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I discovered a home I never knew existed. Now don’t get me wrong. It only looks like it could be a home from the outside. From the outside I’m seeing something I’ve wanted and looked for but never found.
I have for a long time wondered why I was made to want to help others but ‘it seemed’ that no one else was made that way.
It has felt like I was alone in a world where everyone else wanted this that and the other, all centered around themselves. Yet, when I looked at my life, to have this that and the other was so shallow and useless.
The story where a friend made a wonderful and great meal with everything their friend liked simply because they wanted the friend to be happy, and the friend who didn’t want to eat it because it was all prepared for them alone, are both me.
I can see both those realities so well, like it’s my life. But, I’ve not thought anyone else out there could even fathom what that felt like.
To learn there might be an army (in the best sense) of people out there all wanting to do things for others makes me feel kind of ashamed. I feel kind of ashamed for thinking a truly kind and good God beyond our ability to understand would only make perhaps a handful of people who thought that way.
It’s joy and it’s a bit of hesitation. Many things looking to good from the outside have a reason for it.
Ah, the Ego, my old friend.
When I was young it bothered me that I didn’t have a personality. Everyone else had a personality. But all I had was liking the things I liked, and disliking the things I dislike. Yes… silly it was, but that was my understanding or rather misunderstanding.  The one part that I could see in me that seemed like a personality, was this feeling that I wanted to follow what was true. Later, I would see that as my being a seeker of truth.
Because my ego saw me as a seeker of truth, it forced me to accept things that otherwise I could never have accepted.
A dark night of the soul lasting fifteen to seventeen years came upon me at forty years of age when the God of my youth and life, was determined to be a lie. With it, everything, quite literally everything I considered important was torn from this mind. What was left was a mass of flesh without bones to hang it on.
The only way out of it was for me to follow whatever was true. So the Bible was wrong? Not everything in the Bible was wrong. There’s some good stuff in there too. So the Eastern Religions are not totally perfect or even helpful; part of them is.
I used my ego to force a skeleton together of what I believed. That skeleton of my beliefs was and still is based upon the best what I see as truth, without regard to what the source of that truth is.
I don’t see ego as wrong unless the ego is misnamed and misapplied by our desires to be accepted by those around us. I wanted to follow truth more than I wanted anyone to like me. I follow truth to this day. I will follow whatever truth comes from this journey.
It is great I must say, to see in others the desire to see others happy. My own happiness does not come from anything that’s for me, that I experience. And experience is an experience and I’ve had enough of them. What I enjoy more than anything else is to help others enjoy good things more. Okay, that was sort of a lie. There is something I enjoy even more.
The greatest joy is when I can create a better life in another person. When I can add clarity to confusion or hope to despair or understanding and self assurance to doubt; that the greatest. It’s because of this that I don’t see myself as a people pleaser. I’m not trying to please people and I can make people upset when they and I have different ideas on what’s best for them when I’m offering myself to help in some way.
As long as these comments may seem, they are so inferior to what I want to say. Most people don’t want to read all that I could write.
This comment is to the prayer video.
As I grew out of Catholic Religion and into the Christian religion, I experienced some answers to the doctrines that seems archaic. Perhaps that was because Christianity was new to me compared the Catholicism.
But, as I began to study the words that others preached from, I found a great number of problems that didn’t add up. There seemed a real pick-and-choose system of what would be preached and what would be scanned over as if not important, or worse, not ever mentioned.
I began a Christianity based upon my own relationship that I felt I had with God, rather than what others told me I should or shouldn’t have. Specifically, for the reason of this section’s discussion I bring up prayer. It never seemed right that prayer was for things wanted or hoped to be avoided. Which prayer is right when one person prays for nice weather for picnic, when another prays for rain so the crops will grow.
I decided to pray in the way that really felt right. This prayer centered on people rather than what people wanted or didn’t want. If someone asked that I pray for someone to get well, I’d pray that whatever the person needed to learn in order to get better would be quickly found out. In each thing that people requested prayer, I would pray that the person would quickly learn whatever it was they were in that circumstance for, so they could get out of that circumstance.
For my prayers about myself, they stopped asking for this and that. Instead, my prayers turned to asking that I would learn, grow, and develop, into the person that the God that was beyond-my-understanding wanted. For whatever reason, in my mind it was clear that life was for some purpose and that purpose was not consumption. It seemed logical that life would be a living lesson and I really wanted to learn what I was supposed to learn, rather than goof off.
My prayers were not like any prayers of anyone I knew and I most carefully had to craft them when verbal because it was also clear whatever I thought about life, others had different thoughts. It seemed better to let them live where-they-were rather than demand they think like me.
Ah, I thought these reflections were to place or chronical our thoughts and observations as we go through the lessons. It seems I was wrong as I now see that my comment on the first section is also the first comment on this second section.
If I were to comment here, I’d say that because I was born into a strong family of faith in the Catholic religion that my first thoughts of God where the Old-Man-On-A-Cloud God. Yet, at some early point in my life I realized that could not be true. It didn’t make sense that we seemed to understand God so well for being supposedly so far below him.
I took on, in my Catholic religion of my youth, the overarching thought that God was far more than what anyone could express to me. My God, the one I prayed to, was so great it he was beyond description. And still, this “beyond description” God was described by the masculine pronoun. I knew there had to be more, but was still stuck in a web of doctrine.
For much of this, it seems that I’ve always known it yet perhaps without the words to express it. If I was to point out something ‘specific’ that was certainly not known, or even thought, I would go to the five spiritual worlds. In this information I wonder why five. I wonder if they somehow progressed from one to the next through some progression, and I imagine they do.
The idea of there being five spiritual worlds brings in some real specifics. These are things that seem could not be considered apart from direct communication from person to person, along with the corresponding faith to hold that the five spiritual worlds are real both in number and description.
The thought of me accepting something of this sort, where the only proof seems to be found in the faith of the person passing the story along, reminds of religion. It also creates the hope that there is more than that.
Hi, I’m sixty-one years on this earth, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at me. Like everyone, I’ve gone through crises and tragedies that have taken great tolls. I have always believed that everything is for a purpose and things always work out. But after a particularly great personal destruction of my belief system, and its seventeen-year depression as a result, I was beginning to wonder; just a little bit.
As I approached my sixtieth birthday though, things began to change in remarkable ways, and so fast it was incredible. Things began to make sense, first about my life and what I had gone through, and secondarily about my life in the ‘now’ moment.
I was changed or healed or made new or perhaps just “fixed” in ways that could be called miraculous, except these miracles came without prayer. Instead, the feeling inside me was it was time to come out of my walking while it was dying body, and begin to live, perhaps even run.
Then I came upon a video about a week ago and learned about the subject this course teaches, it answered or rather made clear a belief I’ve always had. That idea of the spark or single point of seeking that’s inside all of us.
That point was the mustard seed: of course!
That was the point where God touched us and we touched God. It was the only point that all other points exist for. It was the way.
Before I make too much of a fool of myself by saying things I really have not yet learned of or verified, I’ll stop here. I hope that perhaps it might be that here somewhere with someone or with everyone, I might be able to share my true thoughts unhindered by my doubts of myself. And that by listening to others, all wisdom will be accepted in realization.
Whatever you think of me through this introduction is probably wrong, but kinda close. I look forward to you’all.
Roy
