Could God be both personal and impersonal?

And could this be so without one aspect being higher than the other?

Among many Eastern mystics, it seems as for many of them, the personal relationship with God is used as a stepping stone on our way towards an impersonal union, where everything is just love. But what if both are equally important? As far as I can tell, the Christian mystics seem to agree on this. If you look at for example John of the Cross, it is pretty clear that he talks about ecstatic experiences of love that transcend words. But it is equally clear that he sees his relationship with God as an intimately personal one. 

This is also what my own experiences tell me. I’ve had one experience which only lasted for a couple of seconds, of absolute, wordless love. But in prayer, I’ve also had a few, in some sense equally significant experiences, when I have had a knowing that far surpassed an intellectual one, that God listened to- and cared for what I said. These experiences have been equally filled with love, awe and tears. Sadly it was a while since I felt this in prayer and I miss it. But I keep on praying anyway.

And then I have the feeling that God is with me and communicates with me through my experiences throughout the day. These are by far my most common experiences. I might see and hear something that seems to not be just a coincidence. Maybe a thought pops up in my head and then I see or hear something that relates to that thought a moment later. Sometimes this is accompanied by the feeling that something shifts. Now that I think of it, the feeling reminds me a bit of when someone turns towards me, speaks to me with all his attention focused on me. 

As said in the beginning, when you read many Eastern mystics, it seems as if this personal relationship is less than this impersonal one. That it, in some sense, isn’t really real. But what if these are two sides of the same coin. One intimate, particular and personal and one limitless and universal. There seems to be an infinite aspect to both these types of relationship. In both, God is in a sense infinitely close to us, but in oposite ways. Maybe this can actually be seen in relation to the microcosmos and the macrocosmos. The universe is, at least according to many scientist, bot infinitely big and infinitely dividable. 

One common interpretation of the phrase: “as above, so below”, supposedly coined by the mystic Hermes Trismegistus, is that everything is connected with everything else, in the sense that you can learn the nature of all by studying the nature of one thing. And that two opposite poles share an intimate connection with each other. 

The creator of the universe actually listens when we speak to him

That’s the little secret of prayer. To remember who you are talking to. And that he actually listens. 

A while back I noticed that when I consciously directed my prayer towards God something happened. Something very significant. Namely that I understood this on a level that far exceeded an intellectual understanding. I understood it at the core of my being, at the deepest emotional level possible. I could actually feel God listening to me.

My creator, the eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent creator of everything, in whose hands everything rests and who loves me infinitely and knows me infinitely more deeply than I know myself, actually listens to me when I pray. 

After this my prayers changed for a while. They became more meaningful. More real.

But since then, I’ve gotten caught up in daily life again. I’ve stressed through prayers and they have often turned into words without substance. I think that I actually in a sense forgot that God is with me. Not on an intellectual level of course. I can never fully forget what I’ve experienced. My experiences have been so strong and undeniable, that I can’t ever give in fully to doubt. 

But there is another forgetfulness here. One that I cannot really put my finger on. It has something to do with the temporal vs the eternal. Where I simply get caught up in my ego and forget what is really important. 

This blog post became something completely different from what I had planned. But I just realized that this has been coming back to me over and over again. I think that this is what is meant by “being in the world, but not of it”. We do have a physical experience. But really we are always walking with God for eternity, here and now. And life is meant to be a continual prayer and interaction with God. Adam really walked with God, but as we fell deeper and deeper into our intellects, God became more and more distant. But it’s not going to be like that forever.

Bringing conscious awareness into everything

As with many other things, the first step to changing this, is to set the intention of becoming aware every time my focus starts to drift and consciously bringing it back to what's in front of me every time that it does. I believe that if I persist, I will become aware more and more often. This has worked when it comes to my job. And it works with many other things. 

What I've realized, is that at my job I’m pretty focused on what’s in front of me and do things very efficiently. But when I sit down with projects at home, I tend to lose focus easily and become distracted. And I’ve realized that this is actually a habit. I’ve allowed my work that I do in my spare time to become sloppy and unfocused.

This also goes beyond mere lack of efficiency. When I do things in this manner, I also much more seldom get into a flow state. This means that I more often do things from a place of ego and of trying to force things, which means that I get access to much fewer novel ideas than I could. 

What's going on on the inside Part 3

When I’ve focused on the energies inside my body, I’ve noticed that they correspond with my physical sensations, my body’s, movements and even what is going on on the outside. I’ve  started to feel the mood of other people much more strongly. 

Furthermore, I’ve realized that I’ve numbed and pushed down many emotions in different ways. And that these emotions haven’t simply vanished, but have instead been stored in my body as tensions. I’ve also noticed these emotions get activated in situations that trigger them. This means that when something happens that upset me emotionally, if I manage to be present enough to notice it, I can feel that the areas where I have tensions tense up more than usual, and that this is the areas where I can feel the emotions most strongly. Finally, I’ve noticed that when I don’t react to these emotions and don’t try to push them away either, but simply let them be there, I can let go of them. I’ve released many tensions this way and my body feels much less tense today, than it did just a couple of years ago.

What's going on on the inside Part 2

The truth is that there is a lot of the things that I’ve discovered that I don’t understand fully. Just that I’ve discovered something significant that has been hidden in plain sight for most of my life. 

Looking inside has made me wonder about the connection between thoughts and emotions. What effect thoughts and emotions have on our day to day lives. I have discovered that when I shift focus between different body parts and the sensations in them I can create very different experiences. I can for example create a totally different experience for myself, depending on if I for example focus on the sensations in my fingertips or the taste in my mouth. Depending on if I’m lost in thoughts or engaging in what is actually going on or what I’m actually doing.

What's going on on the inside Part 1

I know that a key component in what is happening right now, is to become aware of what is going on on the inside. When we start feeling our bodies, we start to experience energies flowing through them. When we observe our thoughts, we see that many of them are just repeating themselves over and over again. It’s often negative content that makes us feel bad. But we can also see that some of them contain what seems to be messages. We notice that the stream of thoughts never stops. That we can’t stop it and that when we try, we soon seem to forget what we are doing. Maybe we start to ask important questions, such as: What are thoughts really anyway? How do they function? Maybe we start wondering why we’ve never asked this before, about something that goes on throughout all of our waking lives. Maybe we start seeing that we have much more choice when it comes to our thoughts. That how we treat our thoughts right now, is not our nature, but rather habits. 

EVERYTHING is a dialogue with God

This IS the final step on the journey. And it's a huge leap that takes time. 

If God is everything that has ever been and ever will be, how could it be otherwise? God is speaking to you in every single moment. In every single NOW that you experience. We can misunderstand the communication, but this is the truth. Our destination is to know that we always walk with God, the way Adam (metaphorically) did in the Garden of Eden. The fruit of knowledge of good and evil, I believe, is a metaphor for how we allow our own distorted intellect come between us and God. We can live with God in the Garden of Eden here and now, if we recognize that we are already walking with God and adjust our inner state accordingly. Ultimately, every thought should be part of an ongoing, inner prayer, or the voice of God, that comes to us through discernment and our openness to hearing it in the midst of our minds’ constant chattering and the noise of the world, with its demands and twisted ideas about what’s important and what is going to make us happy. The more we cultivate present moment awareness and keep God in our minds, the stronger this discernment grows.

Learning to listen to ourselves part 2

The confusion between the job of our different faculties mentioned in the previous post, is one of the major reasons why we constantly seem to do things that are not in our best interests, but seem right at the time. What would happen if we started asking ourselves what we truly want and need? What would happen if we stopped caring so much whether what we eat will add a few extra millimeters to our waist or whether it will contribute to an overall caloric deficit?

I’ve noticed that when I am in contact with my body and my emotions instead of using my intellect, I will soon get a message about what I need. It all seems to come down to this over and over again. Paying attention to what is going in inside and around us. When I don’t, I hand my power over to a combination of unconscious forces within me and constant bombardment of messages from the world, about what is important and what I should pay attention to.

I touched upon this in tha last post, but I think it is part of something bigger that I’m beginning to realize. Namely that we have gotten used to function in a very limited way, by using our thoughts to determine almost everything and thereby failing to pay attention to what the rest of us is trying to tell us. I’m suspecting that the more I break free from the invisible prison created by my thoughts, the more I will know things that I’m today only making qualified guesses about, often based on the often conflicting information from various authorities. Or even worse - I might simply be doing things out of habit because I’m in too much of a rush to stop and bring awareness to the present moment.

I want to conclude this post by repeating this: Pay attention to what is going on, within and without. As yourself: What is your experience trying to tell you? Make it a habit of asking this question as often as possible. When someone else is directing your attention, you are by definition not free. 

This is about being in touch with ourselves and our own values, instead of being lost in thoughts that are often not even our own, while trying to do what those same thoughts tell us that we ought to. 

Learning to listen to ourselves part 1

I realized this when I woke up in the weekend the other day: I’ve not cultivated the habit of listening to myself properly. Of listening to what I need. To what my body needs. What my soul needs. In many instances I’ve just considered what my mind thinks about something.

What happened was that I couldn’t sleep, but I felt that I needed to stay in bed. But a part of me wanted to rush up. This time I listened to the part that wanted to stay in bed. When I laid there, tensions started to dissolve and eventually I fell asleep, waking up a little less than an hour later, feeling well rested.

Had I gotten up the first time, chances are that I would have been tired, in a bad moon and more or less spoiled my day. This is something that has happened before. My thoughts usually go something like this: I can’t lay here wasting time when it’s impossible to fall asleep again anyway.

Recently I’ve noticed that there is something magical about asking ourselves questions. It’s almost as if it’s programmed into us to know what we really want and need. We’ve just learned to only ask our thoughts. And our thoughts will come up with all kinds of rational arguments for why one thing is better than the other. Even though they are totally unreliable when it comes to so many things, since they take such a limited amount of factors into consideration. 

In this case, my mind only saw some practical factors, such as that I will get more hours out of my day, while not thinking about how my body felt about it, that I by not listening to I will be less effective and less happy during the day and that I might fall asleep in front of the movie in the evening, thereby wasting a movie experience.

Food is another good example. I might think about what will be nice to eat in the evening and thereby buying some snacks or something. Or the opposite: I might think that I should choose some healthy but boring alternative, when I really want some snacks. 

In the first case, I may end up with some empty enjoyment that wouldn’t be better than a healthy alternative. And in the second case, I might end up unsatisfied, going to the store again or buying something even “worse” the next time.

The way I see it, the problem runs deep. We have not properly learned to discern the different parts of ourselves. We often confuse the job of our thoughts, our body or our emotions. We just allow the first faculty that makes its presence known to guide us.

Learning to walk

I am more and more becoming aware of different layers of reality. Of how I have a whole network of energy inside myself that I can come into contact with just by focusing on it. But since I’ve had my attention firmly placed in the five-sense reality, I have the experience of a toddler just learning to walk, when it comes to these other aspects of reality. 

These aspects are just as real as the physical, five-sense reality. They actually seem to be the same as the five-sense reality. The best theory that I’ve encountered, say that at the core, everything is energy, but we can decode this energy in different ways. And one of these ways is the one that creates the five-sense reality. 

So, it’s time to learn to walk by putting more and more focus on these other aspects. The interesting thing is, that when I focus on these other aspects of reality, the effect is not that I withdraw from the five senses and become neglectful of the physical. On the contrary, focusing on, for example, the energies inside, puts me in a flow state, where everything just seems to run more effortlessly. And if I’m focused on the energies around me, I become able to detect more of the subtle nuances of other people’s behaviour, or the things that God wants to tell me through the events in my life.

But thoughts that "slip by" can teach us something

When we stop believing our thoughts and instead start thinking of what they are saying about us, something happens. We can start looking for clues to what is broken inside of us, or what negative beliefs that hide inside us. This is very liberating. I, for example, have noticed quite a few judgmental thoughts inside my head. But when I chose to just observe them, while knowing that they are not me, they lose their power. As with so many other things, we take control simply by bringing awareness to them.

Don't let thoughts slip by

This is sort of a continuation of  yesterday’s post. This realization came because of something I experienced during meditation yesterday. I’ve been aware for quite a while, that thoughts disappear when I observe them and that when they do, I become present in the moment. And other things seem to happen, such as that my third eye seems to open up and I lose my sense of the physical, of my body and the rest of the world. 

But sometimes thoughts come through that don’t seem to disturb my peace. I’m fully present with them. And they are distinctly different from my usual thoughts, in that they seem to speak to me and they seem true in a sense that my other thoughts aren’t. Yet, at the same time as they seem to speak to me, I’m in more control of them than my usual thoughts, in that as long as I’m fully present, only thoughts that I accept into my mind comes into it.

But as soon as I lose focus, other thoughts can creep in. In fact, I’ve realized that when it comes to any thought that is derived from any other state than present moment awareness, are not fully my own. They slip by, often undetected. And if I’m not careful, I might very well end up believing them.

Think only about now

Something struck me while meditating a while back. When my thoughts were focused on what was going on in the present, such as how my body was feeling, the slight movement that my body did by itself to adjust my spine etcetera, the thought didn’t seem detrimental to my meditation. But as soon as they drifted off into the past or future, my focus was disturbed and I got lost in them. 

Thinking of this afterwards gave me an interesting insight. Almost all thoughts about the past and the future are useless. Not only useless. They profoundly disturb my peace for no good reason. The only time that I can find that it’s useful to think about the past, is when I consciously wish to learn something from it, or when I consciously conjure up a positive memory to elevate my emotions and/or strengthen it. And the only time when it is a good thing to think about the future, is when setting conscious, clear intentions about it or when I think about what I’m doing in the now, in relation to my intentions for the future.

It is interesting and a little scary to notice, that I, and more or less all people that I’ve ever known or come into contact with, have given very little thought to how our thoughts operate. And that we habitually let our thoughts just go where they please. We do this even though it doesn’t take that much to just become aware of what is going on inside our heads from time to time and give the thoughts a nudge in a preferred direction.

The devil is in the details

Pay attention! We miss so much because our attention is elsewhere. Attention is the key to everything. But because we have our attention with us all of the time we take it for granted. We never consider what we can do with it. The world is full of wonders that we miss because we don’t expect them to happen. We don’t believe that they are possible and therefore our focus becomes so narrow that it’s almost non-existent, in comparison to what is possible.

God speaks in the inner silence

When you can honestly say that you receive your thoughts, rather than produce them with your ego? There is a very clear distinction here. But it’s difficult to recognize it, even efter you’ve done it once.

What I’ve found, is that the mind first has to be stilled to the point where there is a break in the thought activity for at least a few seconds. This, again, is difficult to recognize, because it is unawareness that makes us start thinking again, so we are generally not aware of having started thinking, until a few thoughts have passed through the mind. But even when thought activity seizes for just a few seconds, I notice that everything seems to fade away and I move closer to a state of just being if my eyes are closed. And if they are open, everything seems to flow effortlessly, to the same degree as I manage to be present in the here and now and still my mind. 

I believe that this state might put us in direct connection with God. Maybe OUR thoughts are what separates us from God? It would actually fit pretty neatly into the myth of the fall. Since our thoughts give us knowledge and we got separated from God and paradise through eating from the Tree of Knowledge. 

But that’s sort of a little sidenote that I thought was fitting.

Continuing: I’ve noticed that if I remain still and present for a while, my mind still starts talking again. And if I lose focus then, I’m back to the usual pointless chatter. But if I remain still and present, what comes through is completely different. It rings true and gives me insights that are either practical or will lead to more happiness and less suffering, for both me and others. As for the latter, it also often tells me things that I don’t want to hear. 

Another thing that I wonder, is whether our connection with God in the now has to be limited to words. Probably not. I wonder this because I’ve also found that when I am in a flow state, I feel closer to God in other ways as well. It’s as if God slowly takes over my life, the more I manage to be present. It’s as if it’s still me doing the thinking and moving, but yet it is not me. It’s strange, wonderful and difficult to explain.