A Djinn, Lotta Fairies and Sundry Gods by Gregory Edward Flood - HTML preview

Introduction

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably untrue. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

—H. L. Mencken

You’re a grouch.

Oh, you are so. Just admit it.

It’s okay. I’m a grouch, too.

We’re in good company. Some of the greatest spiritual teachers of the past were grouchy. Being grouchy is one of the things that made them so great. They didn’t suffer fools gladly.

You’ve gone the traditional route. Sunday service. Singing hymns. Sit. Kneel. Stand. Sit. Kneel some more. You’ve watched their antics on television: laying on of hands, calls for donations and crying. A lot of crying. You’ve been told stories about carpenters rising from the dead and a celestial vacation resort called Heaven that you’ll get into if you’re good. Whatever “good” is. The people who tell you of these things assure you it’s all true. Honest. We wouldn’t make up something like that, would we?

And it just doesn’t do it for you.

Nevertheless, you’d still like to have a relationship with God or the Infinite or the Universe or whatever you like to call it. (God doesn’t care what you call It.) Or, before that, you’d just like a definitive answer on whether or not God exists. This book is for you.

There’s you, and there’s the Presence that you sense all around you. And beyond that, it’s tough to know what’s true and what isn’t. You can appeal to the wisdom of spiritual teachers, but sooner or later, a person who is truly committed to knowing the Truth gets tired of listening to stories about other people’s experiences. You want to be able to find your own answers about God or Spirit or Infinite Mind or whatever you call It.

And you want real answers. You don’t want to jump to conclusions. You don’t want to believe something just because you read it in a book or heard it from someone who claims to know what he’s talking about. You want to know. And you want to know how you know. You want to know why you believe what you believe. It’s not enough for you to say, “If I believe it, then it’s true for me.” (I hear that all the time and I have no idea what it means. Something is either true or it isn’t. What the hell does “true for me” mean?)

You’re here in this life and you want to get it right. You want to know you’re doing a good job. You sense a great Power all around you, and you want to make sure you’re okay with It, that you’re not working against It, that you’re not pissing it off. Your life is filled with problems and anxieties and you want to know why; you want to know what you’ve done to deserve these things; you want to know what you can do to make them go away. Not everybody has this obsession for knowing the spiritual nitty-gritty. Only people like you. You’re a special and valuable kind of person: you’re a spiritual grouch.

A grouch who wants to investigate his or her spirituality has a tough time of it these days. Most of the groups you go to want you to hug people you wouldn’t touch with a pair of tweezers, or get rebirthed, or get saved by Odin or somebody; you’re required to assume strange positions, fondle strange objects and accept advice on the stock market from things called “trance channeled entities.” You’re encouraged to avoid eating meat and abstain from sugar and talk to yourself in mirrors and avoid the use of certain words—not the words that made your maiden aunt blush, but regular words like “should” and “can’t.” (Should and Can’t are negative words! Oh my God! Run for your life!)

But you don’t like being told what to do, do you? It’s tough to find your niche in today’s spiritual movements if you’re a Republican who puts sugar in his coffee, has cocktails every night at six and thinks nothing of saying “I should be going,” or “I can’t stand that rap music.” We grouches always seem to be getting the message that to live spiritually, we’re just going to have to become different people.

Most every spiritual teaching has a personality profile to which its adherents are expected to conform.So, a religion works beautifully for you if you possess the personality traits it requires. A religion based on judgment and Armageddon will appeal to people with strong—I might say “narrow”—concepts of right and wrong and a flair for the dramatic. A religion of renunciation and withdrawal will appeal to people who feel victimized by external things, or are distrustful of them. A religion of confession and rebirth will appeal to people who feel that they’ve been bad.

But trouble arises for people who don’t match the personality profile of the religion in which they were raised: feminist ideals, unmarried cohabitation, homosexual orientation, or even a love of sarcasm and gallows humor can put you in the dog house. This is particularly true of the so-called “alternative” teachings.

The new personality profile for spiritual people has begun to take shape. And it’s a real downer: the new students of Truth are expected to be soft-spoken, unopinionated and “loving’’ in the drippiest and most sentimental sense of that word. They avoid conflict at all cost. They regard all spiritual teachings as valid, even teachings that wildly contradict each other. They have unicorn decals on the back windows of their cars, sigh volubly when other people discuss “negative” things and sit in restaurants and say “Oh God, how can you eat that?” while you’re trying to enjoy your hamburger. (The can’t-fail response is to look thoughtful for a moment and then say, “Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. Did you know that?” Shuts them right up.)

There’s a whole population of would-be spiritual seekers out there who feel left out of all these new metaphysical goings-on because their personalities don’t match this new identikit for spiritual people. These excluded individuals aren’t soft-spoken, they don’t avoid conflict—at least, not at all cost—and they don’t think everything is valid. They’re opinionated and they’re skeptical—not an absurd, all-negating skepticism but the thoughtful, now-hold-on-a-minute-here skepticism of people who aren’t willing to believe just anything because it feels good.

So, if you’ve ever felt that spiritual growth is not a viable pursuit for someone the likes of you, this book is for you. In fact, even if you’re a macrobiotic anarchist this book is for you, if any spiritual teacher has ever pressured you to become someone you didn’t want to be. A spiritual grouch can be recognized by the following characteristics:

1. He just wants the facts. Skip the incense and robes, thank you, just tell him how it works.
2. He asks questions that the standards of good taste usually don’t permit like, “How would you know?”
3. He doesn’t believe anything he can’t personally verify.
4. He’s hard to impress and gets bored easily.
5. He wishes everybody would stop acting like such damn fools and be more like him.

These are all positive traits. Well, except for that last one.

The purpose of this book is to make you spiritually independent. I want you to rely on no one but yourself in forging your relationship with God. And, yeah, that means not even me.

Don’t expect to be spiritually independent when you finish this book. It can take years. But this book will give you all the tools you need to do it. And it will give you all the information you need to understand what you’re doing and why it works.

I know what you’re going to want to do. You’re going to want to skip to the last section that teaches Effective Prayer and get to all theory stuff some other time.

Sigh. Such greedy children.

Don’t.

Effective Prayer is tough to pull off if you don’t have a crystal clear understanding of why it would ever work in the first place. Read the teaching sections first. It’ll be fun, I promise.

So, let’s start with something simple: You’re here.

Now you respond: “Okay. I’m here. So what?”

Excellent question.

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