LSP10: The Importance of Being (Earnestly) You: Throwing Humility Out the Window

In Dr. Alexander's book, one of the key themes is the importance of feeling you're wanted -- wanted by God and also wanted by your family. Dr. A. is very frank about an episode of depression and heavy drinking he fell into after he learned the birth parents he'd been searching for didn't want to make contact with him. (They'd given him up for adoption as an infant.) He understood at a logical level that those who loved him couldn't help him unless he participated in his own recovery (page 56-58), but at the same time he couldn't shake the despair of the heart that came from his belief that neither his birth parents nor God wanted him.

There's a deeply important truth embedded in this part of Dr. Alexander's story. It's the truth that you are important as yourself. As a soul and as a soul-in-human-form, it matters that you are you. Your job as a human being is not to empty yourself of your true self (a religious process most often called "humility") but to fully embrace the knowledge of who you are as a unique child of God.

I want to be very clear here on a couple of points. First, I want to emphasize that what I'm saying here is the very opposite of the doctrines -- the tree roots -- that underlie most major world religions. It's almost universally taught that if you want to get closer to God, you have to get farther away from your own defective "youness", your own corrupt ego, your own grasping illusory self. In other words, you have a religious duty to not be you.

Second, I want to emphasize I'm not in any way endorsing the idea that you can be whoever you want to be or the idea that nothing you do as a human being is wrong. This is the extreme opposite of pure religious humility. It's a belief system that's widely touted within New Age circles (as in the books of Neale Donald Walsch and Marianne Williamson). To be clear, the tree that grows from New Thought roots is a tree that insists that God is not just a bit stupid, but is also incredibly selfish and narcissistic as well as stupid. Just so you know . . .

Somewhere in the middle of this jungle of depressing religious beliefs about "who you are" is a fairly simple tree that fits with all our best ideas about healing and peace and relationship. It's the tree that grows from the belief (in my view, the truth) that you are a child of God. Not a defective child. Not an inferior child. Not a lost child. Just a child who is very brave (because you chose to incarnate) and a child who is deeply loved and trusted by your divine parents.

Note that I'm NOT saying you're a small piece of God, or a small spark of God who's trying to return to God, or a small drop of water in the great ocean of Absolute Reality, or a pure mind trapped in a corrupt human body who's trying to return to Ultimate Truth. (These, by the way, are all theories that have been put forward and endorsed by major world religions over the centuries. If you want to read more about this, you can check out my Master's Research Paper.)  What I'm saying is that you're exactly who you appear to be -- a unique child who needs to feel loved by his/her own family. What I'm saying is that it's normal and healthy for you to need to know you belong, that you belong in your human family (and also in your divine family) BECAUSE you are you.

Don't try to follow the example of asceticism practised by such traditional Christian Church Fathers as St. Jerome. Ascetic practices, which spring from the roots of religious humility, damage the brain networks you need in order to know yourself and feel God's presence in your life. In God's view, your biological body is a gift to you and should be treated with the utmost gratitude and respect. When you punish and subjugate your body with ascetic and obsessive-compulsive practices, you're saying to Mother Father God that you don't trust them. If, instead, you're moderate in all things related to your biological body, the spiritual path will flow more easily for you. This 18th century terracotta sculpture of St. Jerome, by Angelo Gabriello Pio, is on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2018.

One of the most important things you can take away from Dr. Alexander's book is the fact that he's describing a journey about one person, one unique child of God. When he makes his journey, he doesn't see a big cloud of oneness. What he sees is unique individuals who choose to be together in a community of love. The love he feels is like a single force that unites everyone. But the love doesn't erase the boundaries between individual people. Each person, no matter how divine, is a unique individual. A different person. A different soul.

What makes divine love such a powerful force is the intense respect and trust shown by such very different people towards each other. They're all different people who are coming together as a community with a common cause. They don't all have to be the same. They don't all have to be the same size or the same colour or the same gender. They don't all come prepackaged with the same interests or abilities. But they do all share one thing, one very important thing that unites them as a family:

They're all using their powerful free will to choose to love and trust others, to respect others for their uniqueness.

So when Dr. Alexander says he came back from his journey with three major insights (page 41) -- "You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever; you have nothing to fear; and there is nothing you can do wrong" --  he's referring to the truth about our relationship with God as souls, as children of God. He's saying that when you're choosing to be your true self as a loving child of God, you can do amazing things in the universe, no matter where you happen to be incarnated.

It's an incredibly simple idea, really. It's also an idea that has huge implications for our ability to feel the love that comes from belonging to such a breathtakingly beautiful divine family. But first you have to be willing to believe in the idea that a loving God would not -- and could not -- bring into being any souls who were not already perfect in their own sweet way before they chose to incarnate as human beings on Planet Earth.

It's okay for you to believe you're wanted by God. This isn't pride. All children want and need to know they're loved by their parents for who they really are. Religion tells you this is the one thing you're not allowed to believe. I'm telling you, and Dr. Alexander is telling you, that this is the Number One thing you should be allowed to believe.

You are, indeed, loved, cherished, trusted, and respected, and it's okay for you to trust this truth.

The world would be a much happier place if people were allowed to trust in the brilliant love of their awe-inspiring divine parents and their divine brothers and sisters.


For Further Reflection:

A lot of spiritual people these days have some ideas about Divine Love that really don't pan out when you stop to think about it.

If you insist, as so many seem to be insisting, that humans are working to achieve an evolution towards greater love and harmony and unity in the universe, then we can assume you believe the universe is defective. We can assume you believe that after 13.8 billion years, Divine Love hasn't yet reached a state of "maximum penetration."

Why would you believe that? Why would you believe in a defective universe when you have the option to believe in a universe so strongly grounded in Divine Love and Divine Forgiveness that God is willing to let you incarnate on Planet Earth so you can learn more about who you really are and how the universe came to be?

Spiritual leaders have been talking about Divine Love as if it isn't already here, as if it isn't already surrounding you every moment of every day, as if its role as a fundamental field underlying all of quantum theory is still in need of some work.

Some spiritual leaders have even been talking about God the Mother and God the Father as if they don't already know who they really are.

Are you freakin' kidding me? Do you honestly believe the vast, multi-layered, infinitely complex universe we live in could possibly stay glued together if God was existing in some sort of psychodynamic fugue state? Do you honestly believe that God, who is already holding together all the underlying quantum fields and particles of the universe through the conscious application of free will, would suddenly decide they need a hefty dose of forgetfulness as a human being?

It's an incredible blessing to be able to trust that God is actually God, not an adolescent narcissist in need of self-actualization.

Despite what you may have been told, the universe is doing just fine, thank you very much. All the I's have been dotted and all the T's have been crossed in the great big Divine history of Love and Forgiveness. We'll continue to explore this history together, and we'll continue to find new ways to express our infinite gratitude to our wondrous Mother and Father for all that they do and all that they are. But the only reason you're here as a human being is because God, Master and Mistress of the science of Creation, know that it's safe for you as a child of God to temporarily incarnate.

You're just here for the history lesson.