Sin and forgiveness

If you take the offical version of God to be true, then when you confess, you are confessing to a loving deity who will immediately release you and fill you with forgiveness. If you take God as I described it in my last post, then when you confess, you are admitting to the core of your being that you did something wrong. This is how I confess. I feel the guilt heavy in my gut, and I say to myself with no words, "alright, I did the wrong thing.. what now?"

The difficult thing about my type of confession is that it takes work to be forgiven. First you have to truly recognize and feel what you have done. Then you have to find the strength and love to let go of that feeling. You don't just say sorry and then your remorse is magically scooped up by the light and taken away. You have to fight your way past the ego, and the ego does not forgive. It wants you to suffer so you remember the pain you have caused yourself and others. This may be a protection mechanism, but it only holds you back from liberating yourself. Once you access the God self, the part of you that is everything, the part of you that loves you and knows you are worth unconditional love, you can forgive yourself and you can can finally let go of the past. You are freed from the pain by forgiveness, but you'll never forget that lesson. The day you can remember the lesson and not feel the shame and misery is the day you have truly forgiven yourself.

The thing about this is, how would psychopaths confess, if they don't feel deeply for what they have done? If they can't confess, they can't be forgiven. In my opinion, psychopaths, who have different brain structures in the areas of emotion and empathy, are the furthest removed people from their true selves. They are so far removed that they cannot even recognize when they have hurt another being, a being who in truth has always been part of them. They are so far removed that they would not ever be able to find a true and lasting love for themselves or anyone else. I wonder how a spiritual being could get so far away from themselves. I guess if you have had a parent with pain, or if your own life pain was so deep that it was unbearable to feel, then the ego would block out anything and everything to protect yourself. Even if it means blocking out your emotions, a release and expression of your energy. And the further they fall, the harder it is to feel again, and they become living demons; a human image of their dark, black hole energy. And you can see it in their eyes, the light has been extinguished.

I'm glad I'm not a psychopath, but I see why they exist. Feelings are hard to feel sometimes. Especially those of remorse and guilt. You can see why their ego protects them from it when you have felt it. I feel terribly guilty for a lot of things I have done, and somehow cannot find it within me to forgive myself for some of them. Maybe it is because I have not received forgiveness from the other person or being. I feel if they are still hurting then I cannot forgive myself. But being attached to their pain isn't doing me any favors. If anything it is probably binding them to their own pain at a deeper level. Still doesn't help, it is like my mind thinks I need to be punished.

Now that I think about it that is such a common mentality in western society... we want to see people suffer for what they have done. We see it as justice. We say "they deserve it". And the reason we can't forgive ourselves is because we treat ourselves the same as we treat others. Deep down we think we need to suffer for the pain we have caused others, rather than being loved and forgiven. Maybe the reason I beat myself up so much is because that's what I've been taught is right.

That is actually pretty messed up.
I guess that's why Buddhism focuses so much on compassion; compassion and forgiveness for others will help us liberate ourselves from our own guilt.

I think it's time to exercise that long lost spiritual muscle, and learn to forgive myself.

My love-hate relationship with religion

When I was in the third grade at my small Catholic school, everyone was preparing for their "Reconciliation" ceremony which would lead onto their receiving of the Holy Communion. While everyone else was nervous at the prospect of confessing all their sins to a priest, I was relieved that I didn't have to do so. My school had told me that I could not take part in these religious ceremonies, as I was baptized Anglican, not Catholic. In every subsequent monthly mass, while everyone else stood and lined up to receive the 'body of Christ', 'the bread', or 'communion', I would have to sit in silence and watch them. This was the beginning of my break from religion. We were taught that God loved everyone. Yet, my school basically told me I was not allowed to enter God's kingdom. As a small child, I recognized that if there really was a God, he would not exclude me based on my baptism or any other factor.

Since that moment I had a strong dislike towards Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, which I haven't been quite able to shake, even in my quest towards tolerance and acceptance of others. I felt that God could not have been real if he killed people or imposed rules on people. I disrespected the church every time I was there for weddings, baptisms or whatever reason. I really disliked (putting it nicely) the last Pope and what he stood for, though the new Pope is kind of more favourable. These beliefs about the church have also not been helped by all the bible bashers in America who want to convert Gay people because of a couple of passages in a book that is centuries old and should not be taken literally, at all. I still don't understand how people don't believe in magic, yet they believe there is a man in the sky who created us all. Go figure...

Anyway, religion has made a few appearances in my life where I have been forced to challenge these ideas that formed when I was so young. By the time I started to think about conspiracies, I had concluded that the Bible was a bunch of crap orchestrated by a patriarchy who desired to control the world with strict doctrines and fear. I then stumbled upon my first conspiracy thread, which talked about how the revelations was a prediction of the Roman Empire and how it had continued into modern day America. That was an extremely long but highly convincing thread about the parallels between society and the ancient text's account of our downfall. It was very compelling to me, but it required me to re-evaluate whether the Bible really was a bunch of bullcrap or whether it was something else, maybe a metaphor or a prediction, rather than a literal transcript of actual events. Some while later, I watched the documentary Zeitgeist, which highlighted the parallels between ancient religions and modern day religions. This again, was compelling to me, as that meant that the Bible had not been simply put together as fiction. It had some basis in history.

The most recent catalyst for a change in attitude has been beginning psychic development classes with my cousin, who can contact spirits and is into what people call "New Age" spirituality. And yet, he believes in angels, specifically Christian angels such as Jesus, Mary, Archangels Michael and Gabriel, and so on. He also refers to the "higher power" as 'God'. I have preferred not to do so, as just the word God symbolizes, to me, restriction, compartmentalization, strict beliefs and doctrines. But as I have developed throughout these classes, and developed more open-mindedness, I have realized that God is just the name for this thing that we can all feel within us. God does not need to mean "a man in the sky who kills people if they disobey him". God can just as well refer to the universe, or the cosmos, love, or the singularity before the big bang.

Maybe the God in the Bible doesn't even refer to an actual being. Maybe it is a metaphor of a symbol for the thing that connects us all. Reading "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown tonight has really opened my eyes to the potential symbolism of the Bible. I find it funny that God was the one thing I have strived to reject, when all along I have been lead along the path to find God. I still feel uncomfortable calling it God, I prefer calling it the universe, or love... To me, the universe is God. God is the universe. The universe is within me and it is within everyone else. It's also funny that throughout school we were constantly told that God is within us, and that God is everywhere at once. Because now I can see that this is SO true! We are all connected through God. It's just that everyone takes it too literally and thinks God is a man with a white beard who sits in the clouds! The truth is much more profound than that!

Indeed, we came from God and will one day return to God. But God will not meet us with open arms or a warm embrace.. we will one day return to the gigantic web of the universe where no physical boundaries exist between us. We will not be able to hug God, but we will feel as if we are a PART of God. Oneness!

It still feels wrong saying God. Too Christiany... I feel like a preacher. But there is no wrong way to say it, as long as we are all talking about the same thing I guess, so saying 'God' is a good exercise to reduce my own prejudice.

It feels good writing again! I plan to do a lot more soon :)

Until then,
Peace <3