Can we trust ourselves? Part 2

Maybe we can learn how we can trust ourselves? Maybe if we can clearly see the state that we are in and with God’s help find the tools to transcend it, we can recognize the voice of God without having to rely on external sources, confident that we won’t be led astray by the forces inside and outside ourselves. Maybe Neale Donald Walsh’s books should be read in this way. That is, not as a literal conversation with God, where God’s words are coming through perfectly. But rather as one man’s attempt to discern God’s voice, among all of the other voices that occupies his mind. Maybe, if we’re cautious of our impulse to accept different teachings as gospel (pun intended), we can study different spiritual teachers without fear of being led astray. 

This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. As my spiritual journey progresses and I gain more experience as I go along, the lens through which I view what I read becomes wider, since I can compare it with my personal experience. I don’t think that there is any point for me to take to heart that which I cannot relate to. It doesn’t mean that I have to dismiss it altogether. Sometimes I might sense that there is something with certain teachings, even if I don’t understand them as I’m reading them. I know that this was the case when I first read Eckhart Tolle. I intuitively felt that he had understood something. And now that I am more present in the moment, now that I can see more clearly when I am resisting what is and now that have gotten more in touch with my inner body, I understand what he’s talking about. And I can see myself moving closer to the state of inner peace and silence that he’s talking about.

And what I can also see, is that the more I am in this state, the easier it is for me to have discernment. For one, I pay attention much more, which makes it easier to see what is relevant in any given situation. It also makes it easier to pay attention to the voice of God inside. And maybe the truth is that simple. That when functioning from this calm, present, silent state, discernment becomes easy. Effortless. But, as I said in the beginning of this post, as long we are not on this state constantly, we might need to know as much as possible about the condition that we are in. I believe more and more that Jesus’ teachings are what will come naturally to us, once we function from this state and not via all of the ego-voices that are not really us. This might be why some say that the ego doesn’t really exist. Because what we truly are, is completely natural and effortless. The rest is just constructs in our minds. It is not real. At least, this is what I’ve come to believe. I’ve also come to believe that the more we understand about our condition, the easier it is to see when we’ve gotten off track. Maybe this means that in the end, complexity and simplicity converge naturally and turn out to be two sides of the same coin. As above, so below.

Can we trust ourselves? Part 1

I want to begin this post by asking a second question: Can we trust any authorities? 

These are quite troubling questions for me. On the one hand, I understand enough about self-deception, the unconscious, unconscious motives, manipulative forces in society and a bunch of other stuff that imply that “no” would be the correct answer to the question in the title of the post.

On the other hand, I can’t see how the answer would be to just blindly follow everything in the Bible no matter what. I’ve experienced enough strange and wonderful things, that traditional Christian teachings simply don’t seem like a viable option. 

Let’s get into the absolute beginning of my spiritual journey. I was a Laveyan satanist (basically ago-affirming atheism, at least on the surface), from the age of 17 to the age of 23. I actually started questioning my beliefs a year earlier. But this was when stuff happened that gradually, over a few days or months, shattered my beliefs. I don’t really remember what exactly took place in my mind, but afterwards I’ve just received more and more reasons to strengthen my belief in God and a spiritual reality. 

Since I had vacation to take out, I took a week off from work to think things through. At the time, I lived in Gothenburg and in connection with the vacation, I visited the big shopping mall called Nordstan at the core of the city. I thought that I wanted something to read that could… What? Stimulate my thoughts and help me make sense of things I guess, even though I probably didn’t put it into these exact words in my mind. So I visited a regular bookstore. And as I remember it, the first book my eyes fell on was Neale Donald Walsh’s Tomorrow’s God.

So, I bought the book and read it over the week. And even though I felt a bit uncomfortable with the style of the book, where the author does sort of an interview with God, the book rang true somehow. 

But maybe Satan led me to the book to trick me somehow, just when salvation was within my reach. I’m not kidding here. If Satan is real (something I mostly don’t believe in a litteral sense), wouldn’t this be exactly what could be expected of him, when he sees that he’s about to lose his grip on my soul? The question of the devil deserves to be taken seriously, until we can dismiss it on firm grounds. We are after all talking about the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people, and it is a part of the narrative of 2.5 billion people, even if all of them don’t believe in him. And 200 years ago, the absolute majority of the people in the Western world believed in him.

But I’ll leave that discussion for another post. The point is that we have a tendency to filter the information we take in, keep what we like, discard the rest and view it in a way that supports the “truth” that we prefer. To make matters worse, we don’t always prefer the most favorable truth. Our culture and upbringing shapes what we wish to believe in as well. Plus that we have a bunch of other biases as well. We might have a tendency to believe boring or painful “truths” more, since we might have a tendency to believe more in someone that says something uncomfortable, than someone that just seems to tell us what we want to hear.

So maybe this is the truth. That there are no ultimate truths. And that we therefore are free to do what we want with no spiritual consequences whatsoever. Or maybe we can at least just discard everything that cannot be agreed upon from a religiously neutral stance. This idea seems pretty appealing, doesn’t it? We can just go out, have fun and enjoy life in any way the we please and then we’ll go to heaven when we die. Or reincarnate as a better version of ourselves in another life. I know that I find such thoughts appealing.

But then we come back to the problem of our bias towards believing what we wish to be true.