Love and Loss A Journey through Fear to Peace – Volume Five

GOOD AND EVIL, Part 11 In the beginning, God was perfect, complete, being love itself in the stillness of eternity. But God was lonely, so he created his creation out of himself so that he could have an object for his love. He wanted to create movement in the stillness, to allow his love to flow. He created Man in his own image, implanting divine love within, so that he could behold his love reflected back to him and to all creation. God gave Man dominion over the earth, so that through Man’s obedient stewardship in divine love, the unity of all things in God could be maintained even in the separation of space-time. But God knew that by splitting off one polarity, the opposite polarity would also be released. Interdependent co-arising. With good there would also be evil. With beauty, ugliness. With joy, sorrow. God planted the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and gave Man access to it, but warned Man that there was danger in eating its fruit. The rest is history. ~ 1385 ~ Marriage has nothing to do with love. It is about lust, about providing a protective family to care for the children who inevitably come when young people act out their urges. This is why Jesus said that people are not married in heaven; divine love has no use for marriage and its baggage of worldly concerns. With this realization I have come to another interpretation of this Bible passage: “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4-5 RSV) In what way do a man and woman combine to become literally one flesh – together in one body? When they make a baby. A person is in fact half his mother and half his father – his parents become, literally, “one flesh.” ~ 1389 ~ EMPTINESS I once described the difference between scripture and revelation in terms of limits, like the difference between an infinitely sided polygon and a circle. This also describes the jump of consciousness from duality to eternity. The infinitely sided polygon contains an infinite number of angles, but when we take the quantum leap to a circle, all angles disappear. There are no angles at all, yet every angle is contained therein. Infinite fullness becomes emptiness. In the same sense, eternity is not just the sum total of all things – the entire contents of duality – but the explosion and implosion of everything out of and into nothing. Heaven and nirvana are not the same as eternity. They are the conscious awareness of eternity in duality. A knowing that has nothing to do with knowledge. From the Heart Sutra: “Here, Sariputra, form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness …” ~ 1423 ~ As I walked up to the door of the store, I looked down and saw a white feather wafting across the sidewalk in front of me. I saw many other bird feathers nearby, so I gave it only a passing thought. But then, upon returning to my car after I finished shopping, I was startled to see a small white feather in an unlikely place – nestled next to my car door window just above the door handle. It was as if the spirits said, “Sending one feather across her path was too subtle. She didn’t pay attention. Let’s put one right in front of her where she can’t miss it.” Now I’m paying attention. ~ 1429 ~ Can I find a way to be grateful for pain, fear, and evil? It is relatively easy to forgive when bad things happen by accident and nobody gets hurt, like spilled milk. We understand how these events have a necessary place in the cosmos. But what about heinous acts that cause grievous harm, or the intractable pain of severe illness, or paralyzing fear such as gripped me after Lou died? Forgiveness and acceptance of such things is much harder. Gratitude for such suffering is hardly the first reaction that comes to mind, if it comes at all. I know how to be grateful for the psychological torture that Emily and The Unnamed One inflicted on me, even though their unskilled behavior was intentional and knowingly hurtful. I have learned their lessons and am grateful for them. Perhaps the same kind of gratitude can also apply to even more severe manifestations of darkness. This is the highest gratitude, gratitude for the whole of life. But it is not me, the human being, who is grateful. It is my God-self thanking me, the human being, for my existence. Through me, through my consciousness, the invisible God gets to experience all the colors of the rainbow, to have a channel through which divine love can flow, and also to witness how everything fits together in eternity. This deep gratitude, known as appreciative Joy in Buddhism, describes the condition of Adam and Eve before the Fall, when they were separate from, yet one with, God. I am God – coming apart, coming together, like an accordion, making music by coming apart and coming together. ~ 1435 ~ I enlisted four of my trusted spiritual advisors to help me edit this book. None of them have responded in any significant way to my drafts, neither positively nor negatively. Their silence has led me to think that my mystical life story – my hero’s journey, as Joseph Campbell calls it – is not meant to be edited. The complete and unabridged account of my journey stands as is, without critique or comment. So here it is – the life of Christ, the Word of God – exactly as I am called to transcribe it.