Christianity; Been There Done That Part II

heretolisten (51)in #knowledge • 7 years ago (edited)

When I left off in my last post I was a teenage atheist.(https://steemit.com/life/@heretolisten/christianity-been-there-done-that)

At 19 I got my own place, only almost immediately it became "our place" when Gary, the guy I had recently started dating, gradually moved in. We were both in rampant party mode back then. That was pretty much all we wanted to do.

Our apartment had a second bedroom that the landlord rented separately. Our first roommate had manic depression, the second was a junkie and the third was a, relatively speaking, benign college student/coke dealer named Michael.

The one with Manic Depression, who could be the nicest woman in the world, one night when we weren't home, threw everything we owned into the back yard.

The junkie, after he'd moved out, broke into the apartment and robbed us.

And Michael brought me to the Lord.

But that didn't happen till much later on. Back then we just ended up addicted to cocaine. Fortunately, it was a short-term addiction. The party ended when we all moved out of the apartment and Michael went his separate way.

Gary and I had gotten married about six months before that. Having served our karmic requirements for bad roommates, we found a house that we could afford to rent on our own.

A few years go by. We haven't heard from Michael all this time, when, out of nowhere, I have a dream about him, and not just one--I dream about him for two nights in a row. The first dream really made me miss him, while the second one left me with a feeling I can only describe as "really bad".

Three weeks later Michael shows up on our doorstep. He's been living in Ohio and just got back in town. He's not doing coke anymore. Instead he's joined The Way, a giant, international Bible group that thought they had discovered a new interpretation of the Bible, all about BELIEVING for stuff. It turned out that all you ever had to do was BELIEVE for anything you want and God would happily fulfill all your desires. Like He becomes your own private Genie without the 3 wish maximum.

I know there's a lot of philosophies out there, like the law of attraction, attributing the mind with a great deal of power. This is certainly nothing new. I've been there done that too. I won't say for a moment that there is nothing to it. In fact it's the opposite. I think there's a lot more to it than many practitioners understand, but more about that later.

Back then how could I possibly doubt something that had been heralded by two dreams? So, despite my previous conviction that I was an atheist, I embraced the Bible. Under Michael's guidance, I accepted Jesus Christ as Savior and BOOM! I WAS BORN AGAIN! I began reading The Bible----- INCESSANTLY. I definitely had a 'religious experience', not all of it good. At times it could drag me so far down, I felt that like I would never come up again. Other times it made me feel ecstatic, as if I was falling in love with GOD Himself. I went through 'the rapture', which, to me, was a period early on when all my self-destructive tendencies seem to fall away, (only to have them return ten fold later on).

All that reading clearly had an impact on my personality, though it didn't make me very much like Jesus. In fact, I noticed that generally, people had liked me better before. And that's despite the fact I made a point of not becoming judgmental and/or evangelical. The truth is I felt less comfortable in my own skin. I'd always gotten along well with girls my own age. There is kind of like a club women can belong to. Members recognize each other and form a bond almost the minute they meet.

After I was born again, I was kicked out of the club, and I've never been allowed back in.

But it wasn't all bad either. If I had any to begin with, I could say it raised my moral standards. I did really try to be a "good" person, which had never that high on my list of priorities.

But what I was really wanted at the time was to understand GOD. Well...that didn't happen. Instead what I eventually understood is that the mind cannot contain something so much larger than itself. Fact is our current apparatus is simply not capable of understanding God.

Surprisingly it took me years to realize that truth. By then I had read the Bible thoroughly, over and over and over till the words seemed like an endless blur of repetition. I wanted to build on what I'd been through, but The Bible no longer offered any growth. So I decided, to look into scriptures from the other 'great religions'. I wasn't converting. I just couldn't see Christianity as the only belief system with any merit. How could God just disregard huge swaths of humanity like that? It made no sense to me.

So I started with The Bhagavad Gita and, went on to dabble in Buddhism, especially Zen, Taoism, Confucianism and parts of the Koran. I found many of them contained valuable wisdom that helped me gain insight into the 'human condition", but none of them had the transformational affect that reading The Bible had on me.

At the same time, I was doing this exploring, I had a ritual of fifteen prayers and psalms that I repeated without fail every day, day after day for many, many years. I must literally have said these things several thousand times. I don't remember how it got started, but I was so disciplined about it, there were times I wondered if I had a compulsive behavior disorder. But the truth is, I learned from experience that they helped me maintain a certain level of stability. But even with their protection, I felt caught in a constant pendulum swing. At times I would seem to sink deep into my dark side, my thoughts moving down dangerous corridors.

In defense I would pull out my bible and pull myself back in the other direction. But after a while I would give up reading because, though it staved off my demons, it no longer fed my soul. So I'd end up repeating the cycle over and over again.

It took quite a bit of wrestling with them, but finally I found a way to integrate the demons instead of just playing wack-a-mole with them. I pushed beyond the repeating pattern to experience a new level of awareness. Eventually I was able to see how Christianity had brought me into duality, into a world of opposites. Reading The Bible was calling my demons as much as it chased them off because practicing Christianity divided me in two and got the pendulum swinging.

There's an interesting tie between Christianity and the general concept of BELIEVING that can help explain what was going on internally. If I look back at my rampant need to party, it's clear that there was no thought process involved. I just really, really wanted to go out drinking. The part of me capable of questioning 'why?', hadn't even come into being yet.

When I started BELIEVING for things, I was learning to control and direct my THOUGHTS. Without realizing it, that entered me into a higher level of consciousness, THE THOUGHT REALM. I acknowledged, for the first time, an arena that's different from the physical one that our bodies exists in. This began the process of separating mind from body and creating division within myself.

It is an evolved derivation of the process that we began when, as a species we went from being apes to becoming human. Moving from being one with our bodies' instinctual impulses, to being able to deviate from them, was the shift of our awareness from the body into the mind. Depicted in Genesis by the fall from grace, Adam and Eve, realizing they were naked, expressed the earliest inklings of being SELF CONSCIOUS, the first step and barest beginnings of a long evolutionary process. Our final disconnect from body to the mind occurred through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the second Adam, who was indeed also a God.

The night He died, Jesus took bread, broke it, gave it to his disciples, and announced that it was his body. He was giving it up to save mankind from sin (i.e. our base animal instincts). Through His own division from his body and his blood, He enacted the point of final division from our bodies to our minds, from instinct into consciousness. It's the capacity for reason that cuts us off from the instinctual knowing that once was our guide.

Western culture is the product of this inner division. It's not difficult to see the shift if you observe the history of mankind since the advent of Christianity. To many it seems like something's not right, like maybe we took a wrong turn somewhere. But in fact it was just the next major step in the evolution of the energy of the Universe.
The goal of our divided state was to create, for the first time the SEPARATE AWARENESS. Up till then all of Creation was still part of the Oneness that created it. Eastern philosophy points out that the eye can't see itself. It was only by dividing from the physical world, that Consciousness could see for the first time, what Creation had become.

Guess I'll leave it there for now. I would love to hear anyone's thoughts, especially about the part at the end. I'm afraid when I try and describe what I see, it seems as though I'm stating the obvious. It's actually hugely significant when seen as a whole, especially in terms of where Evolution is going to take us next...