Against all gods…
What if your thoughts were obstructing your view of reality? How would you find your way?
Imagine much of what you think you know is wrong. I tried imagining what if everything I knew was wrong, but then that would make that statement wrong which would necessarily invalidate the premise blocking me from exploring the obvious next thought. The first dilemma of any philosophical movement is getting around yourself to discover truth. There is truth. Probably some fundamental truths coupled with perspective based, subjective truths. In contrast, if truths exist, that means non- truths exist; some fundamental non-truths, and perspective based, subjective truths. How do you get around the devils and level bosses when they are you?
good fantasy writing is pure magic
Now, you may wonder why I am even sorting this. Well, I started listening to a book, Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsch. I am two chapters in. I feel profoundly moved by the voices identifying as God. They seem right. There is a male and female voice. That seems very right. I don’t think I could have heard this book in my youth, bound by a strict, precisely defined interpretation of scripture that separated my maternal side of the family from the paternal side. Church of Christ versus Baptist.
That strictness does make for an amusing anecdote. My first group meditation was at an Ekankar meeting. I didn’t have time to meditate, as I was too busy fighting with the mantra in my head,
“You’re going to hell for being here.” Interestingly, I would have had less quandaries about being in a drug induced state at a brothel compared to simply meditating on kindness and love with a group that believed in spiritual growth.
It is likely reasonable to consider God as non-binary. After all, if God is precisely the embodiment of either gender, then by definition of gender, there would necessarily be another gender. Which makes hearing the masculine and feminine both sacred. That’s important.
There is so much to unpack in just these first two chapters, I am likely unqualified to expound on the book further. Even after having completed the book, I suspect I will still be unqualified to unpack all that’s there. I might as well try and unpack the word GOD. Can God be unpacked at all? If it’s true that perhaps God has relationships with all beings and all cultures, then would God necessarily come to the individuals and cultures in manners they can most appreciate?
Without imposing a limitation on God to appear in that form forever more? May God not come in the form of a raven, never more.
If you have a house with three or more kids, as a parent you likely have learned what works for one child doesn’t work for all children. Children come with different assets, skills, deficits, attributes, and that changes as they grow. One rule for all would be unfair, because the context for each requires personalization in order to truly hear their perspective.
LOVE, TRUTH, JOY
One of the things about the voices of God as they present themselves in the auditory version, and perhaps as they would manifest in the written form, is they seem quite personable.
How would you imagine a conversation with God? If you believe God wouldn’t speak to you because you’re nothing, doesn’t that define the relationship? If you don’t expect God to answer you in any form that you would appreciate, then you already have a barrier to hearing God.
Being open and vulnerable is the only way to truly experience love. If you tell yourself being open and vulnerable leads to pain, then you have created a barrier from experiencing love. It’s not that love can’t get in. Love doesn’t come from without. You already have and are loved.
Love starts on the inside and radiates out. If you put up a barrier, what you have done is trapped yourself with fear. Everything outside of you is now fear based and it will get you. Being vulnerable means allowing your love freedom to seek love in others, and on encountering barriers, love the barriers so hopefully love gets inside.
The scarier the outer world is, the more walls you put up, the smaller the love light becomes. Not because it gets smaller, but because there is an eternity inside you, and no end to which you can suppress love.
If only love rebounded as hard and fast as some of the scary things we suppress! So maybe that is indication it isn’t in the suppression of things, but in the releasing of things that health and joy is experienced.
Conversations with God is useful to read, but it is not necessarily our conversation with God.
That was a conversation between God and Walsch. He needed that conversation. What we need is to know that a conversation is not only possible, it is expected. It is happening all the time, if you know how to hear.
There will be other voices, too. Other souls living on this planet, family, friends, they put words out there that we have to contend with. Some are positive, some are not. Some are functional, some are neutral, and some are not… You have to learn to sort this out, but the discernment that was offered to Walsch is that if it doesn't come from love, truth, or joy, it’s from someone else.
Love the words and the people that use them, for the words are not them any more than your words are you.
TWO EMOTIONS: Love and Fear
The first time I heard this concept was in the book, A Course of Miracles. This made sense to me. All positive emotions are of love, all negative emotions are of fear. A room-mate’s mother saw that I was reading this book and made no bones about telling me: “This is of the devil.”
I am glad she said that. I stopped procrastinating and finished reading it because at that time, if you told me not to read something, I wanted to read every word. I was disappointed I didn’t find anything in it worthy of blasphemy. The book encourages change and it acknowledges miracles happen. How can that be of the devil? Aren’t we taught we will know people by their fruit? If this book helps people be better, is that evidence enough there is something good in it?
There are lots of ways to think of this polarity. Part of me thinks of it in terms of physics. It’s a continuum. A magnet is polarized, north and south poles. North is neither good nor bad, nor is south good or bad. Love and fear are neither good or bad, but just places on a spectrum in which you fall, and you could be going up or down back to positive, and around again.
Well, with caveats. That’s assuming souls are the electrons manifesting as magnetic fields. If you’re the atom in the magnet, your position is fixed. Your orientation determines the level of magnetism in the magnet. A strong magnet, everyone is in alignment.
I don’t like thinking in terms of physics. You can. Karma translated into the basic rule, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The problem with that is, you can use physics to get results. That means karma doesn’t always result in retribution for wrongdoing. Some bad guys do very well at being bad guys, they accumulate great wealth, and they die happy. Maybe there is a balance in the next life, but if you’re chasing fairness, well, then you’re not using a physics paradigm, you’re using a metaphysics paradigm with mythology you created.
So if the universe is inherently neutral, then spiritual karma and the laws of physics are inherently neutral, and you’re not rewarded on attributes so simply defined as good or bad, up or down. There is no up and down in space. Even Galactic North is just an arbitrary flip of the galactic coin.
There is only one truth. God loves us not because of what we do, or did, or will do, but because that is all God can do. We are incredible beings of light, love, and joy. God created us to be the co-creators of everything, and everything around you is God and the creations you have made.
Creation and destruction
Sometimes humans have to destroy things to create things. We can create from scratch.
The world is not the world the way we think of worlds. The world is actually a construct of the language, beliefs, and ideas we hold. Language and beliefs determine our emotional and psychological worlds.
Imagine the world is a dream. Everything in the dream is something you created for an experience. Perhaps not your conscious you, but your subconscious you, or you and your subconscious you collaborated, or you and your subconscious and God did, because everyone loves a trinity. If you realize an expectation in the dream, that expectation usually occurs.
Reality, according to many spiritual beliefs, is likened to a dream. Now imagine there are scary things in the dream. In general, if you experience something scary, you wake up. So, if the goal of scaryness wakes you from the dream, brings you back to your senses, is it truly a scary thing or a useful thing?
If you had angels in your dreams giving you skittles, and material comfort, why would you wake up? You probably wouldn’t. You would want to stay there!
So, if you find a demon confronting you, is this a bad thing- or is it an angel in disguise coming to wake you up?
If you’re being challenged, is the thing helping you learn something? Is it God giving you some resistance because you’re not listening directly? Or is it you just were curious of what the contrast was between love and fear?
Is it God or your imagination? Does it matter? Carl Jung, Active Imagination and Shadow work, confront the demons, and look for angels on the other side of the shadows, that’s where the lights are. Jung went inside and found not only archetypes, but a friend. He called him Philemon.
I have gone inside. I have found all sorts of things. Friends and foes. I don’t know how to sort them all better than that. Some might be archetypes. Some might be thoughtforms that I have created, adopted, inherited, borrowed, or made copies of.
I have heard it said, for every person you meet, your consciousness has expanded by that much and more. Can you meet anyone that doesn’t extend your measure of the universe by the length and breadth of a person? Attributes of resiliency include making connections, accepting change as part of living, and nurturing a positive view of yourself. What person have you ever met that hasn’t changed you?
What idea have you ever met that didn’t change you?
So, imagine every word is a person. Hell, given the power of words, you might as well call them gods. Consider how many words constrain you and liberate you!
Every person comes with their own pack of words, positive and negative. Imagine every person you meet has a legion of words. How do we ever find out who we are given the verbosity of others in relation to the conversations in our own minds?
In the quiet stillness, against all gods, we are defined by the relationship of all that is.
Be still and know I AM, I Am Not.
