Horoscopes and what might be

“Yesterday’s high-spirited mood keeps the fun going today, but without incurring any penalties. You will be in an irresistibly charismatic mood, which bodes well for your relationships. Attached Pisceans can look forward to a cozy evening, while singles can look forward to a buzzing one! “

I’ll admit that I’ve never been a great fan of horoscopes. During my Christian years I viewed them with deep-seated suspicion for their clearly demon-inspired error, and nowadays as a free thinking New Ager with nonchelant indifference.

BUT ….

(and please humour me if you have already figured this out for yourself) I have discovered a rather handy way to use my horoscope. Rather than viewing it as a predestined prophecy of how my day will be, I see it as a possible reality that I can create for myself should it so appeal to me.

There you have it.

Blessing that which I do not choose

During my years as a Christian I was very good at presenting my viewpoint (this was called evangelism) and also very good at attacking opposing viewpoints (this was called apologetics). I spent many hours studying the various religions, cults and other wrong world-views, and learnt ways to argue how wrong they were in light of the teaching of the bible.

From my reading of “Conversations with God”, I now see what unbridled judgementalism ruled my mind, and have now discovered (re-membered) a far better way of living:

“The job of the soul, of course, is to cause us to choose the grandeur-to select the best of Who You Are-without condemming that which you do not select.

This is a big task, taking many lifetimes, for you are wont to rush to judgement, to call a thing “wrong” or “bad” or “not enough” rather than bless what you do not choose.

You do worse than condemn-you actually seek to do harm to that which you do not choose. You seek to destroy it. If there is a person, place or thing with which you do not agree, you attack it. If there is a religion that goes against yours, you make it wrong. If there is a thought that contradicts yours, you riducule it. If there is an idea other than yours, you reject it.”

(quoted from CWG, Book 1, p78 )

Free Will is actually Free Will

Above all, you are not to ask such logical questions as “If God wanted strict obedience to His laws, why did He create the possibility of those laws being violated?” Ah, your teachers tell you – because God wanted you to have “free choice”. Yet what kind of choice is free when to choose one thing over another brings condemnation? How is “free will” free when it is not your will, but someone else’s which must be done? Those who teach you this would make a hypocrite of God.
(quoted from Conversations with God, Book 1, p62)

When I first read these words I was astonished that I had never made this self-evident observation for myself. But of course I had no choice but to ignore its obvious truth, otherwise my whole christian house of cards would have to come tumbling down. To be quite honest, sometimes I am so overwhelmed with gladness to have finally broken free from the tyranny of christian fundamentalism that I feel like weeping for joy.

The joy of …

A few years ago I decided to certify in the Microsoft Windows Server 2000 products and spent 8 months studying many volumes all about this product. Many times I would experience an inner thrill as the lights switched on in my mind as I realised what they were on about and how a particular component actually worked.

It’s a great feeling. The joy of learning and discovery. The delight that comes with understanding.

It’s the same feeling David had as he studied the Hebrew law and delighted in learning and discovering its wisdom and its message for him.

The past year I have been reading and re-reading (and re-reading!) the three books of the trilogy “Conversations With God” and almost every time  I read I feel a delicious welling-up of joy as my soul and mind respond to its simple message. While I don’t agree with every word that is written in its pages, I love the overall message of the book and I embrace it as my own. It has become a “lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path” and I am grateful that this message has been given to mankind at this time.

It speaks

I have not posted anything new on this blog for 3 months now!

The main reason relates to why I ever started this blog at all, which was as a way of me venting first my frustrations with the church, then my exploration of “post-church” christianity, and finally moving to a “post christian” position following my discovery of the “Conversations with God” books. All of these processes gave me a lot to punch and kick about, hence this blog.

The fact that I have not posted anything recently is simply because I have finally found a new resting place now that the dust has settled, and I am no longer in a place of struggle and conflict. This process has taken about 1 year, and the process of deconversion from fundamentalist christianity has been one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life.

To anyone who is struggling and battling with life, whatever your religion or creed, I encourage you to read “Conversations with God” Book 1 as it may be just the right thing for you to get out of the “rut of small thinking” that you are locked into, and open up whole new ways of thinking about your life that you do not even realise are available to you.

It worked for me. 

 

 

Discussion Group Meeting #3

Once I finally got this unruly lot to get onto the actual topic of the evening (that took about an hour), the question we considered was “how do we decide or judge what is right or wrong?”, and the answers boiled down to a surprisingly simple set of ideas (for the record, all the other bits and bobs we discussed were also wonderfully interesting):

1) Does doing this (having an affair, stealing, lying, whatever) make an accurate statement of Who I Am? Does it express a grander version of myself and who I aspire to be?

2) Am I prepared to accept the consequences of this action?

3) If I be still and listen to my heart, my feelings will tell me the truth. Call it conscience or whatever you want, in reality if we are prepared to admit it the fact is we “know” darn well whether or not what we are doing is right by listening to our own heart.

So there you have it. Another of the great questions of life the universe and everything solved for you all. 

WWANAD?

During my christian days, one method of resolving moral/ethical conundrums was to apply the WWJD method. (For the dim and slow-witted amongst my readership, this stands for What Would Jesus Do). Or even better (but I digress), the classic variant “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”. Anyway, this leads me to wondering what answers we would come up with to similar questions with WWANAD. (What Would A New Ager Do?)

Thus here some questions I propose for our next discussion group (which will be Wednesday 27th at my house, 7:30pm)

“Is abortion OK? If not, why not?”

“Is watching porn OK?’ (you would simply not believe how many search hits this blog gets each day with poor christians tying themselves up in knots over porn and masturbation)

“Should marriage be abolished?” (Stats show that marriages are busting up faster than ever, and that many that are married are just going through the motions. Is there a better way of doing this?)

For these, and whatever similar questions arise out of the discussion, the underlying question of course is “on what basis do you make your answer?” For christians, the appeal is to the bible of course. But New Agers don’t have a bible, so who says which answer is right? How do we decide? How do we know? Hmmm.

What’s in a name?

Consider a chap who is just standing there minding his own business.

One person says “That man is my husband”
Another says “That man is my father”
Another says “That man is an engineer”
Another says “That man is a scoundrel”
Another says “That man is a loyal friend”

What is interesting is that, while these descriptions are very varied, we have no trouble accepting that each is partial description of the whole. We don’t fuss and bother that one persons description is “correct” while anothers is “wrong.”

How strange that so many do not apply the same basic common sense to God who is both All There Is and All There Is Not.

How then shall I live?

In our 2-weekly discussion group, we considered the question “What difference has New Age teaching made in your life?” After all, what counts in the final run is how we live our lives.

So … having bored you all with statements of obvious fact .. let me bring out the really big guns …

One of the all time best blogs that I have come across that deals with “How do you actually live out this New Age stuff day to day” is found at http://tobeme.wordpress.com/ . He has a major handle of the idea of awareness, and is worth a careful reading.

Go there now.

No, do not read this.

Stop reading and go there now.

Fine. Waste your time reading this prattle instead of the good oil at http://tobeme.wordpress.com/.

Happy now? (I know you still haven’t read it – you can’t fool me)

Discussion Group Meeting #1

Well, we are under way with “my” new 2-weekly discussion group entitled “Exploring New Age Teaching”. I deliberately kept the first one small with only three of us, but ideally 5 or 6 will be about right. To kick it off, I suggested that each of us give a quick summary of “how we got to this point in our lives”, and then answer a second question “what difference has New Age teaching made to your life”. It turned out that the second question was a goodie and in fact that is mainly what we talked about for the next hour and a half.

For M., who had dabbled in several religions over the years but not found anything that really clicked, reading Conversations with God was almost like a mini “conversion” experience. She feels that CWG gives her a practical philosophy that she can actually use in her day to day, and that this idea of God gives her a way to find much more meaning in her life.

For W., who was a fundie Christian for 40 years (don’t let her try and tell you it was only 30), she has found that many of the questions that she hassled over and never found satisfactory answers have suddenly all fallen into place. She has also been able to see that many of the truths she has gathered over the years but been unable to correctly label with Christian labels, now make perfect sense with New Age terminology.

For me, well like the other two I only discovered all of this in June/July last year, so it’s all a major upheaval of thinking and belief. The really big differences that these ideas have made in my life is there is now a lot less struggle and battle to be what I thought God wanted me to be like. This is replaced with a much more easy-going approach of deciding whether or not any action reflects a grander version of myself or not, and choosing accordingly. Not having to worry about sin is also a big relief. In the New Age model, nothing is intrinsically right or wrong. Events are simply events, and we decide how we wish to behold them. It’s also a relaxing change for me to hold a model that does not insist that it is right and the others a wrong (one mountain, many paths), and that there is no reward or punishment in the afterlife.

I think I speak for all of us in saying that we all enjoyed ourselves and got a lot out of the discussion.

So there you have it. Let’s see where it leads this year.