I dislike the practice of assigning human characteristics and sensibilities to the entity we call God. I believe organized religion in all it's myriad of forms has successfully corrupted the message and motives of the divine consciousness that conceived and created the universe and all it contains.
For my money, It (the Divine It) is unknowable to the degree that we desire to know It. I am particularly uncomfortable with the ideas of Heaven and Hell , both petty human notions that insinuate that God is a sadist and taskmaster that demands obedience from his sheep to avoid eternal suffering. That alone suggests that God has contempt for Its own creation. The concept of Free Will gets thrown in just to give religious interpreters an "out" to portray God as tolerant and fair while still being "Holy." It is a perversion of God through generations of sacred scripture rewrites, exclusions,reinterpretations and in some cases outright embellishment and pandering on the part of leaders and their clerics who see an opportunity to control and manipulate the masses. How else do you explain the European blue-eyed image of Jesus that adorns the halls of religious institutions today or the notion that Jesus and, by association, God Itself is a conservative Republican that endorses War and favors one political view over another. How can anyone take that seriously?
And yet they do.
To the degree that we are able, I believe that we owe it to ourselves to test the tenets of religion against our own experience. Nature is our teacher and this life we live, ultimately our testing ground. It provides a level playing field that does not favor one soul over another by magic or supernatural intervention. I do believe Prayer provides us with a link to our higher nature but I have come to believe that God does not intervene or step in to alter natural outcomes. I do agree with traditional thought as it pertains to the pursuit of spiritual purity because I do think that our ultimate destiny is to be reunited with God, who is by all accounts the standard for purity and enlightenment. But here is where I part with the teachings of my youth, and veer off the path to consider the concept of reincarnation. My own intuition tells me that it is a valid consideration. Nature does, after all, teach life, death and rebirth. Some may say that an argument like that is simplistic, and I would counter by saying that faith in God must be simplistic and it must reject complex, intellectual trappings.
Throughout my life I have been plagued by repetitious dreams that appear to me to be memories of past lives. One takes place in Egypt where I am being punished for some sort of offense, slapped repeatedly and berated by a man...the same man in every dream. Another involves the aftermath of a flood where I stand at the end of a pier and look down below to see the bodies of dead friends consumed by the rising waters. Still another involves an English manor and a wealthy household from at least two hundred years ago and I am a husband to a virtuous woman and the father of two young daughters. They are with me in the house, a house I know well, but their physical appearances tell me that they are sick, all with drawn, pale faces with dark shadows beneath their eyes. Sometimes I feel that the dream itself is a memory of a memory and that my wife and children have already died. These dreams, and others, have appeared over and over again in vivid, stark detail, never changing to any great degree. And they are not like normal dreams. It is as if they are trace memories of previous lives. Previous tests of my will and progress toward final purity. But how long can the process of purification take? Again, unknowable until you at last meet God.
I made up my mind some twenty years ago, when God did not answer my heartfelt prayers to heal my brother-in-law of cancer, that prayer for "special treatment", was an exercise in futility. It is the first and last time that I ever actually fell to my knees and begged God to grant a miracle. But the Age of Miracles is over, so say theologians who try to rationalize why God appears uninterested in parting the waters or raising the dead. My question is , was He ever?
His truth, His wisdom, His love is not and was not ever defined by special consideration of one over the other. That is a human quality and far less than divine. I believe that if there is a final reunion with God that all of us as children of the Creator will see that day, if not together then in our own due time.
The year 2009 has been the year of the Cosmic Screw for me. It is my name for the inexplicable convergence of what I perceive as undeserved piling on of bad luck and Instant Karma from above upon me. Its just the divine process in motion. I won't bother to whine about how I don't deserve it and I certainly won't pray for any special favors from the Creator of the Cosmos. That would be hypocritical of me. In the mean time, I'll rely on my talents and charm to get through the convergence. However, if you don't share my beliefs and want to help, feel free to pray to God for me, and I'll let you know how it works out. If I'm living in a cardboard box next year, I'd say you have some thinking to do.
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