Beloved

I lay awake in the wee hours this morning, unable to go back to sleep. This is a fairly regular occurrence for me at this age. Perhaps aging is part of it, but also perhaps decades of not being able to sleep because of abuse, trauma and loss set a hard pattern after nearly 60 years. Now it’s different. It isn’t waking up in terror or grief, it’s about waking up and realizing I’m listening to something else. Something that feels more like a guide, a help, something intuitive, reaffirming and beautiful. These sleepless portions of the night are now messages, and the messages always have such clarity and reassurance that I can’t be frustrated about losing any sleep. They are messages of love. What a difference that is from the dark decades.

I stopped praying a long time ago. I couldn’t believe in a god that was defined as just another hateful human. God loved that person, hated this person, and I lived in terror of what that vengeful god would do to me. As if I hadn’t suffered enough already. The trauma and losses were too much for me and they literally drove me insane. I was on all kinds of medications including psychotropics leading up to my suicide attempt in 2005. (I am no longer on any medications for mood stabilization, and have not been since the latter part of 2005.) It wasn’t until after that event with years and years of deep counseling that I could finally let go of god and everything I was taught to believe and finally fall into a universe that I discovered was not only benevolent but absolute love. As I forgave and healed, I discovered that love is only two-dimensional until there is forgiveness. With forgiveness, there is grace. Grace is simply everything that is impossible for us to undo, correct, to have or obtain but still, somehow it happens. It’s impossible for us because we are so finite, so fragile and unknowingly ignorant, unable to comprehend the depth and height. I discovered that as I embraced forgiveness and love, love doesn’t simply become three-dimensional, love fills every dimension, every particle, everything until it is all love. That means you don’t have to look for love, you have the choice to become love. That’s a paradigm shift that blew my mind. The paradox is simply that we have a choice to become love or to pretend that there is something else. When we pretend there is something else other than love, we wander. We disconnect from ourselves and our source and we get lost. Actually, paradoxically, we’re supposed to wander. We’re supposed to go and discover, and create, test boundaries, and get lost, and then we’re supposed to feel the loss and reconnect with ourselves first, and then grace, always on time, connects us to our benevolent, loving universe and we whole again. It’s designed this way. We are not just sinners looking for forgiveness. We are creators, explorers testing everything, testing and pushing our bodies and our minds to break new ground. To feel new things, to fill voids, to be on the leading edge of human experience. If that doesn’t describe the mess of our world and civilization, I don’t know what does. Of course, there are going to be terribly tragic things that happen. Things go wrong in order for us to learn to make them right. How could we gain the understanding or knowledge otherwise? If god handed all this to us, we’d have no experience with it and it would be useless to us because we would not be able to comprehend the gift. We have to do it for ourselves. But experience brings comprehension and understanding. We need the contrasts of light and dark in order to understand the power of both. Without contrast, we lose options to create and discover.  

That’s my take on it. That’s my experience. And because it is my experience, no one else’s will be identical to mine. Opinions of my experience don’t matter because I own them. They are singular to me.

As I’ve healed and these sleepless portions of my night became more friendly than frustrating, I began to talk to Beloved. I couldn’t talk to god. I have enough issues with authoritarian commands and definitions that god is not an option. So as I listen to the Beyond I made a decision that for me I needed to name it something and that something is Beloved. And they are complete and absolute love. They. I don’t know why it’s “They” but it is. Mostly They don’t answer, and I just do my talking and meditating with them and I get a few new ideas. I get connected and I’m able to go about my day and choose kindness and love rather than spew some awful, knee-jerk response to all this messy human condition.

I’ve had long talks with my sister, Evelyn. She’s a “woo-woo” gal and I’m a “woo-woo” guy. We get each other. I’ve questioned whether I’m completely bat-shit cray-cray many times, and as I’ve told Evelyn my concern she basically said that all humans need a mythology. We call it religion, but in reality, it’s a mythology. The reason is simple: if we don’t connect to something greater than ourselves, we have no reason to discover and become our best selves. We descend into a self-made hell and treat ourselves and others with hate and contempt because there is no purpose or reason to do anything else. But a mythology, a reason to discover and become our best self is the highest in us. It’s a way to connect the dots that don’t make sense. Without a mythology or religion, it’s not that everything happens for a reason, it’s just that everything happens. And it makes no sense. But with a mythology, there is a reason for things that happen. We connect the dots and life has purpose and meaning and we gain understanding. I don’t know that there anything more beautiful in the entire universe than to discover that there is meaning and purpose behind everything, and it’s all based in love. As I expressed my concern about whether or not I’m making all this up she said basically that who cares if you’re making it up? If it’s bringing you healing, love and connection with your planet, your human family and the universe, isn’t that what you’ve hoped for all these decades? And you know what? I suddenly realized how beautiful it is to honor other people’s journey, to love them on their path, to let them have the joy of their own mythology or religion, or whatever it is, and become love on the journey. My journey. Their journey. Our journey. I no longer worry if there is a god or if Jesus died for my sins. The symbols and meaning of all these things really are beautiful. So I have no regrets for being so religious that I was obligated to adhere to and enforce every bit of religious doctrine whether I agreed with it or not. I can look at the beauty of a loving god sending someone like Jesus to offer us atonement and grace, and I can still weep my tears of gratitude.

When I wake, it’s usually between 3 am and 5 am. Sometimes I can fall back to sleep.  Not this time. I asked Beloved if it was time to write about this and there was nothing. But I felt a smile. That’s all it was. Who cares if I’m making this stuff up? I’m more sane, happier, more at peace, and I treat others with kindness and love. If I’m batshit cray-cray, then this is the only way to live for me. And as I imagine any of you out there reading this, I imagine me smiling at you, sending you love, near or far.

The Opposite of Love Is Not Hate

I will warn you that you need to read to the end of this blog entry to feel hope for our human family and for our world. But please do read to the end. I believe you’ll find it’s worth your time.

The opposite of love is not hate. Hate is the result of loving imperfectly but with ulterior motives. It is filled with codependence, assumption, inaccurate perceptions, half-truths and lies, manipulation, domination, and usury. (To name only a few.) As a result of our hurt and grief, we employ hate to do battle to defend ourselves, creating enmity between “us” and “them.” We process our grief and pain by spewing it to others who relate to our experiences, gaining allies that reassure us that we are not insane. (For we now have validation, which is our proof.) We align ourselves with those who have been similarly maligned and set up battle lines feeling new strength for our cause from being wronged, continuing to enable and justify our victimhood. We become the infantry, captains, and generals of our cause to hate. We vote into office those who will hate with us and for us, believing that creating great armies to eliminate “them”—the ones who have wronged us and disagreed with us—will restore our peace and well-being. As we publish our opinions loudly and divide our family and friends, we become the pawns of governments, institutions, and religions doing their bidding.

As the battle rages, we lose hope because all around us are the walking dead whose vitriol and screams pierce our love-starved souls. There is no point in dying because there is a war to wage. With broken hearts, missing eyes, (because an eye for eye makes the world blind) and traumatized, shattered souls, we expect some ruthless, justice-driven god to make it all right for us because we claim we don’t know how to. But we do really. It's just that we refuse to let go of our justified hate. We sit in our misery and remorse and pretend we have no idea why we feel this way. It's all just so overwhelming, we lament. Our egos scream justice while our souls weep for the lack of love.

But if there is a god, why would this omnipotent being right all of our wrongs for us, denying us the opportunity to learn and understand forgiveness? If this god did such a thing there would be no lessons learned, no understanding or comprehension that we are all the same set of molecules and atoms. No understanding that by our very existence there is no separation between us.

The opposite of love is apathy. Love is the emotion of caring, kindness, and concern for others. It is the universal magnet that binds us to each other, our world, and the universe. Apathy is indifference, a suppression of emotion, and the absence of interest and concern. Apathy is a result of numbing ourselves from hating too much and too long.

The difference between hate and apathy is startling. Hate requires us to stay connected to each other by a chain of enmity. As long as there are negative feelings between two people, that chain and bond of enmity exists. The only way to break that chain is to forgive. Apathy will not break it because getting from hate to apathy means we must cease all feeling and emotion. We are addicted to our hate, and to claim apathy as our new weapon would only be a pretense. Pretending to be apathetic in place of hate is called denial. Denial aligns with other ulterior motives.

The only way to break the chains of hate is to forgive. Forgiveness is one of the most selfish things we can do because we are liberating only ourselves. However, the paradox is that by liberating ourselves, we create safety and love for others to do the same.

It may be impossible for any of us to love perfectly. Loving imperfectly is meant to be an ongoing process of increasing our love. Fred Rogers expressed it better than almost anyone by saying, “Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”

Love says there is no “us” or ‘“them” There is only “we.”