Jesus’ Democratic God

Published on by Jim Category: Christ, Christian, God, Jesus, Nonduality, Religion

It is obvious that Jesus saw the corruption that came from the belief in the God of Abraham, a idea of God that is tyrannical which unscrupulous people use to intimidate and enslave people with keeping them trapped in a paradigm that was and is unhealthy for them.

The God of Abraham was the Creator and Ruler of the world, “out there” or up in the sky some place; distant from people, separate from people.  This God of Abraham, being the Creator and RULER of the world could therefore dictate to the people what HE wanted (God had to be a he because that protects the patriarchal privilege of men).  IN ADDITION, and more importantly, God could assign certain ‘special’ men to tell the people what He, God, wanted.  Of course, this gave those special men great power and privilege in the world.  In so doing, this God of Abraham was justification for all the forms of slavery, most of which still exist today.  The appointed leaders are to be the masters and everyone else is to be the slaves.  Of course, these so-called appointed leaders who create the rules and tell the world they are appointed by God to be the master over the rest of humanity.

Today we can still see that the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are violent, abusive to themselves and others and the planet or environment as a whole.

Obviously, Jesus could see this long ago and that is why he felt the need for a more democratic vision of God, a new idea of God, a gentler, kinder more loving vision of God.  Jesus could see a truth that lesser men could not see, a truth would set people free to love ALL that life offered, a truth that WE are all gods, part of and not separate from the Universal Consciousness or Spirit that primitive people call God.  We are the ones who can choose not to give our power away to other people.  We are judges who decide what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong.  We are the ones that define what sin is and what sin is not.  We are the ones who define what is God.  Even though the religious people of Jesus’ time saw him as a massive sinner, Jesus did not see himself as a sinner or separate from God.  He saw himself as one with God, which he called his Father.  And Jesus said that he saw us all as one with God, that God is within us and we are within God, we are not separate from God.

This “we are all one, we are all part of God” idea is a more democratic idea of God than the autocratic God of Abraham.  No one person or group of people would have dominion over another.  Jesus’ idea of God would do away with the lording of parents over their children, clergy over their congregations and kings or political rulers over the masses.  No longer are the rulers “out there” some place, but WE are the real rulers.

Of course, the ruling classes would not want to see an idea of a more democratic god prevail in society, for they would lose their power and privilege.  So they had to stop Jesus by whatever means became necessary.  That is why they had him arrested, tortured and killed, not just to stop Jesus but also to discourage anyone from following in his example.

Jesus tried to bring about a paradigm shift, one that the ruling classes did not want to happen, and that is why that had to kill him.  However, the ideas that Jesus talked about did not die with him; they started to spread.  Because of this, the ruling classes hired Saul of Taurus to find a way to destroy the movement that Jesus had started.

Saul tried everything he could, he killed and persecuted the followers of Jesus but that only seem to strengthen them.  Then, one day, on the road to Damascus Saul got a brilliant idea, it was so brilliant that it almost blinded him.  He envisioned that he would change his name to Paul, join the follows of Jesus and call himself an ‘apostle’ or leader of them.  Then he would bring those gullible enough to follow him back to “sound doctrine” by which they could be controlled, manipulated and enslaved.  His plan was near perfect, for it worked brilliantly.

Paul got people, including the other apostles, to worship Jesus as someone special, as God incarnate.  In so doing, they were pushing Jesus up on a pedestal so high that people could no longer see Jesus as an example of what they could be but only as an idol worthy of worship.  The people learned to say that Jesus’ teaching were ok for him, he was God, but we are not; thus rendering Jesus teachings no longer valid.

The spirit of the Antichrist wanted to create a movement to ensure that people would never follow Jesus or examples like him.  They were calling Jesus the Christ so when Paul created his movement or religion became known as Christ-anti or Christianity, which is what it is called today.  However, as Jesus said, nothing is hidden that shall not later be revealed.  It is time to expose this Antichrist movement for what it is, there to support the ruling classes and to keep people slaved.  The last thing this antichrist movement wants is for people to think and act like Jesus, to be the part of God that they are.

Remember what Jesus said, “It is not those who say lord, lord to me, but those who do the will of their Father in heaven”; the kingdom of heaven being within us.  Today, Christians will honor Jesus with their mouth but their heart is far from him, they think so differently than he did.

The ruling classes want us to think that God is out there and we are here to serve God.  Jesus said that if you have known him you also know his Father, and then he said, I come to serve and not be served.  When a person identifies as being part of God then they realize that all the rest of humanity and even all life is part of them.  Therefore, they will do unto others as they would want done unto themselves, for they ARE the others, just as Jesus pointed out when he said, as you do unto the least of them you do unto me.

You will never hear any Abrahamic tradition followers say anything like that.  For them, the God of Abraham is the master and we are to be the slaves. That is what we get from Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

It is time for humanity to take it power back and to awaken and realize that WE are that democratic God that Jesus was pointing out and he demonstrated for us the freedom to love that being God brings to anyone open enough and courageous enough embrace.

Master Your Mind

Published on by Jim Category: Health Emotional, Health Mental, Jesus, Understanding Ourselves

Master your own mind.  This is the heart of the message of all the great teachers or ‘masters’ that ever existed, be they called Buddhas or Christs, for they were masters over their own minds and hence masters over the world.

Meditation or ‘watching’ is just the process of watching your own mind so that you can see how it works and then become a master over it.  Meditation enables us to gain clarity and it is with clarity that we can see the truth that sets us free to enjoy and love all that life offers us.

The Four Steps or Four Skills, which I call the Four Ss, enable us to come to that place of clarity.  When you follow these steps, you develop these skills and then whenever you have lost the light within these steps or skills enable you to get back to clarity which again allows you to see the truth that sets you free to go back to enjoying and loving ALL that life has to offer.

When you have found the perfect truth that sets you perfectly free to love unconditionally ALL that life has to offer, and then you will know the Nirvana, the Heaven that is here, now, and AT HAND.

What is Unconditional Love?

Published on by Jim Category: Health Mental, Love and Fear

I do not want to talk about theory or philosophy here; I really want to talk from my personal experience of Unconditional Love.

It took me a lot of work, time just asking myself what I wanted, listening to that inner voice or guidance, before I realized I prefer the experience of loving what life is offering to not loving what life is offering.  AND, it took a lot of work to cut through all the beliefs I had that restricted or limited my opportunity to love.  I had so many beliefs that told me I cannot love this or I cannot love that.  With time and a willingness to look at these beliefs, I eventually saw through ALL of those beliefs that limit my love.

I LOVE to love.  Love is the richest experience I have ever found, or at least love is the word I use to describe the richest experience I have ever had.  Therefore, I had to ask myself, why would I create or allow any conditions to exist that would limit my experience of love?

With a willingness to examine my beliefs and doing so, I realized that there are no good reasons to limit my love.

So now, I can and often do Unconditionally Love ALL that life has to offer.

When I love unconditionally all that life has to offer then I am experiencing Unconditional Love.

It does not matter if another or even the whole world can love me unconditionally, if I do no love then I will not know love.  As someone else once said, the measure you give is the measure you shall receive.

Does this mean that I will always CHOOSE to love what life is offering? No!  Part of life is the experience of fear, hate or whatever emotion life is offering, and I want to have these experiences too.  With consciousness or awareness that I have a choice on what type of emotion I experience, I have the freedom to choose the experience of love or not, it is not conditional upon external situations.

I do not need a complicated philosophy or theology to allow me to love unconditionally.  I do not need any person or object to practice the art of love.  I choose to love unconditionally when love is the experience I want to have.

I also find that with this unconditional love in my heart I have less or no need to see others change, yet I am available to demonstrate that change is an option if you should want it.  Loving what life is offering makes me a softer, kinder person.

Anger Management

Published on by Jim Category: Health Mental
Punished BY Anger
You will not be punished because of your anger, you will be punished BY your anger. Buddha

In my early 30s, I was an anger addict or a rageaholic.  The pain of this anger and rage is what drove me to seek a way out; it drove me to what some call “spiritual seeking”.  Eventually I found relief from the anger and rage and not just relief but I came to be able to see the whole world at perfect just the way it is.  However, before I could see the truth that set me free to fully enjoy and love all that life had to offering I had to calm myself down and let go of the anger and rage.  I also had to recognize that I was the problem not the world, not the people I interacted with, not the government, not the economic system, not religions, not the authorities, not my family or friends: me, myself, I.  That is where I had to start look, at myself and my ways of thinking.

So managing my anger was became managing myself and how I looked at the world, my beliefs, my attitudes and my ways of thinking.

Oh, and myself importantly, managing my anger because a quest to learning how to relax and be healthy, of body and mind.

It was a process.  For thirty years I had been developing my ‘ability’ to be angry and now it was time to develop my ability to be calm, peaceful, joyous and loving.  I still have the ability to be passionate, one of the skills of anger, but now I am free of the fear, which is an aspect of anger that I no longer feel any need for.

I have learned a lot about relaxing and health since then and I try to share that people wherever I can.  Most often I find that people are just not open to learning yet, so I look for ways to crack into their hard exteriors and share with them a way out of that hardness.

Currently I am developing an Anger Management Workshop here in Berkeley California that I want to conduct in a public park so that anyone can attend.  I do not plan to charge for this workshop so that even the homeless will feel that can come.  It is my experience that many if not all the homeless people have some sort of problem with their anger or other emotional issues.  Maybe, through this workshop, I can inspire them to work their way out of their suffering.  Maybe…

How to Realize Benefits of Meditation in the Real World?

Published on by Jim Category: Health, Understanding Ourselves

How to Realize Benefits of Meditation in the Real World? Part 2, Posted on: July 4th, 2012 by Rakesh Sethi

This is the second article by Rakesh on this topic.  Here are my comments I posted about it:

As I said in my comment on the first article, one benefit I have found from meditation is clarity of mind, which enables me to see the truth that sets me free to enjoy and love what life is offering. Part of that truth is watching how the human instrument, the mind/body instrument, works. For instance, I can watch as life produces stimuli to the body which in turn creates thoughts in the brain, which in turn creates reactions in the body, some of which we call emotions. I have also noticed that we can re-train or re-program the mind/body to react to stimuli and thoughts differently if we want a different experience. This is what I do mostly now in my meditations, I re-train the body/mind instrument to react to whatever stimuli life is offering with positive (healthy) emotions. The are lots of healthy side benefits of the practice that I could talk about another time.

I will add here that there are many health benefits to practicing positive emotions.  These include both mental and physical benefits.  I find that the more I practice positive emotions the more peaceful, relaxed, content and positive I feel and experience life as.  I can see why almost all spiritual traditions encourage people to practice positive emotions.

What is the True Purpose of Meditation?

Published on by Jim Category: Health Emotional, Understanding Ourselves

What is the True Purpose of Meditation?. Posted on: November 13th, 2010 by Rakesh Sethi

This is a decent article about meditation, but I do not think the author has gone far enough, so I added my comments:

I have found that meditation calms the mind, brings inner peace, stillness and CLARITY.  It is with this clarity that I have been able to see the truth that sets me free to perfectly enjoy and love ALL that life has to offer.  For instance, I can see that virtually all the stress I experience is a product of MY REACTIONS to what life is offering: my thoughts and then my habitual emotional reaction to those thoughts.  A thought is really nothing more than an electro-chemical impulse traveling along the neurons of the brain and it cannot hurt me, it is only my reaction to the thought that can cause me stress or pain.

So I have changed my practice to include practicing positive emotional reactions to ALL thoughts.  So most of my “meditations” now focus in on practicing happiness, joy, love, peace and feeling freedom.  All of these are inner experiences and ENTIRELY a function of habit, which can be changed.

 

Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation – Philippe Goldin

Published on by Jim Category: Health, Understanding Ourselves

Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation – Philippe Goldin.

This video is a good overview of some of the benefits of meditation.  Raising our consciousness means becoming more aware of how the human instrument operates, which enables us to improve the quality of our life experience.  This improves the emotional and mental health of the practitioner of meditation.

NHL blogger and Aurora victim, first escaped Toronto shooting (via intuition)

Published on by Jim Category: Health Mental, Understanding Ourselves

NHL blogger and Aurora victim, first escaped Toronto shooting.

This blogger wrote, “I can’t get this odd feeling out of my chest. This empty, almost sickening feeling won’t go away. I noticed this feeling when I was in the Eaton Center in Toronto just seconds before someone opened fire in the food court. An odd feeling which led me to go outside and unknowingly out of harm’s way. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how a weird feeling saved me from being in the middle of a deadly shooting.”

This is something I have always wondered about, if people have some premonition that there was going to be some dangerous situation just before it happened.  There is scientific evidence that people around the world were aware of 9/11 minutes before the first planes hit the World Trade Center.  It is like the Cosmic Consciousness know everything before it happens.

Now the challenge is to become sensitive enough to be aware of this when it is happening and both able and willing to act on that sensitivity.  I suspect that there will be a lot of false starts before one gets it down.

Trusting intuition is a hard thing to do at first, but with practice we can improve the quality of our perceptions and this can greatly enhance both our safety or health and the quality of our life experience.  It is my experience that meditation is the practice of listening to our subtle intuitions, so meditation enhances our ability to be aware of subtle indicates that danger is upon us.

I feel sad for the skeptics out there that are closed to all the benefits that intuition has to offer us.  I am not saying that all skeptics are closed to these ideas, only that there are some that refuse to even consider that we can know about events like this shooting before they actually happen.

Demonstrating Love

Published on by Jim Category: Health Mental

Lately, I have been focused on not just talking or writing about what I have to offer, but DEMONSTRATING it. Books and blogs and Facebook do not really allow one to fully demonstrating the courage, which is the manifestation of love, that I feel I have come to share. I am feeling more attracted to public speaking, in public places like town squares, malls or colleges and making videos of that to publish on my blog. The world has change radically in the last 30 years with the advent of the internet and digital communications. Books and the written word are old school, old and outdated ways of communicating. A picture tells a thousand words and a video tells a million.

Demonstrating how to love one’s self FIRST takes being in situations that for most people would be very uncomfortable in and making oneself comfortable. It is skill that comes with practice.

For now, I have my platform, it is called Earth, and I am called to travel around it speaking wherever I can find people gathered.

My Calling

Published on by Jim Category: Communication and Relationships, Jesus, Love and Fear

My Calling is what I have to do and what I am not doing, or where I have to go…

Jesus is my model of sorts.  What he did that was so impressive was that he went and spoke his truth out there in the world.  He had the courage to be honest.  Moreover, this is not just the courage to write a book, make a video, or give lectures for people that want to hear what you have to say.

It is not WHAT you say but how it you say it or, better yet, WHERE it you say it.

It does take some courage to write things that will not be popular.  Yet, to go out into public places and speaking to the public, not people who came to hear me necessarily, but to those who do NOT want to hear me, like the conservative and religious people that Jesus did.  The conservative and religious people would judge him and criticism him and he would demonstrate his lack of fear of their judgment.  Jesus demonstrated that he had overcome that fear of the world’s judgment or the world’s ability to intimidate him with their words. He was not afraid of them when they would say that he was a sinner or that he was Satan.

Jesus was out there speaking his truth; he was demonstrating the courage to be honest.

Courage is the manifestation of love.

Jesus was demonstrating the love, that courage.  That is why they call Jesus God; they say that God is love since Jesus was demonstrating love in his courage to be honest in spite of the hostilities of those who were listening.  Jesus was not intimidated by all these doctrines and theologies that were out there.  Jesus had seen that the judgments and criticisms meant nothing if one aligned within himself.

Demonstrating that courage is what I have to do.  I have done some but I have not consistently spoken out.  That is where I have failed, consistently to speak out in public places.  That is my calling.  To go out and speak my truth to people who do not want to hear it, who will judge me and criticize me and reject me.  People who will take the greatest offense at what I have to say.

I am not necessarily to talk to just individuals, who cannot handle the heat of the confrontation directly, but to crowds of people in public places.

That is my job, to go do this.  Until I have done this I have not done what I have to do.