That mentor can be God.

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

A:  Warts and all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

RS26: Healing – The Gift of Love

A:  Tell me what fearlessness meant for you during your ministry.

J:  Good word.  Fearlessness.  Tricky word, too, because fearlessness for somebody who loves God isn’t the same experience as fearlessness for somebody who hates God.  Psychopaths hate God, no matter what they say.  Psychopaths also show a lack of normal fear, which is not to say they’re afraid of nothing, but that they’re afraid of very different things than non-psychopaths are.

Psychopaths aren’t afraid of hurting other people, aren’t afraid of taking huge physical and financial risks that would turn other people into quivering puddles of emotional jelly.  On the other hand, psychopaths are terrified of dying a nameless death.  They struggle against the reality of death, believe they can somehow circumvent it.  When they realize the universe isn’t going to make a special exception for them, and give them the gift of physical immortality, they try to make themselves immortal anyway in a screw-you,-God,-I’ll-show-you-how-special-I-am demonstration of might and glory.  So they focus all their efforts on “leaving a legacy.”  A big legacy.  A showy legacy.  Something tangible.  Something people can point to and ooh and ahh at — like a big temple.  Or a statue commemorating his/her reign.  Or a library with the family name plastered across the front.  A psychopath is never content to be remembered for his kind heart and consistent ability to lift others up from within.

Celsus Library, Ephesus Turkey 2

Celsus Library, Ephesus Turkey (c) JAT 2001

A:  Blowing up buildings and massacring innocent people is pretty showy, too.

J:  At the time, it seems like a good idea to the psychopath — a way to earn fame and glory.  It doesn’t look that way to the victims, of course, but to the psychopaths, it’s good fodder for the history books.

A:  You must have seen this mindset all around you in the early Roman empire you lived in.  It wasn’t a pretty place for conquered peoples.

J:  Yeah, go to your local arena and see enslaved animals and gladiators savage each other on the big screen of Real Life!  Sick stuff.

A:  Yet these displays of physical prowess were considered normal.  Culturally acceptable.

J:  Like slavery then and slavery later.  Just because it’s culturally acceptable doesn’t make it right.  The soul longs for freedom.  The soul believes in freedom.  Not libertarian freedom (the freedom to do whatever the hell you want, regardless of how it affects other people), but the freedom that comes with dignity and respect and egalitarianism.  Balanced freedom, you could call it.  The freedom to be considered a unique individual who is an important and worthy part of the larger community.  The freedom to look your neighbour in the eye as an equal.

This is the kind of freedom that psychopaths always try to strip away from others.

A:  So how does this relate to fearlessness?

J:  It’s linked very strongly to free will.  To free will and to trust.  When the community you live in allows you to exercise your soul’s free will and your soul’s trust in God in the fullest possible way, you become, in your own unique way, a healer.  Not a physician or surgeon or internist, but a healer.  A person with a unique gift that brings some form of healing into the world and into the hearts and minds of those around you.  There is no sphere of human existence where the inner impulse of fearlessness — trust and free will working together — shows itself more clearly than in the mysterious gift of healing.

A:  By healing . . . do you mean what modern Western allopathic doctors mean by healing?  Treating symptoms until the symptoms go away and “normal” function is restored?

J (shaking his head):  No.  By healing, I mean helping a person find a sense of wholeness, a sense of wholeness within themselves, a sense of worthiness within themselves that incorporates emotional worthiness, cognitive worthiness, physical worthiness, and spiritual worthiness.  All these together.  The whole enchilada.

Obviously there’s no point telling people they can find complete healing through pure physical worthiness or pure cognitive worthiness if in the next breath you’re going to tell them they’re full of Original Sin.

A:  It’s amazing what can happen to a person’s physical symptoms when emotions and cognitive function and spiritual growth are treated with as much respect as the physical symptoms.  (I speak from personal experience  . . . )

J:  Some Western physicians and health care professionals know this.  But not enough of them.  For a brief period in the twentieth century, Western physicians showed a strong blend “science and faith” in their healing relationships with patients.  But today this common sense blend has been shoved out of the way and replaced by the technological model.  It’s a pure Materialistic model, and, to be honest, I see no difference between the current allopathic medical model and the demon-model I fought against 2,000 years ago.  Today’s obsessive-compulsive focus on “germs and genes” and “fighting germs and genes” is no different than yesterday’s obsessive-compulsive focus on “demons” and “fighting demons.”  Both are attempts to control all the laws of Cause and Effect in the universe  — laws which, in fact, no human being has the final say over.

A:  When my beautiful son was battling leukemia — A.L.L. — he had little immune function for the first few months of his treatment, and then he had none at all after they blasted his body with radiation in preparation for a bone marrow transplant.  Theoretically he shouldn’t have been able to fight off any pathogens.  But theory got blown away by reality.  In the nine months he lived between diagnosis and death, he suffered from many painful and frightening events (not least a massive stroke).  But never once did he “get sick” from a cold or a flu or an infection of any kind.

When he was in hospital, he was in isolation.  But after his bone marrow started to show faint signs of recovery, he was discharged from hospital and spent the summer at home.  Our home wasn’t a sanitized and germ-free place.  It was a normal home.  I provided the nursing care for the central venous line that was still sticking out of his chest wall, and he never once got an infection at the entry site or in the line itself.  He probably should have, but he didn’t.  He was very disappointed, though, that he wasn’t allowed to eat fresh strawberries, which had been shown at the time to carry bacteria that could be harmful to immune-suppressed children.  He loved strawberries.

J:  Were you afraid while you were caring for your son?

A:  Yes.  I was terrified of his pain.  Not terrified for me, but terrified for him.  I recall with intense grief the days when he and I had to get through his spinal taps together without any pain medication at all.  He was extraordinarily brave.  He was so brave I couldn’t believe it.  I couldn’t believe anyone could be so brave and so trusting of the people who were trying to help him.

J:  Did your terror for him stop you from doing what needed to be done?  Did it stop you from loving him and showing him your love?

A:  No.  I wasn’t afraid of the procedures.  I understood what had to be done, and I wasn’t afraid of the science.  I was afraid of the grief and the pain.

J:  You were afraid of the grief and the pain, but you did it anyway.  You and your husband made sure your son spent almost no time alone in the hospital room.  Someone was always with him.  You made sure his heart always felt safe, yes?

A:  We did our best.  Though Sick Kids Hospital wouldn’t let us stay with him overnight, which was very difficult for us.  We had to stay at the Ronald McDonald House.

J:  You could have” left the room” (emotionally speaking) and turned things over to “the science” or “the law,” as so many parents have done (not to their credit).  But you didn’t.  You believed you needed to be with him and look him in the eye and tell him you loved him.  You knew he needed constant comfort.

A (nodding):  My heart said he needed us.

J:  Yes.  He needed you.  And you didn’t let him down.  This is what fearlessness feels like.  It’s not lack of fear in the face of illness and death.  It’s the choice to choose love and trust even when you feel the fear.  It’s the choice to do the right thing for somebody else’s healing.  For somebody else’s sense of worthiness and wholeness.  For somebody else’s discovery deep within that the mystery of love cannot be contained.  It’s too big to ever be held back by small rooms and the petty concerns of Law.   It fills up the smallest cracks of Creation with its wondrous powers of growth and healing and expansion.  It grows and grows within, even when the physical body itself is dying.

This is the gift of one human being to another, a gift that is eternal.

All human beings have this power within their hearts if they choose to claim it.

 

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Posted in Cause & Effect, free will, healing, Materialism, Original Sin, psychopathy, Realspiritik, slavery, trust and tagged | Leave a Comment
09 Aug 2012

RS22: Freedom and Slavery

pryamids_giza_Historylink101

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have certainty, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I many boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own ways. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Cor 13: 1 – 8a). This short passage, long attributed to Paul, is so unlike Paul’s teachings and is so resonant with Jesus’ teachings (especially as seen in the Gospel of Thomas), it’s amazing Paul still gets the credit. Shown here are the Pyramids at Giza, photo credit Historylink101.com (Egyptian Picture Gallery).

A:  Last time you said Paul’s religious masters feared contamination by the forces of chaos.  You then defined the forces of chaos as the forces of Love and All Things Feminine.  My first thought was to ask about the reaction from Christians who insist that Paul speaks eloquently about Love.  Then I remembered that you yourself wrote the famous ode to love in First Corinthians 13.  I also remembered the academic papers I’d read about the meaning of the word “love” (aheb in Hebrew) in Second Temple Judaism.  At that time “loving God” meant “obeying God” rather than “liking God” or “being in relationship with God.”  Love for God was a duty, a contractual obligation, a way for human beings to hold up their end of the bargain with God.

Why did Paul talk so much about love (agape in the Greek) if he didn’t believe in love?

J:  Paul was not a man who was capable of love.  What he meant by love was something much closer to the mindset you and I have defined as humility — turning yourself into an empty vessel — an obedient vessel — so you can properly receive Paul’s authority.

A:  He doesn’t use the word “humility” in his letters.

J:  No.  He uses the words “weakness” and “foolishness.”  But it’s still humility.

A:  The meaning is the same.

J:  Paul didn’t believe at all in the concept of love as I understood love.  He believed in obedience.  In orderly, obedient communities.  In pyramids of mystical power where the people at the bottom of the pyramid “knew their place” and obeyed those who were higher up in rank and authority and supported them in their “great mission.”  But he doesn’t use the word “pyramid.”  He uses the metaphor of the body — the one body in Christ.  Christ is the head.  All the members of the community are part of this one body, which makes sense from a practical viewpoint, because a body can move more swiftly if it has two healthy feet.  But make no mistake — the feet are still at the bottom of this pyramid of power.  So  slaves are loved in Paul’s community because they help bring order and stability to the community.  But they’re still slaves.

A:  Christians today read Paul’s speech about the one body (1 Cor 12: 12-31) as a rejection of hierarchical values in Hellenistic culture.  But you’re saying it’s not a rejection.

J:  It’s a different understanding of hierarchy.  For Paul, it’s a superior understanding of hierarchy.  It’s an attempt to reveal the real truth about hierarchy, the real mystical underpinnings of hierarchy that exist within all the worlds of Heaven.  It’s Paul’s attempt to bring “the one true” hierarchy into the corrupt world.  Again, alchemy.  An attempt to bring order and harmony into the corrupt physical world by controlling the powers of chaos.  An attempt to corral the behaviour of everybody so they’ll fit properly within the pyramid of power that Paul and his religious masters are trying to build.

A:  When you say they’ll fit properly, how do you mean that?  Do you mean that figuratively?

J:  No.  I mean that literally.  Don’t forget — “The One True Religion” Paul was commissioned to spread was about 3,000 years old by the time Paul came on the scene.  This group had already spent 3,000 years researching and experimenting with different ways to acquire power.  Their early attempts were focussed on external tools — projects such as the Pyramids of Giza and subsequent wonders of the ancient world.  Eventually, though, they noticed they were having problems with other people’s brains.  People had an annoying habit of trying to find freedom for themselves and their families.  Then they wouldn’t behave!

The Seekers of the Rock decided that all those busy human minds that were always getting in the way of the group’s goals were nothing more than fractured little bits of the universal Order and Perfection that Spirit had already created in pure form for the higher levels of Heaven.  Order and Perfection were envisaged as a pyramid of perfect, exquisite, divine geometry.  Each of the four sides at the base of the pyramid represented one of the immutable Divine Laws (as this group understood them).  One side — the north side — represented vengeance — in other words, the Divine Right to punish lawbreakers.  The south side represented knowledge — the Divine Right to control all knowledge.  The west side represented “mass” — great weight, strength, force, inertia — or the Divine Right to build great armies to seize what was rightfully its own.  The east side represented sacrifice — the Divine Right to demand sacrifice for purposes that cannot be understood by mortal minds.

The Seekers believed that if communities of believers could be gathered together in accordance with these four main principles, they could literally create a metaphysical pyramid that would be pleasing to Spirit.  But, as with a physical pyramid built of carefully cut stones, a mystical pyramid can only be strong and whole and worthy of Spirit’s approval if each “stone” is properly placed in relation to neighbouring stones.  The pyramid is built of many smaller stones.  So all the stones are necessary if the pyramid is to achieve its purpose.  If you remove some of the stones at the bottom, the whole construct might topple.

A:  So, for Paul, slaves are like the stones at the bottom.

J (nodding):  When the slaves know their proper place, and stay where they’ve been placed at the bottom of the pyramid, the Divine Rights of Vengeance, Knowledge, Strength, and Sacrifice will remain in balance, and Order is achievable.  But if the slaves dare step outside the bounds of the pyramid and into the frightening world of chaos that lies beyond, Spirit will have no choice but to exercise its Rights.  That’s when you get divine actions like the Great Flood.  It’s a simple matter of cause and effect.

A:  For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

J:  As I said, this bunch saw themselves as scientists in pursuit of order and harmony.  Their relentless attacks on free will were highly logical, if completely inhumane.  From their twisted perspective, they were “saving” the slaves from the dire consequences of their foolish desire for freedom.  They were acting in the best interests of the group as a whole.  “We’re doing this for your own good.  This hurts us more than it hurts you.  One day you’ll thank us for this.”

A:  Something tells me Paul’s rhetoric on “freedom” is not what it appears to be.

 

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Divine Love, First Corinthians, free will, Gnosticism, HDM Myths, humility, Mother God, mysticism, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, Realspiritik, slavery, spiritual ascent and tagged | Leave a Comment
13 Mar 2012

TBM27: Prayers Your Angels Will Refuse to Answer

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

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

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

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

Which is exactly my point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Says the author (pages 23-24):

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

TBM26: A Practical Tip For Getting Along With Your Angels

Here’s a super-practical tip for people walking the Spiral Path: don’t ask your guardian angels to help you get more status.

Probably the single biggest mistake made by spiritual seekers anywhere (and I mean anywhere) is to assume that God and God’s angels are remotely interested in anything resembling status.

I know that countless religious tomes have told you otherwise. I know you’ve been told that God needs your worship and sacraments (i.e. status points for God). I know you’ve been told that God needs your prayers (i.e. status points for you). I know you’ve been told that angels (if they exist at all) are bound within a strict Celestial Hierarchy — escalating angelic tiers of seniority and importance and proximity to God. (Thanks for nothing, Pseudo-Dionysius). I know this is what you’ve been told again and again. But if you look at the evidence for success among pious devotees of these beliefs, you’ll find precious little in the way of consistent, positive, demonstrable outcomes such as improved health, improved standards of living, or improved family and community safety.

Which is how God measures these things.

God the Mother and God the Father know that your task here is to see what it feels like to juggle the needs of the 4D soul with the needs of the 3D body, with lots of chances to practise forgiveness thrown in (’cause it’s never too late to remember how). So God is very interested in helping you and your family achieve a state of relative good health (both physical health and mental health) until it’s your time to Go Home (colloquially known as dying).

Naturally, a God who’s interested in helping you stay healthy is going to be very worried about the painful effects of addiction in your life, since addiction is one of the major causes of suffering among human beings. Addiction issues create physical suffering, mental suffering, emotional suffering, family suffering, and community suffering. Addiction also creates financial suffering and educational suffering and job-related suffering. It gets in the way of everything that’s positive and selfless and healing.

So . . . it should take you all of about five seconds to realize that God and God’s angels are not going to be supportive of choices based on status addiction.

Even if the myth surrounding the status addiction is a religious myth.

The general assumption seems to be that God is tolerant of all religious beliefs and all religious myths because, when push comes to shove, these religious traditions have one thing in common: they confer status points on God.

Only an emotionally immature person would conclude that God actually wants status points.

Unfortunately, all too many emotionally immature individuals have gradually fallen into the trap of status addiction, where, mired in the swamps of narcissism and bullying, and looking at others through the characteristic tunnel-vision thereof, it seems perfectly logical to conclude that the correct way to approach God is to offer status points. After all, the giving and taking of status points is a normal way of existing (though not a normal way of living) for many human beings on Planet Earth.

As humans, we don’t like to hear that angels have free will, but they do. Your own guardian angels use their free will to decide when, how, and if they’ll respond to your requests for aid – even if it means you have to go through some rough patches to get where you need to go.

So don’t do it. There aren’t a lot of strict rules to follow on the Spiral Path, and even this one isn’t really a rule, since you can ignore me and do whatever you like because you have free will. But before you make that choice, you need to know there are consequences for the choice to seek status on the spiritual journey. Here is the consequence: your guardian angels will stop helping you. They’ll still love you. They’ll still forgive you. But they won’t enable you as you rejoice in the high of an addiction disorder — any addiction disorder, including status addiction.

Just as family members of a person with addiction issues know it’s wrong to enable dysfunctional behaviours, angels know it’s wrong to enable dysfunctional and harmful behaviours. It’s courageous and loving and forgiving of them to refuse to enable the choices of status addiction. And why would we want it any other way?

Angels will help you find healing once you make the choice to be honest about your addiction. They’ll guide you to people and books and learning experiences and medical treatments that will help you heal. But they’ll let you fall flat on your face over and over until you accept the truth that your status addiction isn’t pretty and isn’t divine and isn’t acceptable to anyone, including your core self.

During my theology classes, I was required to read the teachings of Christian theologians from the time of Paul the Apostle to the modern day. I read many different explanations for why human beings suffer, but never once, except in the teachings of Jesus himself, did I come across the one explanation that fits all the facts: God refuses to be an enabler of status addiction.

The communities in the world today that have the highest standards of health, the highest standards of living for the middle and lower classes, the lowest levels of crime and corruption, and the highest standards of ethical, legal, and interpersonal conduct are the communities with the least cultural emphasis on status acquisition.

Too often it’s assumed the recipe for success in these communities is the abolition of faith, a rejection of belief in God — that is, atheistic societies built on humanistic values without religious superstitions to hold people back.

Faith in God never holds a person back. But religious institutions which are deeply committed to the preservation of status addiction can and do hold people back. This is a biological reality.

Keep the idea of God. Ditch the idea of status acquisition and status addiction in all its nasty and insidious forms.

As a spiritual practice, it’s simple. It’s sane. And it works.

Because your guardian angels are thrilled to help you when you aren’t being such an ass.

Next time I’ll talk about some of the ways in which your angels can help you. I think you’ll be very surprised to learn what matters to them.

 

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), faith, free will, HDM Myths, healing miracles, prayer, relationship with God, spiritual practices, status addiction, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy and tagged , | Leave a Comment
24 Jan 2012

TBM17: Learning to Understand Your Own Angels

This piece called “Dream Cloud” is carved from a single piece of boulder opal in an ironstone matrix. It measures 8 x 6 x 4 centimetres, weighs 1167.5 carats, and is believed to have been carved in about 1915 CE. My intuition tells me that the artist who created this piece had some divine inspiration along the way. “Dream Cloud” is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017

Learning to communicate with your guardian angels is a tricky, tricky business.

If you go into the New Age section of your local bookstore, you’ll find quite a few books about how to talk to angels. Most of these books are written by people who are in the early stages of their spiritual journey. They don’t yet have the knowledge or experience or scientific training to teach others how to understand the messages of angels. Therefore, a lot of information in these books is flawed.

However, some New Age books are well-meaning and contain the odd useful nugget. This is more than I can say for books about angels that are written by evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, who want to pummel you with the idea that your soul is filled with sin and your angels are part of a vast celestial hierarchy whose only purpose is to worship God. It’s pretty negative stuff when you stop and think about it.

There’s a history behind these traditional teachings I won’t go into today, but suffice it to say that conventional Christian theories about angels won’t get you very far on the Spiral Path. In fact, Christian theories will slow you down. You’re better off to start with a simple model based on observable facts.

Fact #1: Learning to communicate effectively with anyone — including your angels — takes time and practice and patience. It’s not something you learn overnight. It’s not something you learn at a weekend workshop. It’s something you have to work on bit by bit, day by day. In other words, you need to know from the very beginning of your journey that you won’t be able to understand your angels’ messages right away. You’re going to have to practise.

This doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Quite the opposite, in fact. What you’re trying to develop is a complex skill — a way of thinking and feeling and acting that’s holistic and grounded and peace-filled. Because it’s a complex skill, it takes time for you to develop it. But this is a good thing, right? All complex human endeavours take time and effort. People don’t learn how to become jumbo jet pilots by going to a weekend workshop. Cirque du Soleil artists don’t learn how to scale walls by going to a weekend workshop. And adult men and women don’t learn how to communicate effectively with their angels in a few short hours, either.

If you meet a spiritual teacher who claims to have had an experience of instant conversion to a state of full communion with God or God’s angels overnight, you should be very, very wary. The story in the Bible’s Book of Acts about Saul’s sudden conversion on the road to Damascus is exactly the sort of religious claim that should raise an alarm bell in the back of your head. The story of Saul (who becomes Paul) gives people the idea that God chooses certain special people and then swoops into their heads to instantly rewire their brains so they can serve as special receptacles for divine revelation.

Yeah, okay, so God is just going to dump a few terabytes of new data into your head from one minute to the next, and you’re not even going to get a migraine?

This is just goofy. Not to mention abusive. The story of Saul on the road to Damascus describes an abusive God who seizes hold of one man and forces him to instantly convert to a new vision of God. Saul doesn’t get a say in this conversion, according to the Bible. Instead, he’s forced by God to accept his “destiny.” His “fate.” His chosen status as a messenger of God.

And where in this story does Saul apply his own free will and make the choice to seek redemption?

Nowhere.

This leads us to Fact #2.

Fact #2: Learning to use your own free will is a real bitch. I’m not going to lie to you. A big part of your journey to understand your angels’ messages will involve the journey to understand your own free will.

See, this is another reason I’m suggesting you avoid traditional Christian teachings about angels and souls. According to these traditional teachings, you don’t really have free will. Well, you sorta do, in so far as you can choose to commit sinful acts. And, of course, you’re allowed to apply your free will to choose salvation through Christ. But, other than that, the Church says you’re basically an unworthy piece of shit who can’t choose redemption and can’t really forgive others and can’t be a good person unless God has chosen this destiny for you. But good luck trying!

Fortunately, a great many individuals have figured out the Church is wrong.

Among the people who understand the true potential of your free will are your very own guardian angels. All angels, whether in 4D form or in incarnated human form, live and breathe the concept of free will in its deepest grandeur. So you may as well know from the beginning of your journey that if you try to tell your angels that you can’t change because you don’t have free will, they’ll put on their angel earmuffs and loudly proclaim, “Sorry, we can’t hear you. La la la la la.”

Why are angels allowed to ignore your pity parties? Because angels have free will. And they don’t have to agree with everything you’re saying.

Which leads to the last point I want to highlight today.

Fact #3: All guardian angels are equally competent and equally well qualified to guide their respective charges. There’s no such thing as “defective” or “inferior” guardian angels. The angels who are watching over you are the angels who are best suited to you and your unique needs. Period.

I’ve read a number of New Age books in which authors claim you can break a contract with your guardian angels if you believe they’re not “pure” enough or “advanced” enough for you. According to these authors, you can insist on being teamed with a “better” angel or spirit guide, someone who’s higher on the ladder of spiritual ascent . . . like, say, an archangel instead of a plain ol’ guardian angel. Like maybe even Archangel Michael himself!

Hah!

You may have noticed that in my last post (Angels Aren’t Wusses) I described angels as being more like the crew of the star ship Enterprise than the winged, ethereal, transcendent beings of traditional Western art. This is because angels ARE more like the crew of the Enterprise. They come in many different sizes and shapes (think Klingon, Betazoid, Vulcan). They come with many different combinations of talents and strengths (think strong Klingon, empathic Betazoid, intellectual Vulcan). They come with absences of strengths, too (think gentle Klingon, non-telepathic Betazoid, weepy Vulcan — say what?). So angels always work AS A TEAM, with each angel offering his or her strengths, and each one deferring to others in areas where he or she lacks a strength or talent. (Not coincidentally, the same observation applies to human communities at their best — people with different “sizes and strengths” coming together to work as a team.)

No one incarnates on Planet Earth before a full and appropriate angelic team has been assembled for the particular individual who has chosen to incarnate.

Gosh, did I just say “has chosen to incarnate”? As in “wasn’t forced by cosmic forces beyond my control to be here living this lousy human life?”

Yup.

As I said above, all angels have free will. This free will extends to the choice to either incarnate for a while or to not incarnate for the time being.

Angels choose to incarnate for a variety of reasons, but all these reasons are positive and hopeful and courageous and loving. At the moment you may not remember or understand your own reasons for choosing to incarnate as a human being. But you did choose to be here. And your guardian angels support your choice and are doing far more than you realize to help you achieve your soul’s own purpose.

Next time we’ll talk about soul purpose, ’cause, as the Scotiabank’s TV ads say, “You’re richer than you think!”

 

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), building your intuition, free will, life and death, Paul, Soul, spiritual ascent, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic and tagged , | Leave a Comment
21 Nov 2011

RS14: Balance As a Spiritual Practice

A: Last time you finished by saying there’s only one path to love and belonging, and that one path is balance. That sounds way too easy.

(c) Image*After

(c) Image*After

J: If it were easy, the vast majority of human beings would already be living lives that are full of love and belonging, but few people are. Living in the Christ Zone is a path that’s logical and clear and consistent regardless of race or gender or age, but it’s a lifelong challenge. It’s an everyday way of living, not a “one-off” experience. It’s something you have to keep working at your whole life.

A: There you go, using those annoying words like “life” and “living” again! Readers might start to get the idea that you’re promoting the radical idea of full engagement with life! Gosh, wouldn’t that be heresy? ;))

J: Orthodox Western Christianity has been preaching Escape for two thousand years. Gnostic Christianity and other forms of Gnosticism have been preaching Escape for even longer. I didn’t preach Escape. I preached compassion, forgiveness, and healing — all of which arise out of the practice of balance.

A: Hang on. You’re saying that living a life of balance is a form of spiritual practice. What Christians would call praxis?

J: You bet. And it’s the only form of spiritual practice that actually works.

A: That’s a bold statement.

J: Fortunately for me, I have science on my side. That’s more than the apophatic and anagogic mystics can say.

A: Okay. So can you try to explain why it works when other forms of spiritual practice don’t (according to you)?

J: It works because it flows with the grain of scientific law instead of against it. Traditional mystical practices have always flowed against the grain. Traditional mystical practices such as lengthy fasting, rigorous asceticism, intentional segregation from others, self-induced or drug-induced trances, sleep deprivation, celibacy, begging for alms, withdrawal into cloistered communities, and veneration of saints are all practices that damage one or more circuits of the biological brain.

It’s a straightforward task to draw up a list of traditional spiritual practices, such as fasting, and compare this list to the needs of the Christ Zone model. Right off the bat you can see that fasting is going to seriously interfere with a person’s physiological need for ongoing nutrition to fuel the brain. Chronic sleep deprivation makes mincemeat of the brain’s circuits. Celibacy causes damage on all fronts, and impairs the functioning of the immune system. Same with asceticism. Being forced to beg for alms is an affront to one’s dignity and sense of self worth (the soul would much rather be working for a living). Intentional segregation snuffs out all hope of building on your love and belonging needs to create full, mature, transformative relationships with others. Self-induced or drug-induced trance states — including those brought on by prolonged periods of prayer, meditation, chanting, scriptural study, recitation of the Psalms, praying the Rosary, and contemplation of icons — all force the brain to divert important resources to parts of the brain that are of little or no use to people in their everyday lives.

Those who devote their daily lives to these practices are not balanced. They can’t be. It’s impossible to be balanced if you don’t choose balance on a daily basis. Balance isn’t a magical gift from God. It’s a daily choice that requires you to use all your best attributes in combination with your God-given free will. It’s a daily choice that draws upon your soul’s great courage.

The most toxic spiritual practice of all — one that’s unfortunately all too common in major world religions — is the goal of eradicating the self so one can become an empty vessel. This is the dumbest, stupidest, most dangerous practice imaginable, and I can’t state strongly enough how much we, the angels, want it to stop. But people have got it in their heads (thanks to mystics and mystery schools) that the people who have detached themselves from their own core selves are somehow more saintly, more virtuous in their spiritual devotion than regular folk. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A: So what’s the end result of these traditional practices? People join a cloistered religious community to get closer to God and end up getting farther and farther away from God because of damage to their brains?

J: Couldn’t have said it more clearly.

 

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Posted in "Escape", anagogic mysticism, apophatic mysticism, Christ Zone, Church of today, free will, healing, humility, Jesus' teachings, life and death, Realspiritik and tagged , | Leave a Comment
04 Sep 2011

TBM15: The Necessity of Forgiveness on the Spiral Path

So far, you may be feeling that I haven’t said anything new or different. This would be very disappointing, since it would mean there’s nothing new here for you to learn.

Aren’t you tired of that feeling — the feeling that no one is giving you straight answers to hard questions? It’s easy to find “easy answers” — 10 minutes to a perfect life! Just send 5 easy payments of $99 to the phone number on your screen! — but it’s not so easy to find straight answers.

The one straight answer you almost never hear about is Forgiveness. If you want to travel more than a few feet along the Spiral Path of healing, you’re going to have to be willing to work on Forgiveness.

Forgiveness can be described in a number of different ways. One way is to think of forgiveness is the dishcloth you use to clean up your mistakes. Another way to think of forgiveness is like learning to ride a bicycle under marathon conditions. At first, it's really hard. After a while, though, it becomes second nature to you and you can do it for the rest of your life without really thinking about it -- just like learning to ride bike.

Forgiveness can be described in a number of different ways. One way to think of forgiveness is like the dishcloth you use to clean up your mistakes. Another way to think of forgiveness is like learning to ride a bicycle for a marathon. At first, it’s really hard. After a while, though, it becomes second nature to you and you can do it for the rest of your life without really thinking too much about it. It becomes a natural part of your skill set — just like learning to ride a bike.

The mystery of Forgiveness is where the rubber meets the road. It’s where your soul straps on your walking shoes. Where the parts of your biological brain that are wired into your soul’s energy start to take charge again (as they were supposed to be doing all along). Where you begin to recognize your core identity, your core purpose, as a soul.

In the analogy of the spiritual kitchen, forgiveness is the dishcloth that allows you to clean up your mistakes as you go along.

Yup, the dishcloth.

Forgiveness isn’t the lightbulb that brings illumination to the kitchen. Forgiveness isn’t the secret family recipe for the Colonel’s special chicken or Grandma’s Christmas shortbread. And forgiveness isn’t a magical clock that turns time forward so you don’t have to look at or think about yesterday’s fallen souffle.

Forgiveness is the mundane dishcloth you pick up with your own hands and use to wipe the spilled cocoa from the counter. It’s the tool you use to clean up a mistake once you’ve admitted that you’ve made a mistake. (Or once you’ve admitted that somebody else has made a mistake.)

It’s not very mystical-sounding, is it?

No. Which is why you so rarely hear about it in religious or New Age teachings. Forgiveness is not magical and it’s not secret and it’s not reserved for just a few select, chosen, special students. So it doesn’t have much mystical razzle dazzle. It can’t be bought or sold, so it has no commercial value. It can’t be patented or put in pill form, so it has no pharmaceutical value. Instead, it’s an inner state. Both a choice and a gift. Once it’s yours, it’s yours, and it can’t be taken away from you. Ever.*

So right away you can see why it’s of no interest to Big Religion or Big Business.

One of the reasons the practice of forgiveness isn’t taught by mainstream religion is the embarrassment factor. The embarrassment of mistakes. The average person doesn’t want to admit his own mistakes, let alone the mistakes of his family and clan and revered religious tradition. In fact, there are few things in the human experience that cause more suffering than the refusal to admit one’s own mistakes.

The strange part about this stubborn refusal to be honest about mistakes is that it’s NOT intrinsic to your soul’s true nature. You weren’t born this stubborn. In fact, when you were a young child, you were constantly making mistakes, but it never slowed you down in your learning process because each time you made a mistake, you forgave yourself, learned from the mistake, and moved on.

Most people don’t remember this part of their lives. They think they’ve always been stubborn and unforgiving and quite willing to lie through their teeth in order to avoid the embarrassment of admitting a mistake.

My boss at work is quite willing to lie without blinking an eye whenever somebody close to her points out a mistake she’s made. She can’t deal with honest truth when the honest truth is directed at herself. She’s quick to point out other people’s mistakes, but she’s not good at taking responsibility for her own mistakes. She has a reflex action of trying to shift the blame to somebody else if she can. I don’t think she even realizes what she’s doing. It’s a learned biological response, a trained reflex, not a natural part of her true soul self.  But she’s been doing it for so long she doesn’t question it anymore. For her, it’s normal. Nonetheless, it’s hurtful. Hurtful to herself and hurtful to those she tries to blame for her own mistakes.

She and I don’t get along very well some days because I have a bad habit of being honest with her when she makes a mistake, and then forgiving her right on the spot. I’m also honest with her about my own mistakes. I try to communicate clearly and honestly about mistakes without holding grudges (since holding grudges is the very antithesis of forgiveness). I try to learn from mistakes — my own and others’.

Surprising as this may seem, my boss doesn’t like being treated this way. She doesn’t understand me because I don’t play by the grudgefest rules. She’s used to living in a world where people hold grudges. She knows how to respond to this sort of behaviour and she enjoys playing cat-and-mouse games of revenge (where she’s the cat and her staff members are the mouse). A few of us at work are refusing to play mouse. She finds this quite stressful at times. But, you know, that’s her problem.

When I say I forgive her, I don’t mean I choose to ignore the harm she’s created. I don’t mean I make excuses for her behaviour or pretend that bygones are bygones. I remember what she’s done. I remember her behaviour as clearly and objectively as I can. But I don’t “hang onto” the past. Instead, I allow the past to guide me and teach me so I can deal more effectively with the present. I understand that she’s responsible for her own choices, and I understand that she could be making different choices if she wanted to. It doesn’t do either of us any good to pretend otherwise. Pretending otherwise is just another form of lying. Forgiveness requires honesty.

I choose to love the person and reject the behaviour, rather than rejecting the person. This takes a lot of will power, especially on difficult days when somebody is REALLY not being his/her best self. There have been a few times for me in recent years when I don’t know how I would have got through the day without the decision to forgive, forgive, forgive. Forgiveness keeps your feet planted solidly on the Spiral Path. Forgiveness combined with courage helps you take a deep breath and keep on going, even when the terrain all around you is hostile and cruel (as it sometimes is). Forgiveness is the choice that allows you to move from the glass-half-empty-with-sour-lemon-juice to the glass-half-filled-with-sweet-lemonade.

Of course, you’re the one who has to supply the sugar.

 

* You can read more about what forgiveness feels like at Forgiveness: The Divine String of Pearls or Forgiveness as a Present Reality or Summing Up: Finding the Kingdom of God.

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Posted in building your intuition, forgiveness, free will, honesty, Peace Sequence, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy and tagged | Leave a Comment
24 Aug 2011

RS3: Learning to Like God

A: Jesus, why do you think there’s so much resistance to the idea that God is actually two distinct people, two distinct consciousnesses, a Mother God and a Father God working together to bring new life into being?

Learning to Like God Doesn't Mean You Have to Stop Having Fun (c) JAT 2013

Learning to Like God Doesn’t Mean You Have to Stop Having Fun (c) JAT 2013

J: I don’t think there’s one simple answer to that question. Human beings have been struggling for thousands of years with questions about who God is. The important thing to bear in mind is that people of faith have usually been in conflict with people of religion, regardless of place or time or culture. People of faith, wherever they live, are the people who listen for God’s presence with their hearts and bodies and minds and souls and courage. People of faith have a tendency to get sucked into groups run by people of religion. I’m defining “people of religion” as those who choose to obey the Laws and the Prophets.

A: Whose laws and whose prophets?

J: Everybody’s religious laws and everybody’s religious prophets when those laws and prophets contradict the obvious truths which God speaks to all people of the world each day.

A: Such as?

J: Such as the obvious truth that relationship is the foundation of all life. Human babies aren’t plucked from trees like ripe figs. At some time, there has to be an intimate relationship between male sperm and female ova. Even if this connection takes place in a test tube.

A: That hasn’t stopped scientists from cloning animals. And trying to clone human beings, I’m sure, though I doubt they’re talking out loud about this kind of Mengelian research.

J: The media have been creating the impression in the popular imagination that cloning is an easy, harmless, reliable, Newtonian process that obeys simple laws of Cause and Effect. Why, soon there’ll be home cloning kits for you on the shopping channel! Just think! You’ll be able to clone dear ol’ granny! The reality of cloning is much more complex, however. Beyond all the hidden struggles in labs and the fudged data and the attempts by major corporations to try to patent DNA that doesn’t belong to them, there have been serious failures and inexplicable weaknesses in the cloned creatures.

A: How do God the Mother and God the Father respond to these cloning projects?

J: The same way they respond to other acts of human psychopathy. They allow observable consequences to unfold so other people can see for themselves what a stupid idea it is.

A: Boy, sometimes it takes an awful lot of pain to get regular people to see the observable consequences of a stupid idea.

J: Human beings have free will. They can choose to be greedy and selfish, as many corporate researchers are choosing to be, or they can choose to be compassionate and clear-headed. Many of these corporate researchers see no contradiction in also being practising conservative Christians or Jews or Muslims because Abrahamic orthodoxy insists that God has given human beings special rights and privileges as “sovereigns” over all creatures of Planet Earth (Genesis 1:28 and, by inference, Genesis 2-3). Many, many religious people have assumed this means they can do whatever the hell they want on Earth, and God will simply nod and smile and say, “My, what a good boy you are!” Obviously, there’s something wrong with this picture.

A: Nuclear weapons spring quickly to mind.

J: Yes, plus toxic wastes poured into the ground and water. Diversion of major fresh water sources. Drilling for oil in unsafe and harmful environments such as thousands of metres below the sea bed. There’s not a lot of common sense or clear-headedness — let alone compassion — in any of these choices.

A: Yet you’re not advocating that we give up all technology and return to an ancient agrarian lifestyle.

J: No, I’m not asking people to give up their phones and their cars and go live on a barren mountaintop to get closer to God. On the other hand, a little balance might be nice. People might spend a little less time with their phones and their cars and a little more time with their children.

A: But that would mean spending time on their relationships.

J: It never ceases to amaze me that pious folk who refuse to treat anyone but themselves with respect will turn around and insist they have all the answers about how to be in relationship with God. How can a person who knows nothing about relationships claim to be an expert in relationships? How can a man who treats all women as inferior claim to know who God is? It’s narcissistic bullshit, nothing more.

A: These guys are too busy throwing themselves on their status-saturated swords to notice they’re not very nice people.

J: In orthodox Western Christianity, the image of God is very much one of the old bearded guy in the sky who’s throwing himself on his status-saturated sword for the sake of all those little peons who are too weak and sinful to make any good relationship choices ever.

A: God as the ultimate narcissist. No wonder so many people of faith have rejected the traditional Christian image of God. What’s to like?

J: It’s pretty hard to love and trust somebody when you believe there are no grounds to even like him or her.

A: So . . . it would make sense for the church of the third millennium to show people ways in which they can like God the Mother and God the Father as people and as divine parents. That way they can start to build a solid, respectful, daily relationship with God.

(c) Image*After

(c) Image*After

J: Naturally, it will come as no surprise that having a respectful relationship with God is no different than having a respectful relationship with your neighbour. If you can’t treat the one with kindness, you sure as heck can’t treat the other.

It’s only common sense.

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Posted in Church of today, faith, free will, Law (Nomos), Mother and Father God, Mother God, psychopathy, Realspiritik, the right to be right, theodicy and tagged | Leave a Comment
01 Aug 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J: Couldn’t have said it better myself.

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

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

A: Like the Book of Revelation.

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

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

A: God didn’t stop him, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A: Healing instead of revenge.

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

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

Forever 1

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

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

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

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

No other truth is acceptable.

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

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

JR58: The "My Fellow American" Interfaith Initiative

A: I was contacted this week by a person who’s working with the Unity Productions Foundation on an interfaith initiative called My Fellow American. The goal of the initiative is to encourage Americans to think of their fellow Americans who happen to be Muslim as fellow Americans. There’s a 2 minute film produced by Unity, and there are also uploaded videos and stories from various supporters of the idea that all Americans are equally American, regardless of religion. What do you think of this project?

J (grinning): I think you should post the address.

A: Oh yeah. Good thinking. The address is http://myfellowamerican.us/

I discovered when I went to watch the film how truly outdated my computer really is. Computer updates are not my thing. Good thing the computer at work has more juice in it.

The person who contacted me also wondered if I could maybe Tweet about the project if I checked it out and liked it. I don’t know how to tell her this, but I don’t even own a cell phone. So the Tweeting is pretty much out.

J: Everybody has their own way of communicating with others.

A: Anyway, I certainly can’t argue with the basic principle of treating all your neighbours with dignity and respect and compassion and kindness regardless of religion. This is what makes a society internally strong.

J: The one thing people have to remember is that all human beings are children of God. A Muslim woman is just as a much a child of God as the saints of Christian history. To deny a woman dignity and respect simply because she’s Muslim is to withhold divine love from your neighbour. It’s as simple as that.

A: I think some people are afraid that if they love and accept the woman with an open heart they’ll be required to love and accept all the religious teachings that are part of her tradition. At least that’s how they view it.

Regardless of religious affiliation, we're all children of God. Photo (c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

Regardless of religious affiliation, we’re all children of God. Photo (c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

J: Religious teachings are very much a human thing. Divine love, on the other hand, is a soul thing. Divine love always trumps religious teachings. Every religion on the face of Planet Earth today has problems — problems with abusive doctrines, problems with gender issues, problems with “law,” and problems with balance. Every religion. Islam is no different from Christianity in this regard. Sure, Islam has some problems. But so does orthodox Western Christianity. This is no excuse for failing to love your neighbour and failing to believe in his or her best self. Everybody’s struggling. People of all religions have to hold each other up. People have to work together. It’s the only way to find healing.

A: The 10-year anniversary of 9/11 is coming up. Some people haven’t got over the shock. They’re still looking for someone to blame.

J: If they’re looking for someone to blame, then they should be looking at the unassailable laws of neurophysiology, not at religion. Only a seriously, seriously dysfunctional individual thinks it’s okay to blow up buildings “in the name of God.” This applies across the board to all religions and all cultures. Christianity has had its fair share of psychopaths in martyrs’ clothing, too. Psychopathy is a social, medical, and educational issue. Psychopathy is about as far from genuine relationship with God as it’s possible to get.

The vast majority of Muslims and Christians and those of other faiths are doing their best to get closer to God — not farther away from God and faith — even though they make mistakes along the way. People of all faiths are constantly learning, changing, growing. Traditions change. Religious teachings change. The one core truth that doesn’t change is the reality of the good soul, and the potential of all human beings to help each other understand this reality. If you allow yourself to be open to this truth, amazing things can happen in your community. Whatever community you happen to live in.

A: There are some psychopaths in positions of religious authority.

J: Yes. But there are also psychopaths in positions of political and economic and educational authority. Psychopathy is an entirely separate issue from the question of faith. Inherent to the definition of psychopathy is a total lack of conscience and empathy — in other words, a disconnection from all that enables true faith, true relationship with God. A psychopath seeks status, not faith, when he or she chooses to blow up buildings. It’s entirely a question of status addiction. Can we say this status addiction is true of “all Muslims”? Well, OF COURSE NOT. This would be the same as saying that every person who lives in Boston must be a status-addicted psychopath simply because he or she happens to live in Boston. It isn’t right or fair to make such a claim.

A: Claims such as this have been fairly common over the course of history, though.

J: True. These claims fall under the umbrella of the HDM Myths that you posted about on Concinnate Christianity. (http://concinnatechristianity.blogspot.com/2010/11/it-takes-village-non-hdm-village-that.html ). Group myths of Hierarchy, Dualism, and Monism. Again, these are human myths, human choices, that have nothing to do with the faith of the soul. Challenge the myths and heal the soul, remembering always that the soul is not the aspect of the self that’s perpetuating these myths. It’s certain parts of the biological brain that have gone off the rails, so to speak, and now enjoy the addictive high of schadenfreude. For a person suffering from status addiction, there’s just nothing better than a good hit of mental revenge and religious hatred to get you through the day. It’s cheaper than buying whiskey and cigarettes.

A: That’s a pretty tough statement.

J: Addiction is a pretty tough reality. Addiction destroys lives. Better to be honest about its effects.

A: Because, as you often say, healing follows insight.

J: My hat’s off to the My Fellow American participants because they’re doing their best to help others in their community be their best selves. And they’re working together as a team to teach and share and communicate in relationship with each other. As an angel, I can’t ask for more than that.

Addendum, October 16, 2023: It’s been 12 years since I wrote this post with the soul who lived as Jesus.

The world has changed greatly during this time. One of the unfortunate changes has been an ideological shift towards monism within many educational institutions and humanitarian organizations in Western nations. This shift has taken society further away from the idea that people hold individual responsibility for their own choices. In place of the long-held Judeo-Christian value system built on free will, personal responsibility, and accountability to your own inner wisdom (what we call “conscience”), there has been a push to impose a value system based on “group banners” behind which individuals can hide.

No one can be his or her best self if “group banners” (especially religious “group banners”) are used as an excuse for hanging onto harmful traditions, hateful actions, or justification for revenge.

Mother Father God and your angels don’t care what your religious teachers say. What matters to God is how you choose to use your free will as a human being during your time on Planet Earth. If you decide it’s a great idea to hate other people on the basis of their religion, that’s not okay with God. The recent resurgence of anti-Semitism is therefore not okay with your own soul or your angels.

Anti-Semitism isn’t the only example of extreme hatred in today’s world, but right now it’s a cauldron of suffering, especially for those who are doing the hating.

It’s your job as a human being — as a soul in human form — to learn how to look past the “group banners” that breed hatred and divisiveness. Seek the best in others and stand your ground as a child of God. Treat each person you meet as an individual who is responsible for his or her own choices towards others and towards God. This probably means you’ll have to reject some of the destructive religious doctrines that are causing problems in the world today. But if that’s what you have to do so you can hear your own conscience, that’s what you have to do.

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Posted in conscience & morality, faith, free will, hatred, HDM Myths, Islam, Jesus Redux, monism, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness, Soul, status addiction and tagged , | Leave a Comment
02 Jul 2011

JR54: The Meaning of "the Son of Man"

A: We’ve been talking a lot about the Kingdom and gardens and finding peace through personal responsibility. How does the phrase “the Son of Man” fit into all this? If ever there was a phrase in the New Testament that people don’t understand, it’s the “Son of Man” phrase — ho hyios tou anthropou in Koine Greek, bar nasa in Aramaic, and ben adam in Hebrew. Somehow I suspect the translation of the Greek phrase into English doesn’t do justice to the original meaning.

J: It’s very easy to forget that the Hebrew word adam wasn’t used primarily as a name in Second Temple Judaism. Adam can also be translated as “ground/soil” or as “humankind.” Similarly, the Greek word anthropos meant “humankind,” not just “human beings of the male sex.” These nuances are lost in the traditional English translation “Son of Man.” A much better translation in English would be “essence of humanity” or “highest potential of humankind.” I used the phrase ho hyios tou anthropou to express a concept — a concept for which no vocabulary existed at the time.

“Jesus said: Adam came into being from enormous power and wealth, but he was never worthy of you, for had he been worthy of you he would not have died” (Gospel of Thomas 85). This saying doesn’t make much sense unless you stop to consider what Genesis 2-3 says about the allegorical relationship between humankind (Adam) and God. In the Garden of Eden, there are two trees that embody the deepest and most mystical elements of God, Creation, and faith: (1) the tree of life and (2) the tree of knowledge of good and evil. These two trees are supposed to be in balance, and while they are, Adam and Eve live a life of trusting relationship with God. At some point, however, Eve, followed quickly by Adam, decide they’re more interested in having knowledge than in having a trusting relationship with God. So they eat of the metaphorical fruit from the tree of knowledge and find themselves aligned with the many ancient philosopher kings who also chose knowledge over relationship with God. In Jesus’ teachings, choosing a life that places knowledge far above trust, love, and relationship with God is really no life at all. For Jesus, the mind is important, but not more important than the heart. So the metaphorical example of Adam and Eve — who lost the balance between mind and heart and as a result struggled for the rest of their lives with “death” instead of “life” — is not the example we should be following. Seek instead the path of peace that’s based on relationship with God. This ivory depicting The Fall of Man (by Balthasar Griessmann, c. 1670-1690) is part of the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2018.

A: What concept were you trying to teach about? Enlightenment?

J: No. Forgiveness.

A: Sayings 85 and 86 in the Gospel of Thomas refer to “Adam” and to “the son of man.” Saying 85 says, “Jesus said: Adam came into being from enormous power and wealth, but he was never worthy of you, for had he been worthy of you he would not have died.” Saying 86 goes on to say, “Jesus said: Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay down his head and rest.” Thomas 86 also appears almost word for word in Luke 9:58. How do these verses relate to the concept of forgiveness?

J (sighing): I’ve always been fond of word plays, puns, alliterations, rhymes, and poetry. “Foxes have holes and birds of heaven have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head” sounded catchier in Greek than it does in English.

A: But I guess the important thing to keep in mind is the fact that you weren’t talking about a particular man in this saying. You weren’t talking about yourself. You were trying to explain a concept that was unfamiliar to your students.

J (nodding): The people around me had been raised on a steady diet of values that had no place in humanity’s relationship with God the Mother and God the Father. No matter where you turned, you heard tales of might, tales of glory, tales of revenge. Everyone thought they had the “correct” God — or gods — on their side. Everyone thought they were truly pious, truly deserving of divine reward. Everyone had their own version of the “God will avenge me” myth. The avenging God had as many “faces” as a circus performer has costumes.

If you were a person with a black sense of humour — as I came to be — you could go to bed in the evening and count all the ways you’d offended this god and that god in umpteen hidden ways on that day alone. You could count all the ways you’d be punished. You could count all the ways your masters would take revenge against you for your “heinous crimes” against God. Of course, it was your earthly masters — not the unseen gods of heaven — who were the ones who had the rod in their hands to beat you. It was your earthly masters who would use any “divine” excuse possible to beat you into submission and humility.

But they’d often go easy on you if you offered a payment. Some sort of compensation — an eye for an eye. Some sort of bribe. Contract laws dictated what terms of compensation were acceptable. These contract laws weren’t civil laws in the way you’d understand a Western nation’s legal codes today. These contract laws had political and economic purposes, of course, but they were primarily religious laws and traditions. Nomos in Greek. Nomos provided a list of crimes and a list of acceptable “payments” to balance the scales if you committed a crime. Often these “payments” were sacrifices. Temple sacrifices. In most Greco-Roman religions of the time — not just Judaism — you could bring a sacrifice (a payment, really) to the local temple so you could literally “buy back” God’s favour. This is what “redemption” used to mean. It meant trading something you had — money or goods or livestock or agricultural produce — to get something you needed: divine favour. It had nothing to do with divine love or divine forgiveness as you and I have defined these concepts on this site.

A: And then there was slavery. The actual buying and selling of human beings based on contract laws. A slave could, under certain circumstances, “buy back” his rights. Or a slave could be manumitted — legally freed by his or her “owner.” But contract law gave people the excuse they needed to treat others cruelly. Contract law justified their cruelty.

J: They gave themselves permission to violate the soul’s own understanding of free will, justice, integrity, and respect. They were listening to their own selfishness and not to God’s voice. And I said so. Out loud. Frequently.

A: So your friends and students were conditioned to understand their relationship with God in terms of contract law. In terms of payments to a master or sovereign lord. In terms of monetary debts or “obligatory service contracts” (i.e. slavery).

J: Slavery was — and is — a terrible violation of the soul, of what it means to be a soul, a child of God. Slavery is an artificially created human condition in which a slave’s personal boundaries are invaded in every way imaginable. A slave is forced to give up all rights to physical and sexual safety. All rights to choose where and with whom to be in relationship. All rights to follow his or her own soul’s calling. Even a slave who has property — and there were many wealthy slaves in the Roman Empire — even such a slave is taught to believe he doesn’t actually own the skin he’s in. It’s not his. It belongs to somebody else. His own skin is “dead” to him. His mind and his heart may be free, but his skin — his body — is dead. He can’t view himself as whole — as a “whole bean” — because in his own mind and in the mind of his society he isn’t whole. He’s a sort of ghoulish inhabitant of a body that belongs to somebody else. If, in addition to being a slave, he’s also sexually violated — a fate that was brutally common for young boys and girls in the first century Empire — chances are extremely high that he’ll grow up to be seriously mentally ill. Why? Because children who are beaten and sexually abused and psychologically tortured bear the scars of that treatment in their biological brains, bodies, and psyches until they are healed. It’s a simple statement of fact.

A: You can see how this kind of treatment would lead to dissociative disorders. A person who’s disconnected from emotions. Disconnected from a strong sense of boundaries and personal space.

J: I was trying to get at the point that even lowly foxes and humble birds are given their own personal space, their own “home,” their own sanctuary by God. Foxes and birds will defend their own homes with all their might, as they have a right to do. They don’t have the right to steal another creature’s home, but they do have the right to protect the one they have. God gives no less a right to all human beings. No human contract law “written in stone” anywhere at any time can supersede the obvious truth that each human being owns his own skin and is the sovereign of his own domain, his own personal kingdom. When he knows this and feels this and lives this, he feels alive. He feels whole. He feels at peace.

A: This is the state of “living” that you refer to so often in the Gospel of Thomas.

J: Yes. It’s a psychological state of balance and health. There’s nothing occult about it. It’s the natural outcome of making choices that lead to emotional maturity. It’s the natural outcome of choosing to live according to the highest potential of humankind. It’s the truest essence of humanity.

A: People being their best selves. On purpose.

J: Yes. On purpose. It’s so very much about the purpose. About the purposefulness of “living.” Which is where forgiveness comes in.

A: How so?

J: Christians are usually taught to think of forgiveness as an act of grace on God’s part, as a somewhat sudden and fickle choice on God’s part, as something that human beings can participate in but can’t initiate. Paul tries very hard to give this impression to his readers. But forgiveness is the opposite of suddenness and fickleness and “divine transcendence.” Forgiveness is purposefulness. Purposefulness of a particular kind. Forgiveness is what you get when you choose to combine your free will and your courage and your love. There’s nothing accidental or preordained about it. It’s a choice. An ongoing choice that calls upon the greatest resources of the eternal soul — each and every soul. It’s the choice to love someone wholly in the absence of payment or retribution or just compensation. Divine forgiveness is not settlement of a debt. Debt doesn’t enter into the equation. Education, mentorship, and personal responsibility enter into the equation, but not debt.

A: This is soooooooo not what they taught me in theological school.

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Posted in Book of Genesis, boundary issues, forgiveness, free will, gender and sexuality, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Law (Nomos), life and death, Peace Sequence, relationship with God, religion and mental Illness, slavery, Son of Man and tagged , | Leave a Comment
22 Jun 2011

JR52: Pelagius and Personal Responsibility

A: In our discussions lately, you’ve been emphasizing the role of personal responsibility in the journey of healing and faith, and I’ve been waiting for somebody to jump up and accuse you of being a Pelagian. How do you feel about the Pelagian philosophy of free will?

For the record, Pelagius was born sometime in the late 300’s CE, and died around 418 CE. He and his followers drew vicious attacks from Augustine of Hippo and Jerome, and Pelagianism was condemned as a heresy in 431 CE.

J: Without getting too much into the details of the debate between Augustine and Pelagius on the nature of free will, I’d have to say that both of them were wrong.

A: How so?

J: Neither of them had a balanced view of what it means to be a human being. Augustine had no faith at all in the ability of human beings to consciously change their lives and their communities through human initiative. He thought people would be happier if they just accepted their miserable lot in life. Acceptance of Original Sin and concupiscence was the best they could hope for, in his view. His views on human nature have created no end of suffering for devout Christians over the centuries.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Pelagius preached the opposite extreme. He taught the path of spiritual ascent — anagogic mysticism — which says that people can achieve a state of holiness and perfection if they just try hard enough. He placed the entire burden on the individual. This is no less damaging to people’s lives than Augustine’s idea. Neither man understood — nor wanted to understand — that the path of healing and relationship with God is a path of balance. There must be a balance between personal responsibilities and group responsibilities, a balance between personal responsibilities and divine responsibilities. In particular, there must be a willingness on the part of individuals AND on the part of groups to be honest about their own limits. This honesty is the foundation of great strength for souls-in-human-form. Unfortunately, both Augustine and Pelagius hacked away at this foundation with all their might. They both snatched away a source of deep courage and strength for Christians, and insisted on despair and self-blame in its place. It was a cruel thing to do.

A: So your understanding of personal responsibility isn’t the same as what Pelagius taught.

J: It’s important to note that in the Peace Sequence we’ve been discussing, I’ve placed personal responsibility as the third “gear” in the sequence, not the first gear. Pelagius and others have tried to place personal responsibility in the first position on the Peace Sequence, not the third position. They’ve tried to equate free will with personal responsibility, as if they’re synonymous, as if they’re exactly the same thing. But they’re not.

A: Can you elaborate on that?

J: Personal responsibility is perhaps the most complex, most advanced skill set that human beings can learn during their lifetime here on Planet Earth. It’s not a single skill or a single choice. It’s what we referred to earlier as a “meta-choice” — a pasting together of several smaller choices into something bigger. A meta-choice is so well integrated, so cohesive, so holistic that it often seems like a single choice. But actually it’s a blend of several other choices. It’s a blend of the choice to be courageous, the choice to be empathetic, the choice to be humble, the choice to be intuitive, the choice to be well organized, and the choice to be self disciplined. It’s all those things together.

A: You mean . . . maturity. Emotional, psychological, and physical maturity.

J: Yes. It’s maturity. It’s individuation. It’s compassion. It’s Whole Brain Thinking.

A: Using the whole toolkit of the human brain instead of isolated parts of it.

J: The human brain has long been treated as a single organ, though really it’s an interconnected series of semi-autonomous sectors, each with its own specialized ability to “choose” on behalf of the whole. When all the different choices work together towards a common goal, the human brain works smoothly. If “feels” like a single whole, a single choice. But really it’s a combination of choices. When a person has arrived at the stage in life when he or she “gets” the concept of personal responsibility, it means his/her biological brain is working in a balanced, holistic way. The fruits of this long process should — if all goes well — START to be visible in the actions of people 16 to 18 years of age. The process isn’t normally complete, however, until about age 21 or 22. If all goes well.

A: Last week, after Vancouver lost to Boston in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals, large crowds of young people — many of them now identified as coming from “good” families — rioted in downtown Vancouver. There was a lot of looting and vandalism. Something tells me these young people haven’t developed the Whole Brain Thinking approach to personal responsibility.

J: There were some people in the crowd who stepped forward and did the right thing to protect others who were being beaten. These Good Samaritans are the individuals who instinctively know “the right thing to do” in a crisis. Their sense of personal responsibility, of right and wrong, of courage and compassion doesn’t desert them in an emergency. In fact, it may only be during an unexpected emergency that they themselves realize for the first time that they “get it.” They act first and ask questions later — fortunately for those they can help.

“Do not give what is holy to dogs, or they might throw them upon the manure pile. Do not throw pearls [to] swine, or they might make [mud] of it” (Gospel of Thomas 93). Jesus taught several centuries before either Augustine or Pelagius, so of course we don’t expect to see any reference to these later theologians in the Gospel of Thomas. On the other hand, Jesus had unflattering things to say about both the Pharisees and the Herodians, whose teachings resembled those of Augustine and Pelagius respectively. It seems likely that in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was using the metaphor of “dogs” to refer to the Pharisees and the metaphor of “swine” to refer to the Herodians. It seems Jesus wasn’t impressed with either group’s approach to God’s holy things. Recently, I visited a Toronto Conservatory where several generations of cardinals have learned to enter and exit through the automated roof openings so they can build nests for their young in a warm, safe place. These birds not only provide basic food and shelter for their offspring, but also, in this case, are teaching their young an unusual and complex skill set that calls upon them to maximize their latent potential without exceeding their limits. In other words, the parent cardinals are mentoring their offspring. Photo credit JAT 2017.

 A: You’re saying that maturity — personal responsibility — is the product of many years of education and mentorship of children. Is that right?

J: Yes. Education is the first “gear” in the process, but education alone isn’t enough to guide a child towards maturity and personal responsibility.

A: As the well-educated youths who rioted in Vancouver proved all too well.

J: Along with education there must also be appropriate, mature mentorship. It’s the older mentors who are supposed to guide children in their emotional growth with firm, consistent, boundary-respecting compassionate tough love. Parents, grandparents, teachers, sports coaches, medical professionals, and many others can all be mentors for children if they so choose.

A: What about ministers and priests? Can they be mentors?

J: Ideally, yes. However, realistically speaking, they rarely are.

A: Why not?

J: Because most of them have deeply embraced either Augustine’s idea about human nature or Pelagius’s idea. Neither approach helps a young person learn how to find the balance they so desperately need. In addition, those ministers who try to inject balance into their youth work are also the ones most likely to have rejected the idea of the soul and the spiritual life. It’s lose-lose for ordained clerics.

A: Unless they’re willing to accept new doctrines of faith.

J: For that to happen, they’d have to apply their own God-given free will. It’s a choice each cleric will have to make on the basis of his or her own conscience. That’s what divine courage is all about.

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Church of today, conscience & morality, empathy, free will, honesty, Jesus Redux, meta-choice, Original Sin, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment
31 May 2011

JR45: Lien or No Lien on Your Soul?

My red car (c) JAT 2015

“His disciples said to him: When will the resurrection of the dead take place and when will the new world come? He said to them: What you look for has come, but you do not know it” (Gospel of Thomas 51). In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus talks often about “life” and “beginnings,” yet his sayings involving “death” are not what we typically find in eschatological or apocalyptic teachings. Rather, the sayings about “life” and “death” in Thomas seem closely related to parts of the first century CE text known as The Didache, in which “the way of life” and “the way of death” are used as metaphors for how to live a moral life in full relationship with God. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus spends quite a bit of time and energy trying to persuade the disciples to let go of the eschatological doctrines held by the Pharisees and the Essenes at that time.  Photo of my red car. Photo credit JAT 2015.

A: Last week, I bought a 2007 Pontiac to replace my 1998 Nissan, which was close to death. The Carproof report found a lien against the Pontiac — a financing lien held by Chrysler. At first I wasn’t worried. I figured the paperwork for the clearance of the lien hadn’t yet made it into the computer system at the proper government ministry. But being a thorough person, I decided to phone the ministry yesterday morning to make sure the lien had been cleared. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the lien was still attached to my car! I quickly got the problem straightened out with the dealer I bought the car from. But in the meantime I had a chance to reflect on my feelings about the lien. In Ontario, as in many other jurisdictions, a person who unwittingly buys a car or house that has a lien against it can lose the property they bought. It can be legally seized by the lien holder if the debt hasn’t been paid by the original debtor. The car you think you own outright can be towed away in the blink of an eye by the original lender. It’s a scary thought.

Anyway, I was thinking about my feelings around the lien on my car. I was noticing how upset I was at the thought that somebody could — theoretically — swoop down on my little Pontiac and take it away with no say on my part. I was thinking how I’d paid for the car in full, how I could lose all the money I’d invested (unless I were inclined to sue, which would cost me even more money). I was thinking how unfair it would be for such a thing to happen. I’d bought the car in good faith. Why should I be punished for somebody else’s mistake? Or somebody else’s willful fraud?

So I’m standing in the bathroom and I’m drying my hair so I can get ready for work and it suddenly dawns on me that the feelings I’m expressing to myself about the lien on the car are the same feelings I have about orthodox Western Christianity’s teachings on the soul. The Church teaches us there’s a lien on our souls!

J (grinning): Yes. Not a nice feeling, is it?

A: No! It totally sucks. I never noticed till yesterday how deeply, deeply unfair the church’s claims are. I knew their claims about the soul were based on the writings of Paul, Tertullian, Augustine, and so on. I knew their claims were self-serving. I knew their claims were just plain wrong in light of God’s loving and forgiving nature. But I never felt the unfairness of it before at such a deep level — at a gut level, a visceral level. It’s just wrong to tell people their soul can be taken away from them by lien-holders. It’s so . . . so . . . unfair. And cruel. It’s cruel to tell people they have to invest themselves wholly in their faith while at any time the great big tow truck in the sky could show up to haul them or their loved ones away to the fiery pits of hell. Not to pay their own debts, but to pay somebody else’s debts! Namely Adam and Eve’s debts!

J: Ah, the wages of sin.

A: Very funny. This God-and-Devil-as-lien-holders thing means that devout Christians are always looking over their shoulder, waiting for the cosmic tow truck they can’t do anything about. It makes people feel helpless. It makes them feel like slaves-in-waiting. Their soul isn’t their own. Their time isn’t their own. Their life and their choices and their free will aren’t really their own. They’re always on tenterhooks because they think they don’t fully own their own soul. This is abusive.

J: That’s why it works. From the perspective of certain members of the church hierarchy — stretching all the way back to the time of Paul and his backers — it’s an excellent strategy for gaining control of the populace. People who feel helpless and hopeless tend to cause less trouble. They ask fewer questions. They tend to do what they’re told because they’re frightened. Frightened people turn to strong leaders — in this case, church leaders. The Church is using a psychological control strategy that other groups in other cultures have used to similar effect. Paul’s teachings have been particularly successful in this regard.

The teachings of myself and other like-minded spiritual teachers are useless for this kind of psychological strategy. Totally useless. You can’t frighten people into submission if you’re actually giving them real hope. Real hope doesn’t come from words. Real hope comes from actions — from people’s ongoing choices to help their neighbours. Real hope comes from healing and relationship and dignity and change. If the early church had wanted to teach real hope, it wouldn’t have chosen the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the Chalcedon Creed as its operative statements of faith.

A: Ah. You mean they might have mentioned the themes of divine love, forgiveness, healing, redemption (as opposed to salvation), and egalitarianism?

J: If the bishops in the first few centuries of Christianity had spent one tenth the time on compassion that they spent on their endless arguments over the “substance” of the Trinity, medieval Europe would have been a much nicer place to live in.

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Posted in "4 S's", free will, hope, humility, Jesus Redux, life and death, occult themes, Original Sin, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, resurrection, Soul, Trinitarianism and tagged | Leave a Comment
23 May 2011

JR42: Harold Camping’s Failed Apocalyptic Prophecy . . . Like, There’s a Surprise

A: Well, it’s May 23, and the world didn’t end two days ago as prophesied by Harold Camping and his multi-million dollar non-profit apocalyptic Christian media ministry. The 200 million people who were supposed to be taken up into heaven in the Rapture are still here. Slightly impoverished after giving their money to Camping, but still here. All is well with the universe.

J: People are easily parted from their assets once they’ve lost their common sense.

A: I read the Globe and Mail on-line. Usually when I check an article there are a few dozen readers’ comments — 40 or 50 posts at most. Yesterday, by 2:50 p.m., there were 1,052 comments attached to an article by Garance Burke (Associated Press) called “Believers confused as Judgment Day doesn’t come.” I didn’t read the comments. But I thought it was interesting that a failed prophecy from a retired civil engineer in a different country would attract so much attention.

J: People have very strong opinions about religion and religious leaders.

A: Can’t argue with you there. So let’s talk about angels instead — souls who are not currently incarnated as human beings on Planet Earth. How do you and other angels feel about apocalyptic prophesies?

J (chuckling): Isn’t this a holiday in Canada? Wouldn’t you rather be outside barbequing or something?

A: It started raining again a few minutes ago. There’s been a lot of rain and cool weather this spring. All the more reason to sit down and do some typing.

J: Well, it’ll come as no surprise to you that angels are fully aware of the kinds of things that are being said about us by religious leaders in various parts of the world. You could say we have our own clipping service.

Most people have been conditioned to believe that apocalyptic prophecy is a rare and sacred gift granted by God. Few people realize that from the point of view of God’s angels, all claims from apocalyptic human prophets look like temples — temples to the glory of narcissistic humans. Nothing good comes from prophecies about the End Times, and your angels know it. They see the fear, contempt, and justification of hatred that pour into every aspect of your life if you buy into these unloving lies about God. This is one temple where your angels will always let you fall flat on your face. Shown in this photo are remnants of the temple pediment found during excavations of the Roman Baths at Bath, England (because all good Remnants must come to an end). Photo credit JAT 2023.

A: A man like Harold Camping is giving God bad press — telling people that God is so narcissistic and selfish that “he” enthusiastically plays Russian Roulette with his own children. Do angels care about this bad press? Does God?

J: Would you be happy if the people who claim to know you went around town saying you’re a controlling, manipulative, obsessive compulsive, right wing, politically conservative, Medicare-hating, gun-loving bigot who hates gays, people of colour, and women?

A: No. I’d know they were lying, and I’d forgive them. But I’d still be hurt.

J: Same with angels. Every day in every culture these lies about God are being preached. Angels not only feel hurt on behalf of God the Mother and God the Father, but they feel hurt on behalf of the souls who speak these lies while they’re struggling with human brain dysfunction.

You can be very sure that Harold Camping’s own guardian angels are now very relieved to have the whole thing over with and the lie of his prophecy revealed for what it is — not just among his own followers, but among all those who heard about it on the daily news.

A: Camping’s angels aren’t upset that he’s been embarrassed in front of millions of people?

J: Far from it. They know he’s hurt a lot of people with his narcissistic predictions. At the same time, they know that his harmful choices emerged from his dysfunctional human brain — not from his true self, not from his soul. They forgive him, but they also have to do the right thing by him and by others. They have to allow people to see the consequences of these kinds of abusive choices. If they protect Camping from the consequences of his own choices, and if they protect his followers from their own arrogance and stupidity, how will it be possible for human beings to learn not to make these kinds of choices? Tough Love is an angel’s expression of courage, trust, and faith in the ability of human beings to live their human lives in loving ways. Divine ways. Ways that don’t prey on other people’s vulnerabilities.

A: Ooooooohhh. I can just hear the response from readers. What you’re saying about Tough Love sounds perilously close to the idea of divine punishment — an idea that many liberal and progressive Christians reject as incompatible with the idea of a loving and forgiving God.

J: I can’t help it if some individuals want to reject the possibility of Tough Love from God and God’s angels. Usually the people who are most keen to reject this belief are the ones who are most interested in NOT having to learn from their own mistakes.

A: The narcissists.

J: Religious narcissists — and there are plenty of those — employ a number of psychological defences to try to shift responsibility for their own mistakes onto other people or onto other time frames. Religious doctrines such as Original Sin, Satan, Judgment Day, and the Rapture make it possible for the narcissists to stop blaming themselves for their own choices. They can shift the blame onto “conditions” that are outside their control. “Conditions” that make it easy for them to shrug their shoulders and say — with Godfather-like equanimity — “Hey, we can’t help being who we are. One day God will make us answer for our crimes, but not today. Today we have a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card and we plan to use it. Because we can. So screw you.”

Really, I mean, come on. Do people think God can’t hear that? Of course God can hear that. God forgives them when they say it, which is exactly what you’d expect from a loving and forgiving God. But forgiving somebody means you have faith in their true potential, their truest and most loving nature. Forgiving somebody means you don’t walk away from them when they’re in distress. Forgiving somebody means you do your best to help them better understand the choices they’re making. This usually means you have to let them experience consequences for their choices. That’s how they begin to recognize the harm caused by their abusive choices. Every loving parent knows this.

A: Loving parents also know you have to “choose your battles.” You can’t harangue your child about every little mistake, or he stops listening. You have to save your authoritative tone for the times when it really matters.

J: Guardian angels are no different. Their job is to help guide their human “foster children,” if you will, in the direction of greater compassion, greater balance, greater common sense. They have complete discretion and free will in carrying out this task. Sometimes they decide to help soften the consequences of a really poor human choice. Sometimes they decide to let the consequences build into one mega-consequence that hurts like hell. This is the reality. God has free will and angels have free will. Therefore, God and God’s angels are free to create consequences or not as they see fit. They aren’t bound by religious contract laws. Neither are they bound by laws of cause and effect. God is a heck of a lot smarter than the Law of Cause and Effect would suggest.

A: I don’t think religious narcissists actually want God to be smarter.

“His disciples questioned him: Should we fast? In what way should we pray? Should we give to charity? From which foods should we abstain? Jesus responded: Do not lie. If there is something that you hate, do not do it, for everything is revealed beneath heaven. Nothing hidden will fail to be displayed. Nothing covered will remain undisclosed (Gospel of Thomas 6).” This life-size Roman bronze hand is covered in sacred symbols — well, sacred to occult believers, anyway. It dates from 200-400 CE and was found at Caglia, Umbria, in Central Italy. It’s on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017.

 J: True. Then again, that’s what narcissism is all about. It’s about human beings whose brains are so dysfunctional — whether from head injury, toxic substances, stress hormones, malnutrition, sleep deprivation, lack of social and emotional supports, abusive upbringing, or lack of education — that they start trying to cope by inventing inner myths about their own wonderfulness and superiority and breathtaking talent. There’s no room within the myth for somebody else who’s smarter or faster or stronger. Even if that somebody else is God.

Of course, this is why religious narcissists rely so heavily on the theme of humility. A person of humility — as opposed to a person of humbleness — can see in a logical and practical way that it isn’t very smart to go around proclaiming to be as smart as God, if not smarter. That’s no way to recruit followers who’ll willingly give you money and tell you how wonderful you are. So you don the sackcloth of humility, and you tell everyone who’ll listen that you’re just an empty vessel waiting to be filled by Spirit, by God’s inspired Word. That’s how the world acquires its apocalyptic prophets.

A: So it’s layers upon layers. A myth of personal superiority that has to be cloaked in another myth — the myth of humility. Then, when this isn’t enough to get you the reverence you crave, you add other layers, other myths, each more convoluted than the last to explain why you deserve to be treated as “special.”

J: This is what happens when people aren’t honest with themselves about their own abilities, their own intentions, and their own unhealed anger. The lies build and build on top of each other. After a while the lies can take on an entire imaginary life of their own. Such is the case with orthodox Western Christianity. Its official doctrines are largely a body of lies. Only when individual Christians choose to help their neighbours in love rather than piety do they walk the path of genuine spirituality and faith. These are the times when their guardian angels smile.

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), apocalyptic prophecy, Cause & Effect, forgiveness, free will, humility, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, narcissism, occult themes, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness, theodicy and tagged | Leave a Comment
20 Apr 2011

JR34: Chaining God to the Rock

A: I’d like to return to an idea that was endorsed in Karen Armstrong’s book (The Spiral Staircase), the idea that “when speaking of the reality of God we are at the end of what words or thoughts can usefully do (page 292). I find this idea self-serving and smug. I also find it very demeaning. In fact, I find most religious ideas about God to be self-serving, smug, and demeaning. Demeaning to human beings and demeaning to God. Since this is Holy Week, it seems like a good time to talk to you about your thoughts on the reality of God and what this reality can mean for our lives.

“Jesus said: If they ask you, ‘Where are you from?’ reply to them, ‘We have come from the place where light is produced from itself. It came and revealed itself in their image.’ If they ask you, ‘Are you it?’ reply to them, ‘We are his children. We are the first fruits of the living Father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the sign within you of your Father?’ reply to them, ‘It is movement. It is rest.’ (Gospel of Thomas 50 a-c).” Photo credit JAT 2021.

J: I see you’re still upset about the way people are talking about God.

A: I’m upset about the fact that theologians and mystics are not being honest with themselves and with others. I’m upset about their “closed-shop” attitude. I’m upset about their tiny, closed, pessimistic view of God and Creation. I’m upset about their narcissistic refusal to open wide the doors of theological inquiry. I’m upset about the pettiness. I’m upset about the way religion teaches — or actually doesn’t teach — people to be in relationship with God. I’m especially upset about the religious rituals that get in the way of the relationships.

J: The crucial problem here is worship.

A: Worship?

J: People of faith all over the world are trying to be in relationship with God. Their souls long to know God, to feel the Presence of God in their daily lives. They long for the comfort, the solace of that love. But among those millions of people, how many of them do you think have actually felt that Presence?

A: Not many. You can tell by the look in a person’s eye when you put the words “trust” and “God” in the same sentence. People of faith are disillusioned and very, very hurt.

J: There are three great obstacles to the experience of relationship with God in the daily life of regular human beings. The first obstacle we’ve talked about a fair bit — the role of status addiction in creating suffering and abuse in the lives of humans and other creatures on Planet Earth. Status addiction is deeply imbedded in all major world religions, even the non-theistic ones. Status addiction in a religious setting becomes a self-reinforcing cycle that ruins lives.* The toxic effects of status addiction have not yet been recognized. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how the Vatican could continue to uphold its teachings on sin, separation from God, sacraments, and salvation in the absence of status addiction. Status addiction is one of the three main glues that hold together the Vatican house of cards.

A: Being named Pope is quite the status symbol. Right now the History Channel is showing “The Borgias,” the mini-series about the corrupt family that owned the Papacy at the turn of the 16th century.

J: The second of the three glues holding orthodoxy together is a tenacious belief in the Law of Cause and Effect — the Materialist philosophy you and I have been discussing. What’s astonishing about this belief system is its arrogance. It’s completely oriented towards the supremacy of human beings. The term “anthropocentric” hardly begins to capture it. The Law of Cause and Effect, whatever its particular religious manifestation, teaches people that the Law is more important, more effective, and more divine than God. They say the Law is merely a manifestation of God’s wishes, but what they really mean is that God is utterly bound by all the provisions of the contract law — sort of like Prometheus chained to the rock. This is the source of human religious authority, the foundation on which they claim all their status, power, money, fame, and sexual gratification. This is also the source of human psychological authority — the need to assuage one’s own suffering by claiming there really isn’t a personal God who intervenes in people’s lives. The need for narcissists to obtain psychological authority has never been adequately examined or addressed in the church. The last thing a status-addicted narcissist wants to hear about is a personal God who isn’t chained at a safe distance and who can generate consequences for the narcissist’s smug self-idolization. Today.

A: Okay. What’s the third glue of orthodoxy?

J: The third is worship. I’m defining worship as any spiritual practice that centres around the goal of escape.

A: I’ve never heard that definition of worship before. I tend to think of “liturgy” and “worship” as being more or less the same thing. You go to “worship” on Sundays, and the exact form of this worship is the liturgy — the specific prayers and hymns and sermon content for that particular day.

J: There’s the source of the confusion right there. There’s nothing wrong with liturgy. There’s nothing wrong at all with the idea of people getting together once a week to say some prayers and sing some hymns and hear an uplifting, encouraging, inspiring sermon and maybe even sit together in safe, companionable silence. It’s a healthy practice, one I totally endorse. The idea of setting aside one day per week — the Sabbath — for mutual uplifting and compassionate spiritual reflection is crucial to the health of all human beings. There are lots of different ways to express your love and trust in God on the Sabbath. You can go to church or synagogue. You can visit someone who’s sick in hospital. You and a friend can go outside with a garbage bag and clean up your local parks and streets. You can have a family games afternoon — playing old fashioned board games like Monopoly or Scrabble. The single uniting factor in all these expressions of spirituality is relationship. You’re building positive relationships. You’re connecting to other people and to Nature. In creating these connections, you’re also creating a stronger connection with God the Mother and God the Father. You’re saying “yes” to life, love, service, and laughter. The last thing you’re trying to do is escape.

A: You’re trying to fully engage with life.

J: Yes. I taught engagement, not escape. This is why you see me in the Gospel of Mark as a man who doesn’t retreat into the wilderness, who rarely prays, who never worships in the Jerusalem Temple, and has no use for righteousness in the Law.

A: Yet Mark shows you living a life filled with faith, forgiveness, healing, and redemption. A life filled with relationships. Messy, complicated, frustrating relationships. But that’s what it means to be human, eh?

J: Worship and liturgy are two completely different things. Worship and faith are two completely different things. Worship is the “work” of pious people. Worship is the set of actions they undertake to achieve their long-term goal of escape. Orthodox Western Christians call this escape “salvation.” Buddhists call this escape “nirvana.” Atheists call this escape “saving lives.” At the core of these belief systems lies the intersection of status addiction, Materialism, and worship — the complete abandonment of God by human beings. I want to make it clear that I don’t mean God is doing the abandoning. I mean that human beings are doing the abandoning. I mean that every time a pious Christian devotes an hour or more each day to intercessory prayer, he or she is abandoning God. The more time a person spends in worshipful prayer each day, the farther he or she is getting from God. God doesn’t need your prayers or anyone else’s prayers in order to act. God is not bound by bizarre religious claims about Cause and Effect. God the Mother and God the Father have free will. They’re not chained to the rock. This means that you, as a human being, aren’t that important prayer-wise in the grand cosmological scheme of things. Contrary to the claims of many religious leaders, the sky will not fall down if the “chosen” nuns, monks, and mystics stop praying the Divine Office each day. (The theory here is that God needs to hear the recitation of the Mass and the Divine Office every day to help empower God in his great battle against the Devil to save human souls). Prayers of worship tell the God you’re trying to connect with that you don’t trust God. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot over and over again and then demanding to know why you’re lame.

A: Our prayers of worship may not be needed, but I know one thing for sure — our ability to love and forgive is sure needed.

J (nodding and smiling): God the Mother and God the Father don’t need or want our prayers of worship. AT ALL. On the other hand, they very much need our love. They want and need to be in relationship with us. We’re their children, and they’re just heartbroken, to be honest, when their own beloved children turn away from their divine family — their divine parents and their divine brothers and sisters. It’s very painful for God when human beings choose logic over love, mind over heart, and law over miracles and forgiveness. Some logic is needed, some mind is needed, and some law is needed. This should go without saying. But there has to be balance. And there has to be trust — trust in a loving, forgiving, amazingly brilliant but very humble God. This is what I was trying to teach.

A: It’s what I feel every day — a comforting sense of God’s loving presence, a comforting sense that I’m never alone. I get confused and upset about daily events like everyone else, but I know that at the end of each day God will be there to help me figure it out. I also know that when I screw up, God will help me recognize my mistakes, just as you’d expect mature, loving parents to do. They forgive me when I make a mistake, and they don’t hold any grudges. Their forgiveness helps me find the courage to learn from my mistakes, correct my mistakes, and move forward. Their forgiveness means I’m not caught in that horrible hamster wheel of shame, blame, regret, revenge, and self-loathing that I remember all too well from my earlier years. Their forgiveness has freed me to live.

J: Who needs escape on a future day when the miracle of forgiveness can free you today?

*For an introductory discussion of the role of status addiction in the orthodox Western Church see The Corruption of Free Will Through Addiction and Jesus: The Anti-Status Teacher.

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Posted in "4 S's", "Escape", Buddhism, Cause & Effect, Church of today, forgiveness, free will, Gospel of Mark, Jesus Redux, Law (Nomos), life and death, Materialism, prayer, relationship with God, spiritual practices, status addiction, trust and tagged , | Leave a Comment
13 Apr 2011

JR32: The Buddha Question

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

“His disciples asked him: Is circumcision useful or not? He said to them: If it were useful, children’s fathers would produce them already circumcised from their mothers. On the other hand, the true circumcision of spirit is entirely valuable” (Gospel of Thomas 53 a-b).  Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001-2003.

A: There’s been a trend in the past few decades to try to equate your teachings with the teachings of the Buddha, to try to show that Jesus and Buddha were teaching the same universal truths. This trend seems particularly true of those who are interested in placing you among the apophatic mystics of Christian history — mystics such as Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, the Cloud of Unknowing, and John of the Cross. Thomas Merton, a well-known Roman Catholic Trappist contemplative, was very interested in establishing a dialogue with Buddhist monks. What are your thoughts on the universality of faith and spiritual practice?

J (sighing): You’ve asked a very, very difficult question. There’s no easy answer, but I’ll try to express some of my thoughts. A book such as Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Berkley-Riverhead, 1995) is so beautiful and so kind and so sincere that I want to say I agree with everything he says. But I don’t. I can’t. I can’t agree with the underlying premises, the underlying doctrines of Buddhist belief. On the other hand — and this is where it gets very messy, very complicated — I agree with a lot of the spiritual practices that Thich Nhat Hanh describes. I agree very much with the path of mindfulness and compassion. I agree with the desire to create communities of peace. I agree with the decision to take action to create positive change. These are aspects of faith that are, indeed, universal. I don’t think anyone would disagree. No matter what religious tradition a person belongs to, the truest expression of faith — the truest expression of humanity — has always been a life lived with mindfulness, compassion, peace, and transformative change. This is true for Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and other religions, as well. At any time and in any place there have been some Buddhists and some Jews and some Muslims and some Christians who’ve chosen, as individuals, to pursue the path of true faith. These are the people who’ve consciously tried to help heal communities, families, and individuals. They chose this path because they thought it was the right thing to do.

A: You’re placing the emphasis on individual choice rather than on formal religious beliefs or doctrines.

J: I’m drawing a very clear line here between religion and faith. Religion, as it’s practised in major world religions today, including various schools of Buddhism and various schools of Christiantiy, is one of the biggest obstacles to faith. Faith — by that I mean a relationship with God based on courage, trust, gratitude, and devotion — is supposed to be an everyday part of life. An everyday experience. An everyday sense of belonging. A sense of belonging to Creation, belonging to God’s family. It’s the opposite of abandonment or estrangement from God. Faith is quiet acceptance. It’s compassion. It’s empathy. It’s balance. It’s wholeness. It’s pure humbleness and contentment.

A: Religion doesn’t teach this.

J: No. Religion gets in the way of this. It doesn’t have to. In fact, the world would be a healthier place if people could meet each week on the Sabbath to express their faith and share their spiritual experiences together in a safe spiritual environment. This would be church at its best. Unfortunately, this isn’t what church has become in the Western world. Church has become a place to centralize the authority of narcissistic, fear-mongering men and women. Church has become a place to take people farther away from God, not closer.

A: If you were incarnated as a human being today, would you turn to Buddhism for answers to the questions that Pauline Christianity doesn’t answer very well?

J (sadly shaking his head): No. As I said earlier, Buddhism has some important things to say about spiritual practice — about living the teachings of compassion and mindfulness each day, rather than just speaking of them. There’s more insistence in Buddhism on outward actions matching inward intent. And this is important. It’s integrity, after all. Integrity is what you get when your inner choices match your outer actions. It’s the opposite of hypocrisy. Integrity is an important part of peaceful community. I respect this underlying impulse in Buddhist thought.

A: Yet, based on what you’ve already said, you believe this underlying impulse towards daily practice and integrity is not specifically Buddhist. It’s a universal part of true faith.

J: Yes. All human beings are born with this capacity. Unfortunately, like all aspects of human growth and learning, the capacity for mindful, compassionate practice can be lost. “Use it or lose it” — that’s how the human brain and central nervous system work. All human beings are born with the innate capacity to love and forgive, as well, but as experience shows, many individuals lose both. They lose both their ability to love and their ability to forgive. These are the bullies, the psychopaths, and the narcissists. The same people who’ve been in charge of formal religious instruction in most parts of the world.

A: I get that part. But why do you feel uncomfortable with the trend towards having your teachings conflated with Buddha’s teachings?

J: It’s the cosmology. It’s the core assumptions. I don’t agree with either. How could I? I mean, it would be ludicrous for an angel speaking from the Other Side in partnership with a human mystic to claim there is no God. Buddhism, after all, is a non-theistic religion. In Buddhism, there’s a belief in an ultimate reality, but this reality isn’t a person in the way that you and I talk about God the Mother and God the Father as actual identifiable people — unique, distinct, and both very, very big. Buddhism also rejects the idea of an immortal soul, a distinct consciousness that continues to exist after the death of the physical body. And this is before we get to Buddhist teachings about karma and the nature of suffering, impermanence, rebirth, and enlightenment.

A: What are your thoughts on karma?

J: It’s a form of Materialist philosophy — a profound reliance on the idea that universal laws of cause and effect exist, laws that must be followed and can’t be broken. I reject pure Materialism as a model for explaining and understanding the complex interactions of all life in Creation. It leaves no room for God’s free will. It leaves no room for the profound mysteries of forgiveness, redemption, and humbleness (as opposed to humility). It’s also incredibly depressing when you think about it.

A: The idea that the universe is holding you accountable for choices you can’t even remember from previous “lives” — or previous manifestations.

J: Yes. The idea of blaming the poor and the sick and the downtrodden for their own misfortunes when it’s usually a group’s own leaders who have made the sick sick and the downtrodden downtrodden.

A: How do you feel about the question of rebirth? A number of different religions teach a form of reincarnation. Is there any place for this concept in your understanding of God, soul, and faith?

J: Well, souls can and do incarnate into 3D bodies all the time. But not for the reasons that the Buddha taught. Souls don’t incarnate because they “have to.” Of course, as soon as I start talking about souls, it’s clear I’m talking “apples” and the Buddha is talking “oranges.” Souls do exist, and rebirth, when it happens, is not a form of karmic consequence to be escaped at all costs. Most souls who choose to incarnate as human beings on Planet Earth find that a single human lifetime is enough for their unique purposes of learning, growth, and change. However, a small percentage of human beings have already “been there, done that.” They come back a second time because they want to help guide others on a journey that’s often difficult.

A: Mahayana Buddhism teaches that certain enlightened beings choose to “postpone” their reward so they can help others achieve enlightenment. They call these beings “bodhisattvas.” I’ve met a few people in my lifetime who felt somehow more grounded, more connected to the simplicity of spiritual truth, and I’ve called these individuals bodhisattvas.

J: Not unreasonable.

A: I think I’m going to let the cat out of the bag here. I’m going to tell our readers something I’ve known about you for a long time — you were a bodhisattva. A second-time-arounder. A man who messed up big-time during your first lifetime as a human being, and volunteered to go back in as a spiritual teacher and healer. Not because you had to but because you wanted to. For you, second time round was the charm.

J: It’s not something you realize at the time. You can’t even remember anything from your first life as a human being. There’s just a deepening of the connection, I guess you could say. An ability to stay more grounded, more aware of the patterns. It’s not something you can put your finger on, exactly. The sensation is probably best captured by the old maxim, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” A person who has lived once before as a human being is harder to fool with propaganda, spin doctoring, and religious sleight of hand. That’s why they make good mentors.

A: Can you give another example of a well-known person who was a bodhisattva?

J: Glenn Gould, the Canadian musician, was a bodhisattva.

A: No wonder he played so beautifully.

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Posted in apophatic mysticism, Buddhism, Cause & Effect, Church of today, faith, free will, Jesus Redux, karma, Materialism, Mother and Father God, relationship with God, Soul, spiritual practices and tagged , | Leave a Comment
07 Dec 2010

CC49: Summing Up: Finding the Kingdom of God

Exeter Cathedral, England 3

Exeter Cathedral, England (c) JAT 1997

In wrapping up this blog, I’d like to talk about the 20th century spiritual teacher I most admire, a man whose writings greatly influenced my journey toward becoming a Concinnate Christian. That man is Dr. Viktor Frankl.

Many people on a spiritual path wouldn’t include Viktor Frankl among the great 20th century religious and spiritual leaders. Dr. Frankl, after all, was a psychiatrist, not a monk or a religious sage. He wrote books about Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, not lofty theological commentaries on the Bible. Yet this brilliant Austrian Jewish physician scholar, who endured the horrors of WWII Nazi concentration camps and went on to rebuild a life of integrity and compassion after the war, has more in common with the man who lived as Jesus of Nazareth than anyone else I’ve read.

Dr. Frankl’s well-known book Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy* is only 189 pages long, including the bibliography. Yet within the pages of this slim book he manages to evoke all the deepest aspects of the human experience. He asks the hardest questions possible about human suffering, and arrives at the astonishing conclusion that even in the midst of unutterable deprivation and torment, even in the face of terrible hunger and cold and illness and fear, human beings can still choose to love and forgive. Nothing can take this choice away from them. Nothing.

Dr. Frankl describes his redemption in this way: “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved [spouse]. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.'” (page 48)

Further, despite his own deeply personal turmoil, Dr. Frankl retained his ability to objectively study and assess the psychological reactions of his fellow inmates in the camps:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

“And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become a plaything of circumstances, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.

“Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even through conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him — mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.” (page 75)

Dr. Frankl’s fellow inmates taught him about courage — the courage “to say yes to life” in spite of pain, guilt, and death (page 139). He didn’t deny the reality of pain, guilt, and death, didn’t try to escape it (page 86). Instead he chose a different path — the path of helping others find purpose in their lives, of helping others find a way to turn suffering and guilt into accomplishment, change, and responsible action. He became a mentor to those who were searching for meaning, to those who needed help in reclaiming their free will to choose love. He also understood that each person’s journey is unique, that no two people will find meaning and insight in exactly the same way. Unlike so many others, he found faith in the true potential of God’s children.

I see so much in common between the teachings and methods of Viktor Frankl and those of Jesus son of Joseph! If you really want to understand who Jesus was and what he taught, please read Man’s Search for Meaning. Then read it again. And read it again. There is no clearer modern version of Jesus’ “Kingdom of God” teachings than Dr. Frankl’s book.

Thank you to the readers who have struggled along with me as I tried to put these thoughts on paper. Your support and encouragement have meant more to me than you realize.

I wish you many blessings on your own journey of love, healing, and redemption!

* Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. 3rd Ed. Translated by Ilse Lasch. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1984.

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, courage, faith, forgiveness, free will, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Paul vs Jesus, redemption, soul purpose, theodicy and tagged | 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.

(c) Image*After

(c) Image*After

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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10 Sep 2010

CC32: Forgiveness: The Divine String of Pearls

Today I’m being lazy and posting something I first typed in 2007. When I say “typed,” I mean “typed.” I wasn’t the author of this piece. The author was the person whose name appears at the end of the lesson. He did a particularly fine job of describing forgiveness, and I can’t improve on what he wrote, so I’m giving his words a second airing.

* * *

Lesson 6

So what is forgiveness? I will explain what I learned two thousand years ago, with the help of my angels and my loving Mother and Father, but I’ll put it in modern terms to make it more relevant.

Forgiveness is not a state of grace that mysteriously descends on you. The Gospels report (not to their credit) that the Holy Dove descended on my head while I was being baptized. These passages have led many a faithful person astray because “descent of the Holy Dove” wrongly suggests that God singles out “special people,” and confers on them special gifts through grace.

Am I saying there is no grace? Of course not. I’m saying that everything in God’s good creation is grace, and to single out one event for one person is to highlight 1% of God’s ongoing grace, and ignore the other 99%.

You are here, living a life as a human being on Planet Earth, so that you might understand, in your eternal life as one of God’s angelic children, the transformative power of forgiveness. You are not here because you’re unworthy of God’s love. You are here because God trusts you as an angel, and God knows that when you die as a human being, you will take what you have experienced here and transform it into forgiveness and wisdom.

However, you do not have to wait until you die and return Home to Heaven. You have the tools available to you here and now to begin this transformative process.

Your primary tool is your will power. Forgiveness, as a divine experience, is 100% pure will power. There is no mystery. There is no magic. There is no ritual, no potion, no esoteric way to go about this except to learn to use your divine free will in the same way your divine Mother and Father use their divine free will to forgive the harmful choices you make. Though the method of forgiving involves no mystery, the result is filled with unending mystery. When you accomplish divine forgiveness, God’s true beauty shines even more brightly for you, if such a thing is even possible (though it is . . .). In other words, I find it much easier to put into words how you can get to the place of forgiveness than to put into words what it will feel like when you get there. That is the sacred part of the journey for each person.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

String of Pearls (c) JAT 2013

Forgiveness is what you end up with when you use your soul’s Courage, Trust, Gratitude, and Devotion to make a permanent choice to wrap up a harmful choice in a permanent layer of love. The harm (caused either by you or someone else) is like the grit inside an oyster’s shell. The grit hurts. But the oyster painstakingly covers the grit in smooth, nacreous layers that take your breath away with their beauty. The grit inside the pearl does not go away. But it is permanently transformed into a thing of beauty. The task of forgiving is like the efforts of the oyster. The task of forgiving is not to erase or deny the pain. The task of forgiving is to use your will power to turn the pain into a divine string of pearls.

I used the word “permanent” three times in the above paragraph. This is because I wish to highlight the difference between “forgiving” and “shrugging something off.” What makes forgiveness divine is its immutability. Once God makes the choice to forgive a particular harmful choice you have made, God will never go back on the decision to forgive you. Their forgiveness for that action is permanent. They will not say to you, “We take it back — you’re no longer forgiven.” They will not manipulate your trust by pulling the rug out from under you. They make the choice, and they stick by the choice.

Human forgiveness is meant to be exactly the same. The forgiveness in your own heart must be an unflinching, unshakeable choice that nobody can talk you out of under any circumstances. If somebody can talk you out of it, it’s not real forgiveness. Another way to describe this is to think of it as integrity. Forgiveness is an oath you make, an oath you make to your own soul. Forgiveness is an oath you make to yourself that you will put a layer of love around the harmful choice, and you will never, ever remove the layer. You would not be a person of deep integrity if you broke this sacred oath. So you choose each day to keep your oath, and you choose each day to maintain the layer of love.

Each harmful choice that is forgiven is its own pearl on your divine string of pearls. You do not have just one big pearl that keeps getting bigger and bigger. You have separate pearls for separate acts of forgiveness. Each time you experience pain that must be forgiven, you build a new pearl using your divine free will and your own innate Courage, Trust, Gratitude, and Devotion.

This is the manner in which your loving Mother and Father forgive you.

I invite you, as my beloved sisters and brothers in Christ, to step through the portal of wonder that will open for you when you choose to forgive.

Love Jesus
December 16, 2007

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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 | Leave a Comment
26 Aug 2010

CC30: Forgiveness: The Free Lunch You’ve Been Looking For

Ask most Christian ministers what forgiveness is, and you won’t get much of an answer.

This infuriates me. Christian ministers have been given an incredible opportunity to help people of faith understand what forgiveness is and how to bring forgiveness into their daily lives. In fact, it’s one of the few things the church can offer that isn’t being offered elsewhere through service clubs, secular charities, and weekend workshops taught by various coaches and New Age gurus.

I have a book called Helping People Forgive by David W. Augsburger (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). According to the back cover, Dr. Augsburger is a Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Fuller Theological Seminary. I’m sure Dr. Augsburger is a sincere, well-meaning man. But he doesn’t know the first thing about the mystical reality of forgiveness.

Early in his book, Dr. Augsburger says, “A major paradigmatic shift occurred two thousand years ago in the philosophical breakthrough that allowed persons to disavow their past and alter their future through ‘forgiveness'” (page 9).

I disagree. Forgiveness is not about disavowing the past, nor about reversing a moral judgment (Augsburger, page 11). Nor is it (as one of my classmates said, though he ought to know better, considering his interest in restorative justice) a state of “just not thinking about the harm at all.”

Forgiveness is an act of great moral courage that requires the person who’s doing the forgiving to dredge up from within their own soul all the divine love they’re capable of.

Forgiveness is not for the faint of heart.

While it’s quite within the capacity of all human beings to forgive themselves and to forgive each other (as Jesus taught), it’s not something a person can learn overnight. For many people, it will take years to learn how to forgive. Part of the reason for this is that when you open up your heart wide enough that you can hear your own soul, you have to deal with a lot of intense emotions, including painful emotions. Many people don’t want to deal with such emotions.

If you’ve never learned to master intense, positive, mature emotions such as gratitude, trust, devotion, and courage, you’re going to find it difficult to master the emotion of forgiveness.

Not impossible, but difficult.

This shouldn’t stop you from trying. Each day, your beloved Mother and Father God forgive you for everything you do that’s motivated by status addiction, or greed, or rudeness, or cruelty (to name some of the less-than-loving motivations you might choose in a typical day). They forgive you whether or not you ask for forgiveness. They forgive you for everything — and I mean everything.

HOWEVER, the fact that they forgive you does NOT mean they consider such behaviours acceptable. They forgive you when you’re abusive towards others, but they also have an opinion about your decision to be abusive towards others.

Divine love and forgiveness are like this hoard of 1st century CE Roman coins found in an ancient pottery amphora in Egypt. The original owner buried the coins for safekeeping, but he and his heirs eventually lost track of it. Such treasure hoards, when found today, usually fall under national laws that require the finder to first offer the hoard to a public museum at a fair price. This allows the treasure to be shared equally by all those who visit the museum. In other words, like a museum treasure trove, forgiveness belongs to everyone. Photo credit JAT 2017

God the Mother and God the Father have free will, just as you have free will. They’re within their rights to have an opinion about your harmful actions. They’re also within their rights to promptly respond to you, to share their thoughts and feelings with you about the choices you’re making. This means, of course, that God is not transcendent and God is not unemotional with regard to your choices (although orthodox Western Christianity would have you believe that God would never cry about the choices you’re making.)

God forgives you whether you ask or not, and by the same token, God is always watching and listening whether you ask or not. God is always watching and listening to you, because this is how God knows when it’s time to intervene to help you (whether you ask for help or not).

God will intervene whether or not you recite the right prayer to God, whether or not you think you’re worthy of God’s love, or whether or not you think you’re worthy of God’s forgiveness.

You don’t get a say in these things, because it’s not up to you to decide what God should be thinking, feeling, or doing. That’s up to God.

You can’t make God stop loving you. You just can’t, no matter how hard you try.

You are one of God’s children. They love you. They forgive you. There is no force anywhere in Creation that can block their divine love. The flip side of the coin is this: there’s no ritual, no prayer, no temple, no church, no sacrament that can give you more divine love than you already have. God loves everyone — from the North Pole to the South Pole and all points in between — in the fullest, most wondrous way imaginable. God’s love cannot be purchased. Ever.

Anyone who tells you that you can only receive God’s love by accepting baptism in Christ is lying to you. Give God some credit for being able to love you completely without attaching a bunch of religious strings.

Trust in God’s love and forgiveness as Jesus trusted in God’s love and forgiveness. There’s only one free lunch in all Creation, and this happens to be it.

As a mystic, I’ve worked extensively on the question of forgiveness — what it is, how to do it, how to let it transform your life. I’ll continue to write on this topic in future.

Thanks for listening. And thanks be to God!

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, Divine Love, empathy, forgiveness, free will, honesty, humbleness, meditation, Mother and Father God, prayer, Soul and tagged , | Leave a Comment
15 Jul 2010

CC26: The Corruption of Free Will Through Addiction

Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, what would happen if the Church were to put crack cocaine in your communion bread every week.

From a practical standpoint, if you had a genetic or psychological vulnerability to addiction, you’d fairly soon become addicted to crack cocaine. Then what would happen? You’d begin to suffer from the desperate cravings of addiction. You’d become a prisoner of your own “selfish brain.” You’d find yourself behaving in ways you’re not proud of. You’d try to stop, and you’d try to control your brain’s cravings, but sometimes you’d give in to the need, break your promises, and end up hurting the people you love. You’d feel as if you’d lost your free will.

Addiction is like that. It makes you feel as if you don’t have free will. Addiction to alcohol, addiction to cocaine, addiction to sex. All share a common feature: a frightening sense that you’re not in control of your own brain and your own free will. Rare is the person who can free herself from addiction through will power alone. Most addicts need help on the long journey of healing. This is because their biological brains have been physically damaged by toxic, addictive substances. While the brain is slowly healing from the damage caused by addiction, it needs external supports. Appropriate supports might include Twelve Step meetings, in-patient medical treatment, out-patient treatment, or professional counselling (or a combination of these).

People who seek such help are not weak. They are injured, and they deserve to be cared for during the healing process in the same way that stroke victims deserve to be cared for. For people in recovery, part of the healing process is the gradual restoration of a sense of trust in their own free will. This part isn’t easy, because they remember the way their brains once took control of their choices, and made them frightened of themselves. But if they’re lucky enough to connect with a firm but compassionate mentor, they can reconstruct their lives and relationships a bit at a time. Some even find true redemption.

We’re deeply aware in our society of the dangers of addictive substances such as narcotics, alcohol, and so on. We read about the dangers of them in newspapers and magazines. We see reality shows on TV that feature the struggles of addicts and their families. We listen to our doctors preach about the perils of excessive alcohol. We tell our children to beware of drug dealers. We try to empower ourselves so we won’t be vulnerable to addiction.

Why do we do all these things? We do all these things because we understand that addiction is a bad thing. It’s bad for a person’s mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Addiction ruins lives. Addiction can be treated, because it’s a medical disorder, but before an addicted person can be successfully treated, she has to accept she has a problem. She has to let go of her denial. She must want to recover her own free will. Only then can she work with her treatment team as a willing participant in the healing process. If she isn’t willing, she won’t be able to heal.

Paradoxically, of course, she must have some remnant of free will remaining to her so she can make the choice to heal. Chances of this are much better if she’s dealing with only one addiction. If she has multiple addictions — such as alcohol, tobacco, and narcotics — or if she exhibits co-morbidity — a DSM-IV diagnosis of major depression, bipolar disorder, Axis II personality disorder, or other major mental illness in addition to a diagnosis of substance use disorder — then the situation is even more complex. She may not be able to form the intent to heal until she’s received intensive care in a psychiatric facility on an involuntary basis (i.e. a committal). This is the painful but necessary reality when she’s no longer able to make caring choices for herself. When she’s no longer mentally competent — no longer able to form responsible choices, as determined by a professional review board — the community must step in and make choices on her behalf until she is healed. This is much better than forcing her to live on the street.

Okay. Back to the Church. What does any of this have to do with the Church? Well, here’s the thing. It’s hard enough to recover your free will when you’ve been dealing with only one addiction. It’s a lot harder to even understand what free will means when you’re struggling with another addiction — a hidden addiction, a secret addiction, an addiction you don’t even know you’re dealing with, because our society doesn’t treat it as an addictive disorder.

This is the famous Rosetta Stone which is on display in the British Museum, London, UK. The stone, which features one decree written in three different ancient languages, has become a symbol for deep mysteries that can be untangled if you have the right translation tools. To understand your own free will, it often feels as if you need your very own Rosetta Stone. Photo credit JAT 2024.

I’m talking about an addiction to status. I’m talking about status anxiety run amok. I’m talking about an addiction disorder where dopamine is not generated in the brain by ingesting addictive substances, but instead is generated through a constant process of acquiring “status points.” These “status points” cause the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that’s definitively linked to addiction. Dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain can generate a brief “high,” a feeling of pleasure. It’s the feeling of pleasure that people get addicted to, but it’s a temporary pleasure, a short-term high, and it can’t replace the long-term experience of trust, safety, love, devotion, and peace that human beings are capable of when they open their hearts and minds to their full potential as children of God.

Our society doesn’t believe an addiction to status is a bad thing that undermines your mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health. Instead, our society treats this addiction as a good thing, a positive thing, a necessary thing. We deny the addiction, we minimize it, by labelling status-driven behaviour as simply “Type A” or “Boardroom Material.” We encourage our children to be competitive and aggressive, to be “the best,” “the fastest,” “the strongest,” “the smartest,” “the richest.” Our societal norms and values — including those that stem from the Church’s “most saved” department — have become so interwoven and intertwined with this particular addiction that it’s hardly visible to us now. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

The Church isn’t alone in promoting these status-soaked values. (American pop culture rivals the Church in its ability to satisfy the constant cravings of a status addict.) Neither did the Church invent these values, as a quick review of ancient civilizations will reveal. But since the time of Paul the Apostle, the orthodox Western Church has worked very hard to ensure that Christians will fall prey to this particular addiction.

Why would Church leaders do such a dreadful thing? Well, I suppose that early Church Fathers believed they were helping to forge a more solid, more obedient, more orderly society. I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time. But the cost has been enormous. The cost of this addiction over the centuries has been the loss of free will in the brains of individual Christians. The cost has been fear — the fear of the self that accompanies addiction and its inexplicable urges. The cost has been the sheer inability of regular Christians to believe they’re worthy of God’s love and forgiveness.

That’s a pretty big cost if you ask me.

Augustine’s teachings on original sin and concupiscence actually make sense when you’re struggling against the cravings of addiction, because his theories offer you a sound explanation for your behaviour! It all makes sense . . . until you learn that at least one of your addictions has been caused — not cured — by the Church’s own teachings on sin, salvation, sacraments, and separation from God.

This is why orthodox Western Christians have long felt they’re trapped in a life-long hamster wheel of pain and suffering, sin and absolution.

I don’t see how a good pious Christian could feel any other way, given the circumstances.

That’s why I follow the teachings of Jesus instead.

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Posted in "4 S's", Concinnate Christianity, Favourite Posts, free will, healing miracles, mental illness, redemption, status addiction, theodicy | Leave a Comment
12 Jul 2010

CC25: How the Church Puts Free Will On a Very Short Leash

Not long ago, on Canada Day to be exact (July 1), I headed out from Toronto on the 401. It was early afternoon and the weather was good. For all intents and purposes, the trip should have been easy and stress-free. There were no construction sites (a miracle in itself), and there were no accident sites (thank goodness). The traffic should have flowed smoothly. But it didn’t. If someone had been watching from a helicopter, they would have seen an accordion pattern on the highway: traffic speeding up and spreading out, then suddenly squeezing together into compressed knots as large groups of drivers hit the brakes at the same time.

Now, I’m a person who enjoys driving. I like to feel the sudden kick of acceleration when I hit the gas. I like to go down country roads just to see where they go. I like a road that demands you pay attention to what you’re doing as you navigate tight curves and steep hills. So I find driving on the 401 kind of boring, to be honest. But I’m a careful driver, too, and I think it’s asinine to tailgate. So when traffic is heavy, I usually stay in the right-hand lane, and I keep my distance from the vehicle in front of me. This way, I have choices open to me in the event of an emergency or unexpected problem. I have choices open to me because I have time and space. I have time to see a problem, assess a problem, react to a problem, and hopefully get my car (along with me and my passengers!) safely out of harm’s way.

Many other drivers don’t share this opinion about driving on the 401. They inexplicably believe the laws of Newtonian physics don’t apply to them, which, of course, gives them an excuse to join the large pack of vehicles spaced a mere 3 car lengths apart in the left-hand passing lane.

(When I took driving lessons many moons ago, the rule of thumb for determining a safe distance between cars was one car length per 10 miles/hour of speed — in other words, six car lengths between you and the guy ahead of you if you were driving at 60 mph in dry weather. And this was the minimum recommendation!)

As reality would have it, the laws of inertia bow to no man.* This strikes home when the driver at the front of the left-hand string of traffic suddenly decides to hit his brakes. All the drivers following close behind him must hit their brakes, too. They have no other option, except, of course, to swerve onto the left-hand shoulder or smash into the neighbouring cars. A chain of red brake lights appears. This in turn causes the people in the right-hand to brake, and within moments everyone on this section of the 401 is travelling at a snail’s pace. There’s no external reason — such as a lane closure — for this slowdown. This kind of slowdown is entirely the result of the choices these drivers are making.

Although each of the drivers in the left-hand lane might like to blame somebody else for the slowdown, in fact each person who chose to travel at high speed with no safe buffer of time and space ahead of him is a co-creator of this mess. Each of these drivers has free will. Each one used his free will to make an initial choice (the choice to drive this way). No one forced these drivers to drive 3 car lengths apart. Each driver chose this action independently and autonomously of his neighbour (free will). Yet, in doing so, each driver independently and autonomously volunteered to give up — surrender, eliminate, erase — some of the choices open to him. Each person willingly decided to give up his time and space, the precious and irreducible time and space that would have preserved for him a wider range of options.

You could say — without exaggeration — that each driver used his free will to intentionally (if temporarily) relinquish his free will, and hand it over to the lead driver in the string. Why so? Because it’s the lead driver who sets the speed and who chooses the time when everybody else will have to brake in unison. Once you agree to join his string, his pack of drivers, you don’t get a say in these things.

The Church’s teachings on free will remind me a lot of these traffic strings on the 401. In the orthodox Western church, theologians like to remind their faithful flock that God gives each person free will at birth. This doctrine of free will prevents people from falling into a tar pit of fatalism and despair, because people still have a glimmer of hope with regard to their own free will. Although the doctrines of original sin and grace dictate that they don’t have a lot of free will, they know they still have the choice to pay attention and brake on time, and thereby prevent a major pile-up!

Of course, if they make a mistake, and misjudge the timing, and cause a major pile-up, they’ll accused by the Church of a massive failure of piety.

The Church, unfortunately, has long conspired to prevent Christians from learning about the existence of the right-hand lane — the spiritual lane where people can more fully exercise their free will, the spiritual lane where there’s no leader of the pack to restrict the traffic flow.** In fact, the orthodox Western Church is founded on the premise that you — poor, weak, sin-ridden creature that you are — need to be in the left land and want to be in the left lane because you’re rushing as piously as possible toward the future goal of salvation. You’re rushing anxiously with the rest of the flock, and you’re following as closely as possible to the guy in front of you so you won’t get lost. And you’re grateful to the leader at the front of the pack — oh, excuse me, I mean the flock — because he’s so wise and strong and so much better than you that you can place all your trust in him. You can trust him to know when to brake. And you’re grateful when he decides to brake, because then you yourself have a rare opportunity to apply your free will and choose to brake! And what better way could there be to prove your love for God!

The path to knowing God is neither straight nor paved nor predictable. Photo credit JAT 2014

The path to knowing God is neither straight nor paved nor predictable. Photo credit JAT 2014

What Jesus knew, and what Jesus taught, is that the road to God is neither straight nor level (Isaiah 40:3 notwithstanding). The right-hand spiritual path — the path the Church doesn’t want you to know about because it would lessen Church authority — curves and climbs and enters the most unexpectedly beautiful landscapes. Sometimes you can’t see a darned thing on the road because it’s so foggy and misty. Then you have to slow down and try to listen to God’s voice. And that’s okay, because sometimes God’s voice is very, very quiet, and very, very shy, and you’ll miss it unless you tell yourself it’s okay to listen to God’s shy voice in place of the loud voice of the guy who’s leading the long string of Church traffic.

You should be aware, though, that if you decide to pull into the right-hand lane you’ll be considered a heretic. Or a Concinnate Christian. Or a person who trusts God. Or a follower of Jesus’ message.

Free will is a pain in the ass, eh?

* My apologies for exclusively using the male gender in these paragraphs. My intent is not to point fingers at male drivers, but simply to avoid the awkward use of he/she and his/her phrasing in my sentences. Next time I’ll try to remember to use “she” as the gender in my example.

** In countries such as the United Kingdom, where the convention is to drive on the left and pass on the right, these references to “right-hand” and “left-hand” lanes would be reversed for the purposes of discussion. I’m not in any way endorsing the ancient and misguided view that lefties and left-handed things are somehow tainted or inferior to right-handed people or things.

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Posted in "4 S's", boundary issues, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, free will, Jesus' teachings, Original Sin, sense of time & timing, status addiction and tagged | 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.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.)
  4. The universe (God) sets up the painful learning environment. God is in charge of this part, and no human can control it.
  5. The universe (God) gives each person free will.
  6. People can change.
  7. People won’t change unless they want to (free will).
  8. People are capable of amazing transformation once they decide they want to change.
  9. It takes lots of time for changes to unfold. Redemption isn’t an instant process!
  10. 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.
  11. It takes hard work and consistent effort on the part of a person who wants to find redemption.
  12. 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.
  13. People make mistakes on the journey of change and redemption. That’s okay!
  14. Engaging in active learning helps the process of change. (In the film, Phil starts to take courses — piano lessons and medical training, for example.)
  15. 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.)
  16. The more Phil learns and the more genuinely empathetic he becomes, the more humble he becomes.
  17. 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!
  18. Phil finds his heart when he finds himself.
  19. 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 | Leave a Comment
03 Mar 2010

CC2: Complaint #1 About Orthodoxy: What Happened to the Redemption Theme?

If you’ve read my profile, you may have noticed I’m currently enrolled in graduate studies in the field of theology. This means I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of years learning the language of theological study. I want to say right here at the beginning of this blog that I’ve met a lot of wonderful people in my graduate program, and I’ve learned a lot of things that would have been hard for me to learn on my own. I’m very grateful to the people who have helped me in my studies.

I’m not a spring chicken, however, and I suppose it ‘s fair to say that my personal index of suspicion is fairly high with regard to theological claims. This is (I hope) a polite way of saying I’ve observed some fairly major flaws in the church doctrines I’ve been studying. Those who know me from grad school will know that I’m not particularly shy about speaking up when I see inconsistencies and lapses in logic. (I recall one interesting class when I was the lone voice of dissent against Augustine’s doctrine of original sin.) However, there seems to be a general, unspoken agreement, even at the university level in 2010, that theology students should not rock the doctrinal boat. I don’t know about you, but I honestly don’t know how the liberal Protestant church in Canada can survive if we’re afraid to look unflinchingly at the history of our very complicated theology.

So, like Luther posting his “95 Theses,” I’m going to gradually post some observations about the differences between what Jesus seems to have said, and what the church said he said. (I think there’s a big difference between the two.)

To reassure you that I’m not just making things up to suit my own hermeneutical perspective, I’ll try as much as possible to show references for my position. But you should probably know from the outset that, like all writers on the subject of theology, I have a strong personal position that influences my interpretation of developments in church doctrine. You might be able to guess what my position is if I tell you that my least favourite theologians are the apostle Paul, the early church theologian Tertullian, the highly influential Augustine of Hippo, and the early 12th century writer Anselm of Canterbury. I’m not too crazy about John Wesley, either.

(I’ve read some primary material from all these famous male theologians, which is how I know for sure I don’t like their teachings.)

Anyway, the first complaint I have is about redemption — as in, what the heck happened to Jesus’ message about redemption?

Lilies of Redemption – Photo credit JAT 2017

Redemption, as anyone will know who has experienced this life-altering transformative shift, is not the same as salvation or atonement. I’m so darned tired of hearing about salvation, and its bizarre cousin prolepsis, and I am so eager to hear a United Church of Canada minister tackle redemption head-on. This would require a bold statement to the effect that redemption is an experience of ongoing, present-day relationship with God. But redemption is doctrinally awkward because it clashes with the teachings of Paul, Augustine, and other orthodox Christian teachers on the matter of salvation.

What is redemption for me? It is the unstoppable tsunami of gratitude that overtakes your life when you finally, finally, finally let go of your pigheaded refusal to accept God’s love and forgiveness, and you’re finally able to trust yourself as a humble and worthy child of God, a child who is made in God’s image. That’s when the hard spiritual work begins.

I say this, of course, from painful personal experience. In my younger days, I was nothing if not pigheaded.

Another weird thing about redemption is that it seems to need the “yeast” of relationship with other people. Being with other people, sharing experiences with each other, growing deep roots of empathy — all these seem essential to the experience of redemption. It seems pretty much impossible for people to do it on their own without humble mentorship and guidance. (The founders of the Twelve-Step Program understood this clearly.)

What does redemption mean for you? Have you had a transformative spiritual experience that has forever altered your relationship with God in a positive way? Would you be willing to share this with a few friends you trust?

At the moment, mainstream Protestant Christians are not very comfortable with such sharing, but it’s very hard for anyone, even Christians who are “saved in Christ,” to stumble down the path of redemption without a helping hand from their fellow human beings.

I vote to restore redemption as a major spiritual pursuit for today’s Protestant Christians. If the United Church doesn’t want it, the Concinnates will take it! (I’ll have more on this in a future post.)

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Posted in "4 S's", Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, empathy, forgiveness, free will, gratitude, honesty, humbleness, orthodox teachings about the soul, redemption, relationship with God and tagged | Leave a Comment

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