Where do I want to go with the blog?

This is first and foremost a blog about God and our relationship with God. Because ultimately everything is about God. Because whether you believe in God or not, God exists, has created us, loves us and wants a relationship with us. This is something I know for a fact and it’s something that I feel called to share.

I want this blog to serve as a gentle reminder of this. That even though we are facing dark times, everything is in God’s hands and all will be well. I want to use whatever little voice that I can claim to try and remind people that there are many things to be hopeful about, but that I believe that our rulers, that definitely don’t want the best for us, want us to forget about. There is so much love and beauty in the world. We were made to love each other and to be loved by our creator. This is our natural state. And no matter how numb we have become by following the ways of the world, we can always find our way back to this state.

There are however are many things about faith that I don’t understand, even if every day for me is a search for more clarity. So even if I’m very confident that God exists, most other things I’m not so sure of. And I think that there must be a good reason for this. I’ve been blessed with experiences that have more or less completely removed my doubt about whether God or a spiritual reality exists. But I’ve also found myself in a very strange time in the planet’s history. A strange time that many people within religious and spiritual circles have very firm beliefs about. And a part of me wishes that I could too. Because I’m tired of the uncertainty and I sometimes think that maybe I should just stop resisting and get with the program. But there has to be some reason that I can’t do that.

Some of the questions that I have and wish to explore are: What exactly is the spiritual reality that I referred to in the last paragraph? What does God want us to do? What is the good life? What happens if we stray from the good life? What consequences do our actions have? Are there actions and behaviors that, while not being morally wrong, still are spiritually wrong? Why is it so damned hard to do the right things all the time? How can I reconcile spiritual beliefs that, at least on the surface, seem incompatible, but that I have felt called to, or found truth in? 

Questions such as these I wish to explore here. But I’ve sometimes felt like I’ve wandered too far into esoteric territories. I don’t think that there is something really wrong with it. But I think that the basics of life need to be somewhat in order first. Basics that I’ve just brushed aside as less important, even though in many ways it’s in our everyday experiences that magic happens, if we just allow it to. If we don’t just treat it as boring nonsense that we need to haste through, so that we can get on with the important stuff. It’s in our everyday lives that we learn who we are. And it’s in our everyday struggles we learn about our less admirable traits. 

Furthermore I’ve made a mess of many things in my life. Both in a way that creates many unwanted things in my life, such as debts and negative habits. And in ways that, even though I don’t believe in a judgmental God, keeps me separated from God. However, when it comes to this separation, I believe that almost all of us experience it to one degree or another. And I’ve also made a few rather good decisions too.

No matter what, I’m not ready to give up and just accept the limitations that my choices so far have placed upon my life. But I obviously don’t want my life to be just a waiting for tomorrow either. 

As a sidenote, I do believe that we live in a rather harsh, unforgiving world dominated by tons of rotten values. But the world isn’t going to change just because I want it to. I believe that it will change eventually. But only because we change. Therefore I have to change, but somehow doing it in a way where I don’t swallow the world’s corruption. And even get rid of the corruption that I have already invited into my life. 

I know that many people feel hopelessness right now. I don’t. Even though I see more or less pitch black clouds on the horizon and even though my everyday life is filled with issues and struggles, I’ve also been given many things to be hopeful about. I must believe that God has let me experience the things that I have experienced for a reason, even if my faith often is so weak that even rather small setbacks seriously discourage me. But as long as I don’t stay discouraged forever and get up again, I know somewhere that it’s going to be okay in the end. Life might not become the smooth ride that I hoped for a few years ago. But still, I know somewhere that there is something good on the horizon. I can’t believe that all of the strange things that have happened to me are for nothing. So when things start to move for real, I will have my journey documented on this blog, together with the insights that I’ve gained about the conditions of our being in the world. 

Hopefully this can serve both as an encouragement for others, as well as some food for thought. Because I’ve dug I bigger hole that I have to climb out of than most people. It’s not the worst hole in the world and I think that I can do it. But years of unconscious living tend to mess up one’s inner life as well as one’s outer life. And the outer is a reflection of the inner anyway, no matter if we believe that we literally manifest our reality with our thoughts and feelings, or just make choices that are in line with how our insides look. Regardless of metaphysics, if the inside is chaotic and unfocused, that’s how life tends to unfold. 

But I’ve done some major cleaning already. And more cleaning is happening every day. And just like the everyday stuff that I talked about in the beginning of the post, somehow the cleaning is part of the journey as well. It’s not just something that has to be done so that I can get on with the bigger, more important stuff. I need to love the now and look at it as just as meaningful as that which I believe awaits me in the future. Even though I truly believe that something amazing is awaiting me. Awaiting us: me, my wife, those friends, family and acquaintances and really really everyone on the planet that choose to reject what the rulers of this world have to offer.

If I’m wrong, those of you that follow me will at least have the opportunity to follow the train wreck as it happens. But there is not going to be a train wreck. There is some darkness right now. Both on a personal level and on a global level. This is also something that I may want to talk a bit about on the blog. But not in a doom and gloom kind of way. Because something better is coming. I know that whatever happens in the future we can get through it together, God is on our side and all will be well.

Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash

Something is constantly trying to push me off track

I usually meditation with one focus in mind: staying present in the moment. I have found a few ways to do this, such as keeping focus on my breath, staying present inside my head and feel my heart and/or body.  

When I meditated the other day I made an interesting observation. Namely that something inside me always pushes me off track. I’ve observed this many times before, but never put it into words. It is not just that no matter how focused I am and how empty my head is of thoughts, I always eventually find myself lost in a thought stream. This is of course something I noticed many years ago and a fact that every meditator is aware of. But it is also that after a while I’m not really consciously focused on meditating and on the technique that I’m using. 

This made me realize something else that I’ve noticed but never put into words. Namely that this goes for everything in life. I start doing something with a clear intention of what to do and how to do it, but after a while my mind has wandered into something else and I’m not doing what I’m doing in the way that I intended at all. 

On top of that, when I’ve gotten some momentum going with something, something always seems to happen, which I allow to get me down and stall whatever it is that I’m doing. Notice that I said “allow”. Because I always have a choice not of how I feel, but how I respond to my feelings. And I’ve often allowed my emotions to get the best of me.

What do you bring out in other people? Part 2

Functioning from the higher place does not always bring out the same in other people. But if it doesn’t, you will instead be able to see their mechanicalness if you stay present. And if you’re fully conscious, this should also not bring out judgment in you. Judgment is obviously never good. But judging someone else’s unconsciousness and mechanicalness is a little extra hypocritical, since judgment, as will be made clear here, by necessity only comes out when we ourselves have become unconscious and mechanical.

To remain conscious in the face of someone else’s mechanicalness is difficult though (Sidenote: I believe that there are degrees to which we can be free, conscious, in contact our higher selves etc.). At least it is for me. If you are like me, you will be tempted to see the mechanicalness as the whole truth of the person and thus dismiss him or her as nothing but mechanicalness. Because our brains have this nasty tendency of not being able to see beyond the present situation, while at the same time for the most part being lost in thoughts about the past or the future.

First: As stated earlier, most people drift in and out of various degrees of consciousness, even though there also are many that more or less are sleepwalkers. Second: you don’t know what is inside the person in front of you, that is waiting to come out. And my guess is that if you have really started to awaken into awareness, it wasn’t your own effort that made you wake up. It sure wasn’t for me. My guess is that your awakening was either triggered by something you stumbled upon by accident, some other external event, or you don’t really know how it happened. Your thoughts sort of just started to drift towards certain subjects, leading you into revelations about who you are and the nature of reality. My awakening was a combination of all of the above. 

So why would you judge someone that is in a place that they have no control over? Knowing that you could just as easily be the unconscious one? And maybe, just maybe, if you were fully in your authentic self, you would bring out nothing but authenticity in other people. I don’t know. I’ve never been there. And I suspect that when I’m fully there, I will never want to go back to my sleeping state again and I will not let any judgmental thoughts enter my mind.

Sorry if this post came out a little messy. I noticed that I had to fix a few things in it and I don’t really feel very conscious today…

What do you bring out in other people? Part 1

In spiritual circles there is this idea that we bring out in other people reflects something within ourselves. Is this true? 

What I have seen, is that I basically have two selves that can come out. One of these selves has several sub-personalities, while the other is an integrated whole. The one with sub-personalities acts more or less like a robot. It has certain scripts which it functions from. If you know this self, you will be able to predict what I will do, say and how I will react to the circumstances that I’m facing. The other self will, as long as I remain in it, be able to make authentic, free choices, say genuine, heart-felt things and respond freely, to the best of its ability, to every given situation.

Now, I’m beginning to notice that others have these two modes as well. They might not be conscious of it, but they do. And I’m not sure about this, but I believe that some may be much more in tune with this higher self than I am and yet not know that they have these two sides.

What I’m also beginning to notice, is that people tend to respond to each other from the same level as you interact with them. This means that if I am acting in a mindless way, other people tend to do the same. This in turn leads to social interactions that look like they are taking place between free people, but that are little more than mechanical actions and reactions from pre-determined scripts.

The failure of reason

Something strange is happening in the world. Did I ever tell you that? I’ve had things happening in my life that I absolutely cannot explain. And at the same time, they do leave room for a little bit of doubt. Just enough so that I cannot be certain whether this is really happening or if I’m just going crazy. 

I’ve figured as much as that I cannot hope to understand this with my intellect. I’m neither a dumb nor a smart person. I’m somewhere in between. But I seem to be able to understand a few things. I also seem to understand more the less I allow my ego to meddle with the process. 

But this… I’m starting to see time after time, that where I thought I had everything figured out I didn’t. Not at all. I think that a good example would be what could, in Christian terms, be called “sexual immorality”. On the surface, it seems pretty straight forward. Sex is free as long as you find a willing partner and as long as no one gets an STD or it leads to an unwanted pregnancy we’re all good. This was my view for a long time. But now I’m starting to see that a life with many sexual partners, for me at least, became part of a destructive lifestyle. And having copulation as a goal in my interactions with people in some sense caused me to objectify them. And this objectification did not just damage my relationship with potential sex partners. It damaged my connection with other people in general. 

The point is that none of this was visible to me while I was engaged in the behavior. And the point of this, is that I at least have a very limited perspective. I’m not able to see my life, my choices and my relationship with myself, the world and other people from the all-encompassing perspective that God does. It’s easy to be prideful and arrogant and think that we can know more than we can. Especially if we believe that we are smart.

But the truth is, at least for me, that the more I try to figure things out on my own, the more confusion and misery I create. I’m able to convince myself of two completely different views on a subject, sometimes in the matter of minutes.

So, do I believe that I have any use for my reason? Yes. But I believe that the best use I can put it to, is to, as openly as possible try to understand what can be said of my human condition. How do I function and what is my place in the world? Knowing that God exists, is personal and has a will, what can I learn and understand about these facts? How can I best grow into the person that I believe that God wants me to be?

Intentions, awareness and resistance

Set intentions, don’t try to force them and observe how you feel about the steps you decide to take towards realizing the intentions.

This is a formula that I am going to try and follow. If my beliefs are correct, I will, if possible, alter my course somehow, every time that I encounter resistance. And this will eventually lead me to my goals, if my goals are truly my own.

What is "self-talk"? Part 4

The thing is that when it comes to self-talk, it can take the shape of a dialogue rather than a monologue. It doesn’t have to. But it can. I believe it should. Because the negative voice inside ourselves does not have to have the only say. It can be challenged. And what I am beginning to realize, is that often we have a choice. A choice between bringing ourselves down or up. Between talking to ourselves in a condemning or forgiving way. Between showing compassion or hardness towards ourselves. Between trusting and distrusting ourselves and our abilities. 

And how we talk to ourselves may determine how we feel inside and whether we succeed or fail.

What is "self-talk"? Part 3

In relation to a certain situation recently, I caught myself saying to myself that I was basically a selfish, immoral idiot, with a behavior that was utterly transparent to anyone but myself. But then I realized that I knew nothing of what other people saw in my behavior, that if I wasn’t transparent to myself, it’s not certain that I am to other, that I didn’t take the issue at hand lightly and that I, admittedly hesitating, had actually chosen something good. 

If you look carefully at the former paragraph, you will see that not only are there two completely different perspectives in it. But they are also equally true, apart from the part of what others perceive and think. And what others perceive and think I can know nothing about unless I ask them. But if I stick with only the first perspective, while ignoring the second, it is very likely that it will make me like myself less. 

What is "self-talk"? Part 2

I believe all people are more or less conscious of their self-talk all of their lives. But it was not until I got the aha-moment that lead to this blog post, that I started thinking of what it actually is, and how to separate it from the other thoughts that go on inside my head. 

Basically, the thoughts that place a value judgment on what I do and who I am can be labelled “self-talk”. At its most basic form, self-talk is about judging what I do, say and who I am as good or bad. It entails whether I show compassion or condemnation when I make mistakes. And whether I let successes boost my authentic confidence or whether I let them blow up my ego. 

What is "self-talk"? Part 1

This is a post about that little monologue that goes on constantly in our heads and how there are different aspect of it. One of these aspects is the way we talk to ourselves.

I’ve been familiar with the term “self-talk” for quite some time. I can’t really remember if I first heard it two or twenty years ago though. As with so many other terms, it does mean something that is worth reflecting on, because it can enrich our lives. But until now, I haven’t done so.