Seduction of Spirituality

Posted By on July 27, 2010

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/origen11.html

Above you can view some shocking statements made in the Bible by ‘God’. According to the Bible God says men are better than women, homosexuals deserve to die, disobedient children must be stoned to death, God is jealous, and many more similar terrible things. Could God really have said these things?  These kind of statements about God remind me very much about the Greek Gods of old that used to be unpredictable and vicious. Mankind at that time experienced a natural disaster, and attributed it to the fact that God was punishing them for whatever reason.

It was a primitive time when men still had little understanding of how the universe works. They had to have an explanation for why bad things happen, and in their ignorance they assumed it was all the work of God. Things have not changed much since then. Only the argument is now that if God existed or cared, millions of people wouldn’t suffer each day here on earth. The fact that people don’t understand why bad things happen have not changed, only their explanation has altered. They now believe that God either does not exist or that he takes a passive approach to His/Her(I don’t believe God has a gender) creation.

These people are obviously not religious. Yet their argument is not very different from religious people; it is just at the opposite side of the spectrum. Religious people think that the end time is near and that is why all these bad things are happening. Both religious people and non-believers think of God in human terms. It never occurred to them that God is not anything like humans at all and that maybe they need to think out of the box for once in their lives. According to the online dictionary, God is defined as the supreme or ultimate reality.

Now, given how little we still understand about ultimate reality, wouldn’t it only make sense to think of God in out-of-the-box terms? Yet there are millions of fundamental Christians around the world who still cling to the belief that the Bible is inspired by God and therefor it must be 100% accurate. Their counter-argument for all the shocking statements in the Old Testament is that men is innately evil(as if God created evil beings), so that God had to send his only son to die for us so we can be redeemed. If we then choose to accept God’s offer, we will be saved.

So what they are saying is that God acted like a mad parent(human), but then somehow found it in his heart to send us his only son. This sounds like God changed. Again, change is a human quality. Why would supreme and ultimate reality change? It never ever occurred to them that God gave as true free will(not the free will version of religion) and that we are free to create whatever we want. It is only humans who set conditions and limits on things. It is only humans who are jealous, vengeful, and disappointed. According to the Old Testament God is all these things.

If God is indeed the supreme and ultimate reality, then why would he act like the Old Testament describes? Surely God is ‘bigger’ than that. Or else he simply isn’t supreme and ultimate, but just another flawed human. So if the Bible is wrong, then what is the answer? The answer is that we are all a part of God, and that God is not somewhere outside his creation and uninterested. We are the co-creators of reality with God. There is no separation. The only separation that exist is in the mind. It is the ego, the individual that you believe yourself to be. God can’t be non-existent either. There is too much proof that we live in an intelligent universe.

But I know for atheists this is unacceptable. They still believe that everything they see around them can still somehow be due to chance. To them all I can say is that they can’t prove that God does not exist. To the people who say that God does not care about his creation, I say that we have collectively created this nightmare and that we are Gods. We have been given everything to make this world paradise, but we have chosen hate over love, separation over unity, ego over soul, and war over peace. To change this, and I don’t think it is too late, we need to change our collective consciousness.

We need to make a paradigm shift. This is what is happening at the moment, although it is sometimes hard notice. More and more people are starting to move away from religious superstition and embracing a new spirituality. In this spirituality we are all divine children of God whose birthright is love, peace, and abundance. Once a critical mass of people come to this understanding and take it to heart, this world will be the paradise it was always meant to be. This is the Bible’s equivalent to the second coming. It will be a shift towards global Christ consciousness which will result in God’s kingdom here on earth.

Ps. I am making the argument that the Bible is not inspired by God here, but that does not mean all of it. The point is that it was written by fallible men, and therefor it has its flaws. My argument is really against those fundamentalists who claim that the Bible is 100% correct. I still think there is a divine message somewhere in there, but it takes someone with insight and wisdom to extrapolate that message and interpret the Bible correctly. If you are interested I suggest you read The Third Jesus by Deepak Chopra.

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Tags: bible, global consciousness, god, second coming

Posted By on July 21, 2010

The Bible can be difficult to interpret at times, not to mention knowing whether it is all true. It has always astounded me somewhat how religion are so sure of themselves when interpreting the Bible, while at the same time claiming that it is all 100% accurate. First of all, who said that the Bible is 100% accurate, and why should we believe him/her? And lets say we accept it is 100% accurate, then how do we know who interprets it the right way and who doesn’t? I know religion claims that the Bible is 100% correct because they say it was inspired by God.

But if God wanted us to get a clear message, would he really have made it this hard for us? Would he have wanted us to put our faith in what people wrote some time after events had occurred from what they have been told by others? More importantly, would he have wanted others to interpret the Bible for us? Why would He give us a brain only for us to allow others to imprint their beliefs on it? To me, if there is such a thing as sin, then that must be it. If God wanted us to get a message, I seriously doubt he would have spoken to us only once a in history and then disappear again.

If God cared about us like the Bible says, he would always be in contact with us if we are willing to listen. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to believe in a God who sends us one message through one book, and then leaves us t0 pick up the pieces. Yet still, there is much to be learned from the Bible if we know how to interpret it correctly. Personally I don’t have much use for the old testament.  It seems way too harsh, as if God was a human. Only humans are that harsh. God is not vengeful and judgmental. I think it was written in a time when life was very harsh, and therefor people thought God was harsh.

I find the new testament more accessible. Consider the following versus in the Bible:

“If anyone comes to me, and doesn’t hate his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he can’t be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” (John 14:6-7)

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 14:16-17)

If you take the first verse literally, it makes little sense, because Jesus taught love not hate. But if you look at the deeper meaning, it points to the fact that ego is what holds us back from finding God. When you are not identified with your ego, you know that the ego is not the real you, and neither is this earthly life and everything that goes with it, including family. In enlightenment you realize your oneness with all things and that you can never be truly separated from anything. Thus this verse points to the attachments of the ego, which needs to be ended to achieve enlightenment.

The next two versus are controversial as far as I’m concerned, because religion has interpreted those versus very literally, especially the bolded parts. Christianity makes it very clear that you must except Jesus as your personal savior, or you will burn in eternal hell. For me Christianity takes the Bible way too literally overall. If they take the second and third quotes literally, then it would only be consistent to take the first quote literally as well. But religion has never struck me as very consistent anyway. Surely they can’t possibly take the first quote literally as well.

What kind of God would want you to hate your family and your life to be saved, right? Another thing I have noticed is that Jesus speaks very metaphorically. If you take everything he says literally you would completely miss most of his teachings. The meaning of the second and third quotes is not that you would burn forever if you deny Christ. That would be the literal meaning. The true meaning is that Jesus serves as the perfect example, because he is enlightened himself. So what he means by saying that he is the way and the truth and the life, is that we must be like him.

If we become like him, we would abide in the Father/God/Source like he does. It really is that simple. When he says that those that doesn’t believe in him shall perish, it doesn’t mean they will burn in hell. It just means that they are ignorant of truth and therefor they live in darkness. Jesus was like a shining beacon that came to the world so that anyone who bothered to really take his message to heart, could gain enlightenment as well. That does not mean he was the only one. There have been many like him, like Buddha, Mohammed, etc. But he may well have been the most impacting one of them all.

Consider the following versus:

Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17: 20-21)

I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. (John 14:12)

His message was that the kingdom of God was within, and that we shall do all of what he did and more if we have faith. This is consistent with enlightenment, because enlightenment is simply finding that the kingdom of God is within, and not somewhere outside. And when you become enlightened you will be able to so what Jesus did and more. I don’t think he would have said these things if he was the one and only son of God. So this must mean that we are all sons and daughter of God and we can all become like Jesus. This is the goal of the spiritual journey.

Ps. I realize the title of my post make it seem like I know how to interpret the Bible, but my point is really that you should interpret the Bible in a way that makes sense for you, and not just take someone else’s word for it. A loving God is not going to throw in in hell for doing that.

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Tags: bible, how to interpret the bible, jesus, jesus sayings

Posted By on July 18, 2010

One way to achieve enlightenment is through completely merging with the Now. This is because God exists in the Now. In truth there is no such thing as time, but only one eternal Now. Time as you experience it, flows from the past to the present, and into the future. But if you think about it, both the past and the future happens in the Now. The past is nothing but a memory and the future is nothing but a fantasy. In other words it happens in your mind as a thought. But you are not your thoughts, you are the consciousness where thoughts come from, or the soul as religion calls it.

Nonetheless, time seems very real indeed. We see the effects of time in our own bodies as we grow older. We know time ‘happened’ because things change. Yet the notion that time is an absolute law of nature that we have no control over has already been smashed by science.  Science has already told us that there is no such thing as absolute time when Einstein proposed the theory of relativity. Quantum physics also tells us that an event only occurs in space-time once there is an observer to observe it. Before that it was only a possibility.

The only theory that makes sense then is that time happens in consciousness or being, as the movement of thought. We created it to be able to experience the flow of events. But in pure being itself there is no such thing as time. It just is. It is that ground state of being where the entire universe originated. This ground state is pure consciousness. It is infinitely creative, dynamic and intelligent. It is what religion refers to as God.  God can only be found by merging with this moment. But we humans find that very difficult to do because we identify with our minds or our ego.

We are always regretting things that happened in the past or fretting about the future. To experience pure being we need to move beyond the mind and the ego, which can be done through meditation. In meditation you can quite your mind and reach deeper levels of awareness where time and ego does not exist. It also helps to stop analyzing, judging, and interpreting things. These are all activities of the ego, and as long as you identify with the ego, there is no way you will be able to access the power of the present moment.

Another thing one can do is simply to be aware of the present moment as much as possible. As soon as you realize you are drifting off into the past or future, simply bring your attention back to the now. Take in as much as possible from this moment and just be present. We all make the mistake of thinking that in the future we will be happy, when all the happiness you need is in this moment.  This is not some kind of myth. You don’t need to fulfill your desires in order to be happy. You can still go after your desires, but your happiness won’t depend on it. The happiness then becomes the process, not the outcome.

Being experientially alive in this very moment becomes the ultimate happiness. You don’t react to the unknown in predictable and conditioned ways. You are at one with this moment and the right response comes to you in every moment. This is to be in a state of freedom and enlightenment, but to get there is a process. It takes practice to be fully present, because we are so used to be the slaves of our minds and egos. But the quest to be fully present is the most important quest one can undertake in this life, because the reward is total freedom and power.

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Tags: ego, soul, the power of now