pam grout

Excerpt

“God looks like Z.Z. Top” and other annoying myths: where we learn we are badly misinformed.

 

“Suppose we’ve chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we’re just making him madder and madder.”—Homer Simpson

No sooner did I master my ABC’s than I was taught that I, little Pammy Sue Grout, was a miserable sinner and had fallen short of the glory of God. It was a fact same as 2 plus 2 equals four and that el-em-in-oh-pee is more than one letter in the alphabetical lineup. The only redeeming part of this all-important lesson is that at least I’m not alone. Turns out, everybody else in the world is a sinner, too. Even Mrs. Beckwith, my tender-hearted kindergarten teacher who let me bring Pokey, my pet turtle, to class every other Monday.

The bad thing about being a sinner is that it guarantees a one-way ticket to hell. It was a little hard getting a handle on hell, beings I hadn’t traveled much further than the Kansas border. But, according to my dad, hell was not a place you want to be. It was hotter than my Aunt Gwen and Uncle Ted’s house in Texas the summer their air-conditioner broke. And, unlike that vacation that ended after four days, you stay in hell for eternity. To understand eternity, he said, you think of how you felt last December 26 waiting for Christmas again.

The escape clause is that you can “get saved.”

So when I was four years old, with the church organist playing “Just As I Am,” I walked to the front of the little Methodist church in Canton, Kansas, plopped down on my knobby little four-year-old knees, and asked the good lord to “forgive me for my sins.”  My family, a long line of Methodists, collectively breathed a sigh of relief. Dad and mom called all the aunts and uncles that very night to broadcast the good news.

“Well, our oldest is officially saved now,” they crowed proudly. “At least, we can be assured that Pam is going to heaven.”

The best part, they figured, is that my conversion couldn’t help but set a good example for my sister, Becki, who was two, and my brother Bobby, who was only three months old, although I secretly hoped they would give him until he was old enough to talk.

Course, you didn’t want to take any chances. I mean, Jesus could come back at any time–night or day. He was like a thief in the night. He could come in the morning while you were stirring circles in your Captain Crunch cereal. He could come at recess while you’re hanging from your knees on the monkey bars. He could even come at 2 in the morning while you were sleeping, which could be a real problem if you happen to be a heavy sleeper. Jesus could snatch you up before you had time to get the sleep out of your eyes.

And that you didn’t EVEN want to think about. I mean, Aunt Gwen and Uncle Ted’s house was hot.

At the same time I was learning to accept my true sinful identity, I was being told over and over again that, “God is love.” Never mind that the churches presented God as a sort of hidden camera that watched over everything I did.

It made no rational sense. But, of course, I was only four. What did I know?

Even though I was yawningly close to being a perfect kid (I made straight “A’s,” tried not to fight with my siblings, stayed away from drugs and alcohol, and even made my bed without being told), I felt I was constantly being critiqued by this “loving God” who was sitting up in heaven, gleefully rubbing his hands together whenever I screwed up. Which, gosh darn it, (oops, there I go again, using his name in vain) seemed to be pretty often.

What a legacy to dump on an innocent child.

God as Terrorist

”I don’t know if God exists, but it would certainly be better for His reputation if He didn’t. “

–Jules Renard

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby used to say that if even half of what we believed about God were true, he would be the worst of all tyrants. Osama Bin Laden has nothing on the God we believe in.

The churches and religions of the world have done a huge disservice to God.  They’ve taken this really cool force, this transcendant power, and turned it into a dreaded scared tactic. They’ve stripped God of all compassion, oneness, unity, peace, and mysticism. Their duck and cover theology has convinced us that we are the “bad guys” and that the only one wearing a white hat, the only one who can untie us from the railroad track is Jesus.

As I said, we are badly misinformed.

What’s up is down, what’s in is out, what’s true is false

“The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, of the merchants a merchant.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ask the average individual if he believes in God and he will probably say, “Well, duh!” However, it’s unlikely he will have ever asked himself exactly what he means by God. When pressed, he’d probably answer with some cliché about “the guy upstairs.”

Like these clichés, the God we’ve come to believe in is purely an invention of man. We made him up. Or rather the churches made him up to keep us in line. They fabricated God for the sake of convenience, based their teachings on human experience, not on deep, spiritual truth.

By now this God behaving badly is so firmly established in our consciousness that it never even occurs to us to question it. It’s an opinion planted thousands of years ago that has since grown into a jungle so thick that it never dawns on us to hack our way out.

We accept this God made by man as an indisputable fact. After all, it has been substantiated by ages and ages of Bible interpretation, hasn’t it?

But it makes no sense. If God is love, if God is perfect, if God is good, why would he toss anyone into a lion’s den? Furthermore, why would anyone in their right mind want to hook up with a capricious and unjust god who gets his jollies from punishing them? Even the ditziest of women knows theoretically that she shouldn’t hang out with a guy who might hurt her.

I mean, who needs it?

The ten prevailing fabrications about God:

“Our ideas of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”

– Thomas Merton

Myth No# 1: God is a him. Even though the progressive churches sometimes refer to God as “she,” the God force doesn’t really have a gender. We certainly don’t talk about Mrs. Electricity or Mr. Gravity. The more appropriate pronoun for God would be “It.” God is a force field that runs the universe, a powerful energy source that constantly pushes for wholeness, for growth, for change. It’s the same power that grows flowers, that scabs over skinned knees. Not only is God not a him, it’s not a person at all—anymore than Winnie the Pooh is really a bear that eats honey and talks to Eeyore and Christopher Robinson.

God is more like the force in Star Wars, a presence that dwells within us, a principle by which we live. All of us use “the force” all the time. Our thoughts, our bodies, our consciousness are all vibrating waves of energy. Instinctively, we all know this. That’s why Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader have become such a phenomenon. Star Wars is a myth that speaks to us at a deep, gut level. Some part of us knows that “the force is with us” and that we, through our words, thoughts and deeds, create the world. In fact, it is not too much to say that if you catch the true concept of God, you will be swept up in a new consciousness that will revolutionize your life.

Myth #2: God looks like Z.Z. Top, makes black checkmarks after your name, and is basically too busy working on world hunger to care about you. God, if you believe the preachers, is a little like Boo Radley, this mysterious neighbor constantly peering out the window of his penthouse suite, waiting to catch us doing something “naughty, naughty.” We can’t really see him, but we’ve been properly warned that he’s there. Watching. Judging. Monitoring our every move. If you don’t follow this commandment or if you break that commandment, God just might send his angel secret service after you to bop you on the head like little bunny foo-foo.

Nobody would ever admit to thinking of God as a person, but we all do. We can’t help it. It’s our nature to lump things together, to try to make sense of things. The reptilian part of our brains likes order, likes to understand things–even if it is limited and wrong. Whenever something trips us up, we find a box that we do understand to squeeze it into.

Like parents. We tend to think of God as a father, a guy who keeps us in line, a guy who might love us, but has to (this-is-going-to-hurt me-worse-than-it-hurts-you) punish us.

While we wouldn’t go so far as to send cards on Father’s Day, we openly call God “our father” and in so doing assign him with characteristics we find in our human fathers. Some of these attributes are good. Some of them are bad. All of them are wrong.

By clothing God in human form we might get someone to talk to, but we also end up with a divine busybody who changes his mind, holds grudges, and takes revenge. This inaccurate image of God forever stands in our way.

When we use expressions like “God’s will, “the hand of God,” “God watches over you,” even “God loves you” we’re only reinforcing

the idea that God has human qualities. Only a fool would trust a god that’s anything like him.

Myth No#3: God plays favorites. Once again, the churches have led us to believe we need an intermediary, that we have to go through them to get to God. That’s completely false. God is a force field and is equally available to everyone.

We’ve also been taught that some people have spiritual power and others don’t. We’ve been taught that Jesus and Buddha and other spiritual geniuses have a special power. Sorry, Charlie. You lost out. The truth is that God, which is love, peace, and everything good, is a natural capacity in all of us, not an exclusive gift to a few.

We all have God within us. In fact, that is the primary lesson Jesus taught. God is within. You are part of God. You can perform miracles. Unfortunately, church bigwigs didn’t like that idea—how in the heck were they going to control people and collect tithes if the people were out there performing their own miracles?—so they did what any good thinking dictator would do. They rewrote Jesus’ teachings.

In fact, to worship Jesus the way we do is a little like worshipping Benjamin Franklin because he first discovered electricity. Ben Franklin sent that kite up in an electric storm so we could use the principle he demonstrated. He didn’t do it so we’d build temples to him, paint pictures of him, and wear little keys around our necks. He wanted us to take the principle of electricity and use it…which we do to run radios and computers and air-conditioners. Had we stopped with Ben’s discovery the way we did with Jesus’ discovery, we’d all be sitting in the dark.

Benjamin Franklin didn’t invent electricity anymore than Jesus invented spiritual principles. Lightning and the resulting electricity have always been available. We just didn’t realize it or know how to access it. Galileo didn’t invent gravity when he dropped the wooden ball off the leaning tower of Pisa. He just demonstrated it.

Likewise, Jesus demonstrated spiritual principles that he wants us to use and develop. We’ve wasted 2000 years worshipping this idol of him instead of using the principles he taught us. Look through the

Bible and nowhere does Jesus say, “worship me.” He call to us was “follow me.” There’s a big difference.

By making Jesus out to be a hero, we miss the whole point. Jesus wasn’t saying, “I’m cool. Make statues of me, turn my birthday into a huge commercial holiday.”   He was saying, “Here, look what is possible. Look what we humans are capable of.”

Jesus is our brother, our legacy, the guy we’re supposed to emulate.

What Jesus was trying to tell us is that the churches, the religious leaders, and all their blaring rhetoric has drowned out God’s truth. They’ve pulled the wool over our eyes by failing to mention the fact that God is not just an object of worship, but a very real presence and a principle by which we should live.

Myth #4: God is just so demanding. The Ten Commandments are just the beginning. If you believe the churches, there are rules for everything—how much of your salary to stick in the offering plate, how much of your day to spend in prayer, how to treat your mother, your father, your pet chiauahua. But here’s the truth: God needs nothing. God requires nothing of us to be happy. God is happiness itself. Therefore, God requires nothing of anyone or anything in the universe. God knows nothing of sin, nothing of want, nothing of lack of any kind.

Despite what those Bible-beating TV evangelists have told you, God takes nothing personally. The God force is pure love, tolerance, compassion, generosity, beauty, gentleness, joy and, get this, completely uninterested in that extra beer you drank last night or that time you called your brother, “Mr. Poopy Pants.” As far as the God force is concerned, you walk on water. There’s no ring-around-the-collar, bad breath, or any adjective whatsoever that falls anyplace in a thesaurus except under love.

The God force doesn’t judge. It doesn’t punish. It doesn’t think, “well, Sammy C. was a good boy yesterday, helping that little old lady across the street. I think I’ll answer his prayer about winning the lottery.”

Those are thoughts Sandra Day O’Connor might think. Or Freddy Krueger. God doesn’t make judgments or play favorites. It doesn’t like Mother Teresa more than Celine Dion.

Only misinformed humans, scrambling desperately to make sense of their world, came up with a God who plays eenie-minie-mo with our lives, a God who likes and dislikes the same people we do. It’s because we’re angry and judgmental that we project those characteristics onto God.

There’s no getting around it. We are violent people–emotionally if not physically. We’ve been brought up in a world that doesn’t put love first and where love is absent fear sets in. And our fear has trapped us into a box that plays out our very limited perception. So whether we admit it or not, we have a tendency to see God as a person, as someone like us. We have made him up to fit our feeble, puny, whiny understanding.

This is going to come as a big shock to an awful lot of people, but there is also no such thing as right and wrong. There is only what works and what doesn’t work, depending upon what it is that you seek to be, do or have.

Myth #5: God rewards our suffering, gives brownie points for our sacrifice better known as “Life sucks and then you die.”  Most of us think life is some sort of boot camp for heaven. We believe this short life span is “only a test” for the paradise we’re eventually going to earn. If we hang on and bear up, we’ll someday walk through those pearly gates and be happy.  These errors in thinking have been condensed into living facts. Nothing is plainer than the inevitability of sorrows and trials.

But what if it isn’t necessary? What if there is no reason to be poor? Or sick? Or do anything but live an abundant, exciting life? What if these tragic, difficult lives are another rumor made up by the churches and cemented into our consciousness by years and years of conditioning?

What I’d like to suggest is this heaven you’re waiting for is available now. And that you’ve been sold a bill of goods about who you are and what is possible.

This “sacrifice” you’re unselfishly giving is a notion totally foreign to God. In fact, sacrifice and God energy are polar opposites. The God force is about growth, wholeness, and joyful living. God would never, ever, ever have anything but your very best interests at heart. And you’ve been given a snow job by anybody who tells you that being sick is God’s will, that being poor is God’s will. God’s will is whatever your will is. In fact, your mind contains the God energy and therefore what you think and focus on comes into being.

You’re probably thinking, “Yea, right! Easy for you to say.” But what I’m saying and what this book is all about —is don’t take my word for it. Test it out. Give it a try.

The way I figure it there are only four reasons we aren’t all joyous, loving freedom fighters:

1. We didn’t know we could be.

2. We didn’t ask.

3. We don’t use our mind power properly. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a sailboat, but if you have, you know that unless you hold the sails in the right position, you’re pretty much stuck paddling in circles. The wind, like your mind, is a potent energy source, but it won’t take you anywhere until you learn the proper way to use it.

4. We like drama. Ever wonder why roller coasters are so popular? Why movies like Alien v. Predator boost ticket sales? C’mon, admit it, you crane your neck around to see those mangled bodies lying there along the side of the road after a car accident. You actually like being a little off-kilter and guess what? As long as you enjoy this, you get to have it.

Myth #6: You don’t want to ask too much from God, certainly wouldn’t want to bug him. As I’ve already pointed out, God is not a person so therefore you cannot bug him. God is a power, an unseen spiritual force. It isn’t finite or limited so you certainly couldn’t ask too much of it. As the old saying goes, you can take an eyedropper or a bucket to the ocean. The ocean doesn’t care. If anything we don’t use the God power nearly enough. This is an all-powerful force we’re talking about here, not some last-minute relief team that comes in to pay the mortgage. God is not an adversary that has to be coaxed to the bargaining table.

The God force simply follows the energy you send out. Our thought vibrations draw similar vibrations. Here’s an example: I once thought to myself that I’d like a potato masher. I didn’t mention it to anyone. I just made a mental note, “Next time you’re at Wal-Mart, buy a potato masher.” That very night, my friend Wendy, who was cleaning out her drawers, stopped by with a couple no-longer-needed cooking tools including a potato masher. Another time, I decided I needed more laughter in my life. Within a couple weeks, I met and began dating Todd, a funny co-worker who eventually became a comedian.

The coincidences we see in our lives are just “the force” at work. Most of the time, we employ the force inadvertently, totally oblivious to the fact that what we think, say, and do makes a difference. Consequently, we constantly activate this power to follow the patterns we already believe in.

Myth #7: God doesn’t answer. I must not have faith. Oh, you have faith, my friend. But you have faith in the wrong things.

Over the years, the gods have always been used as scapegoats for things we don’t understand. Look at Greek mythology. If something doesn’t compute in our limited brains, we say, “see, the Gods are really pissed off. They’re taking it out on us.” We’ll grab at any explanation to avoid taking responsibility ourselves. We’re like six-year-olds looking for someone to blame, always pointing fingers outside ourselves. So what if I ate sugar and red meat all my life, didn’t exercise much. This cancer must be God’s will.

Myth #8: God is just so vague. Au contraire. Once you get rid of the black cloud of rumors and half-truths that hide your awareness of God, you’ll find the unseen force communicates just as clearly as Dr. Laura. Once you rid yourself of the blocks, you’ll be shown exactly what to do and how to do it. Like Maxwell Smart, you’ll be given specific assignments complete with individualized instructions on how to proceed.

Again, the churches have gotten a lot of mileage out of steeping God in mystery and superstition. Since he’s so obtuse, they tell us, we’d better listen to them.

Again, we need to condition ourselves to think of God more like we think of electricity. Electricity doesn’t care who plugs in a curling iron. Electricity doesn’t ask us to prove we’re good enough to make toast.

Myth #9: God only answers when he’s good and ready. There is never a time when God or “the force” isn’t guiding you. And you do not have to wait for any green lights or “Get out of jail free” cards.  The big guy is available 24/7 once you’re ready to focus your full attention on it. And God’s guidance, as they say about well, something else– happens–through a song lyric on the radio, by a phone call from a long-lost friend. The trick is to pay attention, trust and, as I will continue to repeat, focus your full attention on it.

Myth #10: God created the heavens and the earth. Admittedly, this is one of the toughest myths to debunk. If God didn’t make this mess, who in the heck did? This may be a hard pill to swallow, but we—you and me–made the mess we call material reality.  If you look very closely at what we politely assume to be the building blocks of the universe, you’ll discover they’re dicey at best. Or to put it another way, as renowned physicist Briane Greene did in the New York Times, “quantum fluctuations so mangle space and time that the conventional ideas of left/right, backward-forward, up/down, and before/after become meaningless.” In other words, we’re experiencing war, global warming, and even tsunamis because that’s what we’ve come to expect, what we look for, what we think is reality. We created this disaster with our angry, fearful consciousness. The exciting thing about this truth (that it’s us, not God) is that another way IS possible. We do not have to accept war and sickness and injustice. We, by changing our consciousness, can create a peaceful, and therefore tsunami-free world. This is possible. And this is what we must continue to look for.

We have a huge tendency to dub things we don’t understand, “God’s will.” But God can’t be blamed if there’s not peace in your relationships. If your body has cancer. Those things aren’t God’s will. God’s will, let me repeat, is one thing and one thing only–love, love, love.

And while we’re on the topic of God’s will, let’s get this out on the table. There is no place in our updated picture of God for a hell of everlasting torment or for a misogynist that would or could attempt to put you there. Nor is there any room for the idea that sickness or deformity or death or poverty or limitation of any kind is the will of God. The will of God, if you insist on using that term, is the ceaseless longing of the spirit in you to become all you’re capable of being.  Amen.

Plenty of Christians, not enough lions: a whole new paradigm

“You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

–Buckminster Fuller

The fact that the crucifix and Jesus’ intense suffering is the central theme of Christianity should have been a dead give-away that something is all screwed up. Like the little boy who hollered, “The king has no clothes on,” somebody should have stood up a long time ago and screamed at the top of their lungs “The Christian church has severely distorted the big cheese’s message.”

So how did this happen? Remember that game “telephone” we played as kids. One person whispers something in somebody’s ear. And then that person repeats it into the ear of the next person. By the time it gets to the end of the circle, a simple statement such as the “The sky is blue” ends up being something like “Abraham Lincoln wears army boots.”

Keep in mind that the printing press wasn’t even invented until 1450 years after Jesus whispered his profound truths into the ears of his disciples. How could his message NOT have gotten a little misconstrued?

Am I suggesting we all take up the stance of Nietzsche’s madman who lit a candle and ran through the marketplace, declaring, “God is dead?” that we put God out of his misery rather than allow him to hang out like some doddering, unwanted, old fool? No, that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Nietzsche was right on in suggesting  the Christian conception of God was corrupt, but instead of planning a funeral, maybe we should simply drive a stake through the heart of our old beliefs.

Maybe it’s time to throw a flaming machete into the teetering tower of old has-been ways of thinking.

Albert Einstein once said that the most important decision any of us ever make is whether the universe is friendly or not. This book will also ask you to make the following decisions:

Is there a benevolent force or not?

Are we guided or not?

Is the world sufficient or not?

Are your fellows for you or against you?

Is the world material or spiritual?

So which is it, fear or love?

Last summer, I learned about paradigm shifting from Lance Polingyouma, a 30-something Hopi Indian whose father is the official storyteller of the Hopi nation.

Lance, who was trained back East as an anthropologist and archeologist, has a fascinating understanding of his culture and you might assume that he used some great Hopi legend about cacti or kachinas to change my paradigm. Oh, how wrong you’d be.

Instead, Lance asked me one simple, pointed question. “Do you ever eat Starburst?”

“Of course,” I replied. “How can you grow up in America without getting at least a few packages at Halloween?”

“How do you eat them?” he contined.

“Well, I peel the wrapper off each candy, toss it in my mouth, and enjoy the lime, the orange, the lemon, or the cherry flavor.”

“Have you ever tired a lime and an orange starburst together?” he asked. “At the same time. In the same mouth.”

Why I’d never thought of that before. Had I not met Lance, I might still be eating Starburst one at a time, missing out on all that juicy fun.