GOD So where do I start to talk about God, or my ongoing relation to God these past 35 years? One place would be the name - I refer to Him as God, but in my spiritual exercise I call him Allah. (One self-repeating phrase is “Allah, yes God.” ) Yet I think He is not the God of the Muslims, nor of the Christians, as far as I understand either one. I sense him as a male being, but unlike one I’ve ever known in the flesh - probably closer to the Christian Jesus - very much a mix of male and female, gentle, loving, not one who wants to be feared. The construct of karma he created is the only thing to be feared - that which you do will come back upon you, in this life or the next. So take care what you do. But He is saddened, not angry, about what we do with that. The God I know is the Father of the Prodigal Son.......forgiving and understanding - re-welcoming, over and over. Not the God of Sin and Hell and Damnation and guilt and recrimination. (You will do that to yourself, through the karma you create. ) In many ways the God I know (through“receivings;” that is, continual questioning over and over the years, and continually feeling those questions answered) is anthropomorphic . He is present in everyone and everything, but locate-able by directing your attention upward. One way I’ve come to think of Him is via the “particle and wave” theory of the New Physics. Matter can present as either particle (a finite thing, locatable) or wave (omnipresent, moving through space.) God, similarly, can be an entity, addressable, AND energy moving throughout the Universe. I perceive the latter form most in nature, in the rhythm of waves, wind, the flight of birds. It feels like something which is simultaneously rhythm/sound/movement.........an OM, if you like........which is in everything, and possibly creates the perceptible world. When I feel that, I connect with something much larger than this everyday world, much sweeter. It wakens the little song/rhythm/dance inside me. It brings tears of joy and gratitude and hope - or maybe more than hope, sure awareness that this is NOT “all there is,” that this goes on forever. My home has always been the primary place where I connect with all of this - this sensing. Standing on my deck and looking out over the valley to the distant hills..............I feel connected to the whole rest of the world and sense the vibration that moves through it all. I also feel as thought I am “she who listens” - as though I feel the whole sorrowing, joyful, seeking, miserable, wondering thoughts and feelings of all the people in the world. My job, as I sense it, is to take all this in....to the point of heartbreak - and return it back with love, cleansed and peaceful. And this is of course what I do in a more finite and specific way in my counseling work. I used to return from my job at the end of the week, and it would take about 1/2 the day on Saturday of being alone, here, before my ears would attune to some sound outside me - the wind in the trees, my windchimes, a bird cry - and suddenly my ears would seem to stretch out to that sound and my heart would quicken and the vibration would start up. And for most of the rest of the weekend I would be in that place, just heartfully present, and the last sound I’d make as I went to sleep was always “Allah.” This internal place makes me dance, makes me sing, makes me cry. The verb tense I’ve used above is the past - and to some degree this experience, even here in my home IS in the past. And this is my sorrow. Into the solitude of 13 years came my third husband, and with all the joy that he brought, his presence (though a VERY spiritual man,) the sound of the tv which he watched a lot due to his physical limitations, and my tendency to expand only so far as the next person, shut a lot of this down. After his death, I was depressed for several years and all my inner attention went to making connection with him, in an effort to “get“ what he‘d been here to teach me, and of course for the love. And then along came the constant frenzy of political activity and connection with other people on that basis, and lots of time spent in town.
So part of my “new journey” is in fact an old one, of remembering to re-connect with God and his presence here in this home-place of mine, which includes the forest and that view out to the valley. I feel as though I am always “on His path” (on the path he designed for me for this lifetime, or the “dream he had of me when he made me”)(of course that which most fits my inner being and what it needs for its next stage of growth.) I thank God all day long for every good thing that comes my way (from finding my palmpilot when I need it, to bringing some bit of understanding, or a good connection with someone,) so it isn’t correct to think that I am not “connected with God,” but I am referring to that more expanded sense of connection, feeling the wind of God move through me. And that’s what I want to remember to make the space for. I can’t leave this topic (if I ever leave it) without describing an experience I had several months before I started on my “path with God.” I was a little high on marijuana, but I smoked for 20 years or so from my 20s into my 40s and never had another experience as strong as this. I was standing on the deck of the house I lived in then, looking out into the descent of forest that moved down the canyon below the house. Suddenly a large wedge open up in the air in front of me and the point of the wedge moved down into the top of my heart, and began to open. Inside this wedge, superimposed on the forest behind it, was a liquid golden light which was moving, dancing even, and the sense that there were large white-feathered wings, barely discernable, and an almost-perceptible but huge sound like a great choir, and at the same time, and part of all of this - all of these things were one and the same thing - was this overwhelming feeling of the greatest love you could possibly imagine and had always wished for. And I’m crying as I write this. The wedge opened, opened, opened the top of my heart until I couldn’t bear it..........couldn’t stand having what I never knew I had always wanted. And the wedge clapped shut and was gone. I feel I glimpsed Heaven........what exists all around us just outside the sphere of influence of the earth. Astrology says that the earth is ruled by Saturn, Chronos, Time. Saturn is also the Heavy, the difficult, the suffering and struggle. It is also the Material - that place where we have to make dreams come TRUE. Where we have to work for them. I think this is the necessity of this plane of existence, where we have to come to learn these lessons. And our only hope, while we’re here working all this out, is to remember it can all be transformed by remembering the larger reality and making it be true in your heart and where you live, and extending it out beyond you, not with proselytizing but with your Being. If I could hold onto this truth strongly enough, I would be a Mother Teresa.............moving through the world I work in with gentle, absolute love and compassion, and that wider reality in my heart. Is that too grand a wish? Well, perhaps, but that’s what I wish for. In my best moments. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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