In sharing spiritual awareness with so many wonderful people over the last 35+ years since my own lucky, Grace-filled gift of suddenly one day realizing in my 16th year that we are literally\u00a0made out of God\u2019s Love and Light and Peace and Joy<\/i>\u00a0(an entirely unexpected event that instantly changed my life forever), I have time and time again noticed that a remarkably large segment of our population has a very\u00a0negative<\/i>\u00a0sense of this powerful little word \u201cGod.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In my many talks and classes over the last 25 years I have actually had some people ask me (usually in private) if it would be possible for me\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0to use this three-letter G-word, because \u201cI really don\u2019t like it,\u201d or \u201cit gives me the creeps.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Early on, I realized that\u00a0far, far too many people have beenreligiously abused<\/i>\u00a0in the name of \u201cGod,\u201d<\/b>\u00a0and my use of the word\u00a0God<\/i>, interspersed with frequent reference to Spirit, Awareness, the Absolute, Divine Reality, Brahman, Tao, Buddha-nature, the Self, and so forth, is a red flag for these abused people. Indeed, the apparently innocuous word \u201cGod\u201d actually triggers stress and emotional pain for them\u2014in severe cases, a full-blown syndrome of PTSD or Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder.<\/span><\/p>\n This brings up the entire issue of communication itself:\u00a0what we mean<\/i>\u00a0by a word is\u00a0not<\/b>\u00a0necessarily\u00a0what other people think or feel it means<\/i>\u00a0when they hear it.<\/span><\/p>\n The plain fact is that, in the name of \u201cGod,\u201d multitudes of people have been disturbed, frightened and in more serious ways\u00a0abused<\/i><\/b>\u00a0by well-meaning\u2014let alone really abusive\u2014parents, grandparents, older siblings, aunts, uncles, teachers, ministers, priests, nuns, televangelists, rabbis, mullahs, et al.<\/span><\/p>\n It can start innocently enough<\/i>: a little child\u2019s goldfish dies and s\/he is told, \u201cGod took your little fish up to heaven.\u201d When another pet or a grandparent or friend dies and the child is similarly told, \u201cGod ended their life here and took them away to be with Him up there in heaven,\u201d the child begins to get the disturbing impression that \u201cGod\u201d is the invisible\u00a0bogeyman<\/i>\u00a0who suddenly and arbitrarily cheats us out of the precious company of our beloved kin and friends.<\/span><\/p>\n When terrible things happen locally or on the world-stage, a child eventually hears from religious-minded persons that this is \u201cGod\u2019s will.\u201d In the impressionable minds of young persons, \u201cGod\u2019s will\u201d usually soon takes on the quality of being an unpredictable, frightening, fickle force, a big \u201cSomebody\u201d or \u201cSomething\u201d that feels adversarial, oppositional and destructive, rather than being\u00a0Someone infinitely near and dear<\/i>. With such conditioning, it\u2019s not evident that God and I are teammates on the same side. On some level, the youngster sooner or later begins to think: \u201cGod\u2019s interests and\u00a0my<\/i>\u00a0interests are\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0aligned.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n It gets\u00a0much more complicated and perverse<\/i><\/b>: at a certain age, the young person in our western monotheistic culture starts hearing and being psychologically conditioned by the notion that God is\u00a0watching you<\/i>, meticulously and obsessively\u00a0examining everything you do and think<\/i>, \u201cwriting down black marks in His big heavenly book concerning your sins and demerits.\u201d For this \u201cGod\u201d is quite intent on eventually\u00a0judging you<\/i>\u00a0to be a good person or a bad person, a person destined (even\u00a0pre<\/i>destined!!) to go either to heaven or to hell after you die and pass into your \u201ceternal reward.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Some 20-30 million Americans alone have evidently bought into\u2014and, alas, are now subjecting their hapless children to\u2014the really barbaric and quite aberrant \u201crapture theology\u201d of rightwing, rigid forms of evangelical Christianity. Based on that horrible mistake appended to the New Testament\u2014the dementedly dualistic, even diabolical\u00a0Book of Revelation<\/i>\u00a0or\u00a0Apocalypse<\/i>\u2014rapture theology holds that our evidently not-so-\u201cloving\u201d but all-knowing, almighty, and quite vindictive Lord has created every soul already knowing that likely well over 80% or even 90% of them (for various reasons foreseen by God) won’t exclusively accept Jesus the Christ \u201cas their personal Lord and Savior\u201d in the prescribed way. And therefore all these souls not partisan enough to join in God’s exclusivist game are going to be damned to eternal hell.<\/span><\/p>\n No wonder that so many people reject their religious upbringing and God\u2014and everything having to do with religion\u2014and, from their felt-sense of emptiness, \u201cact out\u201d their deep disappointment, rage and\/or ennui through sex, drugs and rock\u2019n\u2019roll partying. Or even worse forms of acting out.<\/span><\/p>\n I recall one night, as a little Catholic boy of about 9 years old, running downstairs from my bedroom into the arms of my loving parents who were watching TV in the family room. I was sobbing and crying, because there, in the darkness of my bedroom, rather than peacefully, contentedly falling asleep, I had been filled with horrific agitation, angst and fear over the not so unlikely prospect that one day I might commit a bad sin or two (or three, four or more!) and thereby be banished from God and heaven and all loved ones to burn in hell, forever and ever\u2026. This thought was excruciating! Lying and squirming in my darkened bedroom, racked with emotional pain, I could tolerate only so much before in desperation I finally went running to my dear parents for some kind of relief. I don\u2019t remember particularly what they said, but I think my caring mother responded to the effect that, if I had good intentions and tried my best, even if I failed, God and the saints (led by good ol\u2019 all-forgiving Mother Mary) would still love me, save me from hell, and help me come into heaven. Whatever my mom and dad said, it sufficed to alleviate the existential fear so that I never had that overwhelming type of hellish \u201chell-dread\u201d again.<\/span><\/p>\n Where exactly I had picked up such a disturbing notion of a wrathfully judging God and eternal hell in the first place, I don\u2019t know. Perhaps it was from something on TV (e.g., one of those fire-and-brimstone preachers) that I might have heard while playing with my toy cars and trucks within earshot. Maybe it was something I heard in church or at school, though I was very fortunate to have been raised by the decidedly progressive Paulist priests in Westwood (West Los Angeles), and by the unexpectedly liberal Daughters of Mary and Joseph Catholic nuns who taught us at St. Paul the Apostle school right next-door to the church of the same name. Most of these nuns were recent arrivals from Ireland and one might expect them to be of the conservative type who beat disobedient children over the knuckles with their big wooden rulers. No\u2014if anything, my buddies and I were\u00a0much tougher<\/i>\u00a0on those darling nuns than they were on us, creating chronic disciplinary problems with our relentless joking, teasing and horsing around.<\/span><\/p>\n The bottom line for me is that I was very fortunate to be around people who lived their religion and spirituality in a relatively healthy manner. I don\u2019t recall being subject to any \u201cserial abuse\u201d in the name of religion.<\/span><\/p>\n But listening to or reading about so many people over the decades who\u00a0have<\/i>\u00a0experienced significant and even severe forms of religious abuse, threatened with eternal damnation by a judging, petty, punitive \u201cGod-the-father\u201d critical parent run amok, I can easily see why many persons would like never ever to hear the word \u201cGod\u201d again. A dear friend of mine, deeply spiritual in her own way, when reading through most of the books and articles in her collection has actually blackened out the word \u201cGod\u201d with her marking-pen wherever she finds it. She just doesn’t like to see a word that, to her psyche from childhood, is a signifier loaded with pain.<\/span><\/p>\n Given that the term \u201cGod\u201d can be so negatively-loaded for numerous people, at one point 20 years ago I briefly wondered if it might not be better to drop it altogether from my vocabulary. But in the next instant I realized that this would be a silly thing to do, forGod<\/i>\u00a0as a word and a notion is simply too widespread in our society and, for the majority of our population, still has an overall positive connotation and meaningful content.<\/span><\/p>\n Instead, over the years, as part of the multi-faceted \u201cministry\u201d I\u2019ve been graced and privileged to enjoy, in my conversations and classes I have opted to\u00a0help\u00a0heal<\/i>\u00a0participants of any negative connotations or content around this potent term\u00a0God<\/i><\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n While in undergraduate study of psychology at UCSC and UCLA and then in graduate school at CIIS in San Francisco, I realized long ago\u00a0how powerful the subconscious mind can be<\/b>\u2014and how easily the subconscious can be rendered full of \u201cglitches\u201d due to \u201cbad programming.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n It is obvious that many, many people have been conditioned and programmed by an unwholesome, petty, threatening, punitive\u2014in short,\u00a0toxic<\/i>\u00a0notion of \u201cGod.\u201d\u00a0This unholy, bullying image of \u201cGod\u201d sits in people\u2019s subconscious mind, literally\u00a0haunting<\/i>\u00a0anddisturbing<\/i>\u00a0them<\/b>. Even atheists and agnostics who have long agoconsciously<\/i>\u00a0rejected and renounced the idea of God can still be affected\u00a0subconsciously<\/i>\u00a0by an insidiously subtle, inner \u201cGod-program\u201d deep within their psyche.<\/span><\/p>\n A\u00a0disturbing, unsafe sense of God<\/b>\u00a0(or whatever you regard as the Source or Power behind our life and the manifestation of this universe) will almost invariably lead to feeling that\u00a0our cosmic situation is disturbed and unsafe<\/b>, and that\u00a0we can\u2019t trust the Source of the universe.<\/b><\/i>\u00a0How can we have\u00a0faith<\/b>\u00a0in a Divine Being who, our subconscious mind intimates to us, is\u00a0not faithful<\/b>\u00a0to our best interests and eternal well-being?<\/span><\/p>\n All such \u201cbad religious programming\u201d characterizing our deepest-rooted impression about the nature of God or the Universal Power or Fate is enervating. It is guaranteed to render us restless, fearful, unhappy, imbalanced human beings. We will feel \u201cat odds\u201d with life, the cosmos and its Source at the most basic level of our being.<\/span><\/p>\n Hence, we do well to\u00a0investigate\u2014through an inner psychological inventory\u2014any unhealed, unwholesome, unholy notions of \u201cGod\u201d floating around in our conscious, pre-conscious, or subconscious minds<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, having uncovered such\u00a0pseudo-God<\/i>\u00a0notions masquerading as the Real God within our hearts, we can inwardly, meditatively\u00a0invoke the actual Infinite Divine Being (Absolute Spirit-Love-Light-Truth-Beauty-Goodness-Kindness-Fullness) to purely affirm this God-Self within every aspect of our being<\/b>. In other words, we can let the\u00a0Real God<\/i>, the God before\/beyond our dysfunctional human notions and projections about \u201cGod,\u201d spontaneously blossom forth within our body-mind-soul-consciousness. We can let God, the authentic living God, be fully and truly God in us.<\/span><\/p>\n * * * * * * * * *<\/span><\/p>\n When I first began conducting these healing visualizations and \u201cenergetic attunements\u201d concerning the idea and image or intuitive impression of God, I heard many testimonials on how this was so very helpful to people. Therefore, I began to include this type of healing session more and more with new and old groups of students.<\/span><\/p>\n Here, finally, I have written up this \u201cGod-clearing\u201d exercise as something to explore whenever you wish to turn to it for inner Divine healing.<\/span><\/p>\n This exercise, I find, is very helpful for people not only of a devotional religious temperament but also for those who are involved in \u201cnondual\u201d or \u201cmystical\u201d spirituality and the path of formless, imageless\u00a0self-inquiry<\/i>\u00a0into the real nature of the transpersonal Self. Such self-inquiry will not proceed very deeply if somewhere in the subconscious mind there is a lurking sense of arival power<\/i>\u00a0contaminating our being with toxic energy. To paraphrase and \u201cheal\u201d the old Biblical commandment:\u00a0\u201cI am the Lord your God-Self; you need not have any other \u2018strange gods\u2019 within you.\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n Some of you may wish to record onto tape\/CD a meditatively-soothing, reading of the following visualization, so that you can subsequently listen to it while in a more meditative state with eyes closed and body fully relaxed<\/i>. Alternatively, you can have a gentle companion read this aloud to you from the computer screen while you sit nearby in a relaxed, inwardly focused state. And then you can both trade places\u2014you read the text while your companion meditatively listens. (At some point in the not so distant future, I\u2019ll try to upload a streaming-audio recording of the text for this exercise, so that you can listen to it by yourself as a guided healing meditation while sitting quietly and receptively.)<\/span><\/p>\n I call this experiential process:\u00a0letting God be fully, truly God in your heart<\/b>. Try it\u2014you\u2019ll like it!<\/span><\/p>\n * * * * * * * * * *<\/span><\/p>\n [Note:\u00a0italicized<\/i>\u00a0words can be read with somewhat greater emphasis. Ellipses (\u2026) indicate pauses for contemplative silence.]<\/p>\n * * * * * * * *<\/p>\n Alright<\/i><\/b>. As we\u2019re gathered here together, we can allow ourselves to become\u00a0naturally and fully relaxed<\/i>\u2026.<\/p>\n We can easily maintain a\u00a0gentle, inward focus<\/i>\u00a0as, with\u00a0each breath<\/i>, rising and falling, breathing in and out, we allow ourselves tounwind<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0relax<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0open up<\/i>\u00a0more and more.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no need to grasp or hold onto anything. We\u2019re simplyallowing the breathing<\/i>\u00a0to happen and feeling the\u00a0wonderful and interesting sensations and energies<\/i>\u00a0that arise and pass away, moment by moment\u2026 It\u2019s so very easy to\u00a0relax<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0let go<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0open up<\/i>\u00a0fully and completely\u2026.<\/p>\n Now<\/b>: let us check to see or feel if there are any\u00a0old<\/i>,\u00a0unneeded images or tensions<\/i>\u00a0in any part of us around the idea of \u201cGod.\u201d When we hear the word \u201cGod,\u201d is there\u00a0any feeling of discomfort in any part of the heart or mind or body?<\/i>\u2026<\/p>\n If anything unpleasant arises, let us\u00a0fully feel the sensation or the energy<\/i>\u00a0and then utterly\u00a0let it go<\/i>. Just like letting go the string on a helium balloon, we just\u00a0let go<\/i>\u00a0any threatening images or toxic notions of God that might be cluttering our being, and they just fly away and\u00a0disappear<\/i>\u2026.<\/p>\n Completely letting go,\u00a0we find ourselves feeling wonderfully clear and clean and fresh and new<\/i>\u2026. So much more\u00a0present<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0vital<\/i>and\u00a0alive<\/i>\u2026.<\/p>\n Now<\/b>: right here within our heart, emptied out of the old, unneeded images or feelings about the Divine One, we can allow the\u00a0REAL GOD<\/i>, the\u00a0LIVING GOD of healing Love<\/i>\u00a0\u2026 and\u00a0beautifully luminous Light<\/i>\u2026 and\u00a0clarifying Truth<\/i>\u2026 and\u00a0enchanting Beauty<\/i>\u2026 and\u00a0blissful Sweetness<\/i>\u2026 and\u00a0dazzling Goodness<\/i>\u2026\u2014we can allow this glorious Divine One to affirm this Divine Love, Light and Truth, this Divine Beauty, Sweetness, and Goodness fully within us\u2026. It feels\u00a0so good<\/i>\u00a0to have this God of\u00a0healing Love<\/i>\u00a0in us and around us.<\/p>\n Right\u00a0now<\/i>\u00a0and right\u00a0here<\/i>\u00a0we fully feel the wonderfully\u00a0dear<\/i>\u00a0anddelightful<\/i>\u00a0Presence of the True God gently yet powerfully\u00a0filling<\/i>\u00a0our heart to overflowing with all\u00a0wonderful qualities and virtues<\/i>\u2026 so that now we feel tremendously\u00a0well<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0happy<\/i>, majesticallypeaceful<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0content<\/i>, and perfectly\u00a0nurtured<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0loved<\/i>. We feel filled up with\u00a0so much<\/i>\u00a0power to\u00a0love<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0serve<\/i>\u00a0and be\u00a0helpful<\/i>\u00a0andcreative<\/i>\u2026 God is expressing through us such a wonderful power, a blessed power that fills us up ever more completely so that we can receive and give so,\u00a0so<\/i>\u00a0much\u2026<\/p>\n Again<\/b>: we can check to see if\u00a0any<\/i>\u00a0aspect of our being,\u00a0any<\/i>\u00a0part of our heart or corner of our mind is disturbed by any old\u00a0false<\/i>messages or unnecessary feelings about the human-projected \u201cGod\u201d-idea lurking inside us\u2026.<\/p>\n And, again, we can this very instant allow the REAL GOD to powerfully and completely\u00a0dissolve<\/i>\u00a0any such false notions about the Divine One, the Source or Power behind our life and world, so thathere and now<\/i>\u00a0the\u00a0true God<\/i>\u00a0of pure, Self-shining Spirit and delightfully Divine Presence and Fullness and Goodness washes through and fills our being with\u00a0only God<\/i>\u2026.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cAll is well, and all shall be well\u2026\u201d The true God of astonishingly beautiful\u00a0LOVE<\/i>\u00a0and gloriously gorgeous\u00a0LIGHT<\/i>\u00a0is radiantly\u00a0shining<\/i>within every cell and fiber of our being, filling our\u00a0body<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0mind<\/i>and\u00a0heart<\/i>\u00a0with so much wonderful\u00a0healing<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0empowering<\/i>energy\u2026.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n Alright<\/b>. You may slowly\u00a0open your eyes<\/i>\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n \u2026 and see the One True God, Infinite, Vast and Formless,beautifully manifesting as everyone you see and meet!<\/i><\/p>\nMeditation Exercise:
\nHealing Our Model of God<\/i><\/span><\/h3>\nLetting God be fully, truly God in your heart<\/i><\/b><\/h3>\n