If you look at the date on the previous post, or if you have this blog in your feed reader, you’ll notice I haven’t written here in quite a while. Here is what a block feels like: “I just have nothing to say…”. But underneath that silence is a whole lot of stuff. Feelings and beliefs, mostly. And just recently, it’s beginning to unfold.

Here is one thing: I want to write about God.

Not the white-haired-dude-in-the-sky, of course. Rather, the interconnectedness underneath everything, and how to access it and why it matters and what it means, and how a misunderstanding of it leads to crappiness.

All fine and good, but I grew up in a very intellectual home, and “believing in God” just seemed sort of low class. Intelligent, sophisticated people just don’t talk about that sort of thing. If you wanted to do that in the privacy of your own home, fine, but keep it to yourself.

So essentially, I am afraid. I am afraid smart, interesting people will think I am stupid, delusional, need some kind of crutch to get through life, etc. Because that is exactly what I grew up thinking about people who believed in anything.

And when I run across people like this - intelligent, interesting atheists - I feel anxious and want to “convert” them. (I realized this recently, to my chagrin - how crass!) I feel the urge to tell them how I used to think like them, and I was wrong, and I was so close-minded, and I just didn’t understand before, and they are not hearing what I really mean.

And you can imagine how seriously un-fun that conversation would be.

But what I’m realizing is that underneath that anxious desire to convince them that I’m right, I just want validation. I want someone to say “OK, I see why you think that, that makes sense to me”. Because whatever my connection to Spirit was as a kid, it was never, ever validated. Whatever I believed in was squashed, repeatedly and definitively.

For example, when I was very young I believed in Care Bears for awhile — imaginary helpful teddy bears that live in the coulds. And when my brothers went on a trip, they took pictures out of the airplane windows of the clouds to prove me wrong. This was the atmosphere I grew up in. So I want people who are skeptical to believe me so I feel like I’m not crazy. Which I often did, as a kid. So I project a little bit of my family dynamics onto these unwitting strangers, and then try to make the past come out different. And/or, I live in fear of them judging me.

Which, on the whole, is not a great energy with which to approach teaching or writing.

What this points to of course is just another internal area that needs healing, and that’s fine. But I just wanted to come out with it: sometimes this blog scares me shitless and pushes all my buttons.

I feel constantly afraid of being ridiculed, although that has never happened here. I will have recurring thought trains that I ought to be able to justify my thoughts on God with logic and proofs and arguments based on new physics.

But I can’t — I don’t actually know that much about physics, and my connection to the Divine is not logical, it’s intuitive. I can describe the sense it makes to me, but I can’t lead someone from atheism to spiritual connection in a logical argument. And if I could, it would miss the fundamental point: God only matters if you feel that inner connection, and that is between you and whatever you feel is at the heart of things. I don’t know what your path is — it’s yours, and it has to unfold for you.

It’s very hard, when you find a path that leads you to liberation, to not decide it’s the best path for everyone. And this urge is compounded if you have a fear that you are crazy if people don’t agree with you.

For the most part, I’m fine, but devout atheists punch a particular button having to do with my childhood, and that’s what I fear–that someone will come along and trigger the painful feelings of being invalidated so often as a kid, about something that later turned out to be a huge part of who I am and the work I want to do in the world.

So, there it is. Now I can work with it. Hello, fear. =)

Tags: god, healing by emma
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Note: I have three blogs because I want to have spaces for the different types of thinking and exploring I like to do. I’m bringing over this discussion that started in the comments of a post on Tao of Prosperity, because that blog is focused on the spirituality of business and I wanted to make this a more general discussion.

To recap, Angela referenced the idea of “being used by the Universe” toward some good purpose.

Does this happen? Yes and no. I see it differently.

I think people are like cells in the body of the Universe/God.

Does a body use a cell? Or does the cell use the body? Or does the question make no sense, because neither would be able to exist without the other?

It probably goes without saying that I vote for the latter. It makes no sense. God doesn’t use me or “work through me” exactly.

That implies God is out there, distinct from me, and he/she/it (see, we are getting into pronouns already, that is an indicator of a problem!), this God entity is pushing me around to make good stuff happen, or pushing good stuff out through me.

I think the idea of being “used by God” is an artifact of thinking of oneself separate from God. It’s a product of having bodies that walk around as seemingly autonomous units, and minds that think “I’m separate, yes I am!”.

Let’s think of cells in a body. If you were a red blood cell, and you thought of your body as “using” you to deliver oxygen to the rest of the body - that seems kinda makes sense. Except the body also uses all the rest of the cells to deliver nutrients to you. And there’s not really a distinct “body”, separate from you as a cell, that is in charge of it all. In fact, each cell is encoded with the instructions to do what it does.

So yes, I think we are “used by God” in a certain sense, but only in ways that we are already built for, for things that are inherent in our unique awesomeness.

Right now in our culture we have 5000 years of habitual belief that God is outside us, apart from us, like a galactic CEO or overlord. But that whole thought arose out of disconnection from God. It’s a tragic idea, which got codified and ossified and glorified and written down. It’s gotten lots of play but it’s bogus.

You are a cell in the body of God. You know what to do. You know how to be you. You always have and you always will. It’s written in your bones.

The best thing you can do, to be most “useful” to the rest of God, i.e. your nearby cells and the whole body of God, your community and your planet, is to be as true as possible to your own personal mission in the world. To understand it, to nurture it, to listen carefully to its instructions, to follow its whisper in your soul.

Your soul is connected to the larger body of God.

You, your mind, your ego/small self, is not always aware of this connection. It thinks it is separate and it tries to protect that separateness, because it thinks it needs to for survival.

And it does, to some extent - cells need cell membranes or cell walls and whatnot (I’m dredging up some high school biology here). But a membrane doesn’t make the cell separate from the body. It still belongs to and is inherent to the body.

The ego isn’t so bright about this distinction.

That’s why you’ve got to go inside and listen. Clear away the cruft in the way of hearing that pure, sweet voice of “this is how I was meant to love the world”.

You will never be able to connect to that feeling of being part of the body of God except through doing what you were meant to do. Then you become useful to the body of God, and you start feeling that sense of being part of all that glorious goodness that works together in a magical mysterious way.

Oh geez, writing about this stuff makes me all high and happy. =)

Immanence vs Transcendence

To be fair to the other half of spirituality, you can also listen to the whisper of the body of God telling you what your function is, guiding you where you need to go, through messages from other cells or by flushing you into some other, more suitable area of the body. (OK, I’m possibly beating this metaphor to death.)

The point is that you can open yourself up to listen to something outside of you, larger than you, as well as listening inside. This is the difference between immanent and transcendent spirituality. Transcendent spirituality emphasizes listening outside, and that’s the beauty and gift that is at the heart of the big religions and “God as a big dude in the sky” kind of thinking.

Immanent tends to makes more sense to me, as I have such a strong sense of internal mission, but they are both important.

What I mourn is that people have forgotten how to listen inwardly, because the outward has been so emphasized for so long. They think they need to go find an expert or read a book or “believe” something to find God. Nope.

You just need to do what your DNA tells you is yours to do, and open up those cell walls a bit and let all the other parts of God remind you that you are part of this body too and we need you, the real true you.

So if you feel lost, try both. Try listening inwardly, and try listening outwardly. Just don’t ignore the inward, OK? =)

Tags: big ideas, god by emma
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