Finding A Life-Enhancing Orientation To Perceive What We Experience

July 27, 2003

What Has Conditioned Our Current World View:

 

• Outside Our Control:

  1. Our genetic predisposition, e.g., hair and eye color, height, blood type, etc.

  2. How others responded or respond to us.

  3. Our family's socio-economic level, i.e., our placement in society's economic strata.

  4. How insightful and inspiring our initial guides were during the first 12 years, e.g., parents, mentors, teachers, etc.

  5. The values that were mirrored to us during our early childhood.

• Within Our Control:

  1. Our reliance on external props for our identity, e.g., clothing, cars, vocation, looks, etc. Here we put our energy into masks rather than investing in our authenticity.

  2. Early thought patterns that later become habits, e.g., using people for what we can get from them, volunteering, strong work ethic, attitudes of inferiority/superiority, etc.

  3. Early behavior patterns that produced pleasure, e.g., masturbation, eating, need to get attention, constant desire to be with friends, or withdrawal, solitude, hobbies, artistic expression.

  4. Engaging in an active fantasy life, e.g., dreaming, finding associations and patterns rarely perceived by others, developing our intuition.

  5. Choosing various forms of escape, e.g., novels, "hanging out," alcohol, drugs, sexual activity, video games, television, eating, walks in nature, writing.

  6. Dealing with the need/desire for security and/or the desire to take risks.

  7. Resisting or caving in to peer pressure. The habits learned while traveling through our adolescence often follows us into our adult years.

  1. Creating and sustaining thoughts that reinforce our evolving inner identity while abandoning those that do not serve us.

  2. Desiring to discover greater meaning and purpose in life, or surrendering to the hunger for fitting in, popularity and acceptance.

  3. Finding a form for self-expression, e.g., relationships, hobbies, sports, writing, building, and creating.

  4. Needing to have some "authority" to guide us, e.g., a mentor, Scripture, a professor, or developing the process of thinking for ourselves.

  5. Recognizing that values and beliefs do not define reality. They only influence the development of the prism through which we perceive reality, e.g., the Bible is the "Word of God," "the world is flat," "God will not lose even one of us."


Expanding Our Understanding Of God's Nature

  1. Suppose there really is free will. We can create any thought pattern, act on it and still be "saved," i.e., not damned or eternally condemned to some form of everlasting punishment.

  2. Suppose our salvation has nothing to do with a cross, but with choices that originate from values that are timeless, e.g., love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)

  3. Would God have created our specie only to allow our eternal destiny to remain in the care of our untrained, uninformed, unenlightened and immature choice patterns?

  4. Have we based our understanding of God on concepts formulated by authors who wrote two thousand years ago, i.e., does the Bible define God in some confining and limiting ways?

  5. Suppose God radiates only loving, creative energy and knows nothing of injustice, evil, unhappiness, illness, fear or discomfort. (All issues related to life as it is experienced in our solid forms.  What will become of these issues when we are only spirit?

  6. Suppose Heaven can be any place at any time. Suppose Heaven is a consciousness that knows only loving creativity and is not a place.

  7. Suppose Hell is any place where, out of ignorance to alternatives, people cling to thoughts that cannot enhance what is timeless, e.g., punishment, destruction, revenge, frustration, anger, and brooding.

  1. Suppose God does not judge us ever because we do a very thorough job of that ourselves, e.g., we cannot experience a highly creative level of consciousness requiring skills of spirit without having developed them.

  2. Suppose God's plan is: "You are free to create your eternal destiny in any fashion you choose. You are made from my essence and you cannot fail. It may take eons for your spirit to discover this, but when you eventually awaken, you will be at peace, create, and perceive as I do."

  3. Suppose those who see the clearest are those who have refined their spiritual skills, allowing them to reflect more accurately God's nature and power.  Throughout history, we have projected onto them such image-building titles as:  "prophets," "The Enlightened Ones, "Sons of God" and "Savior." Do we not see in them that which we have the potential to be?


Expanding Our Understanding Of Ourselves

  1. We are conscious beings who project meaning into our physical experiences.  Such definitions and our responses to them reflect the state of our own individual evolution.

  2. We are limited by our fears, reticence, ignorance, values, etc.

  3. We are not our bodies.  We are infinite beings who have entered a physical form in order to refine spiritual skills, an education made possible through the illusion of limitation.

  4. As a species, we are in infancy, i.e., we have been literate for less than 10,000 years.  The known use of our brain is only 5 to 7 percent. Imagine our power when we can use 85 percent.

  5. When our bodies cease to serve us, we lay them aside.  Rather than dying, we transition from one form to another much like ice when it converts to steam.

  6. The written records, such as our Scriptures, are extremely valuable.  They represent the primitive insights of our ancestors to understand the relationship between the Creator and the Created.  Much, much more information will be refined when Spirituality eventually evolves into a science.

  7. Jesus would have never taught the lessons he did if he felt his timeless values were impossible to achieve.

    8.

  8. We will make mistakes in judgment.  We will consistently forsake the substance for the shadow until we learn that such mistakes lead nowhere.  This is not a reflection of "our sinful nature" as early writers suppose.  This is merely who we are at this stage of our evolution.

  1. God could not have created us the way we have chosen to define ourselves.  We must look much deeper. Once we understand more accurately the nature of God, we will understand that we have been just fine at every stage of our evolution.  We have moved from caves into homes and from covered wagons into aircraft.  We are capable of creating that about which we dream, e.g., Alchemy into Chemistry, Astrology into Astronomy and Religion into Spirituality.