For a long time God was in my life, but only ever after the words ‘Oh’ and ‘My.’ Beyond that I had no interest whatsoever in having anything to do with him. God was dead to me and me to him, and that was that, or so I thought.
Having been brought up as a church-going Christian, and never really believing in the sandal and robe-wearing figure in the clouds in the first place, by the time I got to my twenties God was definitely not someone I wanted hanging around, judging me for all of my choices. And anyway, God for most people either didn’t exist, or was for people I’d judged as weirdos or oddballs who were religious, or for people of other faiths that I had no relationship with. Definitely not mainstream, definitely not cool, definitely not my thing.
As a child I prayed to God, hoping that he would save me from a long list of scary things in the world that I perceived might happen to me. I prayed that neither of my parents would get cancer and then when my Dad got cancer, I prayed desperately that he wouldn’t die. When he died I gave up, decided that believing in God was pointless, that God was a waste of time, and chucked my relationship with him on the bonfire.
While I felt like I didn’t have any relationship with God whatsoever, if I’d been really honest I would have felt how actually I resented and blamed God for everything that had gone wrong in the world, and for my Dad dying. If God was so benevolent, so all-knowing and caring, how could he allow such ills to happen? Could he not see that the world was a mess? Either God definitely didn’t exist, or he just didn’t care enough to bother sorting anything out.
Enter Universal Medicine in 2011. By this time I was getting a bit more real about my own choices, and own life, and feeling that there had to be more. None of the spiritual pursuits I’d dedicated myself to over the past few years had worked. I had a brilliant life from the outside – a great job, active social life, friends and relationships – and yet I was still in the same patterns, with the same feelings of “there has to be more to life than this.”
When I first realised that Universal Medicine presented a religion called The Way of The Livingness, my heart sank a bit. Here was this amazing organisation, with healing modalities that were really supporting me to finally let go of some old patterns, delivered by practitioners with an incredible amount of integrity and total dedication to living what they talked about. But religion –– really??
I was prepared to give healing a go, but decided to stay well clear of the religious bits. I still saw it as something a bit stale and weird, something cultish that I definitely didn’t want to be involved in. I was a respectable, responsible person, highly cautious and although I pretended for a while to be wild, I never really fooled anyone: I was the most risk-averse person I knew.
But I was intrigued: why did even the word ‘God’ cause such a strong reaction in me and why was I so anti-religion (apart from Buddhism which I’d deemed as cool and open enough to be legitimate)? I’d associated religion with being told what to do, being judged and constantly feeling guilty for doing something wrong. Yet there was I, judging religion and anyone who had anything to do with it.
When I came to understand the word ‘religion’ as having a relationship with myself, things started to shift. If the word ‘religion’ means to re-bind, to re-establish a relationship with the inner part of one’s self – the Soul, that quiet voice that always knows how we are to live and the choices that are in our best interests but that we so often override – then why would I not want a relationship with that one thing that knows me inside out, and knows how to live truly and honestly? How to live more of me, to be more comfortable in my own skin, more open and less constricted by all the ways of being that I know are not me – are we not all wanting this?
Slowly I saw that my perceptions of religion and God were based on pictures and perceptions that were totally false and so far away from what religion and God are actually about. I came to understand that The Way of The Livingness is not anyone else’s way, but mine. It’s not a dictation from Universal Medicine or anyone else about what to do or how to do it. It’s not even about using the phrase ‘The Way of The Livingness.’ It’s simply a phrase used to describe how and why you live your life that is so personal to you. It’s like following your own bespoke path that has everything you need on it to evolve and grow, at the precise timing. You do your thing, and I’ll do mine, and together we learn and grow.
It’s through our living way, i.e. how we do life, that we access God. Now that’s a big statement. To have gone from perceiving God as some bearded, sandal and robe clad figure in the sky, probably with a clipboard and pen, taking notes of all of my perceived failings for the record card and judgment day when I die, to actually feeling that maybe, that’s not it, has been a process. But through connecting more to my body instead of from my head, I’ve felt that there is something more to life than the lives most of us are living and how we’ve been taught what life is.
We are all so naturally connected to one another, to nature and the entire universe. I started to feel that how I live has an effect on others – even the simplest of movements are felt by others around me, near and far. When I’m off in my head, I’m temporarily oblivious to anything beyond myself, but when I’m connected to what I can feel in my body, there’s a solidity, and a space, and an absolute knowing that I’m part of something much bigger than myself. Call it God, the Universe or the stars: we’re all part of a multi-dimensional life, even if we don’t realise it or want to be.
I’ve started to experience as a physical sensation how naturally connected we are to one another – how connecting with others is our natural way of being, and to not do this, to not allow ourselves to love ourselves and others, to open up and connect, takes a lot of energy and drains us.
We’re all in this together, like it or not, and we all have the same equal access to our natural way of living and being. God is equal to us, within us and around us. God backs us all the way, and allows us to make all our own choices, with no judgment. We are so endlessly supported – we just have to allow ourselves the space to feel and know it, from within.
“If you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God.”
[Corpus Hermeticum 11:20 (1)]
By Bryony, UK
References:
1. Unimed Living. (2018). Hermes | Unimed Living. [online] Available at: http://www.unimedliving.com/ageless-wisdom/the-lineage/hermes.html [Accessed 16 Aug. 2018].
Further Reading:
God’s Waiting Room
We cannot be without God and Religion
Space, God, Purpose and human existence
The Truth about Universal Medicine 
In the past ‘religion’ was a way to control the masses, there were certain people in power and they had the command of life and death. We live in the 21 century but how much as really changed since the dark ages, have they ever gone away? Don’t be fooled by fast cars and aeroplanes they are just the props to make it look as though there are changes taking place when in fact we constantly repeat the same life, life after life.
Gill, The Cathars lived in a way that their daily lives were a constant relationship with themselves and God, it was a living way. This was seen as a threat to the Roman Catholic faith as the Cathars did not attend church and so they did not give money to the church, which was one of the ways the RC church became so rich. The Cathars were not tolerated by Rome and so it was that the persecution started. We don’t hear much about the Cathars and that’s because their way of life ( The way of The livingness) was brutally wiped out by a religion that would brook no other way other than the Roman Catholic faith. When such atrocities take place in the name of God and the many wars that were started in the name of God, is it any wonder that people are turned off by the word God. But God didn’t do any of these things, we humanity did these things to each other and rather than admitting it was us doing this to ourselves, it became convenient to blame God.
Reading this blog again I wondered if it is possible we reject God because we do not want to admit that we have been lied to, fooled, completely taken in by an energy that is constantly bludgeoning us with thoughts that God only exists as a punishment to humanity. What if the complete opposite was true; that actually God doesn’t judge, compare, isn’t angry or abusive. He isn’t any of the negative, abusive tickets we have placed on him. He is instead the space of absolute magnificence which he wants to share with everyone. Many of us are so corrupted by the negative thoughts, we think thoughts are ours because we think them, that we are unable to discern what is true and what is not. I feel the negative energy has to assert the pressure on humanity constantly because if they stopped for one second we would all return to God in an instant.
Our unfolding path is full of twist and turns but the absolute truth is that even in the twist and turns when we feel lost and that God has deserted us it is a lie. We can never be abandoned by God it is us that abandons him and then we blame him for not recusing us when it is us that has turned away. But even these games we play are temporary because we live in the body of God, or we could say the universe and how then can we be abandoned? It’s impossible. So what is fueling our thoughts of being abandoned?
If someone was with us everyday, every moment – we wouldn’t ignore them or pretend that they weren’t there. Yet this is so often how we live with God. The universe is so ubiquitous we’ve dismissed it as of little note and chosen to be unaware.
From this, I got to see once more our relationship with healing or lack of even to the point that when someone dies it can bring a healing both to them and others that on the whole we still do not seem to see, similarly when we have an illness and dis-ease if we listen to our body and work with this what a healing it can be ‘I prayed that neither of my parents would get cancer and then when my Dad got cancer, I prayed desperately that he wouldn’t die. When he died I gave up’. We still associate illness dis-ease and death as a ‘bad’ thing.
This is what we have fallen for because we have all allowed a religion to dictate to us what God is or isn’t, and what a perfect ploy to get humanity to reject God so that the religion of the day could control and dominate our thoughts and way of life. We have fallen for the oldest trick in the book and until we can see past the trick it will hold us in its sway.
‘We are so endlessly supported’ is so true. I can be very belligerent when I’m in a hurt – everyone but me has it easy, why is it so hard etc. But everything, even the bits that are challenging, are all there pointing the way back to love, to God, to myself. The ‘bad’ stuff is showing where I need to pay attention and perhaps heal something or let an ideal go. We’re given it all, all of the time. How much we appreciate this is down to our willingness to see, or not.
Karin your words are very wise we are endlessly supported by God, as you say humanity has over the centuries fallen for the images of God because main stream religions have us all believing that God walks around in the clouds as some angry, judgemental, robe wearing, white bearded man. We do need to let go as you have suggested of the ideals that we are constantly bombarded with. In the surrender we can feel the vibration of God which is always there to be felt and attuned into.
“If you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God.” I love this quote.
‘Who or what is God?”, is a good question. If we were all asked to take a survey about God or religion, we all would have various responses. If we surveyed people to see the effects of God or religion upon their lives, we would have a similar response to what you’ve shared in this blog; the doubt, the anger, the disbelief, being let down and so forth.
And if it was that simple, that religion or accessing God is the relationship to oneself, then we wouldn’t need these different buildings called churches, temples, mosques and so forth. How would people be with one another then?
The Way of The Livingness is my religion and I’ve observed the relationship with myself has evolved. I’ve also observed how people’s relationship towards me has evolved too and it isn’t always pleasant too.
For me is to simply continue and the rest is up to the individual, as to what they do when they are in my presence.
Interesting isn’t it that no matter what our perceived relationship with God is, we still can’t shake that nagging feeling that there has to be more to life than what we see and how things are now. That nagging feeling is our soul gently and persistently knocking on our door.
andrewmooney26, it is interesting that if we scratch the surface of life just a little bit, people will talk about this other feeling they get that there is more to life but they don’t know how to tap into this ‘other’ part or express it. I have had so many conversations with elderly patients who say they have always felt throughout their lives there was something more. When they tried to express this feeling to others they were shut down. When they are allowed to express what they felt it brings a sense of settlement to them that at last someone is willing to listen to them without judgement.
‘We are all so naturally connected to one another’… yes, absolutely and it is of note how much complication we put in the way of this. When I remember the fact in this quote everything becomes so much lighter, more enjoyable and simple.