Everything unwanted stays till we learn

In many ways we can forget about the world that can be analyzed through the five senses and laws of physics. When we start to observe our lives and the patterns in them, we notice that there are so many things happening beneath the surface. A saying in spiritual circles is “whatever you resist persists”. While I believe that this is true in one sense, I also believe that it’s a simplification. Because what does it mean to resist something? Or what does the opposite mean: to let go and/or accept? Can we truly let go and accept something while ignoring the lesson it’s trying to teach us?

I’ve several times talked about how life is a constant interaction with God. I’ve also asked the question: How could it be otherwise, if God is omnipotent, omnipresent and deeply personal? 

I know that a clarification is needed, in a discussion such as this one. I’m talking about my experience and probably the experiences of many other people. But I also know that there are many people in the world whose circumstances are completely out of their control and that seem to bring them nothing but suffering. Therefore this first and foremost applies to those that are born in relatively affluent countries. Though I believe that the world is ruled in an unjust way, by throughly ruthless people, those of us that are born where no one has to starve, are for the most part responsible for our circumstances, even if this should not be equated with blame. Because most of us also have been brought up in an education system that does not teach us true self-reliance. But we do have the ability to listen to what God is trying to teach us and make the decision to take charge or our lives and learn what we need to learn to function in this world. I believe that almost all people in relatively affluent countries have the ability to do so. Everyone in the world isn’t able to. But for most of us, it is our own choices that have gotten us where we are, even though we probably weren’t aware that we were making a choice, when we chose things that led to unwanted results.

So, if the less desirable situations in our lives, are really God trying to teach us something, maybe the best things to do is to listen and make the necessary changes?

One example from my own life is my job. It’s not my dream job. And I felt tons of resistance towards getting it. But now that I’ve been there for over a year, I’ve learned to make the best of a less than ideal situation. For example, now that I can do most of the tasks on auto-pilot, I can listen to audiobooks more or less during the whole workdays. I’ve learned to trust myself and become much more confident. And having a steady income has given me some breathing space, allowing me to more freely explore those things that I really want to do, in spite of having less time on my hands.

I’ve learned to be much more present in what I do and to think about the things that I’m engaged in. I’ve most definitely learned that I’m not the only person in the world that screws up sometimes. That it’s okay to do so as long as I take responsibility for it. I’ve learned to appreciate people that have chosen to live very different lives from my own. And lastly, I’ve learned to have a good work ethic that goes far beyond what is expected of me. To consciously choose to work hard and focused not just because I want to keep my job, but because of a sense of duty and because I believe that it ultimately will make me a better person.

It’s not where I want to work forever, but I know that I have a few lessons left to learn. Lessons relating to trusting myself, fully accepting where I am, living in the now and not rely on external circumstances for my happiness. And I know that when I can quit and go do what I really want to do, there are lots of things that I’m going to miss about my job. 

What I’m talking about here seems to be a fundamental part of the structure of reality. I know that you could argue back and forth about what seems to be and what actually is. When I look a little deeper at the unwanted in my life, there always seems to be lessons in it. But maybe it’s just because we always can find something to learn from our experiences. If so, that's fine. It shows how important perspective is. 

Then again, people and circumstances don’t seem to have come into my life at random. Even if I wanted to, I could not write off everything that happens in my life as mere coincidences. Me and my wife have had experiences that definitely fall under the category “supernatural”. And as the years have passed, I've become thoroughly convinced us of the existence of God. With these things in mind, I think that there is a pretty good case to be made for the idea that the meaning that I’m talking about, isn’t just in my head. If you wish to delve a little deeper into this, you could check out what is known as “synchronicities”, which was something that for example Carl Jung observed. 

If I’m going to try to explain how I think that this actually work, I believe that everything is divinely orchestrated somehow. I believe that God’s hand is present in everything, so that what we need in order to grow is brought into our lives somehow. As I said in the second paragraph, it’s probably not the same for everyone. I believe that in a sense, I’m the main character in my show, but that you also are the main character in yours. In someone else’s show, I might be anything from a second lead, to just one of thousands of small extras that flash by briefly. And God is the grand director of everything.

The stage is of course a metaphor for something that words cannot fully describe. But hopefully it can give you some idea of how I see it and how our learning experiences fit into all of this. Because, as you may know, in basically every good work of fiction, the main character transforms as the story progresses.

What happens with the lessons after we die I don’t know. But I believe that they are among the few things that we take with us to the afterlife, in one form or another, whether it’s one afterlife or the next in a series of afterlives. 

Therefore I believe that one of the main reasons for us to be here, is so that we can learn and grow. We’re probably here for a lot of other things as well, but this is definitely one of them. And we can kick and scream and become angry at life for not giving us a smooth ride. I’ve done my fair share of this and I still do sometimes. But life and the world has never even once changed because I’ve become angry at them. Not once. And yet, it’s hard to not feel offended when we have to face one thing after another that we don’t want to deal with. But I believe that the sooner we can adopt a perspective where we see our hardships as part of the learning experience and as part of the adventure, the sooner we can learn the lessons and move on to more of that which we do want in our lives.

Photo by Joe Zlomek on Unsplash

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.

The voice of God and the truth barometer

We always have access to the voice of God through our thoughts. The difficulty is to separate it from all of the other noise. 

What I’m about to talk about here, should not be regarded as an infallible method for getting in touch with the voice of God. There are other factors here, such as expectations and purely physical emotions.

Many people, including myself, feel pleasant shivers along their spine when something rings true to them. I have also felt the same shivers, but much stronger, when I’ve felt the presence of God. So, may I suggest that maybe we feel these shivers whenever God communicates something to us? Because really, if God communicates with us all the time, which he does, how could it be otherwise?

As I said, there are other factors to consider though. I would say that this falls under the realm of intuition. The main issues, I would say, are expectations and wishes. Do I expect the shivers to come? Do I wish for them to do so? If so, then, as always when it comes to intuition, I may have interference.

I don’t know exactly why things work this way. But something that I am beginning to notice, is that in order for things to work smoothly on the spiritual level, I have to not as much do things, as get out of the way. I have to stop interfering and let God work through me. But it’s easier said than done, when I have cultivated the habit of letting my mind struggle with everything for almost forty years.

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.

EVERYTHING is an interaction with God

EVERYTHING! How could it be otherwise? If God is omnipotent, omnipresent and eternal, how could it be otherwise? God speaks to us in every little minute detail of our lives. There are no coincidences.

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.

Short on prayer part 2

Happy New Year!

When we pray, we need to fully comprehend that God listens.

We don’t need to find the right words. God already knows what we want to say. We do, however, need to pray with sincerity. Sometimes - often in my case - prayers are just empty words. But when we pray with sincerity, we know that God listens and that God hears every little infinitesimal grain of insincerity. He still hears. He still listens. But what we say doesn’t mean anything.

When we pray with sincerity, things that we have hidden from ourselves will come to the surface. It gets brought into the light of God so that he can heal it.

When God answers and we keep on asking

A while back I asked God about a private matter. I received a pretty clear answer and yet I kept on asking. I honestly didn’t consciously forget about the answer. But since I wasn’t pleased with it, I was probably not that keen on remembering either. 

Now I’m going to do my best to remember God’s answer and live by it till God gives me a reason to do otherwise. Unless I forget the answer again.

Short on prayer

I’ve realised that I can treat my experience of prayer in vastly different ways. In prayer as in no other practice, it has become clear whether I’m doing something heartfelt or not. If I’m there, if I’m really speaking to someone and if there  is any true meaning behind my words. I have often caught myself approaching prayer as just something I expect myself to do. I’ve used some nice words about gratitude, forgiveness, guidance or whatever. But I haven’t really been there. I haven’t really thought about what I’ve been saying. Often, I have been somewhere else in my thoughts. And I haven’t intentionally directed my prayer towards God.

I know that this type of absent-mindedness can be found in many of my activities. But as I said, I’ve seen it most clearly in prayer. Felt the difference between it and really being engaged in what I’m doing.