Barbelith Underground > Temple

If you don’t mind, iconoplast, I’d like to be the first to volunteer to be in your church. Your accounts here are remarkably similar to my own experience, in that discerning the will of god has been a primary concern for a great deal of my life. So if you want some sense of religious community then I’d like to be it.

This thread has caused me to pull some old files of mine off the shelf, and although I can’t find a lot of what I’m seeking (for example, I think my notes on Aryeh Kaplan’s The Infinite Light: A Book About God - probably the best and simplest distillation of monotheism I’ve encountered), I have found my old theology notes on the will of god, some of which I now discover retroactively have informed a great deal of my current thinking. I’ve also found pages of old transcripts of prophecies I was given, along with the tapes they were sourced from. Much interesting stuff to mull over: it’s all a legacy from my days when I self-defined as Christian, and it seems a devoted monotheistic faith has stayed with me long after I stopped calling myself that.

So if it helps at all here’s some bits and bobs that I’ve culled out of the notes from my theology course on the will of god, plus my own exposition. I hope you find this useful, I’ve pretty much lived through a lot of this so if it helps you to avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made then it will have served a good purpose. If I use the terms of Christian scripture I trust you’ll understand that it’s because that’s where I come from, not necessarily where I am now, and I always played pretty fast and loose with scripture anyway, even when I did call myself Christian. These days the most I call myself is *Seth* and if you know anything about the name you’ll know that’s loaded enough as it is.

There are a number of potential points to consider in living a life dedicated to serving the will of an unseen omnipotent and omniscient god.

Are we equipped to know god’s will? In exactly the same way as we can never always accurately perceive the universe (because we are a small part of that universe), is it always possible to know god’s will at all times? How much do we forgive ourselves when we mess up, and do we always allow for room that we may be wrong?

Where do you draw the line? In other words, at what point do you allow yourself to just make up your own mind? I’m assuming there’s a level to which you seek god’s perspective on some things and not others, according to the type of issue and the level of its importance to you. For example, I rarely seek the will of god when it comes to drinking alcohol these days, although I certainly used to and for many years operated on a strict three pint limit. Now it’s become something that I no longer have a hard and fast rule over, and I decide how much I want to drink based on each situation. I wonder: is that because I’ve changed, because what once was problematic for me is no longer?

Does god have a single plan for you, or are there infinite acceptable paths you might take? I used to become extraordinarily upset about this one, because I used to subscribe the former. It created a huge amount of anxiety in me: by believing that there was one *correct* path I was in turmoil about whether I was on that path. Sometimes I had the benefit of strong internal feelings that signposted to me that I was on the right track, an inner compass or witness that gave me feelings of peace, wellbeing and congruence with my lord. However, I believed (and, to be honest, still believe) that to live purely by *feelings* is to open yourself up for a huge range of potential problems, and I became determined to live by faith regardless of what my feelings happened to be. The feeling of fear is a very interesting one in how it relates to our ability to accurate understand any situation, for example. Or the numb absence of feeling, something I also know only too well. Or to find a path when all you feel is confusion. So if there’s only one correct route then how do you deal with the possibility that you might think you’re on it but actually aren’t?

By the way, I now subscribe to the latter. God’s will is worked out in my life through the authority he has delegated to me to make my own decisions, based on what I know of him, myself and the world I live in. By examining the consequences of my actions in the light of what I perceive of his wisdom, and my own limited and developing wisdom (if they are not aspects of the same thing) I am living in the realisation of god’s will. I’m convinced that the references to becoming like Jesus in scripture are to finding the unique and personal Jesus within us – exactly as those who have referenced Thelema and True Will above have already related – and that process only makes sense if it is about the choices we make of our own free will, to do what seems good and wise to me. My Christhood is within me, my hope is that it will begin to colour everything in my life, because my Christhood is synonymous with my Sethhood, they are the same thing, and to become more like him is the same process as becoming more like me. I AM the True Vine and My Father is the Husbandman.

Do you allow yourself to foster costly delays because of uncertainty about god’s will for you? If you’re anxious about whether something is right for you in accordance with god’s will or not, then how long can we allow ourselves for the decision making process? I’ve procrastinated for years because I’ve been terrified of doing the wrong thing, always with the knowledge that by procrastinating I almost certainly was doing the wrong thing because I was immobile, unmoveable, and therefore doing nothing except inserting the rod further up my own ass. Under what kind of timeframe do you operate?

Would you allow me to justify any decision I made, based purely on whether I said it was god’s will? What if I were wrong? What if you claimed you were enacting god’s will and weren’t? Look back at everything you know of history, fact and fiction, for examples of people who believed they were doing god’s will and the effects they may have had. This is one of the extraordinary benefits of faith in community, something that you mention in your first post. It’s an advantage of being part of a religion of people with similar religious ideas: you allow yourself constrastive analysis with the people around you, and you allow yourself to painfully and pleasurably rub your rough surfaces along other people’s rough surfaces and allow relationships with them to change you, as much as you might change them. I believe wholeheartedly that it’s impossible to know yourself without other people and the situations that arise between you. This is why the believed concept of an omniscient and loving god works for me regardless of whether it is true or not: by believing I am known utterly, to the furthest depths of myself, and by knowing that I am acceptable to god regardless of how I see myself, I allow myself to know myself. And that one of the best realisations of that relationship with god is in our relationships with other people: for me the two go inseparably hand in hand. The two greatest commandments are inextricably interwoven: To love the Lord Your God with all Your heart, and to love Your Neighbour as You love Yourself.

How much of god’s will or plan should we need to know at any given time? Does he give us a five year business model that is perfect despite the needs of the changing market? Or does he give us enough, just the amount we might need for any given moment? Does he allow us to live without any clear sense of his will for a season? Does he sometimes entrust us with a knowledge of his will that he doesn’t want us to act upon, for example knowledge relating to people and situations with which we are not directly involved? God's thoughts may not always seem similar to Our thoughts, neither are His ways always immediately identifiable as Our ways, and Who can drink of the cup of which He drinks?

When faced with options do we reject personal preference? In my experience almost everyone’s perceptions of god are coloured by their own history, and more often that not the more problematic element of the individual’s history is their relationship with their parents and how rewards were meted out and punishments given whether that was done justly or not. So often people think that if they are to follow god’s will it will by necessity be a joyless and soul destroying path in which their individuality is crushed, and they believe this quite rationally because of their previous experience of authority. But god is not like the authority figures of their experience. He is perfect authority, and his goal is for us to be happy regardless of whether we choose to know him or not, because in order to have the solid lasting happiness of the examined self we have to submit to the process of becoming ourselves fully, as hard and painful as that process can be at times, and that process is god. Don’t be surprised if you ask him what he wants and he replies, “You choose.” It’ll happen with increased frequency.

Do we count ourselves out of acting in accordance with the will of god because we see ourselves as unworthy? In my experience a lot of people never think they’ll be good enough, strong enough or important enough to take part in his plan, or that the need to do so will come at some future point of their life. How will you ever know if you’ve heard the starting gun? Exactly what constitutes *worthy?* This is why understanding that god is full of grace and acceptance is so important to Christian theology: to offer a bridge across people’s poor self image, because the self-image and the image of god your hold within yourself are inextricably linked. My Dad always says, “Your decisions concerning what you understand of god are the most important you’ll ever make.” What happens when you substitute the word *god* in that sentence for *yourself?*

Do we ask for signs? Do we test god? In my notes this practise is referred to as “putting out a fleece.” I think that’s taken from a Bible story in which a fleece was laid on the ground overnight because gave god the ultimatum, “If this decision is your will, then make this fleece dry when I check it in the morning, untouched by dew.” What if we don’t get the signs we want? How much of our freedom is removed by an omniscient god confirming courses of action by giving acknowledgement by the small-minded parameters in which we choose to give him to work? Should god choose to conform himself to what we want, should he become domesticated like that? Or should we pay attention to the infinite variety of ways in which he might be speaking, even if the way he chooses to speak is by allowing us in his wisdom to make a mistake that we believe he could have prevented by his power? In my experience god rarely visits by means of a lightning flash of an epiphany or eureka divine inspiration, let alone by means of a burning bush.

Is all of this carried out in retrospect? Do you live out a day and then examine what fits and what doesn’t fit with your understanding of god’s will? Do you only live out the will of god by looking backwards and learning from your successes and mistakes? Examining ourselves is of crucial importance, but being exclusively focused on the past is like driving away from a car crash in reverse: you get nowhere fast, it’s hard to manoeuvre, you can’t see obstacles because you’re always looking back, and chances are you’ll crash again before you’ve gone fifty feet. I think more psychiatrists and therapists should bear this in mind.

Those are just a few considerations, it’s not intended to be exhaustive, just a brief summary of some of the stuff I’ve had to consider throughout my life because of the way I grew up and who my Dad happened to be. And before I mention anything else I think it’s really important that one more question is asked: How many of the above considerations are important regardless of whether you’re trying to discern god’s will or your own will?

The way I operate is really simple these days: I am devoted to a God who is Everything in the Universe and also transcends the Universe, and that Every Part of Every Thing gives an indication of His Wholeness because That which is Above is reflected in That Which is Below, and that in My Self I hold the keys to understanding God, because I AM the God whose will I discern.

To me the splitting of god and myself in two is more about function than it is about a necessarily accurate description of reality, in that it is sometimes useful to see us as distinct in the same way it is useful to see myself as distinct from the air I breathe or what happens to the food I eat or my piss as it seeps into a brick wall and evaporates as steam as I stop to urinate after a winter night getting wankered in a warm pub full of friends. Sometimes it’s useful to see my friends and I as separate entities, sometimes it’s useful to see us as one single entity and notice how a change in one of us effects all of us, so if two people in a group suddenly get together in a relationship you observe the effect that has on the social structure and perceived hierarchies and how that might change the way those people are seen and acted towards. And because holiness is evenly distributed throughout everything because god is everything then it doesn’t matter whether he actually exists or not, because even a god shaped mirror of my own making will usefully reflect back the qualities of a god, and that mirror will reflect back in accordance with the properties I believe god should have (whether I am conscious of those beliefs or not). Consciously or not I would choose to believe in a god, whether he real or imagined, that acts in ways that may be unprecedented in my previous conceptions of who and what he is. And because everything is part of him I can usefully integrate all the pantheons of other divinities into this conception, as they are reflections of him as much as I am a reflection of him.

If the story of Jesus means anything at all then it means We are all God as he re-experiences Himself within His own Creation, and We all save Our own lives as He saves Us.

Just to pitch in back on topic (or more so), I have found my own behaviours in this whole strange yard of thoughts and actions to have drifted far more towards devotional 'religion' than anything else over the last year, particularly the last six months. Springing from a foundation of total gratitude for the gift of being, and a shrugging acceptance of the fact that I am not, have never been, and will never be in control, and that any sense of such is an illusion, has liberated much of the anxiety and emotional restrictiveness I used to roll with as par for the innings. I am barely in control of the thoughts which cross the screen of consciousness, never mind anything else. Respiration? nope. Immune system? nope. Bodily intelligence generally? Nothing to do with 'me'. The happenstance of my life? Sure, I have an intention. But that is all. Who am I to judge the way that intention manifests? To gauge the time it is going to take to resolve, if it is? What breathtaking presupposition, assumption, and arrogance. There is learning, slowly but surely, to just let it be, without attaching the labels 'Good' or 'Bad' to any of it. The intention is the only (apparent) choice.

It has struck me, as I posted over in the aphorisms thread, that the majority of nodes I encounter requiring an apparent choice, can be usefully sorted in terms of intention, before other considerations, into just two (isn't it always?) base options: Satisfaction of appetite or avoidance of entaglement in suffering.

Suffering is a slippery one, because it is essential to remember that the division between self and other is false. Causing your body (which I take to include the 'emotional body' and 'mind', no seperation, all one thing) to suffer is causing suffering no different to inflicting it 'out there' (hah). It, among other factors, has informed my decision to be vegan, and given me pause for thought over many things within this definition - to honey, or not to honey? It's an ongoing process, and will remain so, but I find the consciousness of it immensely important, suddenly...am I involving myself in a movement of the chain reaction of suffering in order to satisfy the appetites of my ego? Can I avoid this, or at least consciously reduce that movement, towards a goal of complete conscious abnegation? Is it possible?

The reason I wish to is because I believe the entire process of 'God' (existence, isness, that which underlies, gives rise to and bounds Everything, while being 'itself' without boundary, which defines all forms yet has none, which is unseperate and inseperable and yet within which all seperation is occurring and arising, etc...the abstract state of Being which underlies all existence, even Nothing and Nowhere, if such a no-thing and no-place actually 'exist'...the Supreme Being, yes? Not a noun, a verb (and actually neither of those, but, you know, words...) to be Unififed and Closed...like a Tom and Jerry cartoon bump-on-the-head, which can be pushed back flat only to pop up elsewhere exactly the same size and dimensions and emotional weight and resonance. I figure its my point, if I have one, and the point, if there is one. I don't especially mind if there isn't - I'll most likely never know. But it feels right, to me.

I'd say discovering the book 'Prayers of the Cosmos' pretty much radicalised my entire take on the figure of Jesus and the teachings he shared...I know the Aramaic inside out, now, and use it daily, it is so powerful and each line worthy of deep meditation depending on mood and circumstance, location, many things. As a working prayer, I adore it, and I also know a nice slice of Portuguese, both traditional and personal, which I work through, and possibly translate quite deliberately afterwards for myself as well, given time...

I've done this round these parts in a couple of other threads, but will go again, it never bores me.

The first phrase, particularly, contains the vibratory pitch which should resonate most deeply within the whole body - this is your own heritage from Abwoon, and requires a little time and attention to find, and fix...as it leads into the silence, I follow it, and sort of Vipassana meditate on all the processes within my body that continue wihtout attention - heartbeat, breathing, peristalsis, muscular tension etc. - and consider each as internal prayers that point to the gift and responsibility of co-creation with and as part of God.

Abwoon d'bwashmaya

- Pai Nosso que estais no Ceu

- Our father which art in heaven

- O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos, divine process of creation, Radiant Oneness, source of all Power and Stability, whose light, sound, name and vibration within perfection touching and interpenetrating all form, shining in every place we see, every centre of activity, in the potential of all things, that we are able to recognise by our own conscious manifestation in and of this very Universe - name of names, our small identity unravels in you, you hand it back as a lesson. Wordless and actionless action, Silent Potency, where ears and eyes awaken, there Heaven comes, and is, and remains. O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos.

nethqadash shmakh

- Santificado seja o Vosso Nome

- Hallowed be thy Name

- Focus your light within us - make it useful, as the rays of a beacon show the way. Help us breathe one holy breath, feeling only this radiance - creating a shrine inside, and thus around, in wholeness. Help us let go, clearing a space inside of busy forgetfulness: So the Name has a place to live. This Name, this Sound, this Vibration can move us, and play us as instruments, if we tune our intentions as instruments to its tone. Hear the One sound that gave birth to all others, in this way the Name is hallowed in Silence. So often I look elsewhere for this Light, this Sound, drawn out of myself - but the Name always lives within. Focus your Light within us - make it useful.

Teytey malkuthakh

- Vamos nos ao Vosso Reino

- Thy Kingdom come

- Create your reign of Unity now - through this fiery heart and willing hands. Let your quiet counsel rule this life, clearing this intention for co-creation. Unite our sense of "I can" within the Great Mother to your own, that we may walk as Kings and Queens with every creature upon the Earth. Desire with and through us the rule of Universal fruitfulness onto the earth. Your guidance springs into existence as and at the moment that we reach out to embrace all of Creation. Come into the bedroom of our hearts, prepare us for the Divine marriage and union of Power and Beauty. From this Holy Union let us birth new images for a world of Peace. Create your reign of Unity now.

Nehwey tzevyannach aykanna d'bwashmaya aph b'arha

- Seja feita vossa vontade, assim na Terra como no Ceu

- Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven

- Your One desire then acts with and of our own, as in all Light, so in all forms. Let all harmonious cooperation of movement, all actionless action move together in your vortex, as stars and planets swirl through the cosmos. Help us love beyond our ideals and sprout acts of compassion for all creatures. As we find your unbounded Love reflected in our own, let the Universe and all the Powers of Nature form a new creation. Unite the crowd within in a vision of passionate purpose : light mates with form. Create in me a divine co-operation, harmonious - from many selves, one voice, in chorus, one action, in unity. Let your inscrutable fervent desire unite heaven and earth through out harmony. Your One desire then acts with and of our own, as in all Light, so in all forms.

And so on, sorry, I don't have the time for the rest...

And still, within all of this, afterwards, I have time for my Lady Oxum, whom I have a very personal song for, which I recite for her every day, that her particular mysteries may manifest and be present in my attention...like the malakh or angelos of Hebrew/Christian eschatology, the Orixa serve as messengers (the meaning of those two words, in Hebrew/Greek) to the somewhat unapproachable and difficult to do much but give thanks by humans Immensity. The form of this song is very beautiful, and ends with a Yoruba hail to Her...my Brazilian friend, who is part of a Iemanja congregation back in Brazil, told me it is perfectly reminiscent of the Oxum hinos he knows from his homeland - very melodic, swooping, slightly sad...I treasure it. It was a beautiful gift, to me, and my friends, from Her. All under the auspicies of the immense Abwoon here in d'bwashmaya.

It integrates seamlessly with my more general devotions, I find.

Sheesh, rambling much? What Seth said.

On Faith