The Light in the Woods

1/9/10 Insights from Study                Ironically, it’s probable that all religion would be acceptable to all believers if there was no such thing as the holy scriptures.  Imagine religion if it resembled spirituality, where all we need for instruction is direct communications from God. Scriptures plant seeds of belief in us – preordaining us toward the Source – the God who wants to be made known through them. But in each case, the source and the authors have different styles and different goals. Scriptures may be inspired by the Creator, but they are written by man, and worse, manipulated by those with certain agendas.

That’s why we can all profess to worship the one God but don’t recognize the God of other religions, and feel uncomfortable because of it. We see good people worshiping a God Who historically demands the conversion of those who read a different scripture and we wonder. If God is the same God for everyone – and many of us instinctively feel there is one God and one Creator – could it be scripture that is poisoning us against each other?

You can answer this with a resounding “Yes!” and yet still hold your own scriptures close to your heart, just as someone else can halfway around the world. How is this possible? Because there are people who use scripture to seek God’s inspiration behind the words, and those who use the words to hit others over the head.  That’s why there are Christians who are beacons of hope in the dark, and those who are glaring lightbulbs over an interrogation chair. That’s why there are Muslims confident that theirs is a religion of peace, and those who want to reign destruction on everyone who isn’t like them. That’s why there are Jews who are so beaten down by the need to follow strict ritual that they have no time for love of God’s children, who should be benefiting from God’s laws.

But how would we know God if not for scripture? The same way God can be known in cultures which have no written word. God has written on our hearts everything we need to know. When we seek truth by looking into our own conscience, we find God ready and willing to dispense His knowledge and grace. Knowledge and grace directly from God – it’s never deceptive, never wrong, never misleading or prone to misinterpretation. It’s what we as humans do to His word after it’s given that sets us up for spiritual failure and fight.

When asked for sincerely, God’s insight is given – given abundantly and with great joyfulness. When insight is written down, it should not need interpretation – it means something to the person who got the guidance in the first place, and it means whatever God wants another to get out of it when it’s read. No human intervention is needed, or else God’s inspirations become dogma that needs to be defended.

We don’t have to be slaves to scripture.  Scripture is not meant to be a handbook for hate, or for intolerance. When it is used that way there is blasphemy against God’s intentions. But use scripture to guide you in asking for God’s personal communication to you through it, and you are praying the prayer that God loves. You can pray this way through any writing that touches you spiritually. You can find through the experience of others what God wants to teach you personally. This is a logical use of inspiration the way God intends. Always remember your personal place in God’s affections and His desire for you to experience Him. And when you pass along these inspirations, try to do it with love, tolerance, and compassion; not the heat of self-righteousness. God might not have the same message for others through this channel as He does for You. We are better off to leave it to Him to do the teaching.

We should be sharing beliefs; not demanding them. If there is only one Creator, one truth, one master plan, one reality, one eternity – there is an infinite number of ways God’s lessons can be taught. Don’t ever limit God to your capabilities. Put your capabilities before God for His instruction and shut up long enough to hear them. Then live this insight humbly and obediently, and God will surely not steer you wrong.

11/15/09 Inspirations           Spirituality attends to the “rightness” of the way we are when we are wrapped up in God. Religion tells us we please God by following the rules of “rightness”.

This example of the difference came to me: A spiritual woman was so immersed in the things of God that she was seldom moved to look at herself in a mirror and didn’t feel that putting on makeup was important to her. So without giving it much thought, she didn’t wear makeup.

A religious woman was taught all her life that wearing makeup is a sign of wantonness and self-adoration, so she didn’t wear makeup because she believed to do so was to sin against God.

Both women were of a mind to do the right thing, but this “goodness” in the spiritual woman was an effect of abandonment of self to God while this same “goodness” in the religious woman was reached by adherence to law.

If you are waiting for me to tell you the spiritual woman’s way was more pure than the religious woman’s way, you need to hear about the third woman in my example. This woman belonged to a religion that didn’t put forward any tenet at all on the wearing of makeup, but the only time she wore makeup was at church. Why? Her thought was that all week long she sweated and toiled for the sake of keeping body and soul together. On Sunday she was going to church to worship her Creator and wanted to make herself look and feel special for the occasion.

And I don’t know for sure, but it seems logical that there are places in the world where a person doesn’t feel they’ve honored God properly if the ritual didn’t include full body makeup.

We really confuse ourselves when we allow ourselves to judge “goodness”, especially when we move beyond self-examination and into the realm of judging others. That’s precisely why I do believe in the purity of motive that comes with spirituality, even if religious and plain old secular “goodness” is fine as well. It’s because in spirituality we immerse ourselves in God first and exude goodness because we’ve taken on His attributes. We are good because God is good; not because God has given us rules to follow and we’ve followed them.

The less self-interest there is – when our own goodness surprises us – the more evident that we treat goodness as a gift from God instead of as a reason to be rewarded for our own work.

11/7/09 Reflections             Jesus was God manifesting Himself in the world in order to reach out to us in a familiar way so we can benefit by a divinely-apportioned measure of understanding. The Holy Spirit does this as well; it is God making Himself available to human experience in order that we may benefit from divine capabilities.

Why can’t we just leave it at that and absorb the grace in which this gift is given? No, people have to butt in and make up things so the explanation of God is sure to be done “the church way”, leaving any unchurched spirit open to judgment and condemnation.

I find the celebration of Jesus’ humanity especially disturbing the way it is done by churches. It’s as if we can never learn what the coming of Jesus was meant to tell us – that the God/man relationship is a thing perfected in heaven but we are welcome to it even if we can only experience it imperfectly in this life; that it’s not meant to be fully understood by us in order that we keep striving for it.

Instead we see Jesus treated as the Son of God with duties separate from God, as if he was not God. We humans have to give Him human attributes and human names in order for Him to be palatable to us. The Catholic faith is one kind of offender, in that it takes the essence of Jesus and then constructs all sorts of scenarios around Him so that He makes sense to us. The unknown circumstances of His humanity must be filled in and cataloged in such a way as they fit both scripture and human experience. What we end up with is not the awe and wonder of God reaching out to mankind, but a fully logical, and fully made up, explanation of God’s plans.

The same goes for those churches who think they need only to churn out Bible slaves in order to please God. Instead of filling in where scriptural information is lacking like the Catholic church does, these people take each sentence of scripture as the final, exact word, no matter how the sentence got there or how it fits in with the rest of the concept around it. The fact that there is so much infighting among them should be a clue that this method of understanding God isn’t the answer either. One would think, listening to them, that Jesus’ role was to perform a task for man so that people who don’t follow him can be condemned by God.

It all comes from trying to fit God’s plan into human understanding without consulting God. When you base your relationship with God on scripture only, you will probably be too intimidated to listen to God another way, and may never experience what God wants to say to you as an individual. Our churches frighten us with scripture in order that we do not become tempted to accept what God says to us personally. They fear losing control of us when God communicates with us directly. They tell us we open ourselves up to the devil when we pray for God’s guidance. They assure us that if it isn’t in scripture – and this is true in many religions – then it doesn’t exist, because God is incapable of having anything else to say. Really?

Many of us have tried to remain in our churches and still go to God for spiritual guidance. Many churches profess to encourage this, but we have found that when push comes to shove, we are not considered sophisticated enough to receive what God wants to give us. And so many of us have given up the pretense of church religion and gone the way our hearts have told us to go. 

I’m convinced that the Creator sees this as a step in the right direction and works with us in a special way in order to encourage this kind of spirituality worldwide. I believe this is His plan and it gives me a satisfying feeling of hope to know that it’s OK to step out of the feedlots our religions have fenced in for us. Nothing else is needed from man, because all is provided by God anyway. When God works in an individual, it doesn’t take many individuals to become a powerful, self-replicating force for good reaching across any and all human-made boundaries..

10/9/09 Reflections        The purpose of study is not to find out what others believe so we can design our own beliefs after theirs. We study in order to become exposed to various subjects so we know what to ask of God, for ultimately God decides which seeds must take root and grow in our spirits.

No matter how inspired by God, the authors of spiritual reading have human weaknesses and human agendas. For this reason, modern mystics will study spiritual writings all across the boundaries of religion, picking up subjects here and there, and consult God in trust that He will enlighten the individual with truth. This is opposite from the fundamentalist, scripture-based religions which deny that God can impart any new knowledge; that if a person insists they have received God’s inspiration, the proof of that will be that it’s already found in scripture.

The problem with this is that scriptures assigned as the bases of various belief systems often don’t agree with one another. For the mystic, the Creator – being of one mind and that being the only necessary consideration – is the ultimate source of knowledge, who places His wisdom directly into the spirit of the individual – every and any individual. We earn discernment by placing ourselves before God in humility and obedience, firm in the faith that the Creator would not deceive us as another human being would. We can then, with trust in God, retrieve the wisdom that resides within us by willing God to release it to us – this being the highest, most-productive level of gaining spiritual knowledge that’s possible.

Spiritual reading from many sources blesses us with the “seeds” of interest that will bring us close to our Teacher. Contemplation with the Ultimate Inspiration will spur us on to discern well and act on what we learn. If we could not rely on God in all His ways, all hope would be lost for our enlightenment in wisdom and grace.

8/5/09 Inspirations           If it were possible to designate the term “Christian” with a small “c”, it would go a long way towards clearing up an anti-Christian bias that persists because Christians are always talking about how the Christian way is the right way, and all else is unnatural.

To Christians the meaning of this is clear but to non-Christians it’s confusing; it’s degrading to be told one’s way is wrong. And even for a Christian there’s confusion – if you’re told all your life that the Christian way is the right way, you would naturally think that no religion other than Christianity can produce good people.  We know there are good people everywhere – only the most fundamentalist Christian would deny their salvation on the grounds that they are simply not baptized Christians, but they do this consistently through a misrepresentation of the Bible.

Innate goodness in the heart of any human being is christian, because there’s no difference between goodness and what Christ taught us. In other words, it is christian to be good, no matter what your religion or lack of it. People of all beliefs can welcome being called christian if they take that to mean they live life loving their neighbor as themselves. Even an atheist can be christian in this manner.

The entire ministry of Christ is meant to exemplify a right-relationship with God – how it looks and why it’s the way to inner peace and contentment. This ministry is a gift from God showing us the way to happiness; others’ happiness as well as our own. Christ’s death and resurrection is meant to show that we are destined to recover from life on Earth and claim the relationship with God that is lost as long as we’re here.

But as long as we are here, there’s a way to feel close to God in the here and now by pleasing Him with our free wills, and interacting with others in a beneficial way. This way is to be Christlike – not necessarily Christian, but humbly and obediently christian. It’s the way, not the religion, that matters to God.

7/9/09 Insights from Study         If in the beginning there is only God, then we and everything He thinks of are pieces of God. All creation is holiness spun off from the One. You may choose to think of God as, having once created, giving no further thought to His creation. Or you may choose to see God as a master chess player moving us from place to place according to His whim. To me, both views miss the mark in a very important way.

As mystics believe God communicates to human beings on a personal basis, it follows naturally that they believe that God feels for us and treats us as loved creations. To mystics this is more than a theory; it’s a way of life. If you believe this way, you will want to live your life for God. This doesn’t mean you must go off to join a monastery; it means everything you do and experience is seen through the filter of God’s attributes and God’s desires, because those attributes and desires can be known and they are recognized as superior to the demands of the world.

It’s so important to listen to what comes to your inner spirit and to take everything other than that with a grain of salt. Ultimate freedom comes from dropping your need to follow your own agenda as well as the agenda society has picked out for you. It will end up that the calling of your inner spirit and good societal morals will translate the same, but it’s the way you get there that is so liberating. When you do what you do out of humble, obedient, and sincere love for God, you are doing everything your Creator has asked of you. The fact that He has asked it defines your relationship with Him as one deeper than creator/created or master/servant. When you answer Him, you affirm that you welcome this relationship and abide by its responsibilities.

To honor the divinity that God has imparted to you, you don’t want to try to fit what you hear into a dogma that you’ve already been taught – this is being a slave to your own agenda. Instead, trust in God dwelling in you, and view everything else through this prism. Then all is allowed to fall into place because it comes from your Source.

Don’t be in despair if confusion seems to take over – God is in the process of refining you. He gradually takes out the things you’ve learned that are leading you wrong, so that a thing you were sure of one day feels wrong the next. If you’re determined to honor the Godliness in you, what comes from that humble commitment can be relied upon. Just remember that it’s a process, and only declare theologically what has been refined completely. You will know its truth by how it expands your heart and satisfies your love for God. This is the goal, and once the goal has been reached in a certain way, that way can be declared correct despite what others say.

To study how others found their path can be helpful and validating, but remember that God’s work in you is unique; His use to you is specific. Judge things by what God teaches you – if that doesn’t seem to be coming fast enough, relax and let the divine in you set the pace. Don’t fear holding on to faulty convictions too long – God uses them as standard-bearers to contrast with the advancement that is taking place within you.

What’s most important is for you to understand where reality lies. I have learned that God is all and God is perfection, so all is perfection. It’s faulty ways of seeing things that make it seem to us that this is not true. Our faulty perception is a curse, but it’s not reality – reality reigns, but we don’t see it for our clinging to what passes for reality. We can go far to remedy this, but as we go we must not despair that our learning never seems to be complete. Human experience is as pervasive as the understanding of divine existence is elusive. Don’t worry; don’t give in to confusion. You are a piece of God to be reclaimed. When God shook Himself and all creation flew from Him like sparks from a sparkler, you immediately began to return to Him. The closer you get the more you leave the state of being too far from your source. As you move away from nothingness back to reality you will become confused at the transition, but all is for your good.

6/21/09 Insights from Prayer           How do I worship God? I worship Him when I praise Him; that is all He needs to channel His grace to me. How do I praise Him?

I praise Him when I count to ten before speaking out in anger. I praise Him when I defend someone who is the victim of gossip. He must smile when I put a dollar in a beggar’s cup, look longingly at His rainbow, swim in the ocean and think of His mightiness, buy a gift, lie in bed sick and pray for recovery, read a book to a child, plant grass seed. All these things are praise to God if I am willing to live in His presence by doing His will.

There’s something in the Bible that makes me cringe every time I read of it. In Revelation there are these 24 elders, and when something momentous happens the 24 elders immediately fall down before the throne and worship. Right or wrong, whatever it is in the makeup of western society, when we see people fall down in worship, we instantly think “brainwashed, cultists with no independent thoughts.” But because it’s in the Bible, our churches need to ritualize worship some way similar without making the general populace feel uncomfortable.

No wonder secularism is taking over the West. No matter how we spin it, worship of God is linked in our minds with human degradation. Maybe we’ve watched too many Hollywood renditions of third-world ritualism – worship by ritual begins to seem faintly backward. We don’t like to think of ourselves as inferior beings with sinful natures. To heighten our sense of atonement, churches emphasize our sinful nature, but they stop short of making us fall prostrate before a throne. We won’t do it – it seems phony. Before too long it may all seem phony – bowing our heads, folding our hands in prayer, being on our knees after the age of eight, carrying around a Bible, discussing our religious thoughts, uttering God’s name outside of profanity, attending church, going to confession.

I’m not making a judgment call — if you are comfortable doing these things you have found your path. I’m merely stating that spiritual persons that don’tfeel comfortable doing these things are no less spiritual for that. They in fact have an advantage because the privateness of their worship underscores the individual nature of a right-relationship with God; one that does not need to be showcased and therefore is open to genuineness. Behind the closed door of your spirit you are free to be as humble and obedient as you feel.

I wouldn’t argue with the objection that a true believer ought to be willing to go outside of their comfort zone if required. I’m just skeptical of how often God requires this and to what extent does it go on before it becomes ego-driven. I do not and never will, unless told to directly by God, believe that evangelizing others into Christianity is a requirement for entry into heaven, yet I would do it whenever inspired to by God’s Holy Spirit.

The point of it all is that once I am blessed to enter into a right-relationship with God, I am able to discern His will and would have His help in carrying it out.  I don’t need anything else, and God does not need anything else from me. Living the presence of God, I will do what He asks, and nothing He asks will feel degrading or uncomfortable no matter how it seems to others.  In His wisdom God may test me, change my mind, or lead me in ways I don’t understand or would rather not go. At least my praise will be genuine, my worship appropriate, and my works God-directed; all because instead of following a church I am following God’s design for me as an individual. To those who say: How can you be sure? I answer: If God is capable of leading me astray when I humbly ask for His guidance, then all believers are hopelessly deceived and we should all settle for secularism.

All faith is based on divine inspiration, and the moment this seems to stop is the moment we realize our worship and praise has not been sincere enough for God’s grace to attend to us. We need to go back to the basics – the point where it’s just God and me enjoying each other’s presence and straightening things out between us. This presence is what makes me praise God, and my praise is the worship He seeks.

5/29/09  Reflections              Every adversity is an opportunity to glorify God. First we honor Him by persevering and not abandoning hope in Him. Then we honor Him by using the setback to further His agenda.

God doesn’t want bad things to happen to us. It’s the nature of this phase of our lives that evil must exist, but it exists for our eventual good. Our becoming perfect glorifies God, and we cannot become perfect except by wading through this imperfect setting.

To listen to most churches tell it, we are inherently so evil and the devil so powerful that God’s love often cannot overcome our tendencies and so He is forced to banish us from His sight for all eternity, as punishment for not being good enough to win the struggle.

This hogwash has kept millions of human beings from enjoying a right-relationship with God. You cannot hope to get close to this kind of God. This God demands what you can’t give – power over God Himself. This is a false idol, and when churches demand you board this merry-go-round, they are guaranteeing that your path will be more difficult than God wants it to be. We give in to this because we’re used to trusting human words; not communication from God directly.

Religion is the greatest adversity of all; the most insidious, most persistent obstacle to a right-relationship with God. Thankfully, God doesn’t really make marks on your scorecard – He puts what He wants for you into your consciousness and pours the means to get it done into your spirit. You use your free will to respond to God’s presence in you, but that’s icing on the cake for your life in this world. It has nothing to do with the real world, God’s kingdom, that you live in but which fullness is hidden from you as long as you’re subject to the adversity of this imperfect world.

That kingdom is yours because that’s what God created you for.  For anyone to tell you God must change His mind about loving you because of what you do or don’t do here gives you a power over God that you know in your very being you don’t have.  Why do you believe anything they tell you? Run as fast as you can into the arms of God – you are welcome there no matter what you’ve done, you deserve this personal relationship with the Creator, God will not turn you away, and you will be given the powers God feels are right to share with you. Any religion which teaches of a God any less than this is an obstacle around which God wants to guide you. In adversity He demonstrates how loved and protected you are – use these as opportunities to get closer to Him.

4/25/09 Insights from Study       All religious inclinations really point in one direction. All our means – rituals, tenets, scripture, dogma, rites, doctrines – face us in this direction because at our core we agree that there is something bigger than us. What form that takes we don’t understand, and don’t need to understand in order to live. Neither are our beliefs to be counted over and above our basic respect for what controls our existence. In the end, we suspect that however powerful we are we can never control the universe, for we are only what the universe has itself produced. And we cannot even begin to envision the enormous power behind what produced the universe.

So we turn our minds to something we can control, however superficially; something that responds to our senses when we alter it. In our helplessness in the face of great unknowns, and the pride that must cover up our weaknesses, we make our own world the important thing. We put our world above whatever it is that’s above us, and declare that this which we hold in our hands is all there is. And when we are done with it there is nothing but nothingness, for if we can’t be where we are in some control, it’s better to be nowhere at all.

And yet, every civilization, no matter how advanced or how remote, maintains the need to return to its roots – its creation. Somewhere deep inside is the need to acknowledge the higher being that caused us. Rising slowly from the sludge of human pride is the certainty that without supernatural care we could not survive.

And so we worship — just in case. But pride is nearly irresistible – it turns our thoughts away from that which we don’t understand; to make it of secondary importance. This tug-of-war is part of the imperfection of the very world that matters so much to us. Only by looking past Earthly existence, along with its imperfection, do we break out into the joy for which we were meant.

This abandonment then is the perfect worship – a worship available to each of us no matter what our situation or belief. It speaks to our most basic structure – that if there is a purpose to all this, the best we can offer is to further it by agreeing with the author of it. The more we do this, the more effect we feel as the scales of human pride fall away from our eyes, bringing clarity, knowledge, purpose and promise.

Speak to your Creator right now and whenever you are moved to drop this world to experience a bit of the real one. Then listen carefully with the excellent inner senses you seldom use. This is the perfect worship you’ve always known to be your comfort.

4/10/09 Insights from Study          If Jesus died for the salvation of sinners, then He died for the salvation of all of us, since we are all sinners.

How often this is turned around to mean that Christ’s salvation only works for you once you’ve accepted it! Who are we to accept or reject God’s work? The sacrifice is made – God has declared a new covenant with humanity. It’s finished; our free will doesn’t extend to the power to undo the mercy of God.

It’s for this reason that there can be no eternal damnation, and therefore heaven is not the reward of only a select few. To know this is to know there’s no need to attack others for the glory of God. God’s glory is of His own making – you may choose to welcome it and so experience God’s joy in this life, but an assault on others in His name doesn’t make you more Godly and deserving of heaven. God, manifesting Himself as Jesus, accomplished your place in heaven for you. The proper gratitude is love, and love is within the reach of all of us. Christians are to be recognizable by their love. But not all Christians love, and not all that love are Christians.

The irony is that the brilliant arrangement of God’s plan – salvation for all and knowledge of what’s good and fine to reside in every heart – gives us all the proof we need of His existence, whether we accept Him or not. Knowledge of right and wrong goes hand-in-hand with intuitive need to do what’s right. A strictly biological being, unaffected by a supreme plan, would not base its actions on anything so subjective as holiness and evil, but on what bodes best for its survival.

Without the divine plan over-riding survival instinct, shame and guilt and fear of reprisal could never play a part in propagation of the human species, as these emotions repress the dominance of the ego and its self-purposes. Without the divine plan over-riding survival instincts, love and charity and humility would be unknown, as these virtues fly in the face of survival of the fittest; of self before all else.

In fact, all emotions could be counterproductive to raw survival since they benefit others over self. Yet we cannot deny we have these emotions. Where do they come from, if not from divine providence? If the soul is useless and even dangerous to the body and its needs, where do emotions come from and why haven’t they been lost to evolution? Could the knowledge of right and wrong and our propensity to choose right and suffer from the consequences of choosing wrong truly indicate that there is a Master and a master design that provides for us, protects us, and guides us with loving care? And wouldn’t this plan by definition include salvation for every being?

I thank You, Jesus, for Your part in the master plan. May I see how blessed I am through You now and for always. May I spread Your word in the way You intended – by my actions melded with what You desire for me. Thank you for the promise to bring us all home to You.