Gene's Blog

Pot Pouri

September 25th, 2007 | by gene |

Tonight is going to be sort of free form. I sometimes do this on email, usually with a subject of pot pouri since I tend to cover a lot of unrelated ground, varied turf you might say as I wander the twists and turns within. I’ve got a lot of little two line notes to myself lying around and I’m going to talk a little about some of those tonight.

Those of you who’ve seen my main site will know that I am no atheist. I’m not really what you could call a deist either in that I am no friend of religion, at least in its institutional form. Individual practitioners of every persuasion I can love with passion, but their institutions all give me the chills. I wasn’t going to talk about CWG here at all tonight but it turns out I need a quote to set the tone:

This actually starts on the bottom of page 89, book 1, when Neale asks God a rather impertinent question.

Neale: Which brings me to another question. Why don’t You fix the world, instead of allowing it to go to hell?

To which God replies: Why don’t you?

Neale: I don’t have the power.

God responds: Nonsense. You’ve the power and the ability right now to end world hunger this minute, to cure diseases this instant. What if I told you your own medical profession holds back cures, refuses to approve alternative medicines and procedures because they threaten the very structure of the “healing” profession? What if I told you that the governments of the world do not want to end world hunger? Would you believe me?

Neale: I’d have a hard time with that one. I know that’s the populist view, but I can’t believe its actually true. No doctor wants to deny a cure. No countryman wants to see his people die.

God: No individual doctor, that’s true. No particular countryman, that’s right. But doctoring and politicking have become institutionalized, and its the institutions that fight these things, sometimes very subtly, sometimes even unwittingly, but inevitably…because to these institutions it’s a matter of survival.

And so, to give you just one very simple and obvious example, doctors in the West deny the healing efficacies of doctors in the East because to accept them, to admit that certain alternative modalities might just provide some healing, would be to tear at the very fabric of the institution as it has structured itself.

This is not malevolent, yet it is insidious. The profession doesn’t do this because it is evil. It it does it because it is scared.

What started me on this particular train of thought is that I’ve always been sort of on the opposite side of the world from those who consider Mother Theresa now, and while she was living, a saint. I guess my main opposition came from my antipathy toward her religion. Catholicism, as an institution, has been responsible for a great deal of despair and bloodshed during its long history, witch burning, pedophile protecting, not to mention the most recent pope (people who have the temerity to claim they speak as Jesus in the flesh sort of set my nerves on edge) claiming that all adherents of every other faith were condemned, things like that have sort of always left me a bit cold toward the “one true church”. Well, that and being born and raised Lutheran, giggle. But don’t make the mistake of thinking I exempt Lutherans from my irreligious ire. Because I do not. I believe that there has been more evil done by men in the name of God than for any other reason. And, to me, that is the greatest blasphemy of them all. To do evil unto others and to lay the blame at God’s feet and claim you act in His name is the most evil act of all.

So why does Mother Teresa come into this little diatribe? Well, I read an article this past week about a new book, which I have since ordered and will read, which is apparently a collection of letters she wrote various people. Nice people, of course, who saved them and are now using them for their own purposes long after her having returned home, though she never intended they become public and had actually asked they be destroyed. If there were such things as circles of hell, I’d have one reserved for such as they. Anyway, despite her public pronunciations of faith, and some of the harsh things she said (which were what caused my rather low opinion of her personally, not her work; her work was wonderful, bringing comfort to those in need is indeed God’s work. But then since there is nothing which God is not, then, one must also conclude it is EVERYONE’s work – so do I conclude) about people who made choices other than those she might have made herself. Like, for instance, those who faced abortion or divorce. I wasn’t impressed with other reports of about her work either, feeling a lack of compassion in her work which is talked about somewhat in the wiki article I cite below. Now that may sound odd, given what she did, but it was the “feeling” I had. Keeping people alive dogmatically, but not necessarily humanely, didn’t feel saintly to me. It still doesn’t. There is a whole Wiki section devoted to her that talks about some of this: Mother_Teresa

But that is not what I want to talk about now. I want to talk about this book I have on its way to me, Mother Teresa: Come be my Light. I am really looking forward to it. It seems she and I have something in common. Something maybe a lot of us have in common. The article I read was about this book and her letters in which she apparently agonized over her own ability to believe. She heard the voice of Jesus, she said, calling her to the work she did throughout her life, tending to the poorest of the poor. Mystical encounters with Jesus, the article says, now THAT I understand, having detailed my own mystical encounters on my main site, the lights, the awakening, and, of course, my jenna. The difference between us is that she lost her ability to hear Jesus virtually as soon as she began doing the work she thought he asked her to do. Thus beginning what the article calls an extended “long dark night of the soul”, something it says she had in common with many catholic saints, though not many had such an extended night as did she. She doubted her faith, God’s existence and felt abandoned spiritually. I think that showed tremendous courage, for that to me is what courage means, being scared as all hell, feeling completely alone, yet going ahead and doing what you feel is right anyway, no matter the personal cost. I think she did that. I am eager to read how she felt as she did.

I empathize. I cycle myself between complete faith in jenna and everything she tells me to doubt that there is any truth within me at all. My own long dark night of the soul has lasted, well, having just turned 58, I guess one would say quite a long time, because I have vacillated between faith and despair all of my life. Not faith in the sense of disbelieving a creator exists, I have never been able to come to a place wherein I was able to believe that the universe just “happened”, there is too much order and precision in it for me to ever be able to believe that, but my faith that a creator who actually gave a rat’s butt what happened to any particular individual IN this creation, well, that is where the rub has been for me. jenna not withstanding. CWG cleared a lot of that up for me. I’m not saying this is how I would have done it, but that it has been done this way, I understand. Even if there are large pieces I do not like at all. Still, the part about not knowing who we are until we know who we are not makes sense to me. If we come from a place where love is all there is, and I believe we do, then how do we know that? If there is nothing else, how would one “know” anything? Let alone anything else. That we might then come here to experience what we are not in order to experience what we really are makes a terrible sort of sense to me.

Book 1 talks about this on page 61, where God asserts that Hitler went to heaven, which idea, will, when more people hear of it than have now, horrify most “believers”. But God says that there is nowhere else to go and that, in fact, Hitler did us all a service, by showing us what humanity at its darkest, is capable of. If we see the dark and we know we are not that, does that make us the light? Make us appreciate the light more? I would think it must. At home. But here, the dark encroaches everywhere. Fear is the darkness here. And though it has been more than 60 years since Hitler returned to the light, have we really learned all that much about how to live a better way? We have Hitler wannabes living in caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan wanting nothing more than additional bloodshed. And we have Hitler wannabes living in penthouses and global corporate boardrooms wanting the very same thing. Each for their own reasons, but they are the same people.

We have power brokers in political positions around the world who want the same sort of carnage Hitler wrought, because it would bring them, and their idea of power, to the top of their particular ideological mountain. They, too, are the same. And it matters not what nationality these are. Had they been born in different countries they would be the same, just dressed differently and speaking different languages, but they would still ALL be here to show the rest of us what we are not. So should we thank the bin Laden’s and Bush’s and Putin’s and Mao’s of the world today? For modeling for the rest of us behavior that teaches us what we are not? I wonder.

Or do we, as God also says in book 1 on page 133 face this question? This is the answer to your question, “If love is all there is, how can man ever justify war?”

Sometimes man must go to war to make the grandest statement about who man truly is: he who abhors war.

There are times when you may have to give up Who You Are in order to be Who You Are…Thus, in order to “have” yourself as a man of peace, you may have to give up the idea of yourself as a man who never goes to war. History has called upon men for such decisions.

On page 132, He prefaced this piece above by saying:“…As a practical matter – again leaving esoterics aside – if you look in these situations where you are being abused, (gene inserts ANYONE is being abused),at the very least what will do is stop the abuse. And that will be good for both you and your abuser. For even an abuser is abused when his abuse is allowed to continue.

This is not healing to the abuser, but damaging. For if an abuser finds that his abuse is acceptable, what has he learned? yef it if the abuser finds that his abuse will be accepted no more, what has he he been allowed to discover?

Therefore, treating others with love does not necessarily mean allowing others to do as they wish.

Parents learn this early with their children. Adults are not so quick to learn it with other adults, nor nation with nation.

Yet, despots cannot be allowed to flourish, but must be stopped in their despotism. Love of Self, and love of the despot, demands it.

Is it time for good people to wake and take back the truth of humanity from those who would usurp our trust and use it to satisfy their own blood lust? I’ve been hearing Dido in my head lately. Haven’t heard a song of hers in a very long time, but this verse has been playing over and over at odd times for days.

I will go down with this ship, And I won’t put my hands up and surrender, There will be no white flag above my door, I’m in love and always will be.

I think maybe that is what we need assert now. That love is going to win this time, and that we will go down with this ship even if it sinks, believing that the truth of us is that we ARE love and trusting that our ship will not stay down, but will rise again and that our will, I believe the majorities will, to live in peace and family hood, can prevail. I think we approach a cusp. When the scales will finally accumulate enough weight on the side of love to tip the balance and let the dark slide off into the vastness of the universal black hole from which it came, when we can create here a replica of our home and let this be a place where love prevails. Honest to “god” I think that is the only answer that saves us. Because we are in love and always will be. And, as always, Sarah has the perfect line, we should wear our love like heaven. Wouldn’t that be a sight to see? In our rainbow hues, arms linked, facing down those angry men who would make us fear them, fear life, fear each other. Wear our love like heaven, that would certainly let our little lights shine, wouldn’t it?

Okay, I’m going to leave the rest of my thoughts for later, tomorrow maybe. I need to think, these drain me in a way. And maybe walk in a bit in the cool night air of late September. We’ll talk again tomorrow, much love, :^) gene

If today brings even one choice your way
choose to be a bringer of the light :^) gene