The eastern spiritual traditions are about finding peace; the western traditions are about passion. By combining BOTH strategies we can expedite our spiritual evolution and increase the quality of our life experience.
In this podcast, I talk about how I unintentionally combined the strategies of the east and west and how that profoundly helped me on my journey to Heaven/Nirvana/Enlightenment.
The dictionary defines love as a an intense feeling of deep affection.
Scientists like Dr. M. Scott Peck define love as “”the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”. Yet, Dr. Peck admits that he does not know WHY a person has the will to extend one’s self.
That is because Dr. Peck and most people ignore the obvious, that love is something that we FEEL in our bodies. Feelings, like the feeling of hunger, are what motivate us.
One thing that can be said about love is that it feels GOOD, even when it hurts. In fact, sometimes the pain or hurt of love is what is so powerful about love. We can long for union with someone who we are physically with, the longing feeling being the love, and that longing hurts SO good that it is so intense we feel we are going to die or be burned up in the feeling.
We do not have to be limited to this feeling just for a person, we can feel it for a concept like the idea of ‘God’ or country or freedom or just about anything else
The point is that love is a FEELING and the more we are willing to feel that feeling, including the intensity that feels uncomfortable at times, the more love we will have in our life. From the perspective of the person in the drama of romantic love, this idea can really suck.
Yet, on the other side of this coin, fully going into the pain of love and staying there to long can be physically, emotionally and mentally damaging to the human instrument through which one is experiencing life. Too much can be a bad thing.
This is where discipline and sensitivity comes in. We first have to be sensitive in our bodies and mind to know when we are on the threshold of damaging ourselves so that we can then use our disciplined skill to stop the pain.
Without this sensitive and discipline we will continue in the pain until we damage our human instrument or condition it away from love. You can tell a person who has done this for they are shut down to caring about most if not all people and life itself. They become what I call ‘conservatives’ for they ‘conserve’ or hold back their love.
Both sensitivity and discipline come with practice.
Sensitive comes from practicing feeling what we are actually feeling in our body, not just the activity in our brain, our thoughts, but what is happening below the neck. This is not just feeling the gross sensations we normally feel, but also the subtle ones, the beating of our heart, the movement of the blood through our blood vessels, movement of the subtle energies as the body communicates with itself. Feeling this takes practice being still and watching/feeling what else is going on.
Discipline comes from keeping at it no matter what happens, even if at first you lose your focus and get distracted you go back to the practice. That is discipline.
If you want love, unconditional love, then you have to develop sensitivity and discipline.
It has long been attested by religious people that one needs a god to be happy or to find joy and love in life. The reality is far from this.
The atheist can be as happy or even happier and have more joy and love than a theist if they recognize that happiness, joy and love is what they want in life. Any person who recognizes that our emotions are a product of our ways of thinking AND our habitual physiological (emotional) reactions will then practice those positive emotions until they have perfected them.
The theists are taught that happiness, joy and love (God is love) are outside of them or come from outside of themselves so they are always lead to believe that these positive emotions or states are only available under certain conditions, conditions that can be used like carrots on a stick to manipulate and enslave the them.
Of course, not all atheists are happy people. Many if not most atheists are very materialistic and think that happiness, joy and love comes from material things (pretty much like religious people). Yet the atheist has the advantage of not being dictated to by some deity flying around in the sky, they can go after whatever makes them happy without worry of the opinion of that deity.
So again, the atheist has a better opportunity to find happiness, joy and love than the theists.
It is obvious that Jesus saw the corruption that came from the belief in the God of Abraham, a idea of God that is tyrannical which unscrupulous people use to intimidate and enslave people with keeping them trapped in a paradigm that was and is unhealthy for them.
The God of Abraham was the Creator and Ruler of the world, “out there” or up in the sky some place; distant from people, separate from people. This God of Abraham, being the Creator and RULER of the world could therefore dictate to the people what HE wanted (God had to be a he because that protects the patriarchal privilege of men). IN ADDITION, and more importantly, God could assign certain ‘special’ men to tell the people what He, God, wanted. Of course, this gave those special men great power and privilege in the world. In so doing, this God of Abraham was justification for all the forms of slavery, most of which still exist today. The appointed leaders are to be the masters and everyone else is to be the slaves. Of course, these so-called appointed leaders who create the rules and tell the world they are appointed by God to be the master over the rest of humanity.
Today we can still see that the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are violent, abusive to themselves and others and the planet or environment as a whole.
Obviously, Jesus could see this long ago and that is why he felt the need for a more democratic vision of God, a new idea of God, a gentler, kinder more loving vision of God. Jesus could see a truth that lesser men could not see, a truth would set people free to love ALL that life offered, a truth that WE are all gods, part of and not separate from the Universal Consciousness or Spirit that primitive people call God. We are the ones who can choose not to give our power away to other people. We are judges who decide what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong. We are the ones that define what sin is and what sin is not. We are the ones who define what is God. Even though the religious people of Jesus’ time saw him as a massive sinner, Jesus did not see himself as a sinner or separate from God. He saw himself as one with God, which he called his Father. And Jesus said that he saw us all as one with God, that God is within us and we are within God, we are not separate from God.
This “we are all one, we are all part of God” idea is a more democratic idea of God than the autocratic God of Abraham. No one person or group of people would have dominion over another. Jesus’ idea of God would do away with the lording of parents over their children, clergy over their congregations and kings or political rulers over the masses. No longer are the rulers “out there” some place, but WE are the real rulers.
Of course, the ruling classes would not want to see an idea of a more democratic god prevail in society, for they would lose their power and privilege. So they had to stop Jesus by whatever means became necessary. That is why they had him arrested, tortured and killed, not just to stop Jesus but also to discourage anyone from following in his example.
Jesus tried to bring about a paradigm shift, one that the ruling classes did not want to happen, and that is why that had to kill him. However, the ideas that Jesus talked about did not die with him; they started to spread. Because of this, the ruling classes hired Saul of Taurus to find a way to destroy the movement that Jesus had started.
Saul tried everything he could, he killed and persecuted the followers of Jesus but that only seem to strengthen them. Then, one day, on the road to Damascus Saul got a brilliant idea, it was so brilliant that it almost blinded him. He envisioned that he would change his name to Paul, join the follows of Jesus and call himself an ‘apostle’ or leader of them. Then he would bring those gullible enough to follow him back to “sound doctrine” by which they could be controlled, manipulated and enslaved. His plan was near perfect, for it worked brilliantly.
Paul got people, including the other apostles, to worship Jesus as someone special, as God incarnate. In so doing, they were pushing Jesus up on a pedestal so high that people could no longer see Jesus as an example of what they could be but only as an idol worthy of worship. The people learned to say that Jesus’ teaching were ok for him, he was God, but we are not; thus rendering Jesus teachings no longer valid.
The spirit of the Antichrist wanted to create a movement to ensure that people would never follow Jesus or examples like him. They were calling Jesus the Christ so when Paul created his movement or religion became known as Christ-anti or Christianity, which is what it is called today. However, as Jesus said, nothing is hidden that shall not later be revealed. It is time to expose this Antichrist movement for what it is, there to support the ruling classes and to keep people slaved. The last thing this antichrist movement wants is for people to think and act like Jesus, to be the part of God that they are.
Remember what Jesus said, “It is not those who say lord, lord to me, but those who do the will of their Father in heaven”; the kingdom of heaven being within us. Today, Christians will honor Jesus with their mouth but their heart is far from him, they think so differently than he did.
The ruling classes want us to think that God is out there and we are here to serve God. Jesus said that if you have known him you also know his Father, and then he said, I come to serve and not be served. When a person identifies as being part of God then they realize that all the rest of humanity and even all life is part of them. Therefore, they will do unto others as they would want done unto themselves, for they ARE the others, just as Jesus pointed out when he said, as you do unto the least of them you do unto me.
You will never hear any Abrahamic tradition followers say anything like that. For them, the God of Abraham is the master and we are to be the slaves. That is what we get from Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
It is time for humanity to take it power back and to awaken and realize that WE are that democratic God that Jesus was pointing out and he demonstrated for us the freedom to love that being God brings to anyone open enough and courageous enough embrace.
I love life and all that it has to offer. Nothing is impossible to me. I love judgment and criticism. I love to judge and be judged. Judgment cannot hurt me it can only awaken me should I fall asleep. I love to push buttons and I love to have people try to push my buttons. If I react with less than love then I am asleep and it is only an opportunity to wake up, or, I can choose to stay asleep.
The worldly will tell me I am not God. I only smile, for their darkness has no power over me. I have overcome the world and its ability to darken my light. And I love the worldly as they try to bring their darkness upon. I can choose to stay in the darkness and sleep or I can wake up to the light. If I submit to darkness it only means it is time for me to sleep.
Does God sleep? God does EVERYTHING for everything is God. God is in everything and everything is in God. There is only one, separation is only an illusion.
Does God change? God changes and does not change. God is inclusive of change and is outside of change.
Why be God? God is love and God loves. Who does not want to love all that life has to offer? Who does not want to enjoy all that life has to offer? Yes, there are those who are too afraid to love all, so their fear will dictate to them that they do not want to be God, to be love and to love. They are just those who are still in the darkness and asleep. As the light starts to shine on them they will start to awaken and want to be awakened. As those of us who have awaken to who we really are start to shine our light then those in the darkness, those who are asleep will start to yearn for the more light and to be the light.
We can all be the light of the world. We can all be God. To the awakened there are no limits, all is possible.
I find that atheist tend to “throw the baby out with the bath water” in that they reject the god concept while missing the underlining REASON for creating the concept of god. The etymology of the title “Holy Bible” shows that it means Health Book; meaning that it was a primitive attempt by primitive people to share what they had learned that was healthy for the mind, body and society. Atheists tend to miss this all together.
But one of the unhealthy aspects of religion is the belief in a personal creator god that rules the universe, for this belief in that leads to wars, torture, murder, terrorism and all kinds of suffering in the person, in society and for the planet itself.
So I feel that the idea is to get people to focus on a healthy DISCUSSION of OUR ways of thinking and our lifestyle choices and away from the superstition of theism.
Unfortunately, theists do not seem healthy enough to look at deep issues like this, so how do we get their attention, or how do we circumvent their unhealthy efforts to reach the youth of the world or those who would be open to it?
I want to raise the level of debate in the world but I am not sure how to do that, short of writing a book about it and going on the speaking trail.
I went to church tonight and was amazed at how dumb the eulogy was. The minister was trying to talk the people into thinking they were dumb animals: sheep. Maybe they really are that dumb…