PSIII 13 Relationship With God

13 - Relationship With God

I'm sure you've heard it said that even atheists have a relationship with god - so I'm afraid, we all have one then, and there's no getting away from it.

I'd had a right old laugh the other day - this person told me he was brought up a strict Catholic and had "lost his faith". Now I thought that was extremely careless of him - but then it struck me with horror, that if no-one else had found it, the faith could still be lurking out there, waiting to launch itself on an unsuspecting passer by. My god! You go out for a nice little walk, and boom! you find yourself a strict catholic!

But all jokes aside for a moment, I think it's really nice that people once more turn to more spiritual considerations and allow themselves to find time for the question, "What am I doing here?" once more, rather than sticking strictly to discussing the price of tomatoes.

Now I'm sure you have your own representation of "god/goddess/all that is" (I borrow that term from Mr Lazarus, it rather covers the bases, doesn't it), but if you feel your relationship with God could be closer, more intense, more generally supportive than it is at present, you will find that the sanctuary environment makes it easy to open new lines of communications in many ways.

Some years ago, I experienced what you might call a spiritual crisis. It occurred to me to invite the parish priest over for a cup of tea to discuss the matter, reasoning that if you’re physically sick, you call out a doctor; if you got problems in the mind department you go to a psychologist and if it’s spiritual, you call a priest.

The poor man nearly had a heart attack as this is not the kind of thing, it seems, Church Of England vicars deal with a lot in their current job description, but still, he was brave and he came. I found the good man to be very sweet, very helpful, and spectacularly unenlightened.

He didn't have a clue about mystical experiences, didn't actually believe in God and found the whole subject rather distressing, as though this kind of thing had gone out of fashion with the martyr saints a few hundred years ago.

Since then, I've learned that the particular experience that caused me to seek his help is very common indeed, well described as far back as ancient Sanskrit texts and as far forward as a recent publication on enlightenment experiences by a couple of bona fide professors of psychiatry; and that it represents nothing more than a quite ordinary step in normal human development.

Boy, what I wouldn't have given if someone had told me that at the time, rather than gently suggesting that I was probably turning psychotic, should consider voluntary hospitalisation and start on the medication immediately!

Luckily, I knew myself enough even then to trust the processes that I was engaged in, and now can happily say from personal experience that when the unseen realms open themselves to you, although it may be frightening at first, it certainly makes life a much better place, and a much more realistic one.

We've already talked a lot already about spiritual mediators, in the form of guides, angels and higher selves, to mention just a few.

These are a great way of beginning to make contact and to consciously re-connect, as it were, to the "all there is", safely and easily. However, as most of the really enlightened folk (such as Jesus and Buddha) rightfully point out, the relationship with God in the end has to be a personal thing, a true one-on-one.

There's the theory that a lot of people prefer to go through mediators such as priests or gurus, then saints, then angels, then aspects of the "all there is" rather than going directly to the top level, is because they don't think they're worthy of the personal attention of The Source and therefore feel more comfortable with the mediators. However, and I could quote reams of passages from the bible at this point, although, don't worry, I won't, the smallest sheep in the flock is just as important as the fattest, and that you are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars, and that you have a right to address the source directly - just as much right as everyone and everything else.

I think you should seriously consider a one-on-one romance with the all-there-is if you haven't already done so. The resources on offer, if nothing else, are absolutely breathtaking.

I mean, could you imagine what it would take to have yourself burned at the stake, suffer immense torture, be thrown to lions, or die slowly and excruciatingly over an extended period of time on the cross voluntarily, deliberately and unfaltering in the strength you have found through your connection with the source?

Could you imagine having your deepest love affair multiplied by a factor of a hundred thousand -

- and then to experience it with everything there is, with equal intensity of return, with God itself?

That's pretty mind boggling stuff, and I'm sure there's even more to it than that - these examples are only some of the benefits I've heard about, I'm not an expert on the subject. If you think how much effort we put into getting to live in a better house, wouldn't it make sense in this light to put a little more effort into gaining more access to such a relationship?

Anyway, how do you view the source? How would you go about connecting with it more fully? How would you go ahead and enhance your relationship with "All There Is"?

I'd love to hear how you are going to approach this, and I know you will make great gains. You already have all the resources you need to start today.

From the highest, let's now turn the most basic, and that's found in the general topic of ...