My search for Divinity

Some time ago, a columnist in the local paper asked his readers what they thought the difference between religious and spiritual is. I have always thought of myself as spiritual more so than religious, so this piqued my interest. You see, he is the pastor of a very small church, and having been through his wife’s devastating illness and ultimate death while still a young man, he had learned he had a strength that he never knew he had. Yet, there were times he despaired against God for making his wife and family suffer so. Still, religion was his life. He wanted to reach out to those people who avoided coming to church by saying they were very spiritual but not religious. How could he reach them? While reading through his column the next week, one of the responses electrified me.

“Religion is for people who don’t want to go to hell. Spiritualism is for those of us who have been there.”

Hello. That’s me. Or well, it was. It was the beginning of my journey to develop and cement my own personal beliefs, to reconcile them with the rigid confines of the religions I had grown up in and been exposed to. My issues with organized religions were complex, but the foremost issue was the paradox of how any place that considers itself a place of worship and holiness could exclude and judge so many people. Aren’t we taught that God loves all of us? That God loves us and does so without judgment? That God wants us to love the goodness and the humanness in our fellow man? That we are all worthy of salvation, and that we may all find different paths to get there? I certainly heard these things, but never saw this type of unconditional love and acceptance actually in practice in any of the churches I had been in. And thus began my path to find my own way to the divine, and in the process to find myself.

And yes, years later, I know myself. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And oh yes there are ugly parts, but as a human we all have them, and I am struggling with learning to come to terms with them, a process that will last my whole life. Which isn’t a bad place to be in… when we achieve perfection, we no longer are of this earth. At that point, we no longer need to be here. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I read the following concepts in Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” and they stuck with me:

The Hopi Indians believed that each of the religions in the universe contained a single thread. The also believed that these threads were constantly seeking each other, and if they were to ever join together, they would weave into a rope that would pull us out of the darkness and into the new realm.

Even in recent times, the Dalai Lama has proclaimed repeatedly that you do not have to be a Tibetan Buddhist to walk the path of enlightenment. He encourages his students to take bits and pieces out of Buddhism that ring true for them, and integrate them with other religious (or spiritual) practices they possess. Wow! What radically different concepts than ones that were hammered into me at an early age. And what realistic and practical ones! So, my journey began, to ”choose” my religion. And at last I felt free to do so.

In my search for the Divine, I put together many thoughts and beliefs that I had carried bits and pieces of throughout my life, and wove them in with other threads I learned along the way in my search. My beliefs are also not set in stone, nor do I believe they are the same for everyone. Each of us can find salvation (the Christian term) or enlightenment (the Buddhist and other Far East word) if we follow our own path.

Here are my threads:

• I believe that Heaven is what happens to our souls once we have learned all the lessons God needs us to know.
• I believe that some people go their whole lives and still don’t learn the lessons God wants us to learn. These souls come back again and again until they (we) learn the lessons we were put here to learn.
• I believe that Hell is what we live through here on earth while we are learning how to be loving, giving humans. Sometimes this Hell is out of our control, such as when we are children, or otherwise vulnerable. Often it is something we create for ourselves.
• I believe that our greatest enemies our ourselves. That until we learn to love ourselves, we will never learn how to truly love others. But that God loves us unconditionally, at all times, and there is always a master plan, for the greater good. That plan might not me good for me at this moment, but we are not in this alone.
• I believe that at any point in our lives, no matter what we are doing, that where I am at right now.. that God had this in his plan for me, and drew a circle in the dirt of where I stand. Right now.
• I believe that misery in any form stains the collective consciousness. That God wants us to search for happiness, for the greater good of ALL people and mankind. That this search for happiness and actualization teaches us the lessons we know to be happy forever in Heaven.
• I believe that true Divinity comes from within us. It is in all of us. It can be seen in all living creatures. We must learn to love life.
• I believe that people come into your life for a reason, to fill a need, to teach you, to turn your life upside down - whatever it takes for you to learn the lesson of life and love. There will be people in your life that hurt you. You will hurt others. It’s all a part of the master plan for mankind to learn the art of forgiveness, humility, self-worth, and unconditional love.
• I also believe that in many ways we ARE the masters of our own destinies. We have to work and search to learn the lessons we need to learn to love ourselves and love others. Sometimes we will give up on someone too soon, but maybe that is so next time we will dig in and follow our heart, follow the voice inside that says “Try one more time”. Maybe our lesson is to learn to let something go and walk away, and we will do that too.
• I believe in life you run into certain special people who will change your life forever. Are these angels? Soulmates? These are people that act as a mirror to your own soul and character, and reflect back to you the things to help you learn what you are supposed to learn.
• I believe that the person that we are meant to be someday helps pull us through our obstacles to get to that place. “Eat, Pray, Love” refers to a story in which the Zen Buddhists have a fable about an oak tree that represents this. This fable says that an oak tree is not only brought into being by the acorn holding all it’s potential, from whence it sprouts, but also the force of the future tree itself. The mighty, mature oak who wants so badly to exist that it acts on the acorn, and then the seedling, the young tree.. pulling and guiding it into maturity. The force inside us, pulling and guiding us into the person we need to become, is the Divinity within us, and is a mighty force in our lives.
• I believe we each have our own path to the Divine. I believe we must each break out of our barriers, throw down our boundaries, and dare ourselves to discover who we are.
  
  The ironic part is that in searching for the “Divine”, I learned that really, the search for divinity and peace isn’t something you can find on the outside. The divinity is within. It is within each and every one of us. I never understood before when I would read “God dwells within us”, until I thought of it as… when I walk on the street, God feels the earth with my feet because he cannot. When I look into the soulful eyes of my horses, I see God’s love reflected back through them. We are not perfect. We are human. God loves us. It is his “job” to love us. It is our job to go through life and learn to love others. And we have to start with ourselves.
  
  Ref: Gilbert, Elizabeth. "Eat, Pray, Love", ISBN-13: 978-0143038412