God And Intelligence

Perhaps you are in pain right now.  Perhaps you are lost.  I go in and out of that, too.  Depression, the pain of it, can serve a purpose.  We live in a world of contrasts, of duality.  Darkness helps to define the light.  Depression can help to give clarity to happiness, when happiness comes, and happiness does come back.  The key to clarity can be found in cultivating awareness.  The path to awareness is through receptivity to the present moment.  That means you have to come to a stop.  A lot of people seem to have trouble with this - stopping.  I learned about this from Jon Kabat-Zinn.  He wrote a book called Wherever You Go There You Are and I bought an audio recording of the book and listened to it many times the year before I became psychotic.  It was a meditation tape and it helped me in my own meditation practice to learn the art of mindfulness.

It's been a long time since I meditated by stopping and doing nothing, letting the world around me go on its way without any effort on my part.  I do meditate, but there are multiple ways to meditate.  I am meditating right now while I write this.  But sitting in my living room and doing nothing has in the past been a special form of meditation for me.  My voices are uncomfortable with me even considering doing this again.  I feel so different from myself back then when I only had voices now and then.  Now they are always there moving from foreground to background and back again.  I am never alone, nor do I want to be anymore now that these voices have become my friends.  I do stop and listen for some kind of guidance throughout the day and night.  That listening is subtle and intuitive.  I remain receptive and I wait.  And I have faith that not only my voices are listening and being receptive to me.  Some greater intelligence is always there, listening, ever aware of my small life.

I want to improve my conscious contact with this intelligence.  My understanding of God is still abstract.  I don't know what it is or where it came from.  I do not anthropomorphize my idea of God.  I do believe intelligence is God given.  Or in other words, no God, no intelligence.  From intelligence comes understanding and I yearn to understand.  There is so much harmony within understanding and that is really what I yearn for, harmony, which, to me, is the essence of God.  This is not a random universe.  We do not live in chaos.  There is a sense and a logic to even the smallest things.  The atom is the smallest miracle.  And then there is the beauty in discovering the logic behind all life and its actions.  There is a logic to all life.  Discover the logic to make the sense to gain the understanding to find the truth.  Seeking the truth is my motivation for engaging in my life.  There is grace in understanding the truth in anything or any living being.  All the interconnections express God, lead back to God as I understand God.

Nothing exists in isolation.  Even black holes exist in relation to all that is not a black hole.  I believe that there is intelligence in space.  Intelligence is not biological; it has no heart, no brain.  We are a materialistic species afraid of the unknown, of what lies after death.  We are experts at distraction.  And yet wherever we go, whatever we do we cannot escape our own intelligence.  Our spirits are intertwined with our intelligence.

I'm going to try writing in this blog more often, just explore some of my daily thoughts, work with my intelligence.  I took my nighttime anti-psychotic medication before I began writing this and I am feeling quite tired.  It's time to get some rest.  I just wanted to put some ideas out there, some food for thought for whoever reads this.

Existential Angst?

Existentialism:  philosophical theory which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free agent, responsible for their own development.

Angst:  a strong feeling of anxiety about life in general.

We all start out as infants and children dependent on others for our existence.  For better and worse, other adults take on the responsibility for training and developing our skills and understanding.  And yet from the start we are separate individuals, separate bodies and spirits.  No one can see through our eyes or feel through our bodies.  No one can know, not even our adult selves, what our first associations were when we were learning the symbols of words.  So much of what children do is the practice of imitation.  We learn by watching and repeating at home, in school, with friends.  For some attitudes and actions we are praised, rewarded emotionally and sometimes physically.  For others we are scolded and sometimes punished physically.  We learn young to identify our confusion when other adults and children say one thing and do another.  Here is where we have to reach for our own understanding, our own unique perspective.

In our minds as children we are free agents because there are no other people in our minds to oversee us, but in our circumstances, in the way we are treated, we are not free.  And in our physical bodies, none of us is free.  We are dependent on food and water and air; we are dependent on our bodies for survival and we are interconnected, interdependent on the people that make up the society that we live in.  Our minds appear to be self contained, but there is the sense that we can push the limits.  We are not restrained by our bodies.  But as we age, we become almost too contained within our minds.  After we learned to say no to others, we learned to say no to ourselves.  We suffer so much with our hypercritical attitudes and thoughts.  We shut ourselves down and our most constant pain becomes more internal than external.  This is the angst we tap into during the day when we worry, scold ourselves and others, keep our heads stuck in the past or imagining the future.

We are shown early that life and death are two sides of the same thing.  We haven't experienced death, but we know it will come as we see it striking others.  This can be the undercurrent of our "anxiety about life in general."  This foreknowledge is why we are not free agents, but mortal beings chained to the cycles of birth and death.  The best we can do is to take care of ourselves and think that this will extend our life here.  But I'd say most of us don't take care of ourselves.  Think of how many millions of people have fallen victim to all kinds of addictions.  And yet I do think that we need to take responsibility for ourselves and try our best.  

Most of my days are spent alone but in a strange relationship with my illness.  I see time pass and I see how slow I am to take on simple responsibilities.  In the last few years I have committed to my belief that there is so much more going on in me and around me than it seems.  There is a message in some support literature for people recovering from addiction that says:  you are where you are supposed to be.  That can be hard to accept when life is not moving smoothly or moving too slowly.  My angst takes hold when I forget it and I do a lot of the time.  I have a persistent barrier in my trained psyche to resist telling myself that it is okay just to exist.  I'm not in a race or competition and my life does have meaning, every second of it.  

I can hear some cynical person saying - we are where we're supposed to be according to whom or what?  I say according to God, that nebulous entity that is so free that no one can catch it.  Belief in God requires a leap of faith and once you've leapt you have to continue to nurture the faith.  I nurture it every day when I pray in the morning and ask for guidance throughout the day.  I know that I am not free and have chosen to depend of something elusive yet real to me, to help me, maybe even mold me, into being a happier, better individual.   

Angst is disbelief, is resistance, is fear and it goes deep.  People in the happier stages of life believe in something greater than themselves, whatever that turns out to be, and do not resist that force for goodness.  Belief and acceptance lead to peace.  And I'm not talking about blind faith which can often be prejudiced towards one group or another without deeper reflection.  Reflection on self and life experiences is meditation and a way to get closer to the mysteriously unknown benevolent forces that seem to rule the world giving us this beautiful planet to live on.  Reflection is constructive thinking instead of the wasted thinking of worry and anxiety.  We can compare our life experiences with others while respecting that they are separate and on their own path, but ultimately we have to think for ourselves and use our intuition and insight in our past life and present life.  What we think now leads to what we do later leads to one direction over another.  Without reflection we fall into the grooves of habitual patterns we've been practicing since childhood.  With reflection we broaden the healthier choices we have.  We re-train ourselves towards healing.  We lessen those feelings of angst.

Let Go And Let God

Right now I am holding on and I am in a lot of pain.  I want to figure things out and find solutions, but the more I study and work and think, the more overwhelmed I am by the massive quantities of problems and pain in this world.  That I am in pain is the logical outcome of trying to take on the role of God.  I lose sight of my smallness when I get ambitious this way and I forget that I am dependent on God for help and not the other way around.  I lose the faith that God is in this world and that every person is connected to God and on their particular path.  It is not my job to heal anyone else.  My responsibility is to take care of myself and hopefully set a good example for other people to do the same.  God loves me as I am; I do not need to prove myself to God or anyone else.  The goal is for each of us to do our part, working from inside out, from improving our conscious contact with God and being helpful to others without taking on their responsibilities to themselves. There is no one human savior for humankind.  What we have on this planet is a living network and that is how we create positive change in the world.  We willingly work together on one playing field without bogus hierarchies.

I have to accept that I will never know the big picture; only God has that vision.  Letting go is accepting my limitations, letting myself be humbled by them and putting myself in my proper place as one small being amongst many.

The Third Step

3.  Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

The God of my understanding is a God of Love; within Love there is balance, health, wisdom and compassion.  What Buddhists call “Buddha Nature”, which is seen as the core of everyone of us, is God.  I see God everywhere, in everything, especially in our hearts and minds, which when combined seem to form our spirit.  From this perspective we never have been, nor ever will be, disconnected from this Higher Power.  And yet so many of us walk around feeling as is we are separate, not only from others, but from God.  I’ve felt this way too when I was young and especially when I was in a co-addicted relationship where I unconsciously turned my will over to my human partner, not yet having had a clear conception of God in my life till then.  But falling quickly to one of my bottoms within that addicted relationship taught me more in five and a half years than my whole previous life.  My partner, who suffered greatly both before I had met him and with me, was my greatest teacher.  He taught me sweet lessons and he taught me horribly painful lessons, but I realized that that was just the Higher Power working through him, not letting anything go to waste for either of us.  It was up to us to learn the lessons and move forward towards health and balance.

I did so gradually wandering a meandering path up and down still not knowing how to direct myself towards a good and useful life.  When I wandered away from the path, away from the Higher Power, by forgetting the great lesson I was given about admitting that I was spiritually and mentally ill and that I needed to reach out to other recovering people, I was brought, I believe with a most deliberate intention, into several years of acute psychosis.  Over three years time, I hit bottom three times.  The problem and the pain were no longer outside of me in an addicted relationship with an abusive young man, but within my mind itself.  I was given the opportunity to experience the nature of delusions and paranoia.  From the very first moment that this psychic mental illness descended upon me in my already sick, self hating state, there was the strong presence of God there.  When I was most desolate, I never felt abandoned.  It was early in my psychosis that I turned my will over to God.  I know I was thoroughly prepared years before I became acutely ill to endure the hellish times and to place God above every person in the world by practicing peace towards others, towards the voices in my mind, towards myself.

It’s been sixteen years that I have been turning my will over to God during adverse circumstances and good ones equally.  In the beginning it was excruciating and off and on I wanted to die, but the very clear answer I got when I called out to God was - it was not allowed; I had to stay and continue which was the biggest test of my faith I’d ever had.  But in my mind to reject my faith in the absolute goodness of the Higher Power was to be pulled deeper and deeper into the horror of insanity.  And I struggled with having faith when I tried to do what I thought God wanted and still was in so much pain.  But the alternative was so much worse and on a very basic level the sickness within me did not make sense to me, it was illogical, perverse, distorting basic truths.  I was already in love with seeking the Truth since I was a teenager.  My main motivation for continuing to live was that I just wanted to understand the Truth regardless of whether it worked in my favor or not.  I wanted to know because I already knew that revealing the Truth brought God in my presence too and when God was there so strongly I felt myself being healed.

I am in a very good place in my life right now because I am improving my conscious contact with this Higher Power.  I turn my will over every day and ask for guidance throughout the day to be given the clues and intuition to be of service in whatever way this great force, this Great Mystery, decides for me.  As best I can, I go with the flow of the goodness I find all around me.  This is not a painless process.  Following God’s will is not about removing pain and there are times when I absolutely must just sit with the pain and wait.  But now, as compared to before, the pain is mostly minimal and I feel and express a lot of joy in living.

Faith: The Bigger Picture

The truth cannot be contained within a scientific theory, though many people take comfort in the belief that it can.  Then again, many people also take comfort in a belief in faith which demands no tangible proofs.  I place myself somewhere in the middle, or perhaps I should say that some scientific facts form the groundwork for an exploration beyond the facts.  The material world and the spiritual world are not divorced in my world view.

It is human nature to struggle with not knowing.  The biggest struggle we face is coming to terms with our own mortality.  We commonly accept that we will die, but we don’t know when and often don’t know how.  The danger in being alive is that there is always the chance of physical injury or illness or, worse, death itself.  If we walk through our lives preoccupied with this shadow, we rob ourselves of the joys contained within life.  And so, even the most committed atheist, who relies heavily on the truth in facts, must walk out the door carrying inside himself, or herself, a degree of faith.

What can we do in this place of not knowing, this place of faith where we suspend the knowledge that we will die and place in its stead the belief that we will continue to live?  We commit to living moment by moment, day after day.  I think all of us, without exception, put our faith in something larger than ourselves be it the world we live in and our encounters with other people and places and experiences or a faith in some kind of higher power watching over us and guiding us through all our encounters.  We do not exist only for ourselves, but in relation to the world outside our physical bodies.  Even at our earliest physical beginnings, we were in a relationship with our mothers.  We have never been in isolation.

The biggest mystery is not death, the supposed end point of existence, that implacable, unknowable experience.  The mystery is within our spirits, that is our everyday lives and process of living.  We live without a memory of our conception or our birth and so we don’t really know where we come from. We don’t understand the fundamental elements of how or why we came into being on this planet. We’ve learned some facts about the means of sexual reproduction for human animals, but the facts leave out so much and can’t reveal the precise moment we began to exists as a life force.

What does it mean to exist as a life force?  It is more than just blood being pumped by our heart into our organs, animating ourselves to continue breath by breath.  Our life force is contained within our awareness.  So much of our bodily functions are involuntary and accomplished without awareness, our hearts pumping, our breath in and out, the digestion of the food we eat.  It’s as if our bodies are on automatic pilot thereby allowing us either to rest in, or be restless within, our consciousness.  Our consciousness is greater than our bodies and has more in common with the space around us, the intangible, the vast, something with nothing to hold onto.

And so, with so much freedom we get frightened by the power of all the choices we can make and do make, with the present and potential consequences of our actions.  Beyond our instinct for self-preservation, the fight or flight reaction to negative stimuli, we have the ability to rise above our reactions by learning to pause and reflect, to take stock of our present lives and our pasts.  We rely heavily on memory, but because we all have lived such rich lives with so many moments, so many thoughts and feelings, only some memories get recorded.  There is a process of selection or editing out the parts of our lives that are not essential to our underlying spirit, the thing that motivates us to keep on going.  Our experience is too vast for us to be in conscious control of just what we remember and what we don’t remember.

This leads us back to the mystery of our spirits.  What is this unconscious self that selects what to store and what to release into the flow of our ever flowing lives?  I truly do not believe that our selections are haphazard, but how do we know what is essential to know, and remember, when we proceed so often not knowing the deeper nature of our thought processes.  Something within us does know that our lives have this greater meaning, even when we are so very doubtful about ourselves.  This inner self is not so easily explained away by scientists and psychologists.  We can talk about the effects of neurotransmitters and label our psyches as divided into superego, ego and id, but we truly do not know the origins of this mystery.

This mystery leads us right back to faith and to sitting with a sometimes uncomfortable mixture of knowing and not knowing.  People are deluded when they affirm that they do not have faith.  Whenever we take something for granted we have faith, faith in our lives, faith that the sun will rise the next day, faith that the world is turning.  Whenever we reach out for a greater understanding of our lives and the meaning within it, we have faith.  Faith allows us to open up instead of shut down.  Those people caught within severe depression struggle desperately with a lack of faith and so they shut down and they shut down some more until they are cornered within their minds and left unbalanced, left hurting so badly that they turn to various escapes, including suicide.

What do they or any of us have left to work with?  Our awareness which is greater than our minds. You can sit somewhere in silence with no thoughts and be so very aware of all the details of your environment, be very much alive because of your awareness.  When you sit with your awareness you can feel the life force all around you.  The beautiful simplicity of our awareness often is contrasted with the misdirected complexity of our thoughts.  Thoughts can point the way to underlying truths, but they can just as easily direct us into accepting lies.  The fact is we learn through misunderstanding except when we persist in cherishing falseness.  Some people cherish falseness because they are, as yet, ignorant and other people cherish falseness as a means of disguising themselves and/or taking advantage of other people and situations.

All of us have lied consciously to others and unconsciously to ourselves.  We are probably the only potentially insincere species on this planet.  We are not always what we seem.  Because we have this great power to deceive and manipulate, we rely heavily on our false thoughts to motivate us to continue in the deceptions.  We play a serious game with our lives and others' lives.   The problem with believing in lies and lying is that it produces delusional thinking within individuals and worse, the acceptance of illusion over reality for the general populace.

When delusional thinking takes hold within people and spreads into a collective of people, true awareness becomes obscured.  Prejudices and lies partially color every culture on the globe.  And so conflict is born over and over again and a seemingly unending need to inevitably find scape goats.  It is an illusion that we can find justice through blaming and condemning others.  Justice can only be found through an unprejudiced awareness using thoughts to seek out truth rather than using thoughts to hide the truth or only partially convey the greater truth.  Good intentions towards all beings really does count, just as negative intentions really do distort reality and cause great harm to harmless beings.

In order cultivate good intentions towards everyone, you have to get very, very honest.  Those hardest hit by distorted thinking and compulsive actions are addicts.  Addicts move into recovery when they acknowledge that their intentions towards themselves and others are not good intentions, but rather self-serving and self-destructive.  If they can get honest about that and if they can hold onto that realization, they can begin the recovery process of deconstructing the lies that they’ve been living under for so long.  As the distortions in their thought processes begin to clear up, they naturally find that their intentions towards themselves and others returns to health.  Health reinforces the positive and the positive is non harming.

I know some addicts struggle with 12 step programs because so much of the program asks each individual to either reach for a belief in a higher power or deepen the faith they already have.  Faith demands surrender and surrender for many of us is a scary concept and a scarier practice.  Faith also requires that you believe in the essential goodness in life and in everyone.  Faith allows room for a bigger picture to emerge, one greater than our individual stories.  As I said earlier, I believe we all have faith to a greater or lesser extent; it’s how we get through our days and nights when things get rough. As we rely on it, we also take it for granted.  The gift of facing one’s addiction is that one stops taking faith for granted.  Faith becomes a rich and rewarding way of approaching life with openness, honesty and dignity.  I have found in my practice that when I have faith in others higher self and tell them so, that they relax, open, and in return have faith in me too.  A supportive bond gets created, the basis rests in trust and trust allows people to live together in harmony while facing the continuing challenges of daily life.