My spiritual awakening part 4

I forgot to mention two of important things in the previous post. One of those was that I cannot really remember my thought processes at this time, except for what I’ve just mentioned. But one thing that I do remember, is the other one. You see, I took out one week’s vacation from the post terminal that I was working at when this happened. I just wanted to take a week to myself and think things through. 

The first day of my vacation I was in central Gothenburg and I wanted to find a book to read. I went into the bookstore and my eyes immediately fell on Tomorrow’s God by Neale Donals Walsh. I did have a feeling that I was guided to it, but then I knew next to nothing about what I know today, so I didn’t think much of it. After a while, I didn’t think much of it, even though the book gave me some real food for thought and seemed like just the book I needed to read. Today I don’t believe that everything that is said in it comes from God. Because now I have some experience of hearing the voice of God myself, and I know that it’s often hard to distinguish from one’s own thoughts. 

Now I have lots of experience of being guided to books, movies and documentaries. I believe that God speaks to us all the time. We are just too occupied with thoughts about the past or the future to notice it. So for most of us, myself included, it’s just when God hits us in the face with a message that we actually take notice. I think that the robbery that I told you about in the first post in this series was such a message.

My spiritual awakening part 3

Just because I found meaning didn’t mean that my old patterns were gone of course. And among other things, I had developed the habit of lying to myself and others. Even though I wanted to be a force for good in the world, I was excellent at making myself believe my justifications for bad, destructive behaviour. But even then, I started to remove the worst stuff from my life.

I went back and forth for a bit, basically between living quite clean and partying quite hard. I tried some yoga and picked up a meditation practice. I don’t remember the exact times for everything. But somewhere around 26 I stopped smoking, started working out and went to the university. 

It’s interesting to look back at these things now. To see where I’ve made major decisions that have affected my life in a positive manner. And you can say what you want about the university (you learn a lot of nonsense there), but my time there taught me how to think in a different manner, to understand texts better and to sharpen my speech. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to get into the debt that I am in to get these skills. But I had fun and it changed me quite a lot in a positive way. It was an experience that both boosted my confidence and humbled me. It boosted my confidence to see that I did quite well in an academic setting and humbled me because I was constantly around loads of people that were smarter than me. And again it boosted my confidence, because I got to see how these same smart people could come to really stupid conclusions, when these conclusions were too shaped by their opinions. 

A little further down the road, I realized that my own opinions often skewed my perceptions of the world. It’s always easier to see these things in others than in oneself. 

An important lesson here, is that accurate thinking is very dependent on one’s ability to free oneself from one’s subjective opinions and views of the world. 

My spiritual awakening part 2

Before this event that set me off on my spiritual journey, I was a nihilist. I was into Laveyean satanism (basically ego-affirming atheism, at least on the surface) and I believed that life was completely pointless. You live and you die and when you die nothing matters anymore. I didn’t really care if I died tomorrow or in a hundred years and basically felt that I might as well grab hold of whatever little pleasure that came my way while I was still alive. Not that it was right or wrong. It just seemed like the thing that came most naturally when I just let myself go.

When I went through this back in 2006, I had very few to talk to about it and no one that knew exactly what was going on. And even though I never lost my faith in God, I slipped back into many of my old patterns after a while. But from this point, my life was less chaotic. I would say that meaningfulness was the big thing here. I cared whether I lived or died because I believed that there was a purpose with my life. Looking back on this now, I think that this is actually very significant. Because our attitudes towards life affect how we think, feel and act in pretty profound ways. I know that this could be considered speculation, but at the same time it’s undeniable. When you suddenly feel like there is meaning to your existence, you care if you live or die and then you start caring about your actions. It follows logically that this will have an effect on your actions.

My spiritual awakening part 1

I’ve written a lot about my awakening here on the Blog. But I wanted to collect the essentials under one heading.

For me it started way back in 2006. Basically I had started to question my former atheism a while back, when I got robbed as a direct consequence of the life that I was living. The same day I had had a hunch that something was going to happen, but since I didn’t believe in intuition and only a very vague openness to anything that went outside of the five sense reality, I ignored it and soon forgot it. In the evening it knocked on the door. I opened and four guys that I didn’t know stood outside. You can fill in the rest.

Afterwards I got a very strong feeling that this was God telling me something about the life. Had I known what I know now about religious psychology, I might have been more skeptical. The psychological literature says that traumatic events and rough periods can trigger sudden changes in religious beliefs. But I’m glad that I didn’t know this, because today I know that even though I trust the research on this, nothing happens by accident. Today I know that everything is in God’s hands and that God talks to us through every single little moment in our lives.

There is something strange happening in the world. Part 2

So, what can we do? I believe that the only thing that we can do, is trust that God wants what’s best for us, and do our best to be our best, towards ourselves, each other and the world. I cannot believe in some final judgment where the saved go to heaven and sinners go to hell. There is no way for me to reconcile this with the idea of a good God. Not if God also is omnipotent. I don’t understand how an omnipotent, good god could make/let even the worst person in the history of mankind suffer forever. But I’m open to the possibility that there is something I don’t understand here.

What I do feel is important right now however, is that we do our best to be our best. Not because of some reward or punishment down the road, but because this is what God calls us to do. Because it is what is going to give us the best possible outcomes, and because there might be some hard lessons in store for us otherwise. 

I wish to interject that being our best, does not mean to be flawless. On the contrary, being our best often means to accept and embrace ourselves as flawed creatures fully. To allow ourselves to make mistakes and accept that we sometimes act against our own interests. Because this is part of being human.

So maybe, just maybe, this is not a time where God will let fire rain down on earth in a literal sense, where the saved will get to live in paradise, while sinners will face eternal suffering. Maybe this is rather the time where we really start seeing that living for our own selfish interests and instant gratifications will do nothing good for anyone. Maybe this is a time where we finally see our madness and confusion for what they are and choose to let go of them. 

And I don’t know. Maybe in the end it is as simple as letting go of fear and embracing love. But maybe things are a little more complicated than people make them as well. Maybe we don’t have to be afraid of anything. But maybe, when it comes to certain things that we need to let go of, we will find a few things that are rather difficult to do so with. Maybe things that we have made parts of our identity and that we are very defensive about. I know that this has been the case for me. And it took som pretty deep soul searching to see these things and how they affected my life and ultimately who I was as a person.

There is something strange happening in the world. Part 1

In New Age circles there is talk about “The Ascension Process”. In more biblical contexts, people are talking about “the apocalypse”, “armageddon” or “the end-times”. 

Personally, I find labels like this one problematic, since labels bring with them certain ideas and expectations, exclude others, brings some to the forefront and others to the back. 

A very common human trait seems to be that we want to know. And we don’t just want to know. We want to belong to the group that knows something that the others do not. This is of course one of the many ways that the ego tricks us and I don’t think that we can say “I don’t know” enough these days.

But I find it interesting to look at the ideas of the Ascension Process and The Apocalypse together. Because both of them have some merit. 

On the one hand, we have a huge amount of people reporting strange things happening with them, that seem to point to some magnificent revelation of us being much more than we seem, when we perceive the world through our physical bodies with our physical senses. I’m one of those people.

On the other hand, we have enough biblical end-times prophecies coming true that I believe it warrants at least enough concern, that we cannot just brush it off lightly. We of course have the verse from Matthew that says “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars.” We also have several places in the Bible, where it is talked about how people are going to be in the end-times. One usch place is Timothy 3:2-4: “People will be selfish, greedy, boastful, and conceited; they will be insulting, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, and irreligious; ³ they will be unkind, merciless, slanderers, violent, and fierce; they will hate the good; ⁴ they will be treacherous, reckless, and swollen with pride; they will love pleasure rather than God.”

I’m not saying this to condemn anyone. I don’t think people are this way because they are bad. And these are all traits that I myself wrestle with. And… I’m actually going to write something completely different here than I thought. I honestly don’t think that these traits are more prevalent today than in Jesus’ times. It’s just that we recognize them as something bad today and we actually have a bigger chance of catching a glimpse of who we really are today than in ancient times. So this could actually be a prophecy that is unequivocally positive throughout. People are as they’ve always been, but now they have a chance to see it and recognize it as something that doesn’t make either themselves or anyone else happy. 

I guess that I believe that we can’t just condemn everything that belong to the category of New Age as bad or evil, because I’ve seen how this stuff works and how it is helping me to become a better person. Besides, what has been crammed into this labe is everything from letting go of negative emotional energy, to tarot cards and astrology, to channeling and contact with spirit guides.