You Are Not What They Say You Are

I can read all the books about creativity that I want, it ain’t going to make me creative. Although it can help me to know that potential exists. What I need is to dig in, push past the fears and see what’s in there. I need to push past the fears and clean out the muck. That feels the most relevant right now. Too many thoughts born of holding them all in for a lifetime, never letting them out, always doubting them, doubting myself. Let them loose, examine them, see what they’re made of, be inquisitive rather than disdainful of them. Discover what I am made of.

I do not think that You are anything like they say You are. I sense You as a force, an energy, shimmering unseen to our naked, physical eye. And yet consuming every square inch of what we call ‘space’. Flowing through and impelling everything that is. The life force that holds it all together. And part and parcel of that energy is all that we think and feel, our mental and emotional energy and that which includes our capacity to both love and hate. It includes our capacity to create anything and everything that I can bring into being from my mental and emotional energy.

I think You are there and here. “Out there” and “In here”. Not a stream but THE energy that glues all that is together. That which connects me – however indirectly (and yet so directly) to the smallest particle of matter in an ocean on the other side of the planet and in outer space a million miles away.

The Christ. I AM the way, the truth and the life. I have long puzzled over this statement. But it is the answer… when we come to discover the question. After a very long and arduous and intensely personal struggle.

The Christ. The Center. Somehow this points to the very core of ourselves, the center of the human being. Of course I can never be sure, at least not right now but it seems rational that You would exist in material form if my theory of “every idea and expression of idea points to something that already is” is true. And I sense that it is. It would make sense that You had come in human form to show us that the way to You is somehow the way to our true self, the center of our being. It is both the path to me and the path to You. I could never quite put my finger on it but it makes sense to me now.

It is both interesting and rather sad that as I reach for You and (I think) get ever closer to You the more ‘out there’ people would take me to be. But the fact is that the more I reach for You and the closer I get the less ‘out there’ I become.

*****

It is very odd to be headed somewhere and not have the slightest idea where. I still have this idea that I should be ‘doing’ stuff, ‘accomplishing’ things. What I haven’t the slightest idea. Making money? Curing cancer? Saving lives? I don’t know.

I wonder if that isn’t quite true. I suppose it can be true if that is what I choose. But in the end that which I accomplish doesn’t help me much. I’ll be dead as will everyone that is to come. So much distraction comes from without and it is so hard to close my ears to it. So hard to shut it out and not allow myself to fall for that which others impose on me as necessary. Do I let society define what is important for me? Do I let the people around me dictate what I should or should not be doing. Does somebody else get to determine what is good or bad, right or wrong, useful or useless?

Striving after wind.

Is it not true that anything that flows from me, represented in the way that I choose to represent, done in a such a way that I am capable of representing, does that not automatically make it good? Simply because it is a work of my hands and my mind and my heart brought into being by me… the image of God.

I have been wanting to say this for a very long time: You are not what they say You are.

Collateral Damage

I am in awe at the power we possess to alter our reality with our minds. Let us talk about the power of denial. To me the word ‘denial’ has a very negative connotation, as if we willfully and wantonly exercise our power of denial to rid ourselves of something that is plainly obvious to us, something that is right in front of our noses that we simply choose, consciously (there’s the kicker) to ignore for some selfish, self-serving (read ‘evil’) purpose.

But our power of denial is in many instances a tool for survival and it enables us to actually alter our reality to such an extent that we can truly forget things as if they had never happened.

This is an amazing and useful tool of adaptation that we possess. The power to make ourselves forget something as if it never happened, to fragment our minds, split off that part of memory that we do not want and simply make it go away.

Problem solved.

Well, not really. For it is an amazingly useful power and at the same time an enormously destructive power. The power we have over our own minds. This ability we possess to simply make part of ourselves go away, oftentimes never to be heard from again. Amazing and tragic all at the same time. Amazing that we can do this in order to save ourselves and tragic that we find ourselves in situations that it must be done in order to save ourselves and even more tragic in that this power to slice off and away parts of ourselves closes us off to vital parts without even knowing it. It is not possible to slice off and do away with parts and pieces, e.g. painful memories without also slicing off and doing away with some of the good stuff too.

I sort of think of it as chemotherapy for treating cancer. While it is necessary to run this toxic medicine through the body to kill off the cancerous cells, there is no way it can be done without taking with it many of the good cells. There is no discernment.

We could call this ‘collateral damage’. We got the bad guys but unfortunately we had to kill numerous innocent civilians in the process. But the good news is we got the bad guys. But the bad news is…

More and more I am convinced that we are separated from God in that we are separated from ourselves. He isn’t gone, we just cannot see Him because the place where we can find Him is inaccessible to us.

I read Jungian psychology and I read it because it has become plain to me that Dr. Jung was on to something very vital and central to his psychology is the idea of circumambulation of the Self. We are looking for the center, for the Self, for OUR Self. I absolutely and positively would not dispute because it is right on the money for me. However there are questions as to whether he considered the Self to be that one thing for which we are searching, i.e. the Self as God.

I finished a book recently, The Living God and Our Living Psyche, What Christians Can Learn from Carl Jung by Ann Belford Ulanov. And I do believe that this very smart lady hit the crux of the matter when she states that the Self is not God but that part of us that knows God.

I just love it when I stumble across the words for that which I have to that point been unable to put into words.

Disconnection of Thoughts about Connection

I’ve just started a new book entitled In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky. Ouspensky was a student of a gentleman by the name of G.I. Gurdjieff. Gurdieff was an Armenian born teacher and mystic. The following from the site www.gurdieff.org presents a brief synopsis of the basic tenets of his teachings:


Mr. Gurdjieff was an extraordinary man, a master in the truest sense. His teachings speak to our most essential questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life, and of human life in particular? As a young man, Gurdjieff relentlessly pursued these questions and became convinced that practical answers lay within ancient traditions. Through many years of searching and practice he discovered answers and then set about putting what he had learned into a form understandable to the Western world. Gurdjieff maintained that, owing to the abnormal conditions of modern life, we no longer function in a harmonious way. He taught that in order to become harmonious, we must develop new faculties—or actualize latent potentialities—through “work on oneself.” He presented his teachings and ideas in three forms: writings, music, and movements which correspond to our intellect, emotions, and physical body.

P.D. Ouspensky was an author and student of Gurdjieff. The book is a reflection of Ouspensky’s spent with Gurdjieff as well as a discussion of his teachings.

I agree with much, if not all of that brief synopsis although I have yet to get far enough into the book to know the details of his teachings. I just finished chapter one.

Anyway… as I’m reading this morning I got to thinking about a few things. I got to thinking about all of the books on spirituality, theology, psychology and philosophy that I’ve read over the past few years, which include both some eastern and western philosophies about spirituality, psychodynamic and Jungian psychology, Christian theology, admittedly for much of this time I’ve read mostly what could be classified as Christian spirituality, theology and philosophy however for the past year I’ve started to open my sphere of investigation. I am starting to dabble in more mystical writings, Buddhist and the like.

And I had a thought and it goes like this…

It is interesting to me that in all of these spiritual, mystical, philosophical (call them what you will) books we are presented with what appear to present deep, dark and profound thoughts about the nature of human beings, the nature of the universe, the different levels of being right down to the concept of ‘being’ itself. I have to say that these ideas are exciting to me, always something new to consider, always something new to confound and investigate and drive me forward for new levels of insight, understanding, wisdom and so on. These ideas, they spark a flame in us, a flame that points to a place within us that allows us to think that there just might be something else ‘out’ there or ‘in’ here or around it all SOMEWHERE that can fill the gigantic hole that exists in us. A void that so many of us cannot seem to touch no matter what we do, no matter what we buy, no matter how many churches we go to, books we read, trees we hug or yoga positions we assume.

We read, we listen, we practice yoga, we meditate, we worship in church, we volunteer at soup kitchens, we fight for our causes and we write checks to charities but still that hole remains. We are always listening to somebody else’s ideas, practicing somebody else’s instructions of movement or non-movement, hanging on somebody else’s words for the ANSWER. Somebody to tell us THE meaning, THE way, somebody to point us the way to that thing which we cannot even define. We are asking somebody to show us the way to a place that remains a mystery to us. It’s like going up to police officer on the street to ask for directions and saying “I’m going to a place, I don’t know what country it’s in, I don’t know the name of it and I don’t know anything about what it looks like but I need you to tell me how to get there.”.

I have noticed a similarity however among all of the teachings; they all talk about ‘connectedness’. They all infer knowledge of creation, a way to a ‘better’ place, a ‘higher’ plane, an elusive way of existence or a feeling or a state of mind that only a fortunate few might ever attain to.

But where is God in all of this? Where is God in all of these deep and profound explanations of the universe, of the talk of suffering and the connectedness of everything. Where is God in the talk of ‘higher’ states of being?

I cannot shake the feeling that all of these concepts exclude the personal. That is our deep connectedness to each other, the NEED of a person for other persons. I could be wrong but in my brief forays into Buddhist thought I’m pretty sure I’m detecting the suggestion that God is superfluous to the whole thing. I get a sense that this Buddhist idea of enlightenment does not require God. It’s all presented so… impersonally.

I am a human being and I must be connected to other human beings if I am to survive. This is a fact, pretty much everyone knows it. And so this necessity of connectedness to other people, this requirement of being human must dictate somehow that the ‘thing’ that I am searching for, the ‘higher’ plane of being is a different level of connectedness, in fact the ultimate level of personal connectedness and interaction which would be our connectedness to God.

How is it possible that a method (a path, a teaching, call it what you will) of being and living that purports to attain enlightenment or espouses a different (higher) level of existence could possibly exclude that THING from which everyone comes, runs through, exists in moment to moment? Given our connectedness to one another and everything then how can any “answer” to life exclude God?

You might say because God does not exist and we must find ourselves within ourselves. Hmm…

Then explain the connectedness. How is it possible that everything that IS is connected to everything else that IS? Random chance?

Unlikely.

The Ultimate Paradox of Faith

First of all I would like to make clear what I mean when I use the term ‘faith’. When I say ‘faith’ I mean ‘experiential knowledge of God’. To me they are one in the same and going forward I will use those two terms interchangeably. This, I think is an important note to what follows and in light of the fact that so many of us struggle to get our own clear concept of what faith means it is necessary to attach a definition to it. With that in mind please read on.


Our scientifically linear, rational, organized structure of thought does not permit knowledge of God. This to me is the greatest paradox of all; It isn’t really ‘thought’ at all that permits knowledge of God and no willful, intellectual effort to understand what faith means or where to find God will ultimately result in our gaining that understanding which we seek through our search.

And yet…

For some that search must happen. That willful task of struggling to understand, of groping for answers cannot be excluded from the process, the journey that seeks spiritual truth and growth. Why? I have no idea. I am reminded of a passage from St. Paul in the book of Philippians:

“So then my beloved just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”

This passage seems to suggest a requirement of effort on our part and yet in the end confirms that ultimately, the result comes only from God, that our effort is somehow superfluous to the whole thing. Crazy, crazy stuff yes?

If I were to sum up my discovery of faith I would say this:

My willful efforts can only produce that which cannot find Him because my willful efforts can only be carried out in such a way as to obfuscate Reality. And so when He did show Himself to me I immediately understood that I could never have attained by my own strength that which He allowed me to know.

And yet…

I cannot help but think that everything that had come before, every moment of the search that I had undertaken to that point, every book I read, every conversation I had, every minute I spent struggling to understand by force of my intellect was absolutely necessary.

Paradoxes. Crazy, crazy stuff yes?