Missing a Friend Who Died

Gera died in the spring of 1984. She was driving her mother home at about midnight when a drunk driver ran a stop sign and hit her car on the driver's side. Gera was thrown out of the car and suffered massive brain damage. She died four or five days later.

I loved Gera and miss her, although she was living in Los Angeles with her partner at the time and I was living in Santa Fe. It took a while for her death to become real to me. I only saw her once or twice a year, so I didn't immediately miss her from my daily life. It took time to experience her as gone. On the other hand, since I firmly believed that her being did not cease to exist, I thought I would continue to be in some sort of relationship with her spirit.

More than twenty years have passed since she died. I have thought of her occasionally, wondering what she experiences now and what her being is up to. In that time, I have communicated with other beings who are no longer embodied, like my father and my mother, but to my surprise I have never had communications with Gera. I thought we would certainly communicate if that were at all possible, and yet we haven't.

This morning, I open myself to Gera's being, asking that she communicate with me, if that's relevant and useful for our souls.

Gera seems to be present, now. I sense her smiling and can see her gypsy-like, colorful skirts and simple tank-top, covered with several necklaces, her long, dark wavy hair and long, ornate earrings. She is happy to be here, although it has taken her a while to be present like this. She was confused and uncertain of herself for a while after her death, unsure what she was experiencing.

She remembers when my wife and I visited her partner in LA in the spring of 1985. She felt excited that I was there and disappointed that we couldn't communicate very well. She tried to communicate with us, and we certainly sensed her presence at that time. However, my wife and I were very confused at that time, as well. My wife was pregnant but we hadn't realized that fact, yet. So, we felt Gera's spirit pressing in on us, as if she wanted to reincarnate through us.

Gera is telling me that she was not wanting to reincarnate at that time. She was still sorting out her status as spirit and coming to terms with her ability to communicate with those of us who were still embodied. She did want to let me know that she was still present and wanted to make a connection with my wife. But the house where her former partner and she had lived, where we were visiting, was still filled with his grief. My wife was having hormonal changes connected to the pregnancy, so there was a lot in the air. Add to that Gera's confusion and disorientation as well as my discomfort with emotions, and the result was difficulty for all of us.

Gera is saying that out connection remains strong and that we can communicate more easily, now that we are both clear about who we are and where we are. She looks forward to more interactions with me.

Remembering You

I was sad about my brother's death. He was the baby of the family and I was very sad that he died. You were named after him and also after your father's father, in case there was any bad luck in having his name or his father's name. Both of them died young, so your dad and I didn't want you to have their same, exact name.

I felt close to you, when you were a baby, although I don't know if I felt any closer to you than to any of the others. I felt there was something special about you, however. You seemed so bright and happy. It was like having a 1000 watt light bulb in the house. You had so much energy and enthusiasm about many different things. I often felt that you had bigger ideas and plans than you had focus, because you often left trails of unfinished projects about the house.

I still remember your intelligence, and the way you would get bored with repetitive games. The board games that you played with your brothers and sisters often ended in arguments because you would keep wanting to change the rules and eventually, someone would get mad, either because they were losing the game or because they couldn't remember what the latest set of rules were. I was surprised how well you took the criticisms and complaints. You just couldn't stop yourself from wanting to improve on the rules.

Some of the changes were helpful. In Monopoly, for example, you changed the rules so that players who had lots of money could loan someone who was almost broke enough money to keep the game going. That kept all the players happy, but the games would go on for days without anyone actually winning. Eventually, I would pack up the board game to end the game. You seemed to like the keep the games going and didn't like losing or having anyone else lose the game.

I loved hearing you sing around the house, just like you've told me you liked hearing me sing. You had the sweetest voice. Your dad was concerned about you, though. He was afraid that you might be thought a sissy if you sang with such a sweet voice.

We were also concerned with your difficulties in making friends at school. You had a lot of friends and playmates in the neighborhood, but you didn't seem to get along that well with your classmates. It may have been jealousy from the other kids because the teachers seemed to like you. Dad was afraid that you were a teachers' pet and that's why the other kids didn't like you very much. You were a good boy, although you were so rambunctious that you got into trouble because of your energy. When you were having fun, you just didn't know how to stop. That energy got you into trouble with dad on many nights because you just couldn't wind down from the day, so you kept talking and giggling in bed even after dad would warn you to be quiet and go to sleep.

Because he couldn't be sure who was making the noise and talking, he would spank everyone, which did not endear you to your brothers and sisters. You were quite a handful, and you reminded me of my younger brothers, who were also pretty wild at times.

What Were the Early Church Fathers Thinking?

What can I conclude about the motivations of the early Church Fathers? They knowingly converted pagan gods into saints, adding their stories to their lives of the saints compilation. They borrowed stories about pagan gods as the basis of the story of Jesus. They took the teachings from the mystery schools and added them to the teachings of Jesus. They determined which doctrines were true, that is, divinely inspired, and which were false or suspect.

I wonder if they were doing this for the edification of the people, for their own aggrandizement, for power, because the emperor commanded them to do it, or for the unification of the holy Roman Empire. It appears like a tremendous scam, but I don't know the motivation for creating the edifice of Catholicism.

I know Constantine was interested in uniting the people in his empire into one people and that he believed that he had to impose a single religion on them to accomplish this. Once he and the bishops had agreed upon a set of doctrines and an established hierarchy for the Church, the creative thought process and the gathering of beliefs was done. This ushered the Dark Ages into the foreground, since the people were now discouraged from thinking, doubt, investigation, and especially performing any religious or spiritual practices other than those prescribed by the Church. The Fathers and the Emperor decided that their authority was the determinant of all things social, spiritual and political. This historical decision formed the backbone of the next thousand years, the Dark Ages.

I used to think that the Church Fathers were divinely inspired and that they made choices based on a great, spiritual plan that they had in mind. From this perspective, I trusted their motivation and considered them to be doing God's work. Putting that same plan in the social and political context of the Holy Roman Empire puts it into an entirely different light. I know that Constantine was a power-hungry despot who wanted to have complete control over his empire. He forced his vision and his will onto the disparate sects of Christianity to forge an empire out of the warring factions. He had a few Church henchmen at his side and threatened to detain or kill the bishops who might have rebelled against the doctrinal compromise. When they left the king's compound after the agreement that created the Catholic Church, did they feel compromised?

I wonder how they perceived the unification of the Christian Church? I suppose that there were as many perspectives on this as there were participants in the council. Did they imagine that God worked in this way or were they focused on wanting to control the people and grabbing for power in the spiritual/political marketplace where they had been struggling.

I do know that this council and the creation of the Catholic Church was an incredible opportunity for advancing the hierarchical game. The Catholic hierarchical game has been playing for 1700 years and is still going strong. People join the game while others quit, and the game goes on. It fits well into the hierarchical world and still elicits great interest in the players and the adherents. What an incredible opportunity for learning.

Just Do It!

Just do it!

It's that simple. When you have the impulse to write some lyrics or record a particular sound that you like, just do it.

You learned to procrastinate when it comes to impulsive actions, as though you were waiting to test the validity of the impulse. It's no surprise that you respond that way, given your childhood training and programming in the Catholic traditions. Basically, according to your teachers, such impulses are probably coming from the devil and will lead you astray. Obey the Church's rules and teachings so that you can walk the straight and narrow path to God.

There you have it. It summarizes the programming that you received during your formative years, and shows clearly how you learned to distrust your impulses, your desires, and your dreams. Know that you still have distrust as your habitual response to impulses and creative thoughts, which will most likely remain with you for the rest of your life. If you remember where this distrust comes from and how it came to be second nature in you, you can discard it and move forward anyway.

There is no advantage to waiting and assessing your creative thoughts. Act on them and see what happens. You've spent almost your entire life ignoring and repressing them. You are not satisfied where that response has taken you. This is your opportunity to create, a chance to play with reality, a way to have fun in your life. If you consider what your life without creative action would be, it might help you overcome the distrust and hesitation so effectively programmed into you during your childhood. Do you imagine that distrust and hesitation are part of your nature now or were part of your nature when you were a child?

Sunrise is here.
Arise and walk in the Light of God,
and leave behind the night of fear and mistrust.

Let your creative consciousness be the Light you experience anew so that you can act on the inspiration without wallowing in fear and mistrust of yourself.

Taking the Next Step

Someone who is considered brilliant is one who acts upon their ideas. Taking your insights and your creative impulses the next step is the significant part, not the insights that you have and the creative impulses that arise. When you have an impulse, notice what you do with it. If you are playing around with a MIDI keyboard and begin playing something that you like, taking it the next step would be actually recording it. Taking the time to lay down a few tracks of improvisation on the theme you've come up with places the impulse into reality.

This is where your inner child resists your creative ideas. He does not like to put anything into writing or record musical thoughts. In his mind, once something is written or recorded, it is available to other people. He assumes that they will not like it and will criticize you for coming up with it. To him, criticism is as threatening as death; it's dangerous because the good will of others on which his survival is based is compromised by another's displeasure at something he does. This does not make sense to you, the adult, but his survival was dependent on the goodwill of his parents, teachers and the other adults who were passing judgment on him. This is a deep issue for him, and no amount of intellectual analysis will convince him otherwise. What will convince him, though, is taking the next step with your creative ideas and letting him see that you still thrive. That will convince him like nothing else.

In the meantime, assume that you will feel resistance to recording and writing what you imagine. Know that you will have thoughts that run counter to your impulses to make anything concrete. If you have an impulse to record a melody or harmony, you might expect that you will think it a waste of time because it's not polished, yet. You'll notice how sketchy the music sounds and hesitate, thinking you will record it when you've had time to work out the details of the piece. You'll have thoughts like realizing you don't know where you'd save the sketch and you probably won't be able to find it, so there's no point in actually recording it. You'll think that you're being immature and that anyone with taste would notice right away how poorly the music is put together. You'll think that the ideas are too simple or stupid, so you should wait until another time.

These thoughts are his creations. Your inner child is trying to protect you from criticism and isolation, which to him would have been tantamount to death. As an adult, you don't mind if others can't relate to your music or your ideas, as long as you like them. Take the next step, then, and see what happens.

The Lack of Historical Evidence that Jesus Ever Lived

There is no historical evidence that Jesus ever lived. The gospels, of course, tell stories of his life and relate his teachings. But the gospels were not written until the third century CE, hardly reliable historical documents. All the other stories about Jesus and his teachings that accumulated during those centuries were declared fictional and unreliable by the early Church councils. Think about this. The genre of Jesus Christ stories, which contained scores of them, many of which have survived to the present time, either as rejected gospels or as Gnostic scriptures, is declared to consist of fictional accounts of Jesus' life and teachings, yet four of them are considered to be trustworthy historical documents by the Catholic Church in the fourth century. To me, this raises serious questions about the historical validity of the accepted gospels, given that the great majority of writings were not historically accurate. Writing about Jesus was obviously an exercise in imagination and inspiration, not the research and reporting that scholars would like to believe. Accepting these four writings about Jesus to be historically accurate is like selecting four papers from a creative writing class as historical documents, or believing that the old episodes of Star Trek are historical documentaries.

The fact that there are no references to Jesus in any of the existing historical documents from the era during which he supposedly lived was compelling enough to convince me that he didn't actually live. This made perfect sense to me and explained the great number of discrepancies in the stories as well as the discrepancies in the Church.

For example, I use to wonder how it was possible for the present, hierarchical and dogmatic Church to arise from the early Christian communities. I could see no relationship between the two forms of Christianity. The early Christian communities were informal, with women and men equal participants. Those who manifested the greatest spiritual gifts were considered the teachers and leaders of the communities, while everyone pooled their resources to support the community. How did this become an organization run by celibate men, that claims its authority by tracing its foundation to Jesus blessing Peter and calling him the Rock of his Church, and quoting Jesus telling the male disciples to teach all nations? I liked the notion of the early Church but present day Catholicism did not resemble it at all.

What about all the atrocities committed in the name of Jesus by the Catholic Church throughout the ages? Is this the best that Jesus could come up with?

It all makes sense, then, to imagine the Church Fathers making up the stories about the Christians being persecuted in the catacombs in Rome. It also explains why the Roman Empire was so desperate to erase all traces of the Gnostic Christianity that actually preceded it. They believed that Jesus was a mythical character whose story symbolically related the stages of spiritual development for anyone, man or woman, who was initiated into the mysteries contained in his story. That contradicts the argument for the authority of the Roman Catholic Church so it had to be suppressed and all those who lived that way had to be silenced.

Truth does not require an army to enforce it.

Wholeness is Divinity

The history of Christianity is filled with inspirational stories that claim to represent a spiritual reality that breaks into the normal life experience whenever God feels compassionate toward humanity and wants to show them the way. The stories are fabulous and suggest that ultimate reality is spiritual and that everyday reality is an empty shell without the direction and support of divine guidance and spirit.

When I read or heard these stories as a child and young adult, I was inspired to seek that spiritual reality that made anything else pale in comparison. I wanted to know God and sought divine guidance in all that I did. And yet, the certainty and the comfort that should have come with spiritual surrender did not materialize. My conviction that spiritual reality existed did not waver, but my trust that I could experience divinity through the traditional channels did.

I sought God and spirit through Christian teachings and rituals, through practicing Yoga and Meditation, through Buddhist teachings and Hindu Scriptures, through Native American rituals and teachings, through New Age writings, workshops and training, and through in-depth processing of my nature and being. All these practices and lessons were great learning opportunities for me and I became more self-aware. Each system emphasized certain aspects of the spiritual life, so I became more aware of different ways of perceiving myself and spirit, while learning the limitations of each point of view. Nonetheless, each of these perspectives offered insights into myself and spiritual reality.

By looking at myself and spirit from so many different vantage points, I actually learned to see myself as a whole. Each of these perspectives helped me grasp an aspect of myself and spirit, but all together they allowed me to experience myself as bigger than any one of these views of myself. In seeing the bigger picture, getting a sense of myself as more than a collection of traits and characteristics, I experience myself as whole. The whole that I am is greater than the sum of my characteristics and personality traits. I have come to the conclusion that the whole that I am is my divinity.

For all those years, I thought I was digging deeper and deeper into the hidden recesses of my being to find the spark of divinity I knew had to be somewhere within me. However, I see that my divinity is the whole of my being, leaving nothing out and encompassing more than I can grasp at this time. All the little details of my life and the different ways to understand myself turned out to be important parts of the whole that I was seeking. Only, I didn't know then that each piece I discarded on my search for enlightenment was actually a stepping stone to being myself and experiencing wholeness, my divinity.