The earliest memory I have of spiritual seeking and searching for answers to the “WTF are we all doing here and how does this place work?” question I have grappled with my whole life, is being eight years old or so and lying awake in my bedroom, just thinking about how the Universe works, what/who is God and how it all fits together.
Many years later I still do the same thing lying in bed at night, which is comforting to realize. It’s also a reminder of how enormous the task is of finding answers to those large questions from the limited perspective of physical human form where we find ourselves. That doesn’t mean it still isn’t fun to try as there isn’t a more challenging puzzle to solve. Killer Sudoku has nothing on this place.
My eight-year-old self wasn’t given a lot of help understanding the mechanics of this realm. I was baptized a Catholic, and my mother made a half-hearted attempt to take me and my sisters to church, but the cathedral was a confusing place on Sunday mornings. Architectural grandeur, intricate statues, incense and old guys in elaborate robes muttering confusing phrases that had nothing to do with my eight-year-old life didn’t move the bar forward at all.
Before church, I filled the pockets of my bomber jacket with action figures, rubber bands and hot wheels cars and did my best to survive the strange hour of abstract weirdness. I figured out how to palm the quarter my mother gave me for the donation dish so I could go buy hockey cards with it later that afternoon. At least I could alchemize the strange experience into something positive in my life.
Sunday school didn’t work any better. I followed my older sister’s lead as she railed against the establishment and caused shit in class, so I wound up sitting in the corner with my face to wall, a situation somehow more tolerable than the indoctrination exercise the other kids were forced to endure. The priest came down to talk to me after class one Sunday and tried to explain his vision of God and how everything worked, but it was like he was telling me that my Mom’s car could fly when I knew it couldn’t.
But that’s the level of help that was available to me in my junior-human spiritual seeker form. This just isn’t the most enlightened matrix, and it certainly wasn’t in the 1970’s. The situation has improved a lot since then with the internet bringing YouTube and all matter of communication around the planet. Today if you are a spiritual seeker, you have the opposite problem of too much information to sift through to find what it helpful for you in the moment.
But the 20th century and earlier was a bit of a dark age for spiritual seekers on this planet, and those of us who came here to do deeper work have had an experience like being plunged deep under water, as if birth was a leap off a 10m diving platform that sent you straight to the bottom of the pool.
My lifetime that followed has been a practice of orienting and trying to make sense of where I am in this strange underwater environment, all the while noticing the air bubbles I exhale that float upwards to the surface. I’ve instinctually followed that rising air my whole life swimming up, up, up to where it feels like I finally made it to the surface and I’m breathing air again.
Whew.
And from the perspective of swimming on the surface and looking down at the watery realm below, the question of why it is the way it is lingers with intense curiosity. Why do the religions of this planet seem programmed with a ceiling that limits a person’s ability to gain the deepest, meaningful insight available?
Why do the most popular pathways to deeper understanding lead to a temple where you are taught to worship another being and give them all your personal power? Why are most of the answers delivered in a format aimed at elementary school kids instead of adults?
God made everything and you’re going to heaven when you die is not an answer to the deep questions of “WTF am I doing here, and how does this place work?”. It’s a fairy tale for children, except it’s made for adult minds as well, like Marvel movies and the Star Wars franchise. And even if you wrap it up in amazing architecture and the pageantry of ritual, the answer isn’t any more effective.
Just because Star Wars and Marvel movies have great graphics and amazing battle scenes where everything blows up, doesn’t mean the characters aren’t underdeveloped wooden archetypes and story line isn’t unrealistic shit.
And the religions of the planet have put a lot of effort into amazing graphics of their own in the forms of mosques, temples, churches, pyramids, you name it to get us to watch their movie even though the story and characters are weak and banal.
Which doesn’t mean the love people feel for their religion and God isn’t real. All the amazing beauty imbued in the religious structures of our world was spawned in the love and devotion to a God or holy being, a practice that offers a powerful flavor of peace, happiness and higher fulfilment to many beings on this planet. It’s as real an experience as anything else out there. But it’s helpful to decipher the mechanics behind that energy to understand what is really going on.
When you cheer for your favorite sports team and you follow the drama and excitement of that team winning the championship, you are ecstatic and filled with joy. People dance in the streets and celebrate for days when their team wins it all, and that joy is as real as anything else out there.
But the sport that team is playing, the league, and how one team wins the championship is all a creation, something humanity made up for pleasure and excitement, along with all the stadiums, uniforms, video broadcasts, and hype behind it all. It’s a creation we could end tomorrow and all go do something else, if that was something we agreed to do. But we maintain our beloved sports leagues and teams year after year because we like the excitement, drama and sense of belonging that it brings us.
And the same model is in place for all the religions of our world, the Gods and the ways we worship them. The joy you feel in the prayer and ritual is real, like when your sports team wins, but it doesn’t mean it exists in the way you believe it does. Much of it is a creation just like that sports league.
A great Yogi once said, “Life isn’t what you think it is, it’s what you think it is”. Every human being alive is powerful co-creator being who, whether they realize it or not, creates the world around them using their thoughts, actions and intentions. We think our world is a static reality operating under the “laws of physics” where we somehow just ended up, and we are powerless to shift it in any fundamental way.
But the world is actually “what we think it is”, the direct result of our thoughts, actions and intentions because instead of being a human who needs to worship God, you in essence “are God”. You are the Universe Itself in Action, and you shape your reality using thoughts and intention as a co-creator fragment of Everything That Is, which includes you and the world around you.
If you think your version of God is real, then it is. And if multiple beings are creating the same idea of reality together, then it gains even more power. That small, local sports league grows to become the Olympics or the World Cup of Soccer so that winning an Olympic gold medal brings much greater joy than winning your local town championship.
The religions of the world have a great power behind them because so many people are worshipping, praying and co-creating a similar idea of a God or holy being and the metaphysical structure in which they operate. If they imbue the ideas and feeling they have towards their God with love, they receive love in return, like everyone filling a reservoir with water so it can provide water to others. If they fill their God with notions of hate, then it becomes a reservoir of hateful energy and people are killed in the name of a God. It all starts and ends with the humans involved in creating the concept of God in the first place.
And many of these beings we call God, or Gods, or holy beings do exist and are incredibly benevolent, loving beings of incredible magnitude who reside in dimensions much different from our own. And connecting to their energy can bring wonderful benefits to your own life as happens whenever we hang out with wonderful, loving people.
But it doesn’t mean they created the Universe, or you, or they are somehow the master of your life who makes decisions about what you are able to experience or not experience. They are not any “better” than you are, and don’t require worship for them to be your friend and imbue your life with positive energy. If you are interfacing with a being on another dimension who requires you to worship them, head in the opposite direction.
But we are taught from our earliest times to consider ourselves as lesser-than, as subservient to these mighty beings who live in the sky. God will tell you what you are able to do in this lifetime, not the other way around.
Even though I was only eight, I knew something was off in the model I was being taught in the Catholic cathedral on Sunday mornings. There was something intrinsic to the institutionalized concept of God and his worship that didn’t sit with me, so it never was able to get it hooks in me despite the efforts, and the efforts of this entire matrix my whole life to coax me onto the side of worshipping other beings.
As I now breathe the clear air of sovereignty after my long swim to the surface from the bottom of the pool where I was plunged at birth, the notion of worshipping other beings seems so limiting, so restrictive. And it’s not just Gods we worship around here as we also place celebrities, sports stars, musicians, politicians, artists, leaders and others on pedestals of adulation. And though we revere these beings with genuine love and appreciation for who they are and what they do, we diminish ourselves in the process by creating a hierarchy in our minds where we place ourselves at a lower level than those we worship.
There is no hierarchy to the Universe, as the Universe is made of only one thing – itself. And you are a part of it and as valuable and worthy of admiration as any other of its fragments. You do not need to give your power away to anyone else or think of yourself as lesser-than or subservient to the will of others. You are the Universe Itself in Action.
This place has many concepts and structures in place that convince you otherwise, repeating the message until you believe it is true. For most of us that starts right away at birth when we’re plunged to the bottom of this pool filled with the waters of distortion.
But if you follow those rising bubbles coming from your own breath, your own beingness up, up, up, you will eventually make back up it to the surface. Ahhh, enjoy. That first breath of air will feel amazing.
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