“We’d rather cuddle with a statue”: We Remove the Essence of Divinity from Our Ideas of the Divine ... and What God Really Is Is God Nothing or No Thing? … Why We Think Less Is More “…we keep removing the essence of Divinity — Experience — from all our depictions of Divinity, guaranteeing we will be wrong.” “We turn living Spirit into emotionless icon and end up worshiping, even emulating, the very things that our holy people exhort us to look away from.” “There is a good reason why we make the mistake of confusing unfeelingness and a vapid personality and life experience with a greater and more Divine one. We are so traumatized by things that have been done to us in early life … maybe we had an angry daddy, a cruel mommy … that we get comfort only in imagining a Divine with no emotional qualities. We would rather cuddle with a statue, cozy up to a piece of granite, or be enamored of an empty concept or an ambiguous image or symbol than expose ourselves to what we feel to be the only alternative. That is, that Divinity might come crashing down on us like a thunderbolt … something perhaps our parents did. Because life was threatening to us, once, we seek to create a Divinity, thus, a Reality, that will not be, cannot be.” “Emotions having become soured in us, in our religious and spiritual pursuits we strive to empty ourselves of them. Our cultures, similarly, glorify the unaffected personality; and we wish to put ourselves above our feelings and to train our children out of their emotions. We call it “growing up” to be more insensitive, less spontaneous … to be impassionate, and morosely and meekly obedient. Our educators exhort us to deny emotions; our doctors provide pills to suppress them; and our therapists counsel their clients, helping them to be less alive. Like suburbanites paving over everything with asphalt and with manicured lawns in which any weed has been assassinated out of existence, we are terrified of anything unpredictable in the Divine, anything emotional. We want to control Divinity.” “…this kind of going to the opposite extreme of emotion … worshiping nothingness, emotionlessness … does not give us a picture of Reality. It only gives us a picture of a defense against what happened to us. The problem is that God is more, not less of what is Real. Divinity is not Reality devoid of the Real, of real experience. But that is what, out of fear, we have come to wish for.” “How many stories have you heard, how many movies have you seen, where some old curmudgeon of a man or woman … some really mean S.O.B. is depicted at the end to have a heart of gold?” “What we are telling ourselves over and over is that the meanness we experienced didn’t really happen. We are engaging in denial. Daddy and Mommy really did love us, though they never showed it. Like the incomprehensible goodness our religions tell us to worship, it was hidden … “ “We do something similar with the Divine. We’ve experienced meanness and cruelty in our early lives, so we imagine a Divine with no qualities at all. We say It is loving, but in an incomprehensible way and “from a distance.”” “So how loving … really … is someone who is distant? We don’t see ourselves as free and loved and forgiven … let alone, sinless and unjudged. We are terrified of an emotionlessness monster, which we call God, which we say is loving, but who we depict as emotionless so as to be better able to apprehend than if we depicted Him as we felt Him to be … cruel.” “We’d rather think of God as being nothing … or devitalized … rather than heartless; like we feel Him to be, because of our experiences with authorities in childhood.” “…we’ve built theologies out of our fears.” “We’ve created religions to soothe and deny our experiences … our Experience.” “The theologies and religions … and many spiritualities … have nothing to do with God, either. They take the most alive, profound, glorious, and exciting things imaginable (and unimaginable) and reduce them to nothing … and thus to something that is safe: A statue Jesus. A distant and unknowable God. An amorphous, boring, and bland Universal Consciousness. An impersonal detail of the physical world like light, vibration, or energy. All of which — in denial of what we truly feel about them and their coldness, abstractness, or emptiness — we call glorious, ultimate, grand … and loving. Like those heartless parental figures we wished had been there for us … but weren’t….” https://facebook/notes/michael-adzema/wed-rather-cuddle-with-a-statue-we-remove-the-essence-of-divinity-from-our-ideas/10152677583538138
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 21:20:07 +0000
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