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Last year, I started going to a support group for women with breast cancer at the Hearth Place, a not-for-profit cancer support center in Oshawa. It carried me through some of the worst parts of the journey, and when I felt like I needed something more, I “graduated” myself to a class called The Healing Journey.
The first part of The Healing Journey was a four week introductory class on how to cope with cancer, and the second part took those principles and expanded on them in an eight week class. There was a bit of a gap, but now I’m taking The Healing Journey 3, which started a week and a half ago. It focuses on the spiritual side of our healing journey.
Our first homework assignment was to think about what God is. Because I am, of course, a writer, I wrote down an essay that I read aloud to my classmates. One of my peers asked if I’d posted this on my blog, to which the answer was, no, not yet, and she encouraged me to do so.
But before I actually share an edited and expanded version of it, I need to ramble on for a bit, because that’s what I do, right?
Toward the end of chemotherapy, I was (weirdly) starting to feel minutely better, and I decided that I wanted to do some reading with the one or two extra spoons I had every day/week. Early in chemo, I wasn’t able to read because my brain fog was too much, but something shifted after my stint in the hospital to allow a little bit of respite.
My original thought was to take a tour of the religions of the world to understand what was out there. I wanted to read widely. I wanted to be serious about it; I wanted to be logical and rational and thorough.
Well.
What actually happened was that I started reading and things began to fall into place. Every time I’d finish a book, another one would come along. Sometimes it would be in the recommended reading section. One time, a psychic told me that Herman was trying to get me to read a certain book. (That’s a whole other story.) Another time, I happened upon an author on a website that I was at because something else happened only tangentially related… And on and on like this. Each book was a stepping stone to the next, with no clear path. I’ve come to trust it, though. Whatever I’m supposed to be reading next is going to appear when I’m done with the last, and I’ll be swept into more knowledge than I ever imagined existed.
I actually don’t remember how I happened upon this book, but it was the book I needed, the one that could bridge the gap between the physical and spiritual for me, at just the time and place I was at. Entangled Minds by Dead Radin talks about how psychic phenomena are now being proven in a laboratory setting. There’s a whole ugly undercurrent around what the monolith of Science accepts as proof, but for me, it was enough.
I decided to believe, for the first time in my life, that psi experiences are real. That they’re not coincidences. That when the phone rings and you know it’s your best friend, it wasn’t a lucky guess.
One day when I was pregnant with the twins, Morrigan, Kevin, and I were sitting at the table, eating dinner. She was about three, and she looked at me and said, “What’s that music?”
I thought, Oh, maybe she hears the neighbors. So I listened, but I didn’t hear anything. “I’m sorry, honey, I don’t hear anything. What music?”
“The music! What’s the music?”
Then my phone started to ring–of course, it was a song.
That right there–that happened. That’s real. She knew. And even more–it doesn’t need to be explained away.
And that’s what I first had to work on. I was so enmeshed in the Scientific way of looking at things: What’s the rational explanation? There’s got to be something that I was missing. Maybe the neighbors were playing music and I didn’t hear it.
But no. No more. At that point, once I read that book, my spiritual journey had begun.
Also, if you want to test your own psychic abilities, go have a gander at GotPsi.org and prepare for your mind to be blown.
It took a lot of thought to come to my conclusion, but I’m fairly confident in my views on the nature of God. What I really think is that whatever we perceive with our limited humans minds is far less than what actually exists. I think that we’re sitting in a dark room, with our faces to the wall, seeing only 5% of the universe. But for what we know–for what we can know–of that 5%, this is a pretty good approximation.
The questions were:
- Your views
- Write an account of your current views on the possible existence of some higher power, order, intelligence, or God.
- What would you regard as evidence? What would it take to convince you?
- What kind of doubts or resistance do you have? Or perhaps you have had experiences that convinced you of the existence of a higher power. Write about them.
- Your understanding of the Divine: If you believe or are prepared to consider that a Divine Power, Order, Intelligence, or Being exists, ask yourself:
- What might it be like?
- What is God not like?
- What is your relationship to this power? How do you fit into the picture?
- What would convince you of the existence of such a Power?
- What would convince you it does not exist?
And here was my answer.
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I believe in the Divine as a force that is what everything (matter, energy, and all unseen forces) is made of. I also believe that a property of this force is consciousness–that is, “sub-groups” of particles bind together to have will and personality. This is an animist worldview–something not the norm in Western culture–that people, animals, trees, rocks, chairs, walls, doorways, all have a spirit that is a result of this grouping together.
In nature, we see combinations of life joining to create something whole that has a will of its own. As an example, birds flying in a V don’t actually have a leader. They turn as one. (See more on this in Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispensa, another stepping stone in my journey.) I believe “God” is the whole of the universe, greater than the sum of its parts, a consciousness that arises out of all the smaller consciousnesses within it.
Put another way, the Universe–God–is like a clock. Open the back and you see gears and bolts, which are distinct from one another and have them own specific purpose. But they fit together to create a whole that couldn’t be imagined by looking at each individual part.
God is not a surrogate parent. God is not either male or female: God is both because It is everything. God does not tell you what to do. God has no rules. We our own judges. God does not, will not judge us. It may hold up a mirror to our actions, but It does not tell us what to do. God is not separate from us; It is made up of us. We are the particles inside of God’s “body.”
From God proceeds individual parts–forces or deities that help run the universe. I believe there is a “spirit” of gravity, of electromagnetism, a “spirit” of nature that establishes–that is–the laws of nature. In some cultures, these forces/spirits are regarded as or worshiped as gods. Because of how the universe works, these forces can and do respond as “people” with personalities. But they’re not necessarily human or human-like. They would “talk” to a rock like a rock or a cat like a cat, so they talk to people like people as best as they can.
Because the Divine therefore is Everything, I interact with it sometimes as a personality (in worship or devotion, for advice, for comfort) and sometimes with tools (such as tarot or a pendulum). I also interact with its sub-forces in the same way–these forces, gods, spirits, including Herman and my other two spirit guides–as one might talk to a friend. I “feel” the energy of objects. I try to make them “happy,” to help them in fulfilling their purpose, for isn’t that what makes us all happy? I have a respect, now, of all items, including inanimate objects, which I use to affect my will out into the great web / quantum field of the Universe / God.
When I was diagnosed with cancer, I felt like I had gone through the looking glass into a hostile and confusing world from which I could never escape. Toward the end of chemo, I felt a strong calling to figure out what I believe and how I fit into the universe, although at the time, I didn’t realize the Unseen was actually calling me. As I’ve found my way through this looking glass world, I’ve found it much more wondrous, strange, and magickal than the one I knew before.
I don’t think I could ever go back because I feel so strongly that something is leading me through the fog of the unknown. I do have doubts–fears that I’m crazy or making things up. But instead of worrying so much as I did for so many years about “what if it isn’t true,” I choose to believe. I’ve had too many spiritual and psychic experiences in the past few months to ever truly doubt that there’s something more.
Plus I much prefer this world, filled with beautiful spirit helpers that surround and embrace me, than the dead, Godless, angry one populated by logic and rationality that I believed in before.
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