The ‘Religion’ Mind Trap

Sorry I’ve been away so long. Mundane things have demanded more of my attention than usual, but one benefit of the long break between posts was that it gave people time to comment on my last entry, Why People Reject God. One of those comments in particular has prompted me to talk about something I call the Religious Paradigm.

Right now, many people are experiencing something called paradigm shift, which is just a trendy phrase to describe the switch from one frame of mind to another. The shift I’m referring to is from a primitive frame of mind that keeps humanity stuck in a set of outgrown beliefs, to a new, mature frame of mind in which people are able to relationship with God/Source directly, without a middleman.

For as long as humanity has been sentient, there have been spiritual people who looked beyond the obvious and tried to describe to others what they saw. Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha, and Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, were such people. Visionaries like these have the ability to rise beyond the paradigm – the frame of mind – of their day, and reach out for God through their own experience of who and what God is. And though their individual experiences of God differ from one to another, their understanding of how God interacts with each of us is remarkably the same.

Predictably, when a spiritual person tries to express their inner spiritual experience to students who aren’t yet at that stage of development, the best the students can do is observe and then try to interpret. Unfortunately, merely observing their teacher results in behaviors rather than the actual inner liberation the teacher has achieved. Thus, the students turn their teacher’s words into formulas and rituals and it becomes a religion, which is a law or rule of outer conduct, not an internal spiritual path.

Religion as it exists in our world today is entirely divorced and removed from the spirituality of the teachers who started the movements. This is true for Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and most other religions (there are a few exceptions, such as Islam and Mormonism, which were religions from the start). Whenever the intentions of a spiritual teacher transform into a religion, it is destined to become a manmade thing devoid of the spirituality that started it. This is due to a vast number of factors that play into the development of the religion as an institution, but the fact that it happens is a universal truth. There are no exceptions.

What we absolutely must understand is that the road to spirituality is more than just walking away from the religion one has been born into or adopted, BECAUSE religion establishes itself in a believer’s mind at a deeper level than the realm of conscious choice. Instead, the believer comes to view life through religion-colored glasses that follow them wherever they go, even if they decide to walk away from that religion later. This is how even an atheist can still look at life in a religious way.

Many ‘recovering’ Catholics still suffer beneath the crushing weight of guilt and shame, and so many others who walk away from religion also walk away from God. Religion has convinced them that God sucks – but they only know the god their religion has shown them. And that god is a dysfunctional manmade concept, not our true Source.

Unfortunately, religion creates a kind of post traumatic stress disorder in people which we can call Perfectionism. Perfectionism is the belief that we are wrong as we are and must be purified before we can be saved. And also unfortunately, the idea of being saved usually means getting to heaven, which I’ve explained before as simply a human idea of reward (with hell being our human notion of punishment). God neither needs nor uses these concepts, but we still believe we have to be purified, and that leads to a disease of hate. We hate everything that reminds us of how imperfect we are. We hate anyone who does something we consider wrong. We hate whatever threatens our ‘salvation’. And that means we commit the one thing we were never meant to do – hurt others.

Religion has taught all of us to hate others when they don’t conform to what we think God or Life expects. We crouch in fear behind this need to be purified and made right so that we can approach God. And this means we’ll do anything – from torturing homosexuals to killing believers of another religion – simply because they threaten our hope for salvation.

Folks, real salvation is rising above hatred and perfectionism and realizing that there’s only one single rule in life: DO NOT HARM OTHERS. Anything besides offering love in some way is against life, against your own heart and soul, and against the intentions of God/Source when He/She/It invented existence.

This is the ultimate lesson of life, and is the real basis of karma, which mankind has mistaken as a law which must be adhered to and performed. Karma is not a law; it is a paradigm of supporting and promoting life, health and well-being in yourself and everyone you meet, rather than hurting or cutting them down. Period.

Of course, it’s difficult to clean out all the religious junk that gets brainwashed into us, and spirituality is about approaching God/Source authentically, as who we really are. Religion gets in the way of that. But when we finally break the bonds of that mental tyranny and seek a true spiritual relationship with our Creator, it causes a revolution in more than just the lifetime of the believer. It is a transformative event in the existence of our eternal soul, leading us to the very liberation / enlightenment / salvation that religion promised but could not deliver.

It’s my sincerest hope that this blog helps everyone see the truth explained above, because when we rise above judgment, legalism, perfectionism, fear, and the desperation of becoming saved, we discover the true substance of life. This substance, which could be called love for lack of a more descriptive term, is what drenches life with meaning and gives it purpose. It isn’t some metaphysical fallenness of humankind that has caused the world that terrifies us. It’s the blindness of religious conditioning, which demands that we fear, reject and attack everything that threatens our beliefs.

The solution is not found by becoming purified and holy and righteous. It’s found by getting beyond that blind fear, regardless of the labels we give ourselves and others. Everyone you will ever meet or know is a human being just like you. We’re all here without knowing how or why. None of us chose our race, color, appearance, gender, persuasion or handicaps. We’re just here doing the best we know how, and all any of us wants is a good life. We’re exactly the same, and we each yearn for a safe world that won’t destroy us. This is a sane thing to wish for, and spirituality – authentic spirituality – leads to sanity. Anything else is just the insanity of hate, which always comes from fear.

Sincerely,

Michael

Why People Reject God

Many years ago I met a young lady who had married very young. When her husband became abusive, she left him and turned away from men altogether, choosing a female partner instead. It wasn’t that she was a lesbian, it’s that she was a victim of a reactive mindset. She had come to believe that all men were abusive, even though a casual glance around at other couples would have proven otherwise. Instead of testing her beliefs against reality, she simply chose to accept them and turned to a lifestyle that wasn’t natural for her.

Why am I talking about this on a spiritual blog? Because it reveals something about human nature that needs to be pointed out. When we encounter something we don’t like, we have a tendency to go in the opposite direction. Thus, a child raised by overly strict parents often becomes too liberal with their own kids. But more to the point, a person raised in a religious house will often grow up to reject religion and God altogether and become an atheist. And that’s today’s topic.

It’s natural for a person to walk away from religion. Religion, after all, does nothing to meet our soul’s true spiritual needs. So rejecting religion is a very normal and very positive response. But why do people walk away from God in the process? The reason is that, even though they’re choosing to reject religion, they still believe what it has taught them about God. They’ve been raised to believe in a vicious god, so they reject both the religion and the god it promotes. But this is like the girl above. She didn’t understand that only broken men are abusive, and many people who walk away from religion don’t understand that religion only teaches about a false and broken god.

I’ve described the true God in my earlier posts, and I’ve explained how religion has invented a god based on abusive parents. So what I want people to understand is that when you wake up and realize that religion isn’t feeding you, that’s your cue to leave religion behind. But you’re not leaving God behind. You’re only leaving a manmade image of God. What awaits you is the discovery of who God really is. But if you reject the idea of God altogether and label yourself an atheist, you won’t be open to discovering true God, and that means all your courage in walking away from religion will amount to nothing.

Don’t make that mistake. If you hate the god you’ve been taught to believe in, stop for a moment and question whether that image of god is accurate. What you’ll find, especially if you’ve been reading this blog, is that the god you’ve been raised with is a lie. You haven’t even met true God yet!

So what’s the difference between the god of religion and the true God? How can you know which is which? It’s actually pretty simple. The false god of religion is mean. He hates anyone who doesn’t worship and obey him, and he threatens you with hell if you dare to do anything wrong. He condemns you for sinning even though your sins come from internal wounds, and he insists that you either hate people who don’t believe in him, or you do everything in your power to convince them to believe. And if you do everything just right, maybe you will be saved.

That’s a god well worth walking away from. So who are we walking TO?

You walk to true God, and you know Him by His love. He has provided the world for you to live in. He holds you in existence at every moment of your life. He brings you the blessings of your life. And most importantly, He gives you the space and freedom you need to find Him on your own terms. He doesn’t relate to you through a religion because He isn’t concerned about religion. That’s a manmade thing. He relates to you through your life. How happy are you? How do you feel about your life? Are you engaged in it? Do you feel like you have a purpose? Are you actively engaged in that purpose? Do you have people around you who love and support you and believe in you? Are you healthy or healing? Are you maturing and developing compassion for others and learning why judging them isn’t the way to go? Do you have a warm, fuzzy feeling in your heart that tells you you’re loved by something greater than yourself?

These are the hallmarks of true God. Do you see how different they are from the god of religion? Do you see how they have your best interests in mind? This is how true God feels. He created you because He loved who you are and who you’re becoming. There’s no judgment, no condemnation, no hoops to jump through to gain His approval. Those are all trademarks of the false god of religion. True God doesn’t do those things to you because He doesn’t need to. He is the source of your life, so there isn’t any reason for Him to punish you. There isn’t any reason for Him to do anything except help you grow into an even more aware person. That’s always His goal, and that’s always the work He does in your life. This is not someone to reject. This is someone to run to and seek with all your heart.

That’s the difference, and that’s why people who do an about-face from what they don’t like are actually hurting themselves. Don’t simply walk in the opposite direction of something you don’t agree with. Instead, figure out what it is you object to. That gives you the power to go your own direction. That isn’t reacting, that’s being proactive. Choosing your own way according to what’s right for you is ALWAYS the right response. Simply doing the opposite is choosing to be controlled by the thing you reject. Like the young lady I mentioned earlier… she isn’t a lesbian, but because she couldn’t see how her abusive childhood had made her a magnet for abusive relationships, she went in the opposite direction. And her new lifestyle has nothing to do with who she really is.

Don’t just assume God sucks and become an atheist. Challenge what you’ve been taught about God and see if it was right. Find out for yourself!

‘Til next time…

Michael

The Actual Experience of God

So many people think the only way to reach God is through prayers. Since we can’t see Him, we worry that He might actually be a figment of our imagination. At the very least, we wonder if He listens to us. But a very large percentage of people on our planet are externally focused. They only relate to things through their five physical senses, and throughout history we see that it’s the introspective people who seem to have the most success with having an experience of God. Unfortunately, that leaves out a lot of folks (about 70% according to the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator). So, if you’re in that seventy percent of people who focus on what your physical senses tell you, is there a way for you to understand what God feels like in your life? I believe there is, and I’ll do my best to describe it.

In my last post I explained how God holds each of us in existence from moment to moment. Now picture that constant presence like a laptop computer with a wireless connection to the internet. As long as the wireless router is up and running and the laptop is working properly, everything’s fine. But what happens when the wireless connection fails? Suddenly, the computer goes into panic mode. It sends you message after message that something’s wrong and gives you options to try to fix it. But inside the computer itself, it’s constantly retrying the connection to see if anything has changed. In fact, it makes this a priority. Think of an endless loop where it tries the same thing over and over again in desperation. For the laptop, one of its primary functions is broken and it gives that its full attention. And those warning messages to the user are cries for help.

With people, God’s presence is even more powerful than the laptop’s wireless connection. God’s presence is our life, and He’s with us so continuously that we take Him for granted. We’ve never known a time without Him, because we only know what it’s like to be alive. So the most powerful experience of God we can have is also so ordinary to us that we simply think of it as our life. But once in awhile, God will send us a wake up call.

Twice in my life I’ve had the experience of losing my connection to God. Of course, the connection wasn’t broken completely or I’d be dead. But He withdrew enough of Himself from me to reveal how much I rely on Him and take His presence to be my own existence. Here’s what it was like:

Suddenly, I found myself unable to care about anything. I had no desire to do the things that, only minutes earlier, had filled me with motivation. The sensation of complete uselessness was so disturbing that my mind immediately began flashing images of things I like and care about. It was a desperate attempt to reconnect with my life, but no matter what my mind brought before me, none of it seemed to have any meaning. Things I cherished, things I felt proud of, things that were fun – even people. Nothing in my life meant anything to me at all. In a metaphorical sense, everything had gone gray and I saw no colors. But my mind refused to give up. It was stuck in an endless loop of trying to find something to bring back my interest in living.

Finding myself powerless, I began to panic. How could I continue with my life without feeling any connection to it? My best response was to curl up and wait it out, not knowing what was happening or how long it would last. I didn’t want to speak to anyone, I didn’t care if my world slipped through my fingers. None of it mattered. I didn’t even eat. Eventually, the connection returned and I found color and flavor and care and interest flooding back into me from some source I couldn’t identify. I myself had done nothing – either to break the connection or to repair it. It was something that happened to me.

The second time this happened was the same, but afterwards I recognized what I was being shown. God wanted me to be able to explain to people how ever-present He is. He was giving me the ability to describe the difference between ourselves and the spark of life that God uses to hold us in existence. And what I realized was that GOD IS OUR EXPERIENCE OF LIFE. Not only is it impossible to exist without Him, but He’s even the things that happen to us. He is our ability to engage with the world and others. He’s even the color we see and the flavors we taste. He is what our five senses recognize and respond to. But even more than that, God is our very ability to care about those things. It’s only because of our experience of God within someone else that we’re able to care about them. It’s only the presence of God in an object that makes it important to us. We are made up of God, held in existence by God, and respond only to God.

This is what mystics are trying to explain when they say God is Love. But we don’t get it because it’s just an abstract idea. To make it real, we need to see that God is the part of our world that we’re able to relate to and care about. We may not think of that as love, but I can assure you that without God’s presence, there is no ability to care about anything, including our own self. The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. In the absence of God, who is love, we care for nothing and relate to nothing. He is all that we are and all that we respond to. Period.

If you ever find yourself losing your ability to care about something in your life, think of it as God withdrawing His presence from that thing. Whether it’s a hobby, a career, a person or an ability, God’s presence in it is what makes you care about it. And when He removes Himself from that thing, you drop it like cold mush. It’s not your fault; it’s just God giving you a glimpse of what He does for you and how much He means to you. It is a gift, showing you how much He colors your world. He’s asking you to go beyond what’s apparent and begin to recognize Him, the truth behind what you see. He’s calling you.

Hopefully, this will help you see that God isn’t out there; He’s in here. See Him in this new way. As long as you look out on your life and want to be part of it, you can be sure that God is with you, giving you that desire. Whatever you seek, whatever moves you, whatever drives you on, whatever demands your attention – it is God inviting you to engage with Him. Let this understanding bring deep richness to your world and fill you with technicolor passion!

‘Til next time…

Michael

For the Love of God

So far I’ve been talking about the difference between religion and spirituality, and making the case that religion actually keeps you from God rather than bringing you to Him. And while I believe there’s still a lot to be said about all that, I don’t want to be like everyone else and just point out the problem. This blog is about the solution, so this time I’m going to explain our existence in relation to God.

One of my biggest complaints against religion is that it teaches you God is someone ‘out there’. He’s separate from you and you have to find Him somehow. Religion provides a series of hoops you must jump through in order to earn God through obedience, but all those hoops are manmade things. God doesn’t set out any hoops. Instead, He provides the world for us to live in and patiently waits for us to open our eyes and see Him. He isn’t a jealous God, as the Old Testament claims, and He doesn’t insist on signing His name to everything He creates. Do you see “Made by God” written on a sunset or a rainbow? What about on the mountains or the seashore? No, God doesn’t have to sign His work because there’s no one else who could have done it. Everything is God, so He has no need to take credit for it. He just makes it and lets us discover who it’s from.

That includes ourselves. I didn’t create me, and neither did my parents. God created me and everyone else, and that means I’m part of His Creation. I’m an intrinsic part of this place. I’m not some afterthought that was created because the universe was empty. He created the universe for us, and He created us for the universe. There’s no separation. We’re made from the dust that came from stars that exploded long ago. We aren’t made from something separate. We’re part of all there is. So before I beat that horse to death, let me explain what this means to us. It means that just as God holds Creation in existence from moment to moment, He also holds us in existence from moment to moment. We’re not like toys that He puts batteries in and then lets us go. There are no batteries. If God removes His spark of life from us at any second, we simply drop dead.

That isn’t meant to scare you. What it means is that every second that you’re alive, God is the one making that possible. And that has powerful implications. It means that if you’re still alive, then He still wants you alive. In other words, you haven’t done anything to cause Him to stop giving you existence. Think about that for a moment… Most people suffer from something I call life-guilt. This is a deep-seated worry that we’re not worthy of our lives. We’re ashamed of who we are and we’re always trying to redeem ourselves and justify our existence. But God doesn’t see us that way. If He did, He wouldn’t hold us in existence. He would simply let the connection drop and we’d stop being.

So the fact that you exist and your life continues is a form of proof that God loves you. In fact, He adores you! He’s not holding your life over your head threatening to take it away if you do something wrong. He’s supporting you with the fullness of His grace, offering you everything the world has to give, if only you’ll ask for it and then reach out and receive it from His hand. This is the source of infinite abundance that God is offering each one of us at all moments of our lives, but we’re so steeped in shame and life-guilt that we actually say no. In fact, the inner dialog sounds a lot like this: “I don’t deserve all those things and all that joy, because I’m just taking up space and not doing anything for the world or God. I’m not good enough, so I can’t say ‘yes’.”

That’s what we tell ourselves deep in our hearts, and that’s what keeps us from reaching for God. We don’t think we have the right because we don’t think we’ve done anything to earn it. And almost all of that misunderstanding comes from religious thinking. The truth is, there’s no such thing as ‘deserve’. It’s not whether we deserve something or don’t deserve something. It’s not whether we’ve earned a relationship with God or haven’t earned it. Justifying ourselves is not part of God’s approach to life. He created us because He wanted us to have life. He wanted to delight in the diversity of individuals, and each individual adds to that diversity. The dance of life thrills Him, and He makes it what it is by giving His Life to it at all moments, no matter what’s happening.

And about that Flood
I suspect that some people will point back to the Great Flood and complain that God was angry by us and almost wiped us out. But that’s just prehistoric man believing that natural calamities were from angry gods. Scientists have learned that a comet or asteroid landed in the Indian Ocean and caused a massive tsunami followed by weeks, if not months, of climate shift (i.e., rain) right at the time when all ancient flood myths are said to have happened. It wasn’t God seeking to wipe us out and then repenting of it; it was a fact of living on Earth. Sometimes space intrudes on our seemingly safe little planet and changes our lives. That’s all the flood was. It wasn’t God smiting us for being wicked. And the flood didn’t destroy all life except for one guy and his family. The impact of that asteroid was global, and nearly every single ancient culture has some record of that event, which means that people all over the world witnessed and survived it. So the Flood isn’t proof that God gets disgusted with us. It’s just primitive man thinking the end of the world had come because the gods were angry. Primitive people always believe everything’s about them. That’s just narcissism, not truth or fact.

So getting back to my point – the fact that you exist is proof positive that God is holding you in existence at every moment, every second, every breath. He is intimately involved with your life and what you’re doing, and He cherishes you. If He didn’t, you wouldn’t be here. It’s time to wake up to that reality and learn what it is that’s keeping you from trusting in God’s love. Is it religion? I’ll bet that has a lot to do with it.

Next time, I’ll describe the actual experience of God’s presence – the very thing that causes our life. ‘Til then…

Michael

The Waltz of Conflict

Feel your breath for a moment. Feel it flood down your throat and into your lungs as they expand. Feel it flow outward as you exhale. Feel your heart beating in your chest. You take these feelings for granted, but open yourself to them for a brief moment. What do you experience?

Friction.

Step onto the floor for a moment and feel your foot against the sole of your shoe or your skin against whatever floor you’re on. What do you experience?

Friction.

Friction is the conflict between two things, and it’s the nature of existence, because without it nothing can happen. In the absence of friction, there’s no beat for your heart; there’s no way to inflate or deflate your lungs; there’s nothing for the bottom of your foot to push against. Without friction, all of life stops. Dead.

Friction is life. It’s what I call productive antagonism. The problem is, we’re taught that conflict and antagonism are things to avoid. Few people enjoy conflict, but without it nothing changes. Without change, there can be no existence. Existence is dynamic, fluid, always in motion. In order for there to be life, there must be motion. In order for there to be motion, there must be conflict, friction, productive antagonism. This is the mechanical basis of existence.

Imagine being a disembodied soul floating around in the afterlife. You have your mind, but there’s nothing to push against, so there’s no way to test any of things you think about. It’s all just theory until you can bring it into the world and test it. When we have nothing to push against and nothing pushing against us, we stagnate. This is part of why life exists. And it implies that the soul has need of conflict in order to grow. Obviously, if the soul already knew everything it needed to know, there would be no reason at all for it to enter a human body and experience physical existence.

This is how we can tell that life has a purpose – and at least part of that purpose is growth. But because conflict is such a stressful thing, we naturally try to avoid it. This has become so important in the Far East that they’ve built entire religions around avoidance. Certain sects of Buddhism, as well as Taoism and the underlying premise of Confucianism are designed specifically with conflict avoidance in mind. Their premise is harmony with all things, and some practitioners take this to such extremes that they shun normal life and hole themselves away in monasteries trying to rid themselves of the natural desires that come with the body.

But what happens when such a person eventually dies and finds themselves on the other side looking back on Earth and realizing they never actually rid themselves of those interests? They spent a lifetime trying to bury their passions, but now they discover that all they did was force themselves into denial, and they want to return to do the things they didn’t allow themselves to do in the first place.

Fortunately, they do get the opportunity to come back. But wouldn’t it have been better if they simply lived life and allowed themselves to explore what they were drawn to? Eventually, the curiosity dies away and we find ourselves choosing the things of the spirit without forcing it. This happens so naturally that there’s no reason to try to fast-forward ourselves. That’s the danger with some Far Eastern religions.

There’s no way to graduate from physical existence (which is known in certain traditions as the Maya) without first having gotten your fill of it. That’s the only way to grow, and it helps us to start looking at conflict in a new way. Rather than something to avoid and dread, we can change our perspective to see conflict as a prompt to grow in a way we wouldn’t have otherwise. This turns life into a productive exercise rather than a series of traumas, and it allows us to realize that there’s a reason for the things that happen.

The key to escaping the victim mentality that’s so common to religion is to stop trying to turn life into an endlessly harmonious vacation. There’s supposed to be conflict, and the more awake and aware we become, the less traumatic that conflict becomes. Eventually, we find ourselves harmonizing with God’s will and with the world around us, but you can’t get there by skipping ahead. You have to grow through it. Life is designed to get us to grow into spiritually mature souls over the course of lifetimes. Look at it that way and the craziness disappears!

‘Til next time…

Michael

What is a Human Being?

What is a human being? We all ask at some point in our lives, but does anyone offer a good answer? If we look to science we’re told that a human being is a complex biological machine designed over millions of years of accidental genetic mutation, but that doesn’t explain sentience. If we look to religion, we’re told that a human being is a soul imprisoned in a shell of fallen flesh. If we ask metaphysics, we’re given all kinds of conflicting ideas about energy bodies and flesh and spirit and ethers and resonating notes and so on. So what’s the truth?

The way I see it, Jesus put it as plainly as the language of the time would allow. There is the son of God and the son of man. The son of God is a metaphor for the soul, which is the spiritual aspect of a person. The son of Man is a metaphor for the flesh, which has its own viewpoint and perspective. The flesh is the part of a person that’s defined by what their five senses can comprehend. These two aspects of a person are meant to operate in cooperation with each other, but are often at odds when it comes to the purpose of life.

For instance, if your soul is bent on reuniting with God, and your flesh is bent on experiencing as much of this pretty blue world as it can, you’re going to have an internal conflict of interest. This is the internal war that we all struggle with to a greater or lesser extent. And it comes from a very clear cause.

A human being isn’t a soul trapped in a body. Rather, we’re a soul and a body that have been brought together to form a composite being of both spirit and flesh. The soul aspect of a person is an eternal spiritual being, while the flesh aspect of a person is a temporary physical being that serves as a vehicle for exploring the world. And when these two come together to form a person, the person is actually more than the sum of these two parts. We’re more than just our soul and more than just our flesh. Since both of these aspects have their own degree of intelligence, both intelligences join together to form something greater.

We are both eternal and temporal. We are both ethereal and mundane. We are the combination of spirit and matter. We are the bridge between the infinite and the restricted. And the most salient aspect of who and what we are is our sentience. This is the part of us that taps into the mind of God and searches out truth and understanding. Sentience is something evolution can’t make heads or tails of, and anthropologists suggest absurd notions like how becoming meat eaters enlarged our brains and gave us the capacity to think at higher levels than the rest of the animals. But if that were true, all carnivores would be more evolved than their vegetarian prey, which is not the case. Nor is there any greater sentience among carnivorous animals than among vegetarian or omnivorous animals. The diet theory doesn’t hold up, and nothing else exists to scientifically explain the distinction between humans and animals.

Clearly stated, sentience comes from God. Our ability to think and reason and be self-aware is what prompted Jesus to cry out in exasperation “Do you not know that you are gods?” He was lamenting our reluctance to think soundly. We’re gifted with so much sentience that we can literally comprehend the universe, but so many of us simply sleepwalk through life without giving it even the shallowest consideration. We seem to take everything as a given and go on our way, investigating nothing. What a waste of the gift of divine sentience!

But there’s also a very good reason for why we do this. The fact is, our souls aren’t always the part of us that’s in control. More often than not, our bodies dominate our lives. Brain chemistry, hormones and plain old sensory fascination drown out the voice of the soul until all we hear is the call of the wild, inviting us to play in this bright, colorful world without giving a care to our spiritual needs. If you’re not sure what I mean, consider how big Viagra and Cialis have become. Why does a seventy year-old man need to act like a thirty year-old stud? He’s grown to an age where hormones aren’t meant to be driving him anymore, but since he’s only used to being driven by his body he doesn’t recognize the call of his soul to go deeper into life. Instead, he tries to return to the heyday of his youth and resume the sensory familiarity of sex.

Why are we so uncomfortable with spiritual things? Why are we so resistant to doing inner work and reflection? Why are we such sensation-junkies? Well, truth be told, not all of us are. In fact, there are plenty of people who aren’t driven by their hormones and do lead internal lives where they ponder deeper things and grow spiritually. The difference is the amount of life experience a person’s soul has. And that’s where we tie into my last post where I promised to make sense of multiple lifetimes and Jesus’ statement that we live only once.

It’s true that a person lives only once. But remember, a person is a combination of soul and body, not merely a soul trapped in a flesh shell. Thus, when the person dies, they are gone. But the soul doesn’t die. Nor is it necessarily ready to rejoin God. In fact, the soul returns to life again and again until it no longer has anything to learn from the experience. The flesh dies and takes that part of the person with it, and what’s left over is the life experience and wisdom gained by the soul as it returns to the afterlife. And when it discovers that it isn’t ready to reunite with God, it returns to life and is combined with another body to become a whole new person.

This is why it was possible for Jesus to state that a person lives only once, and yet he could also say that John the Baptist was the same spirit as Elijah from the Old Testament. It’s not reincarnation, exactly. This is known as the transmigration of the soul.

Transmigration does not contradict Jesus or the ‘one person, one life’ doctrine. It actually makes much more sense of it, and it perfectly explains why some people seem so caught up in sensations while others are so much more inward and contemplative. The more mature a soul becomes, the less its body can dominate it. This is how people grow from being panting puppies who can’t wait to get involved in everything going on, to becoming mature, careful and considerate individuals who seem to bear themselves with great dignity and responsibility. The difference is simply the relative maturity of their souls. And that’s in complete agreement with Jesus’ distinction between the son of God (soul) and the son of man (flesh).

Tragically, our ignorance of this dichotomy has led many immature souls to aspire to maturity before their time. That’s why not all priests are ready to be celibate, which is the reason why they become pedophiles and molesters. It’s why so many Buddhists are wasting their formative lifetimes trying to quench their desires in monasteries rather than simply letting the experiences of life get them there naturally. Without a multiple lifetime perspective, all of life appears insane and irreconcilable. Life only makes sense once we understand that our souls live many times, and that there’s a reason for this progression.

Next time, I’ll explain why trying to escape this place isn’t necessarily the right course of action – or even a legitimate path out.

 
‘Til then…

Michael

Why God doesn’t need Hell

In my last post I discussed how we project our dysfunctional parents onto God so that He seems to act like a human parent with conditional love. This belief is what gives rise to the idea of eternal reward and punishment, and this time I’m going to explain exactly why that’s a false belief. In fact, I’m going so far as to say that God has no use for Hell at all.

Recently, a statistic came out claiming that 1 in every 99 people in the US are in prison. Naturally, when crime and jail are such major aspects of civilization it only makes sense that there would be prison in the afterlife as well. But this is based on a false assumption that we all seem to miss. We only send people to prison because WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO HEAL THEM! Do you see that? If we had the ability to heal a person of their pathological behavior, there would no longer be any need for prison at all. We would simply cure them and send them on their way.

Now, reminding ourselves that there is a God and He is the creator of the human race and every individual who makes up the human race, it becomes fairly obvious that He’s also perfectly capable of healing everyone of everything. EVERYTHING. Therefore, we have to change our way of looking at this. Instead of seeing the world and people as fallen, we need to recognize that God permits human brokenness. There’s a purpose for our brokenness even though it leads to so much pain, so much trauma, so much fear. As our souls journey through time and existence, we learn to become more authentic. We learn to look inward to seek and face our own pain, our own brokenness. And when we do that we awaken to greater spiritual truth. This is the process we all take on our pilgrimage back to God.

Understanding that truth makes it possible to look around at this distressing world and realize that it’s not fallen or owned by the devil, but rather, is a place where unawakened souls can come awake and step into the birthright of their true sentience. The ultimate nature of the soul is sentience, which is awareness of self in relation to everything else. The more sentient we become, the more we face and deal with our brokenness. Conversely, the more we face and deal with our brokenness, the more sentient we become. This life is a gauntlet that each of us runs as we work our way toward sentience. And when we finally achieve it, the reward is reuniting with God, our source.

This is the purpose of life. It’s not a punishment. It’s not a one-time exploration of the nature of good and evil. It’s not the necessary evil of becoming an adult. It’s not a one-time test of whether we choose God or reject Him.

Life is the on-going development of each soul as it learns to rejoin God.

Knowing this, it becomes obvious that God allows pain because we must discover how and why not to cause it. He allows crime because we must learn why it’s wrong. He allows human suffering because being human is a kind of temporary uniform that a soul puts on for the sake of growth. It isn’t permanent, it isn’t a one-time event, and the mistakes and choices we make in one lifetime don’t cause eternal repercussions. We’re simply growing up in the spiritual sense, and that means we need a sandbox where we can make lots of mistakes on our way to spiritual maturity.

Because we’re human beings stuck in the timeframe of a single life, it seems like everything we do has dire consequences that lead to whether our soul goes to heaven or hell after life. But from God’s eternal perspective, life is just a playpen where spiritual children grow into spiritual adults, learning to play well with one another and eventually comprehending the oneness of everything.

This is why God doesn’t stop all the madness that goes on here. God isn’t insane, as if He’s somehow all-good and yet refuses to make things right. What makes life seem so crazy is that we look at it as a one-time event. If this is the only life I’m ever going to have, then how dare it not be the blissful, magnificent expression of everything I know myself to be! What a crime that I had to spend my one single lifetime as a bum, as a convict, as a druggie, as a blue-collar worker, as a cubicle rat, as an abused spouse… The list of woes can go on forever, but only because we don’t realize each of us is going to experience every angle of life before we’re done with it. We’re going to be both the criminal and the cop, the guttersnipe and the wealthy debutante, the killer and the priest. Each one of us does it all, because that’s the only way to comprehend the fullness of life and all the vicissitudes of individuality. Our choices now don’t define who we are in eternity because we’re just trying on roles for size. Nothing here is permanent.

So going back to the problem of prisons, remember how I mentioned that we wouldn’t need them if we could heal people of their pathology? Well God CAN heal us of our pathology. He is able to reconfigure the brain and brain chemistry of the serial killer so there’s no longer a compulsion to kill, and so he no longer views people as things to destroy. God knows that the soul of the serial killer isn’t evil. Killing is just one of the many aspects of life that have to be explored so the soul can understand all that it needs to. And since God can heal anyone of anything, He has no need of Hell. Hell would just be an eternal form of prison. And once again, prisons only exist because we human beings can’t cure the criminals. God has no such limitation, so Hell simply doesn’t apply. Not only would it be completely ineffective and ungodly, it’s also based on a childish view of what life is for. Life isn’t a litmus test for determining a person’s devotion and obedience to God, but rather, to give the soul experience after experience so that it can grow beyond individuality and dualism and be reunited with God once and for all.

Anything less than that is counterfeit spirituality. Don’t believe in it.

 
Next time, I’ll explain how the fact that our souls experience multiple lifetimes doesn’t contradict Jesus’ statement that “It is given to man but once to die.”

 
‘Till then…

 Michael

The Truth about Heaven and Hell

People have been fearing God since time immemorial because of the notion of eternal punishment. Still others worship God because of the promise of eternal bliss if they do. But isn’t it odd that the Creator of the human race would love us with the conditional love of a human parent? “Do what I like and I’ll love you, but do what I hate and I’ll kill you.” All too many of us are raised with parents who deal with us that way. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right way to raise a kid, and it certainly isn’t the way God looks upon us.

The grim fact of the matter is, the gods we’ve been given through history are merely projections of parents. All religious scripture has been written by people, and those people were often very broken. A few posts ago I spoke of Moses and how his upbringing in the house of the Pharaoh would have made him a very dysfunctional person. But all of us are dysfunctional to some degree, because all of us have been raised by human frailty. Thus, we come to think of obedience as love. That’s what our parents teach us, and that’s what we take to be true. But is it?

Let’s step into God’s shoes for a moment. If you create a race of sentient beings, but you don’t give them the ability to know the future, how can you expect them to make good decisions? If I’m unable to know for certain whether my decision now leads to good or bad in the future, all I can do is make my best guess. If I’m only guessing, and my intention is to do the best possible thing, then I can’t really be held accountable if I guess wrong. Instead, it’s my intention that matters.

God understands this, because God created us to relationship with Him. If we knew all possible outcomes ahead of time, what would we need Him for? In order to convince us that we do need God, He created us without that ability to see the effects of our actions. Instead, we have to wait to find out if we guessed right. You don’t punish someone for doing the best they can. Or at least, a sane person doesn’t. But who does punish someone for doing the best they can?

Aha! That’s where we discover the true anthropomorphism of God. For those unfamiliar with the term, ‘anthropomorphism’ means giving human characteristics to something that isn’t human, such as a cartoon mouse, a robot, or… God.

Human beings automatically give human character traits to everything. That’s why some of us give names to our beloved cars or talk to our plants. But when it comes to God, we give Him the traits of our human parents. And what happens if our parents are broken? Well, God becomes broken. This isn’t because we need God to be broken, but rather, because we don’t recognize the brokenness of our parents. They are simply the model of parenting that we understand. And since God is our spiritual parent, He must have some things in common with our physical parents, right?

WRONG!

The YHWH of the Old Testament exhibits the characteristic conditional love of an alcoholic parent. I know that sounds like blasphemy, but you’re going to have to take a closer look at things if you want to get to the truth. The Old Testament god is modeled on a human father who was alcoholic and demanded that his children treat him with kid-gloves. Do anything wrong and he will beat you to a pulp. Do what he wants you to do and he will praise you up one side and down the other. This, folks, is categorically dysfunctional conditional love, not the love of a deity.

And the big problem with conditional love is that it teaches the child to defend the parent against all nay-sayers. The broken parent is the one who gets defended, while the people who witness the abuse and understand that the child is being harmed are shut out and rejected. This is simply because a child has too much invested in the parent to look at the truth. What child can stand alone and let their parent be taken away? Human beings just aren’t that strong, and children even less so.

This is why we have thousands of years of people cowering in the shadow of a brutal god, and yet defending him to the death because of their terror of him. That’s not true God. That’s just alcoholic behavior projected onto God. How very human of us!

So what does this have to do with heaven and hell? It’s very simple. Reward and punishment are simply human ideas that we’ve applied to the afterlife because we were raised to expect conditional love. But the truth is, we don’t deserve to be punished. We’re just guessing, for heaven’s sake! No one sets out to specifically and intentionally do the wrong thing. That goes against our very nature. So to condemn us for making a mistake is like condemning a three year-old for spilling a drink. The child is only just learning how to use their hand properly. How can they help it if they slip?

Folks, we can’t help making errors. God built that into us so we would turn to Him for guidance! It’s not a flaw; it’s a design feature. It’s what causes us to seek out our Creator. He doesn’t punish us for getting it wrong, because there was only a fifty-fifty chance of ever getting it right – and even that would have simply been a happy accident.

The alcoholic parent demands perfection from their children, and children can’t live up to perfection, so they automatically get abused. But isn’t it remarkable that the parent is as far from perfection as anyone can get? What right do they have to demand perfection from their child? That’s what’s so damning about parental abuse. The parent somehow sees themselves as having the right to judge their children. But God made those kids, not the parent. The parent is himself a kid from God’s perspective.

Do you see how warped this gets? Both heaven and hell are merely the human notion of reward and punishment for either obeying or disobeying. But since we’re all doing our best to obey and we simply make mistakes from time to time, the concept of eternal punishment or eternal reward is silly. Nothing more than silly. God has no use for it, and that’s right where we’ll pick up next time.

‘Til then…

Michael

Self Identity and the Shifting Sands

What you think about becomes your identity.

Thus, an extreme sports athlete is their sport. A religious zealot is their religion, and a porn star is sex. But these are all illusions. This is what Jesus was talking about when he said build your house on a solid foundation rather than on the shifting sands. Anything in physical existence can be taken from you, can pass away. What happens to the extreme sports athlete once he breaks his body to the point that he can no longer compete? What happens to the porn star who gets AIDS? What happens to the religious zealot who discovers their faith is merely a cult and has nothing to do with God?

These are the shifting sands, and when you identify yourself with the life you lead, you’re setting yourself up for a hard fall. The solution? To discover your spiritual reality. Developing a real relationship with God (rather than going to Bible study and thinking that’s the same thing) demands that you figure out who you are for real, because God doesn’t relationship with illusions. He requires you to bring your whole self to the table, good, bad and ugly. And that’s when you begin to figure out who you are in reality.

I love riding my motorcycle, but I can’t identify myself as a motorcyclist, because it’s only a fraction of who I am. Just a small piece of what it means to be me. Yet, I’ve met guys who believe they really are the Marlboro Man. Their bike is their core identity. But what happens to them when their bike gets wrecked? What if they themselves get wrecked? Suddenly, they must discover a deeper sense of self that transcends their self-image of being a rider. They must face the unknown of finding out more about themselves.

Why do we human beings recoil from that inner work? The very reasonable answer is: because we don’t know what’s real and what’s fake. Think about it. We don’t where we were before we were born, and we don’t know where we go after we die. All we know is this place, which is full of chaos, color, noise and danger. Sometimes we can carve out a safe little niche for ourselves – but sometimes we can’t. Life is terrifying, and we have to bring it down to our size to keep it from swallowing us whole. To do that, we must decide who we will be, and that’s where our core identity comes from. It is the necessity of shrinking the largeness of life to something we can deal with. And that means it’s simply a way to minimize our fear.

All self-identity is a means of minimizing fear. So it makes sense that we choose little pieces of life to become part of and leave the rest of life to others. But ultimately this creates in us a terror of death, because death spells the end to our safe little piece of the pie. How can we get past the need for a small piece of life and enlarge our self-identity to where it transcends death and allows us to leave life behind peacefully and with hope for a new future?

Again, it comes down to a real relationship with God. If you can accept this article, you’ll be able to recognize that the faith you place in religion is simply a shifting sands kind of self-identity. That will help you understand the difference between quoting scripture and actually coming to know God in your heart and soul. God is larger than your religion or anyone else’s. Religion doesn’t lead you to God, it leads you to an illusion of God and self. Find who you truly are by seeking God outside of the safety net of organized religion and you’ll discover your true anchor. That’s a sense of self built upon bedrock.

Of course, the truly religious person will point out that religion’s purpose is to safeguard the eternal soul from hell and damnation. I know that’s a big, big deal for most people, so I promise not to treat it lightly. Tune in next time for a profound understanding of the difference between real God and the god we’ve all been taught to believe in. Even if you don’t agree with my conclusions, you’ll still come away with a much deeper understanding of human nature.

 
‘Til then…

Michael

 

Discernment and the illusion of ‘One True Faith’

Here’s a question: do you know how to tell if your life is aligned with the will of God?

Spiritual discernment is one of the most crucial aspects of faith, and yet so few people understand what discernment looks like. It’s time to fix that, and not simply because you need to understand discernment, but because it will also reveal to you a spiritual truth you might be unaware of.

When a person isn’t aligned with the will of God, things go wrong in their life. This might be things as minor as constantly getting stuck at stoplights when you’re in a hurry, or as major as a life-threatening illness. God designed life to be benevolent for us. In other words, we’re meant to receive that which causes us to thrive. So if your life is toxic and is causing you to suffer, that’s an indicator that you’re off-track with God’s will. This doesn’t mean you’re evil or wicked, and it doesn’t mean He’s punishing you; it means that something you’re doing or something you believe in is keeping God from being able to bless you with the fullness of life.

Look at your life and it will reveal to you the extent to which you’re on-track with God or not. Do things go easy for you, or is life a constant swim upstream? Are you blessed with a sense of gladness about being alive, or are you merely surviving and hoping against hope that it will get better? Worse, do you hate your life and wish it would finally end and give you some peace?

These are indicators of your alignment with divine will, because every person alive is here to grow closer to God. This may look very different from person to person, but it really is the ultimate intention. Individual existence is about growing past our sense of separation and rediscovering our constant connection with God. But the more separated from God we feel, the more our lives fall apart. Sometimes they unravel slowly while we watch, like a train-wreck happening in slow-motion. Sometimes it happens like a cataclysm, seemingly without warning (although I strongly suspect there are always indicators of being off-line. We just don’t always recognize them.).

What’s very hard for people to accept is that nothing in life ever happens without God allowing it. This means that when a criminal escapes from the police, God allowed that to happen. Take this as deep and as dark as you’re willing, because it’s true even though it’s very difficult to embrace. Humanity is all about what’s fair and just, and we have a serious obsession with reward and punishment (much, much more on this next time). So when something happens that goes against our sense of justice, we’re perplexed, and this leads to a lot of theological debate about the nature of existence and our separation from God. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons behind mythologies like The Fall of Adam and Eve, as well as the Great Flood.

But we’re very small compared to the universe, and the universe is very small compared to God. So expecting God’s sense of justice to conform to ours is embarrassingly immature. It’s so difficult for a religiously trained person to accept that God might have a larger perspective than the one expressed in scripture. But we have to recognize that there are almost countless different scripture traditions in the world. And here’s where I really wanted to begin this discussion, because when we assume that our set of scriptures is right and all the others are wrong, it makes our religion look idiotic. But rather than call such believers to open their minds, I’d rather give them a good reason to do so.

Let’s consider a list of things that we all recognize as blessings:

·   Meeting the right marriage partner

·   Healing from a disease

·   Finding the right job or career

·   Being spared from having a traffic accident

·   Receiving a much deserved raise

·   Giving birth to a healthy child

·   Qualifying for a much needed vehicle or home

The list could obviously continue, but these are mundane things that we all recognize as blessings. So here’s where spiritual discernment challenges the faithful.

How can a Christian reconcile the fact that Buddhists might receive these very same blessings from God? After all, since the quality of our lives is a direct, one-to-one ratio of how aligned we are with God’s will, it becomes very clear that if Buddhism was a false faith, God wouldn’t be able to bless anyone who believes in it.

But it doesn’t take any effort at all to realize that the list of blessings above are experienced regularly by Buddhists, Hindus, Islamists, Taoists, Catholics, Protestants, New Agers, Wiccans and believers of any other faith you can name.

All of which means that God blesses everyone who is aligned with His will, and THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FAITH THEY PRACTICE. He blesses people across the board. God doesn’t just cause the sun and rain to fall upon people of other faiths – He actually goes way out of His way to bless them just as He might bless a Christian. And even more telling than that, He will withhold those blessings from Christians if they’re out of alignment with His will. Thus, the fact that they’re Christian is irrelevant.

This, more than any other argument one can make, is proof positive that God is larger than any human belief system, and He transcends every version of holy writings or scriptures or practices that people cling to. Religion isn’t truth; it is comfort for those of us who still need rules imposed on our life. Not everyone is comfortable in a freeform existence, and that’s what religion is for. It provides structure for people who need it, but it isn’t truth in relation to God. It’s simply for the comfort of people who haven’t yet become convinced of spiritual reality.

This is why it’s so important for the human race to finally wake up and accept that religion is not the same as spirituality, and that God is not involved in religion. He’s beyond it, and that’s where we meet Him… beyond religion.

 

‘Til next time

 
Michael