When I was a young person I was trained by philosophers and theologians to be a philosopher/theologian. That is why in these articles I often I veer into that territory. I actually find I enjoy it. However I didn’t become the kind of theologian the Jesuits had in mind. Oops! I guess I became a heretic instead. Well, such is life. I enjoy being a heretic much better because it feels right and I get to exercise the free will that the Jesuits claimed I had before they tried to take it away again.
Did anyone notice a discrepancy between two teachings of the Judeo Christian theology that most Americans have grown up learning? On the one hand we are told that mankind was given free will to make choices. On the other hand we are told God delivered commandments to humans about how to live, or else. Now I don’t know about you but when I hear the word command I think of a military general giving commands to lower ranked soldiers who must obey. Yes, they can choose not to obey but in the military that results in being jailed and according to the theologians, in ordinary life disobeying God’s commandments gets you thrown into hell. What kind of free will is that? Technically one is free to choose yet in reality there is not really much of a choice, enjoy everlasting salvation or be damned forever to the burning fires of hell. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.
What I have discovered from working with many people as a psychotherapist over a long span of years is that even within the most intelligent people lie contradictions, areas that remain unexamined, topics that people are just too afraid to look at. They may be brilliant chemists, mathematicians, doctors, architects and the like but when it comes to examination of deeply harbored fears, they just don’t want to go there because they are afraid to question. They become very nervous and start to change the subject quickly.
The reason they are afraid is that authorities got to them at a very young age and planted the fear of God into them with a variety of controlling and contradictory beliefs. The very idea that God is a loving presence and God is a scary punishing male authority is one of the most insane contradictions ever to rise to the light of day. In fact, all this turns out to be is a variety of the good cop/bad cop scenarios used in brainwashing. You scare the daylights out of someone with abuse and threats and then you show them some kindness and they will do whatever you want. Did anyone notice that this is basically the foundation of the torture techniques used by the CIA’s contracted and demented psychologists. This is diabolical. So how did God come to be diabolical, the exact opposite of what Spirit is?
Let us take this a step further. We have a maternal presence in Christianity known as the Blessed Mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and known by many other names around the world. She is all loving kindness, patient, and compassionate. She often issues warnings or wants things to get done like building churches or keeping God’s laws. Sometimes there are veiled threats about what will happen if people don’t tow the line. Then there is the father God who is all lightening bolts and judgment over everyone. Doesn’t this sound a lot like mom being the kind one but warning the kids that if they are bad dad will come home and beat them? This is just another psychological control mechanism to keep people in line, behaving obediently, funding churches, and keeping quiet about contradictions and abuses happening right under their noses. Again, it is diabolical.
This is pure and simple tyranny and a primitive strategy as well, yet people are afraid to look at it because they fear that deep inside they have been bad and need to be punished. Questioning authority is part of what they think is bad. The other fear is that if one questions authority the whole structure is going to come tumbling down and they will be lost, having no meaning, no direction anymore. Well, its true this does happen at times. However, one thing is assured, the longer a person leaves this terrain unexamined, the more likely some day it all will come crashing down around their ears. As the old expression goes there is no reason to throw out the baby with the bath water.
All these crazy ideas can be reinterpreted in a more enlightened way and nothing is lost but the insanity and control. There is no doubt that human beings have choice about how to behave. I can punch someone in the nose if I feel like it but when they punch me back and hurt me I eventually learn that there are consequences for certain behaviors. I simply stop doing that after awhile. For some people it takes a very long time to learn this lesson. Others get it more quickly. However there is no reason for shame, guilt, or bad feelings of any kind. This is about learning pure mechanics. If I take a glass of water and pour it out over my feet they will get wet. What is so complicated about that and where is the shame in that?
The reason that it takes some people so long to learn this lesson is that deep in their hearts they know that hurting others results in they themselves being hurt and that is exactly why they do it over and over. They do believe they need to be punished, that they are worthless, and of course coming from this position, they project out their worthlessness and need to be punished onto others. They then continue to hurt and be hurt because they feel like they deserve it, and everyone else deserves it as well.
Let us proceed to two great commandments that God allegedly gave to human beings. 1. Thou shalt Love the Lord thy God with they whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with they whole mind, and with thy whole strength. 2. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Well at least these commandments are stated in the positive, however let us think about this. Does God really have to command people to love, especially if human beings were given free will? I think not. No one needs to be commanded to love or to treat others decently. The God I know would never do that anyway. One simply finds out that it feels better to do so. How? Because they make poor choices until they discover how to make good choices that make them feel better. The whole system is self-correcting as it was designed to be. So rather than command humans to love, which by the way doesn’t work, I put forth that Spirit gave these so called commandments to people as recommendations or suggestions. “Look folks, have fun, explore, learn, use your free will to gain experience. In the course of your adventures you will find that certain things tend to feel good and have very positive outcomes and other things feel good momentarily but then have terrible consequences. So here are some suggestions. Love will bring you favorable returns. I know you won’t listen until you find out for yourself so I’ll celebrate with you when you make this discovery. No shame, no blame, no guilt needed. Go in peace.” There, that sounds more accurate to me. After all, would god be a poorly trained psychologist? I think not.
Remote Shamanic Healing
Each month, around the new and full moons, Jose, Lena or Anna leads a remote shamanic healing session. These approximately 30 minute sessions are designed to be experienced in a quiet, safe place free from distraction. Even if you cannot join live they can be very powerful, and always include a good clearing and beautiful icaros. These are live webinars where you cannot be seen or heard. You can hear the practitioner and see their altar for that evening. Recording access is included for 48 hours afterwards. See the product description for dates and times.
Let’s move on to another commandment, “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange god’s before me.” Oops! What about free will. How about, “You can have any strange gods you want to but you will find that life doesn’t work so well that way.” Ok, what does it mean to have strange gods?: Golden calves, statues of Bal or other ancient pagan god’s? So what. “Go play kids and find out what has real power and what doesn’t.”
Anyway, that is not what was meant by the phrase having “strange gods before me.” Strange gods refers to various forms of fear. Making a god of fear doesn’t feel good and won’t have good consequences. Just about everything you can think of that has fear in it is ordinary ego behavior. What about Greed for money and luxury items? How is that related to fear? First of all there is nothing wrong with money or even enjoying some luxury items. The problem comes from obsession with anything, and speaking as a psychologist, obsession always has to do with fear. Obsession with money means that one is afraid of losing it, so fear is running the show. That is a false god. Obsession with power, sex, attention, material things, and control are all the same. They are in fact the same false god, fear. Fear is a place holder where love could be just as when you buy a frame at the store it has a picture of some model instead of your loved one. Something or someone that you don’t connect with is sitting in the place where someone that you love could be. That is what obsession and all fears are. They take the place of where love could be. There is your false god, simple and clear. You have to find out for yourself what the false god’s are and they will fall away and reveal an open heart where love abounds. That is where people find God. No need for heavy rules, commandments, condemnation, judgment, hand wringing, blaming, or martyrdom.
What is helpful is compassion. “Oh. I’m so sorry you are miserable. You are obsessed. You are so afraid and isolated. Here is a little love. There, that feels better.” However, you may argue that some people run faster from love than anything else and you would be right. Why?; because they are scared to death of love. “What if I opened up to love and they snatched it away just when I made myself vulnerable. Last time I let love in I was punished for it. Loving hurts too much.” So instead of love the person learns to live with fear instead and they are bitter and cynical indeed. They have adopted a false god. Do they need conversion? Missionary work? Do they need to be saved?” Not really. Why. Because they are already saved, they just forgot for a while. They will remember when they are ready to remember and not one second sooner. Otherwise there would be no game of discovery. So there is no problem and there is nothing to do but show them love.
So in my view, real God would never make the dumb mistakes of untrained psychologists holding theories that have been proven false over and over. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” is an idiocy that is still believed in this very country. Does that make it right? Basically what most people call God is a collective projection of their own ignorant ideas. God help us. People can be pretty dumb sometimes when they are under the influence of the ego. God is not ignorant, thank God.
In the end it is all pretty simple. Spirit made it possible for us to experience self-awareness through personal evolution. We (aspects of Spirit) have naturally evolved into creative dreamers and we have the capacity to dream anything we want. Our dreams are made up of thoughts and these thoughts coupled with faith lead to manifested experiences. The word “Faith” is another way of describing those things we have come to truly believe. Eventually we learn that what manifests around us is not random or an act of some distant God but comes directly out of our beliefs. Through direct experience we learn to modify our beliefs to be more in harmony with what brings joy, harmony, happiness, beauty, and wisdom. Aaaahhh! That’s better. Perhaps it is time for the world’s religions to get their theology out of the world of projected fears and to actually make sense to adults.
After a recent conversation with a rather enlightened Jesuit I realized that even he had trouble going beyond certain careful limits in his theology. He could simply not say that human beings are aspects of Spirit. Yet how could we be anything other than Spirit if Spirit is everything and everywhere? Is there anything that is not Spirit? Well you could say that dreams are not Spirit because they are just phantasms. I would tend to agree with that. That is why anything that is not love is not real. But are humans just phantasms? No, I would not go so far as to say that. We are aspects of Spirit having phantasms, dreams that are manifested into miserable experiences at times, beautiful experiences at other times. It is the dreams and manifestations that are not real. It is not the dreamers that are unreal.
So, let me summarize here. I know this is heresy to many, but I posit that God did not really have to issue any commands other than to say, “Let there be light,” or “Make it so,” or “So be it.” Rather than commands there are simply implicit lessons about the universe that people discover as they live and gain experience. Love thy neighbor as thyself is a good practice but let’s face it, first everyone tends to try “Hate thy neighbor.” We all find out that does not work very well because in the end we discover that hating thy neighbor is hating ourselves. We are all one. God never had to say a thing, just raise a heavenly eyebrow now and then and give a cosmic grin. Time to grow up theologians.
Tags:
José Stevens
José Luis Stevens, PhD is the president and co-founder (with wife Lena) of Power Path Seminars, an international school and consulting firm dedicated to the study and application of shamanism and indigenous wisdom to business and everyday life. José completed a ten-year apprenticeship with a Huichol (Wixarika) Maracame (Huichol shaman) in the Sierras of Central Mexico. In addition, he is studying with Shipibo shamans in the Peruvian Amazon and with Paqos (shamans) in the Andes in Peru. In 1983 he completed his doctoral dissertation at the California Institute of Integral Studies focusing on the interface between shamanism and western psychological counseling. Since then, he has studied cross-cultural shamanism around the world to distill the core elements of shamanic healing and practice. He is the author of twenty books and numerous articles including Encounters With Power, Awaken The Inner Shaman, The Power Path, Secrets of Shamanism, Transforming Your Dragons and How To Pray The Shaman’s Way.
Related Articles
The Evolution of Perception and Fear
The Challenge Of Creating Our Future
The frequency of the Earth is shifting, The hertz frequency of the earth is dropping temporarily while changes are being made from the core of…