EMPOWERING WHAT IT IS WE OPPOSE

EMPOWERING WHAT IT IS WE OPPOSE
Míceál Ledwith.

It will take a great shift in the present state of consciousness to be able to understand instinctively that when we fight against something we only empower what it is we oppose. This is far indeed from saying that God is aloof and coldly objective and that "he" will allow us to stumble along until we painfully discover for ourselves how things work. In short "he" lets us suffer misfortune or pain until eventually we may wake up to how things actually function and stop creating the endless succession of problems and difficulties for ourselves which we are all too prone to do.

If we replace the picture of God as the old man with the beard in the clouds with some formal, abstract and impartial judge, then we have just replaced one Hamburger Universe style image of God with another. To understand God as a cold and impartial judge who allows us to bungle along, is just taking up one more version of God as a human being enlarged.

Even while acknowledging the very limited abilities of our minds to envisage what the creator of this universe might be like, it is much closer to the mark from what we know of the universe and its workings, to envisage God as a personal and conscious energy that pulsates through everything that exists. When we come to fully realize that this energy also pulsates in each and every one of us then we can start to understand the great truth which all the great teachers first propounded: "You are Gods." But the small degree to which we have managed to implement this in our lives makes us shamefaced to act on that truth.

God is not disinterested or aloof, and neither is God proactive in our lives in the sense of some friend or neighbor who is interested in our welfare. To speak of God as either interested or disinterested in our lives is simply pouring onto God categories that do not belong there. The divine energy that permeates all that exists is pulsing with life and energy and is urging us forward to channel that energy where we will. If we ever become adept at this then we may reach its supreme degree which is what the notion of ascension consists in. That is a condition where the obstacles to the full realization of the divine power is removed and there is no further blockage to the realization of the divine life and power within the human framework of the mind and body.

Many years ago when I first studied the Old Testament in detail I was fascinated when I saw the vastly different pictures of God that lived there side by side between the covers of what so many people regard as the Book of Books. Yet some of thee images of God were so different from each other that it seemed that there was no way they could co-exist within the same individual.

At one stage I set about placing those images of God in the chronological order of when they appeared in the history of the Old Testament, starting with the oldest books of the Old Testament and moving forward to the newest. (The arrangement of the sequence of the Old Testament books as we have it dates only from the first century of our era, and the books are not in chronological order).

What struck me very forcibly was that in the very ancient books of the Old Testament there were images of God portrayed which we nowadays would have no hesitation in classifying as immoral. For instance when God is pictured as rising from a drunken stupor to kill his enemies there is no indication that the biblical author who wrote that account saw any problem with it. Nowadays we would have considerable difficulties indeed with that, for drunkenness and murder still have a considerable way to go before they could be regarded as virtues in our society.

Moving on to the later, or newer, Old Testament it was easy to see that immoral images of God were no longer acceptable, and while some doubt might have arisen about God's justice or mercy the authors were at pains to stress than God was always just what he did. A good example is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah which is recounted in the Book of Genesis, chapters 18 and 19. The author is at pains to stress that God acted justly in destroying the city simply because it had been clearly demonstrated that there were no just people in the city, but only evildoers. (What about babies and children?)

The treatment in Genesis is remarkably different from the way those same sagas are told in the much more ancient Chaldean sources which most major scholars now freely admit was the precursor of Genesis. When telling of the destruction of the cities the Chaldean sources seem to attach no importance whatever to the question of whether God was acting justly or unjustly in this destroying an entire population.

So from being content with immoral images of God in the early Old Testament, through the struggle to ensure that God is always pictured as acting justly, through the even greater struggle to see qualities such as compassion or love in the divine, we begin to see a very clear picture emerge. With the passage of time over the centuries as peoples understanding of themselves developed and progressed, so did the ways in which they were able to picture God.

The insights wee have got into the working of the universe and into the nature of the Creator behind it have given us a better understanding now from which to picture God anew. The divine energy which stands in pride of place at the top of that long and distinguished history of images, has nothing in common that human-style God whom we like to think of as involved in our everyday affairs. God is not involved in our lives in this way. The care of God for us does not come from without, such as the care of another human being for us might come. It comes from within, not from outside, and not from a being separate from us. Where we place our focus and acceptance is where that divine energy will infallibly manifest the results for us. This is how manifestations such as what we traditionally call "answers to prayer" really come about, and it is absolutely not the result of some type of arbitrary decision by a Supreme Being whom we have managed to cajole. Knowing that in the quantum world the effect has to always precede the cause is one of the greatest insights we can have into the workings of the cosmos.

When groups set up in opposition to each other about the great issues of our day, about the legitimacy of war, or the rights of women or whether we are for or against capital punishment, it needs to be realized that the primary manifestation of such opposition will be more of the raw material which caused those groups to arise in the first place. From an enlightened perspective campaigning for or against capital punishment can only generate the fuel from which those opposing groups originally drew their strength, which in the case capital punishment will be the horrible and gruesome murders which first gave rise to the conflict of those opposing or favoring the death penalty; in the case of war, those sources that generated war in the first place, and in the case of rights for women the savage abuses that enslaved one half of the human race for most of its history. When we fight in this way we only empower what it is we oppose, inevitably.

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