LSP56: The Roots of Christianity and Why They Still Matter

Early on in this collection of essays about finding relationship with God, I wrote a piece called "It's the Roots, Not the Fruits, That Matter," and there I suggested that the key to reconnecting with God is understanding how your brain-soul nexus works. I also said that if you insist on trying to find God by climbing trees that are covered in the horrible thorns of distrust in God, you're going to get stabbed and cut and covered in painful scars.

As I conclude the Lessons from the Spiral Path blog, I feel it's important for me to state why, despite everything my angelic friends have taught me about the perils of assorted ideologies, I self-identify as a Christian.

This is the Geometric Stair of St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral, London, UK. The spiralling cantilevered staircase was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in about 1705. Photo credit JAT 2024.

When I first set foot on my own Spiral Path of wonder, science, and faith, I had no inkling that I'd eventually return to the Christian roots of my upbringing. I don't know where I thought I'd end up -- maybe at some pinnacle of New Age enlightenment? -- but I didn't imagine for a second that my spiritual journey would take me back to the core teachings of Jesus.

After many years of study and contemplation and conversation with God and God's angels, including Jesus himself, I think I can finally express why I now believe that Christianity in its best form (not Christianity in its worst form) is the surest hope for healing your brain-soul nexus and opening your inner heart to the experience of God's love.

Crown of Thorns plant. Photo credit JAT 2018.

I've spent a lot of time in my other books on the problems I've seen in Christianity. I'm very honest about the grave harms perpetrated under the label of Christianity. Paul's teachings in particular grafted some extremely abusive thorns onto the message of Jesus. We're still grappling today with the results of those thorns -- thorns that have hurt women and gays and children and God in the form of hate-filled fundamentalist and evangelical preaching.

But Paul wasn't Jesus. We have the power within our hearts and minds to reject what Paul told us about God, and to turn instead to the roots of Jesus' teachings about God. We have the potential to grow the tree that springs from Jesus' two great laws: "The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these" (Mark 12:29-31).

The roots of Jesus' teachings lead to many important spiritual and emotional and intellectual fruits, all of which may help you sense God's presence in your life. The Christianity of Jesus asks you to know yourself in positive ways; calls upon you to respect the balance between heart and mind; rejoices with you in the healing power of love and forgiveness and humbleness; reminds you to use the gift of free will wisely and well; gives you uplifting ways to think of Mother Father God and your soul and the afterlife; and most of all tells you that God loves you just as much as God has loved all the famous figures of history. No other major world religion teaches you that you can be close to God even if you aren't purely perfect, purely pious, or purely pure. It's enough for God that you try each day to understand what it means to love.

Jesus knew what few religious teachers before him articulated. He understood that Divine Love is a two-way street. He told us we must love our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength, but this love we give to God is not a form of worship. It's a way of being like God, living in the image of God -- honouring and respecting our loving God by paying our blessings forward instead of hoarding them for ourselves. There's nothing quite like the inspiration that comes from accepting God's Love despite our very humble humanness.

When we love our neighbours as ourselves, we do only what God has already done. When we love with courage and hope and inclusiveness, we are walking in the footsteps of God.

My wish for you is that you may find the faith you seek on your own Spiral Path.

God bless!

LSP52: The Twelve Days of Faith

It's often suggested in our culture today that religion and faith have little relevance and don't contribute much to our lives.

Well, if you believe it's not important to have a healthy brain, then I suppose you're right to pour contempt on those who can feel God's presence in their lives. But there's a cost to scorning faith, as so many today are discovering.

If you want to have a life filled with love and meaning and purpose, you need a healthy, balanced brain. And in order to have a healthy, balanced brain, you need faith.

Faith -- which I'm defining as a relationship with God that endures in the absence of sacred texts -- is nothing like the superstitious mumbo jumbo decried by those who have never felt faith. Faith is a deeply enriching emotional experience that adds clarity, common sense, patience, and humour to our otherwise confusing human lives.

Faith changes the brain. It calls on the brain to wire itself in ways that promote the best and most mysterious aspects of human existence, aspects such as empathy, creativity, openness to change, and the quest for meaning -- in other words, what we call the "heart." Faith tells your brain you want to be in relationship with God and all Creation. This in turn prompts your brain to spend time, energy, and biological resources on the task of building the networks that let you feel these life-changing connections. 

As it turns out, these are the same brain networks you depend on for feeling good not only about God but about yourself and other people in your life. Same brain, same networks, same feelings of empathy and love. Jesus has said to me, "Love is love is love." This seems to me an apt way to understand how the brain actually processes the remarkable experience of agape -- the selfless and transformative love we feel when we set aside our fear and narcissism and choose relationship with God instead. It's all intertwined in certain brain networks that we can't separate no matter how much we'd like to. You can certainly try to separate them -- many people have been sure they can overcome the brain's natural Dual Process blueprint through the application of logic alone -- but you'll eventually start to feel dissociated from your own empathy and sense of meaning (if you can even tap into your heart at all).

Herewith is my updated version of the well-known (but sometimes not so well-loved) Christmas carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas." It's all about the ways in which faith can give you a lasting set of gifts -- not on the outside but on the inside, where nobody can take them away from you. These gifts of faith are all part of the brain package you need if you want to be able to love God and love your neighbour with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your courage. Please sing along if the spirit strikes you!

The Twelve Days of Faith
(presented in reverse order to minimize the torture):

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true faith gave to me:
Twelve shades of Meaning
Eleven kinds of healing
Ten ways o'giving
Nine ways o'learning
Eight ways o'hearing
Seven tales a'reading
Six songs a'singing
True Empathy
Four mysteries
Three deep dreams
Two hugs from God
And a Heart and a way to be.

May God bless you and may God's loving presence light your way this day and always.

LSP42: Gordian Knots in the Faith/Science/Religion Debate

On March 1, 2015, Scientific American blogger John Horgan posted a written reply he'd received from John Lennox on the question of whether religion and science can coexist. John Horgan (whose views are agnostic) had debated the question with John Lennox (whose views are Christian) at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Horgan posted Lennox's follow-up letter, and readers of the blog were then free to comment.

Here is my response, posted in the comment section on April 27, 2015 (with typos now fixed):

___________________________________________________
 

Religion isn't just "one thing." Faith isn't just "one thing." The human brain (where both religion and faith are experienced) isn't just "one thing." Anyone who tries to reduce these incredibly complex questions to simple either-or explanations isn't paying attention to reality. Photo credit JAT 2026.

 

In my experience, the real question is not whether religion and science can coexist, but whether religion and faith can coexist.

@4 Paul Topping wrote, "In my mind, the main 'proof' that convinces me of the atheist point of view is that people have so many different religions with such different explanations. . . . The only reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong and that belief in religion is just something that some people have like blue eyes."

When I read a comment such as this (and there are many these days) I know the individual hasn't taken the time and trouble to use objective research tools to examine key questions about religion -- questions examined with tools such as historicity, source criticism, socio-rhetorical criticism, and cost-benefit analyses from political, economic, social, military, and legal perspectives in the contexts in which the doctrines arose. Most importantly, when superficial assessments of religion are offered, it's quickly clear that all questions about neurophysiology have been shelved.

Shelving questions about neurophysiology isn't reserved for those who claim to espouse the methodology of science. Shelving questions about how and why the human mind works in relationship with the rest of the universe is one of theology's least helpful contributions to humankind, in my opinion. I've read theological arguments so convoluted in their efforts to avoid the question of how and why the human mind works that they make a Gordian knot look like a simple twist tie.

Theology is increasingly understood today as some sort of withering branch of philosophical thought, a deservedly marginalized branch of human thought that has now been proudly replaced by the randomized, double-blind study method, etc.

Those who've studied the history of theological evolution, however, know that all early schools of theological thought (no matter what "religion" they're linked with today) arose from careful study of scientific principles followed by the application of scientific observations to questions of human character, morality, Law (nomos in Greek), justice, disease, healing, mental health, and the pursuit of happiness.

It's not possible from a scientific perspective to reasonably argue that human beings 5,000 years ago (when the roots of today's religions really took hold in the soil of technological advances) had DNA so vastly different from ours that they couldn't use their brains in ways virtually identical to the ways we do. It's not reasonable to argue that they couldn't see for themselves the destructive issues of psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, and machiavellianism without the benefit of today's research and today's DSM-V (which hasn't the courage to include psychopathy in its lauded pages).

Just as we continue to struggle today with these issues, our ancestors took steps to limit the destructive power of certain human choices that spring from Axis II issues. One of the tools each major culture developed was religious doctrine. But religious doctrine wasn't set apart from questions of politics, economics, healing, justice, legal codes, and scientific inquiry. To attack religion as if it has ever been a separate and unnecessary "entity" -- like a dead tree branch that can be lopped off -- is just plain sloppy and lazy from a methodological viewpoint.

Religious doctrines reflect the times and the cultural necessities from which they were born. This is why names and places change from religion to religion, but underlying concerns about destructive human choices don't. Such concerns are universal to the human condition because a psychopath by any other name is still a psychopath. (Members of the Greek pantheon, for instance, certainly seem to be archetypes for the human behaviours we find least desirable: narcissism, fickleness, lust, power-mongering, status addiction, and lack of empathy. Sound like any world leaders you know?)

Religious doctrines, however useful they may have been over the centuries from a political point of view, typically reflect a Materialist cause-and-effect understanding of science, which is quite useful and practical on a day-to-day basis. (Can't argue with classical physics when it comes to everyday usefulness.) The one thing major world religions don't do well, however, is to reflect the needs of FAITH -- a highly influential current of human experience, mostly expressed through System 1 thinking patterns in the brain. System 1 patterns have always paralleled -- and continue to parallel -- the more rigid, linear, Materialist thinking patterns of the human brain's newer System 2 processes.

The experience of faith is the experience of the presence of God in our daily lives. It may or may not be linked to membership in a formal religion.

For me, faith is a relationship with God that endures in the absence of sacred texts. It's an experience that can't be placed within the restrictive boxes of religious doctrinal traditions or texts -- or, for that matter, the restrictive boxes of Materialist cause-and-effect scientific traditions or theories. (Same thing, really.) Faith, far from being just a fanciful belief, is rooted 100% in the most objective scientific realities of the biological brain.

I won't bore you with my own experiences, but if you're interested in opening your heart and mind to what this faith experience might be, I'd recommend the awe-inspiring book Man's Search by Meaning by Dr. Viktor Frankl. Any scientific questions we have about the experience of faith, love, forgiveness, and the human search for meaning must take into account the data collected by Dr. Frankl under some of the most searing and horrendous conditions humankind has ever known: the European Holocaust.

Dr. Frankl, as both participant and scientific observer of the "best" and "worst" in human behaviour, introduced data into the faith/science/religion debate that must, at the very least, be considered from a falsifiability perspective.

It's not enough for any sort of "ism" promoter (whether scientism or religious fundamentalism -- same thing, really) to make lofty claims about the origins of evil and suffering. (Did you know, for instance, that Tertullian's late 2nd century CE doctrine of original sin -- a theory now called Traducianism -- tried to account for human evil on biological grounds?) Ideologues must also account for the data of innate goodness collected by less lofty and less voluble speakers such as the late Dr. Frankl.

Therein lies the really juicy stuff.

LSP38: How Prayer Practices Look to Your Angels

If you want to drive your guardian angel crazy, follow these 2014 instructions from the United Church of Canada for praying during Lent:

M&S Lenten Calendar 2014

March 5: Pray for strength for the journey of deepening faith and spiritual growth.

March 6: Offer a prayer of thanks for those in your life who have been examples of faithful believers.

March 7: Pray for your family and give thanks for other encouragers in your life.

March 8: Offer a prayer of thanks for God’s gift of the presence of the spirit in your life.

March 9: Pray for all those who live with spiritual hunger.

March 10: Pray for strength for someone facing a challenge.

March 11: Pray that you will put trust in God during a challenge you face.

March 12: Pray in a place that is special to you.

March 13: Pray for our leaders in the world.

March 14: Pray for those who search for justice.

March 15: Offer a prayer of thanks for spiritual comfort which God offers to all.

March 16: Pray for all those who serve the church.

March 17: Pray while walking in silence.

March 18: Pray for forgiveness for a failing of yours.

March 19: Sing a prayer today.

March 20: Pray that your decisions will be guided by the spirit.

March 21: Pray that your actions will reflect a Christian spirit.

March 22: Offer a prayer of thanks for the season.

March 23: Let the Holy Spirit guide you as you pray today.

March 24: Pray that the spirit will open your heart.

March 25: Pray that you can generously forgive others or yourself.

March 26: Pray in a new way or place or at a different time of day.

March 27: Pray for deepened trust in God and in the spirit of others.

March 28: Pray for laughter and joy in your life.

March 29: Pray that a conflict you feel will end with peace in your life.

March 30: Pray for those who face discrimination.

March 31: Pray that you will smile at everyone you meet.

April 1: Pray that today you can share the Good News.

April 2: Pray as a group or in the company of others.

April 3: Pray for deepened understanding of Christ’s message.

April 4: Pray for all who struggle with their faith.

April 5: Pray that God will walk with you.

April 6: Pray for “the luck of the Irish” in your life.

April 7: Pray for true joy in sharing the love of God.

April 8: Pray that you will see the beauty around you.

April 9: Pray in the morning and when the sun goes down.

April 10: Pray for our planet and all of God’s creation.

April 11: Pray for those in Canada who lack safe drinking water.

April 12: Pray for The United Church of Canada and its world mission.

April 13: Palm Sunday–Pray for those living in the Holy Land.

April 14: Pray for our Mission partners around the world.

April 15: Pray for the children who live in poverty.

April 16: Pray five times today.

April 17: Maundy Thursday–Pray for your faith community.

April 18: Good Friday–Pray that you will meet faith challenges.

April 19: Pray for faith in yourself and those you love.

The reason you'll drive your guardian angels crazy is that your guardian angels know how your brain actually works and they know you'll feel incredibly frustrated if you pray in a way that confuses and stymies your biological brain. Relationship with God depends on your ability to process incoming information from God and your angels, so effective spiritual practices are those that work with your brain instead of against it. Keep it simple, keep it sane!

With prayer, as with all spiritual practices, there's an easy way and there's a hard way. Your angels are very keen on the easy way (since being an angel-in-human-form is hard enough for you on the best of days). The prayer calendar above is the hard way.

This is how the above calendar looks to your angels:

How Prayer Practices Look to Your Angels: When you use 46 different prayers over the Lenten period, your biological brain sees it as 46 different maps (instead of a single, unified map!) After a while, your brain stops paying attention to the prayers because there's no consistency to them and therefore no chance of building strong inter-neuronal connections. On the other hand, your brain will pay attention to one clearly written prayer repeated earnestly each day for a minimum of 6 weeks. (Six weeks is the minimum amount of time it takes the brain to build a new neuron -- and building neurons and inter-neuronal connections is the key to long-term learning and change!) Credit JAT 2015.

Next year, why not try to easy way? Pick one prayer, reflect on it in the morning and again in the evening, and try to find small messages, synchronicities, or reminders during the course of your everyday life that relate to the one prayer you've chosen. You'll be surprised at what you notice when you're only asking your brain to follow one map at a time. It doesn't mean you're being spiritually lazy -- it means you're respecting God's wishes for you!

LSP34: Signs and Wonders and Mummified Monks

"Mummified monk in Mongolia 'not dead', say Buddhists." This is the headline on a short article that appeared this week on the BBC news. Other news sites carried similar stories.

To recap, a very well preserved mummified Buddhist monk was discovered in Mongolia last week. The body is seated in the lotus position (a position that assists in entering an intentional meditative state) and the monk appears to have died while in this position. The body (the exact age of which isn't certain) was recovered by police just before it was about to be sold on the black market.

What's extraordinary about this story is not that a mummified body was found in a cold, dry climate (which preserves body tissues quite well), but that an expert, Dr. Barry Kerzin (a Buddhist monk and physician to the Dalai Lama) has gone on record to say it's possible the monk may not be dead at all. He may, according to Dr. Kerzin, be in a rare meditative state called "tukdam."

Dr. Kerzin apparently told the Siberian Times this:

'If the person is able to remain in this state for more than three weeks - which rarely happens - his body gradually shrinks, and in the end all that remains from the person is his hair, nails, and clothes. Usually in this case, people who live next to the monk see a rainbow that glows in the sky for several days. This means that he has found a 'rainbow body'. This is the highest state close to the state of Buddha'.

He added: 'If the meditator can continue to stay in this meditative state, he can become a Buddha. Reaching such a high spiritual level the meditator will also help others, and all the people around will feel a deep sense of joy'.

The Siberian Times article also reports that "over the last 50 years there are said to have been 40 such cases in India involving meditating Tibetan monks.

You can read about a recent example of this on the website of the Benchen Monastery Community.  There, they offer notice of the death of Kyabje Tenga Rinpoche, who "chose to end the state of Tukdam, which is the deep meditative composure that some realized masters enter into after the demise of their physical bodies, after three and half days." The notice also describes the unusual weather conditions that took place on the day of Kyabje Tenga Rinpoche's 2012 death. The unseasonal thunderstorms, followed by rainbows, were not thought to be coincidental or irrelevant, the notice strongly implies.

The point I want to make is this: Although you might like to believe that Buddhism isn't a religion, but is instead an atheistic, secular, humanist spiritual practice, it is not.

Buddhism is, and always has been, a religion. This is especially obvious in Mahayana Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism (of which the Dalai Lama's school of Tibetan Buddhism is a part).

Buddha, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2017.

ROM text accompanying the Buddha sculpture.

Some readers might have noticed the similarity between the description of Kyabje Tenga Rinpoche's death and the description of Jesus' death (the whole 3-day-thing plus multiple signs and wonders). The similarities aren't surprising, though, because certain themes and symbols -- like the number 3 -- draw our attention and ignite our spiritual curiosity. Our innate attunement to coincidences and universal patterns, along with our heightened awareness during times of intense emotional transition, are all part of our hardwired need for mystery. It's mystery that swirls and swims beneath the bridges of our hearts. Quiet questions wend their way into our creativity, intuition, spirituality, storytelling, and we long to know what's hidden across the next bridge in our lives and our relationships. Signs and wonders from God become beacons to remind us that the bridges between our hearts and God's Heart are ever present.

I've seen many signs and wonders, and I know they pop into our lives far more often than people realize. But inexplicable signs aren't just for religious people; they're for everyone, because all of us are children of God and all of us need reminders that mystery is important to our hearts and souls.

Despite what you may have heard from your leaders, no one religious group has a monopoly on signs and wonders -- neither Christianity nor Buddhism nor any other group. Everyone who lives on Planet Earth is part of the same Creation. There isn't one Creation for Christians and a different Creation for Buddhists. We all come from the same place (God's Heart). We all live under the same roof here on Planet Earth. We all live by the same "house rules" while we're here (which is why the need for morality is universal). And we all return to the same place when we die (claims for apotheosis notwithstanding).

Do I think the mummified monk is still alive and in a deep state of tukdam? No, I do not. I think the poor man is dead. I think he's been dead for a long, long time, and I think we should trust that and let him be dead instead of trying to force the mantle of Buddhahood onto his very shrivelled shoulders. (Did you check out the photo on the BBC?)

Do I think it's possible his physical body -- what remained after his soul and his biology parted ways -- has been miraculously preserved?

I think it's theoretically possible. I really do. I've seen much stranger things than abnormally extended tissue preservation. (And tissue preservation is, after all, simply a matter of knowing your chemistry, physics, and biology really, really well -- a particular talent of God.)

The real question is this: what does this news story tell you about you? What does this story make you think about? Do you want to laugh with contempt and call it all a hoax? Or do you have a small itchy sense of spiritual curiosity in the very back of your head?

If you're just a little bit curious, it's a good sign.

P.S. Thank you to the persons-of-soul who made this discussion possible. Without you, we couldn't do this! Amen.

Postscript February 26, 2015:  Please see "Eerie remains of 1,000-year-old mummified monk inside Buddhist statue unveiled by CAT scan," which was posted this week on Canada's National Post news site. Please see also another helpful story story posted this week by the BBC about the elaborate and beautiful Ajanta caves used by the Buddhist community of India’s Maharashtra state until the complex was abandoned in the early 6th century CE. Again, my point is that Buddhism is a religion, not just a simple philosophy or way of life that anyone can -- and should -- incorporate into their spiritual journey. It's up to you to decide whether the religious doctrines of Buddhism are right for you. But please don't pretend there are no doctrines!

LSP12: Not Your Usual Valentine Song: Why We're Here on Planet Earth

Okay.  o if God is so loving and we, as souls, are so loving, and everything in the universe is so galldarned loving, then why the heck are any of us here?

Why not just jump to the good part -- Heaven, that is -- and skip all this crazy, frustrating, painful, human stuff?

Every major world religion (past and present) has tried to answer this question. In fact, there wouldn't be any religions without this question. Faith* asks the question with an open heart. Religion's job has always been not to answer the question but to control the answer, to control the theory which decides what other people can observe.

This is not to say that religious people don't have faith or can't have faith. Many have great faith in a loving God. But many more have no faith in themselves or each other because they've been taught by their religious leaders to believe in their own inherent sinfulness or karmic imperfection. (Take your pick -- both boil down to a belief in Materialist laws of cause and effect.)

What if all these religions are wrong? What if there is no inherent sinfulness and no karmic imperfection? What if the goal is not to escape our sinfulness through grace or to escape the cycle of rebirth through sheer willpower? What if the goal for human beings has nothing whatsoever to do with saving ourselves so we can get to Heaven or to a state of Nirvana?**

What if we're here on Planet Earth for an entirely different reason? A simple reason. A loving reason. Say . . . so we can experience a number of complicated things about God's Heart that some of us just can't seem to understand without "walking a mile in God's shoes."

Maybe we're here as human beings because, as souls, we're so determined and so loving and so trusting and so courageous that nothing -- not even the sure knowledge of our temporary suffering and anguish and loneliness -- can stop us from wanting (as souls) to know more about who God the Mother and God the Father really are as people.

This clock, made of ivory, gilded copper, brass, and enamel, is called "The Twelve States of the Soul," and was made by German clockmaker  Johan Georg Gusderman of Kaemten in about 1680. It's part of the Kenneth Thomson collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2018.

From what I've just said, you'd have to conclude that if we want to know (as souls) what it feels like to walk a mile in suffering and anguish and loneliness, then this must mean . . . hmmm, now here's a thought you won't be hearing in church anytime soon . . . this must mean that once upon a time (long, long ago and far, far away) there was no Divine Love and existence was a real bitch until God the Mother and God the Father found redemption in each other.

As the song says, it takes two.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.


*(I define faith as a relationship with God that endures in the absence of sacred texts.)

**(Please bear in mind that I'm simplifying on purpose.)


For Further Reflection:

People love to know about their human ancestry. For reasons we can't describe, we're endlessly fascinated by our family trees and family histories. These days, it's popular to add a DNA analysis to the confusing piles of unnamed photos and undated letters we find in old trunks in the basement. Sharing historical information has recently become a way of bringing people closer, but it hasn't always been this way.

It used to be, in centuries past, that families lived in the same small region for many generations, so you didn't have to go much further than the local graveyard or the local parish register to learn more about your ancestors. You could also go to the pub or the sewing circle, where you could hear every nasty rumour about everybody's ancestors right back to the time of Adam. Heaven help you if you came from the clan or caste despised by your community for some ancient crime. There was no escaping the power of genealogy to build lives and also ruin them, depending on who your ancestors were. Forgiveness for bloodlines was almost unheard of.

Human culture has taught us to think about family history in some pretty strange ways that have nothing to do with learning how to love your God or yourself or your neighbour. We don't like to acknowledge it, but, over time, all of our most dysfunctional beliefs about families and family history have mutated into religious doctrines. We do this -- we drag our flawed theories about family into the history of our relationship with God -- because so many of us like the idea of having power over the people closest to us.

In order to get the family power we want, we take our understanding of God the Mother and God the Father and we beat the crap out of it. We take God's image and cut out all the parts that might interfere with our own authority. We then take the parts that are left (such as God's immeasurably vast talents) and rearrange them into a new portrait of the Divine that "proves" such religious theories as the human right to be right; human exceptionalism; human hierarchies of salvation; and monism (the quest to dissolve all humans into a single soup of Oneness).

We then use these theories to justify our treatment of God, our families, our communities, and our planet.

Your angels, however, are having none of it.

The story you've been told about God is in all likelihood one of the many cut-and-paste jobs that exist in today's religious and spiritual circles. (In some circles, God's image has been cut into such tiny pieces that nothing meaningful is left.) It's up to you, then, (with the help of your angels) to find the courage to open your eyes and ears and heart to God so you can rebuild a healthy, mature, loving image of your Divine Parents.

Deep within your core self, in the places of yearning you so rarely listen to except when your dreams overtake you, you're absolutely desperate to know more about your angelic history and more about your Mother and Father's personal journey of redemption, hope, healing, and faith.

Don't be surprised if your journey forward on the Spiral Path sometimes feels like a journey backwards.

There's an important angelic reason for this.

LSP6: Why God?

Why God? Why a personal God instead of a transcendent cloud of Oneness from which all of us come and to which all of us return? 

Quite simply, knowing God makes you a better person.

We human beings are funny creatures. When we sit down long enough to notice what we're really thinking and feeling, all sorts of strange emotions bubble up inside us. We want more than anything to feel we belong and to feel we have a purpose in life. We want to feel safe--emotionally and physically safe--and when we're not, we feel frightened and anxious. We long to be surrounded by beauty and peace and kindness and honesty, and when we're forced to deal with selfishness and betrayal and corruption, we're devastated.We want to know others and we want to be known--really, really known and accepted for who we are deep inside. We desperately crave love and trust. We desperately need other people.

Is it wrong for us to feel this way? Are we to blame for our own suffering because we're too attached to certain people and ideals and creature comforts? Are we suffering because of the weight of our emotions and attachments? Or is it possible we're suffering because we haven't been paying enough attention to what we really want and need?

God's love is Beauty. Don't reject it. Rejoice in it! Photo credit JAT 2018.

For a long time now, human beings in all places and in all religious traditions have been trying to answer the problem of suffering by following one of two major paths. (Yes, more paths!) The first major path is the path of spiritual ascent that leads to holiness and perfection (in technical terms, "anagogism"). The second major path is the path of self-dissolution and blurring of boundaries for the purpose of rejoining the cloud of Oneness (called "apophasis"). Both of these paths are paths of abandonment--abandonment of yourself and abandonment of God. Neither path (not even when they're combined, as they often are, in a one-two punch) will help you become a better person--the person you want to be deep in your Heart.

What helps you become a better person is your faith and trust in the "rightness" of needing powerful emotions such as love and safety and deep acceptance in all your relationships. Families (and communities) that embrace the "rightness" of love and safety and deep acceptance are families that are healthy and happy (within the limits of our temporary human lives). Families that focus on achieving holiness and perfection (anagogism), or on beating all emotional needs out of you because emotions aren't "logical" (apophasis) are . . . well, I think you know where I'm going with this.

Knowing God the Mother and God the Father as the people they are means you have a constant source of inspiration in your life for how to be the person you want to be. A person who is patient. And kind. And grounded. And forgiving. And full of empathy for all life (not just caring about the people you know). And courageous. And balanced. And willing to do the right thing. In short, you become once again a person who's in full relationship with all of life, including all the reaches of Creation you'll never see for yourself with your own human eyes.

It all boils down to relationships. Everything that really matters in our lives depends on relationships.  We're hardwired this way. We want and need Divine Love because Divine Love is the ultimate expression of two or more consciousnesses building a relationship of beauty and truth and learning together.

There's no force I've encountered that's anything like the feeling of unconditional love flooding into your heart and mind and bones and gut. This love--which begins within the Hearts of God the Mother and God the Father and within the infinite love they share for each other--this love . . . it's gravity. It's sanity. It's safety. It's trust. It's truth--but not one single truth. It's the truth of everything. It's the truth of you and the truth of me and the truth of all of us. Countless truths, all equally valid, all founded in the reality that we are not One Truth but instead are One Big Family.

All that we most cherish, all that we view as the best expression of ourselves and our communities, depends on our having the courage to love and trust. Forgiveness and transformation and emotional healing all depend on the love and the trust. Once you allow your own heart to be open to these wondrous emotions, you won't be able to stop yourself from letting the rest of it pour in, too.

You won't be able to stop yourself from feeling the gravity of God's love.


For Further Reflection:

Have you ever paid attention to how you feel--how you really feel--when you're treated by your human family if you're just a robot who performs needed tasks? Or a person who's valued for the status you can bring to your family but not for the unique emotions that make you you? Or an invisible slave who's only important in so far as you worship and obey your hierarchical leaders? Do you enjoy being treated in these ways? Do you like being told repeatedly you're unworthy of love? Or does it feel wrong to you in every way?

Being loved by your family is a deep, rich, ongoing set of observations and conversations and memories between people who aren't carbon copies of each other yet who value each other despite their differences. This applies as much to your relationship with God as to your human family.

To seek the path of holiness and perfection is to make the claim that God is only willing to love those who meet a strict and narrow standard of what it means to be beautiful in God's eyes. Such a claim has nothing to do with the way God loves you.

To seek the path of Oneness, where all beings are said to merge into a single Intelligence or Source, is to make the claim that God isn't capable of seeing you and loving you as a unique individual. Furthermore, claims for apophatic Oneness implicitly suggest that you're somehow already a spark of God -- not a child of God, but an actual piece of God's core essence. Have you given any thought to the narcissism involved in such a claim? Have you thought about how it feels from God's perspective when you work your ass off on spiritual practices that claim to give you a godhood that was never yours to begin with?

The human Mind is easily tricked into assuming that God only sees beauty in things that are perfectly perfect.

Fortunately, the Heart that's able to love the imperfectly perfect is a Heart that knows God.

A God who loves you despite the fact that you're very normal and very human and very not God is so much easier to trust.

LSP5: Feeling Completely and Truly Well

Dr. Eben Alexander describes in his book how he knew during the early stages of his recovery that he was "completely and truly 'well' for the first time in [his] entire life" (page 123). This statement is right on the money from my point of view. Feeling your connection with God means feeling "completely and truly well."

This doesn't mean you'll never get sick. This doesn't mean you'll never die. It means you feel wholly present in your human skin and wholly accepting of the many simple truths about God and God's Creation that you've never noticed before.

People are often afraid that if they know "too much" about the mysteries of Divine Love, their sense of wonder will be diminished, and they'll be left with nothing but a bunch of facts and legal rulings, like the mundane wrappings strewn on the floor after all the Christmas presents have been opened. Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. The more you open your eyes and your heart to God's mysteries, the more mysteries you stumble across in the course of your everyday life. This photo, which reminds me of the feeling of Divine Love, came to me in an unexpected way. My angelic guardians, who know me so well, suggested one day that I put my camera in the trunk of my car "just in case." I didn't get around to taking any photos that day, so I left my camera in the trunk. It turned quite cold that night, and by the time I visited the nearby conservatory the next day, my camera was so cold that the lens fogged over when as I entered the warm, moist interior of the gardens. At first I was upset. But my loving guardians pointed out that I could take some misty photos before my lens warmed up. This was clearly what they had in mind for me all along. I got some lovely mystical shots that make me smile with wonder every time I look at them, but I wouldn't have got them if I'd been purely logical about how to use my camera. Photo credit JAT 2018.

This can be a hard thing to put into words, especially if you're not 100% sure yourself exactly what you're trying to express. I can see this struggle in Dr. Alexander's book. He knows he knows it, but he still isn't 100% certain of what he's trying to say. Why isn't he sure? He isn't sure because during any near death experience, your brain gets what writers call an "info-dump" -- a vast quantity of new information that can take many years to process. I estimate that, during his 7-day coma, Dr. Alexander probably received the equivalent of a few terabytes of new data.

That's a lot of new data.

Dr. Alexander is a very bright man, and, as a soul, he's also a risk taker who's willing to plunge right into the deep end and worry later about the mechanics of swimming. So for him the right approach to finding his connection with God was to jump hard and fast into the pool, hold his breath, and take in as much information as he possibly could in one big gulp.

Most souls who are here on Planet Earth are not risk takers to this degree. There are many souls who, like myself, need to know about the mechanics of swimming before they go anywhere near the deep end. They need to understand at a logical level where they're going -- and why -- so they won't be afraid.

I've spent the past few years reverse-engineering the process of going to the Core. Like Dr. Alexander, I have a hard science background (mostly chemistry). Although I'm a practising mystic, and although I see wonder and mystery and divine love in everything around me, I also need straight, simple, scientific answers to all the big questions in life.

It's not good enough for me to say, "Well, I've been to the Core and I've talked to God the Mother and God the Father and I trust in their love." I need to know how I do this. I need to what's going on inside my brain, what's normal and completely and truly well about the physiology of my brain that makes it possible for me to do this in my everyday life. Because if I can do it as a normal human being, then it's not about "otherness" or "transcendence" but instead about "wholeness" and "healing."

This opens up a realm of possibilities for others who want to know what it feels like to be "completely and truly well."

Being open to the idea that there really is a God, and being open to the idea that God is a real person (actually, two people united in love as parents to us all) is the first step in the healing process.


For Further Reflection:

You've probably heard of the placebo effect and its role in helping us heal our physical minds and bodies. Although researchers aren't entirely certain how the placebo effect works, there's no doubt our DNA comes preloaded with a mysterious healing mechanism that can help us move towards a state of wellness.

Two psychospiritual factors are especially relevant in activating the placebo effect. One is our personal desire to get better. If we secretly want to remain sick because we're getting secondary benefits, there's not much of an incentive for the body to trigger its own healing mechanisms.

The second factor is our relationship with our caregivers, including our professionally trained physicians, nurses, and the like. There's evidence that when we trust our caregivers, and believe they're acting with genuine care and concern for us (instead of acting by rote for the sole purpose of billing our insurance companies), we're much more likely to experience the positive benefits of the placebo effect. (A 2018 experiment in Britain investigated this effect.)

There's a similar spontaneous healing effect that takes place within our bodies and brains when we turn our attention in positive ways towards a loving relationship with God. Some people call this effect "faith." Whatever you call it, there's nothing quite like the experience of opening your heart to God's immense love and feeling safe in that love.

Your biology responds to relationship with God in the same way your body responds to an empathetic caregiver. You may continue to be physically sick (because not every illness can or will be cured), but inside your Heart you find the courage to believe you're still safe in God's love, despite your pain.

Feeling "completely and truly well" is an emotional and spiritual state, not a physical or cognitive state. Once you decide the feeling of psychospiritual wholeness is worth the trouble, you and your angels will understand each other much better.

LSP4: Second Chances

Do you worry there's only one right way to find the doorway to God's help? Are you afraid that if you pick the wrong path, you'll be punished by God?

Most of the recent writers talking about God, the soul, and the afterlife are describing the early stages of the faith journey. They start with their observations about how messed up our human lives are. Then they offer their insights about how you can get onto the Spiral Path. This is fine. In fact, this is what you find at the heart of the world's great religions: the yearning to step onto the Spiral Path and stumble your way toward reconnection with God.

For many people, this is the longest part of the human journey, the part that fills up the bulk of their lives. Often people only find what they've been looking for as they draw near the end of their allotted time on Planet Earth. So they don't have a lot of time to "start again," so to speak -- to start again on the faith journey by asking all the questions they didn't think to ask the first time.

Each person's journey on the Spiral Path is unique. Like this rune stone that tells the story of a Viking expedition to the Far East that didn't go well, the narrative of our lives is filled with unexpected plot twists. Shit happens on the Spiral Path. Shown here is a reproduction of a Viking rune stone that was part of a special exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2018.

The difference for me is that I've had plenty of time -- many years, in fact -- to come full circle on the Spiral Path and start again near the beginning with fresh eyes, fresh questions, and a healed heart. This is a chance not many people get.

I view myself as a spiritual muckraker, someone who's not afraid to challenge old ways of religious thinking that are holding people back as they try to reconnect with God. To be good at this, I had to draw a deep breath and accept a costly twist in the path: a return to university when I was forty-nine. Theological studies helped me examine religious thought patterns from the inside and compare what I was reading to what I'd been experiencing as a heretical Christian mystic.

I began my academic studies after I'd already come full circle on the Spiral Path -- after I'd already learned what it means to forgive, what it means to receive God's love, what it means to find redemption as a human being. I'll be very honest with you and say that a lot of the church's traditional teachings look like a pile of mouldy baloney once you've talked to God the Mother and God the Father about the soul's journey in Creation.

Nonetheless, I still self-identify with Christianity -- that is, with the teachings of Jesus son of Joseph. If you've read my other blogs, you know how little sympathy I have for the teachings of Paul. (I filled three books with thoughts about the contrasts between Jesus and Paul, so you know I take the subject seriously!) Having complained at length about orthodox Western Christianity, I still maintain there's good stuff hidden within Christianity (especially the idea of a personal God and a soul that's inherently good); so, if you need to know where I'm starting from, I'd reply that I'm starting from the same place as that well known heretical Jewish man who came full circle on the Spiral Path and restarted his relationship with God after he (the man) realized that questions are the doorway.

If you wholeheartedly believe in the Church's teachings on sin, separation, sacraments, and salvation ("the 4 S's"), you're not going to like my posts. If, on the other hand, you're open to the idea that God has never stopped talking to you, and never will, and that you're totally worthy of God's unconditional love, you may find something helpful in my thoughts.

God bless,

Jen

For Further Reflection:

Because God is always with you, and because God's angels are always with you, too, there is no limit to the number of times you can have a second chance. Right up until the day you die, God is presenting you with new opportunities for change, growth, learning, and asking logical questions. No matter how often you turn away from Divine Love, God will forgive you and find exasperating ways to challenge you to be your best self.

You know that saying about new chances? The saying that wisely reminds us,"When one door closes, another door opens"? It's true. I don't know who first came up with this maxim, but I know it's a timeless truth for anyone who wants to get closer to God the Mother and God the Father.

As humans, most of us have some pretty bad habits. We like to cling to things we know, things we're comfortable with, things we believe are right (even when they're totally wrong). So God and God's angels frequently close certain doors you're clinging to in order to shake you up and give you a chance to let go of bad habits.

Dr. Alexander's book, when looked at through the light of this maxim, is the story of how God firmly slammed the door on one man's narcissism and opened up a different door (previously hidden beneath layers of anger and status addiction) that showed this same man he's worthy of God's love.

It's important to keep in mind as you pursue your own journey of relationship with God that Dr. Alexander never asked for the journey he got. He never prayed for it. He never used any rituals to get it. He didn't, in fact, even know he was on a journey. Nevertheless, he got the journey God decided was best for him and for those around him.

Dr. Alexander wasn't unique or specially chosen in this regard. Everyone gets the journey and the doorways that are best suited to them.

Keep your eyes and ears open for the doorways God is showing you all the time. Keeping your eyes and ears open is a huge part of learning how to be in full relationship with God.