|
Phoenix Rising:
Religion has been a dominant factor throughout
human history, both constructively and destructively. It has
served to bond whole cultures together, but also to tragically
divide individual cultures and to draw lines between different
ones. In the context of the Grid and the move toward Sacred
Status, we want to explore some broad questions about religion
and spirituality.
It seems that religion arises in every culture
and takes many forms, ranging from violence and bloodthirstiness
and blood sacrifice to complete pacifism, and from devout
worship of a higher being to a purely philosophical attitude
that recognizes only the “natural order.” Do all
these manifestations of religion arise from some impulse that
is inherent in all humanity?
Samuel: Yes,
they do, but the impulse isn’t “Recognize you are
a part of the greater whole.” The impulse is “I
can put this in a package that will allow me to become more
powerful.”
I’m willing to be startling with this.
Do you think it’s the direction you want to go?
Of course. We all want to be startled. I think
we should be blunt.
Religion is the human need to manipulate
and control, for its own purposes, an inherent trait toward
growth and good. Now you understand why I asked if you minded
if I was startling, because I don’t usually take off
the mask that hides the idea that religion, even though it
appears to be so good, is based in something that is inherently
not good. I do not usually care to take your cultural background
and shake it out and say, “Is this what you’re looking
at here?” And I don’t usually care to imply that
something that is meaningful to you might be a negative thing.
But just as the spirit is beyond human, religion is about
human. And Guardians need to remember that, even if mass consciousness
cannot.
I want to say this, perhaps as a warning.
Discussing religion without bias is almost impossible. You
are naturally pulled toward spiritual awareness, but in your
society religion has been the only acceptable way to express
your spiritual function—which is a pity. Nonetheless,
ninety-nine percent of humanity only accepts spiritual understanding
through the filter of their own version of what god will or
will not accept, which is a reflection of what they will or
will not accept. The religious impulse is an instinctual and
seeded and primary function of spiritual awareness in mass
consciousness. It is the means for most to experience god.
So human nature will make that need a security
issue because it is such a primary function, meaning you will
have more defense mechanisms arise out of a talk regarding
religion and spirituality—out of this interview—even
amongst Guardians, because the means of expressing oneself
and the reasons behind accepting certain beliefs are so tied
in to cultural acceptance.
This is a dangerous interview, and readers
need to be aware ahead of time that, even if they do not officially
follow the religious version of spirituality, even Guardians
are still looking for an all-knowing god and rules they can
follow. That shows up in every area of your life that requires
security. So you’ve got to read this realizing that your
security issues are going to be punched, even if you don’t
think you have anything to do with religious acceptance.
The whole concept of worship is one I don’t
understand; in my Christian experience it seems to equate
with praise, which addresses God as if he had an ego. In other
traditions, worship seems to take the form of offerings or
sacrifice, sometimes in perverted forms (sacrificing others
or an animal instead of making a sacrifice of oneself, for
instance). What is this idea of deity and worship, and where
did it come from?
Most of the time worship is a means by which
a human is able to have an example that it can compare itself
to and model its behaviors on. And most of the time, worship
is the by-product of taking oneself out of the game and pretending
that nothing in your life is in your control, that it’s
fate or God’s will or something to do with “I don’t
have that kind of power, therefore I need to appease this
greater being by being humble.” Of course the problem
with that is you’re going to end up with a higher being
that is more a reflection of you than anything else, instead
of recognizing your power to create a life that gives you
your own empowerment. It’s better not to risk failing
in one’s own higher-level empowerment, and therefore
you choose a representation that is so impossible to attain
that there is no reason to make the attempt.
It’s a whole lot easier in this world
to follow someone else’s direction than to step forward
and make your own map. Making your own map is a lot of hard
work. Following someone else’s directions because they
are the “authority” allows you to justify lacking
the courage to move forward in that same way yourself.
God is in you. Like political leaders in
the United States, you get the god you deserve, and you get
the one that you’re willing to deal with. And at different
times within your history, that has been a different god.
Of course it’s not a different god, but it’s a different
choice based on what you need at the time. When what you need
is absolute, fearsome, stunning power, you’re going to
create a god that is the embodiment of fearsome, stunning
power.
The god of the Old Testament.
For instance. “Smite your enemies,”
because you feel overwhelmed by your enemies. You want a god
that will smite them for you, and you will create a standard
that allows you to see the behaviors of that god as fulfilling
what you need at the time.
It’s an externalization of your self-justification.
Yes, exactly that.
When you said “seeded” into humanity,
that leads me to believe that religion is a natural part of
the human evolution into the spirituality of “I am god,”
as opposed to “god is outside of me.” Are you saying
it was seeded as part of that evolution?
What was seeded was the urge to seek your
spiritual connection. Religion becomes the means by which
it is culturally acceptable to do that, to keep that seeding
in effect. So religion isn’t seeded; the search is. Religion
is the easiest way to check that search off your list as done.
When we as Guardians say, “Universe, will
you give me this?” are we actually doing that very thing
that you’re talking about, instead of saying, “Oh,
I’d like to create this myself.”
You accept what you know, which is to say
you anthropomorphize a construct so that you can relate to
it. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. I am spirit
that has no Scottish accent, no gender, no need for conversation.
All of that is put on to give you something to relate to comfortably.
You are really this big thing out there, and
Samuel is the user interface.
I like that. Actually, that’s perfect.
Your relating to that comfortably is to
my advantage, isn’t it? And it’s to your advantage,
isn’t it? But if you limit the relationship and the contact
to “Scottish male,” no matter how real that has
been in your past, you’re doing that for your convenience.
I’m always ready to tell you, this [channeling using
Lea’s body] is a circus, a show; this isn’t the
point; there is much, much more. Your need to have god or
gods is to give you something to relate to.
That doesn’t deny, however, that the
Universe sees the misuse of an instinctual seeking and is
able to make use of it, so that now that comfortable personification
becomes a means for you to actually move higher spiritually.
The nature of Guardians tends to be that
you’re not comfortable with the types of limitations
mass-consciousness is subject to. But if it works, why not
use it, because you and they (mass consciousness) will reach
a point where you realize, All right, this is going to take
a leap, but it makes sense. Guardians tend to come resistant
enough to authority that that leap happened a long time ago
for you, whereas for mass consciousness it’s been such
a comfortable, everyday function of life that that leap often
doesn’t happen until mid-life.
I see what you’re saying. It could seem
disempowering, but if we are aware as we say it, in a sense
we’re sort of putting out a language that we all understand,
even though we are aware at the same time that we’re
in charge and we are creating our own reality.
What I’m hearing you say is that religion’s
success throughout human history has been because it capitalizes
on two things: our seeded desire to connect back to Source
and the physical form’s need for security. Religion is
a vehicle for fulfilling both of those needs. If I look at
religious teachings and at what you teach, our beliefs about
Heart Portals in the earth are not any farther out there than
the belief that Jesus rose from the dead.
When you get into questions about the different
religions’ value systems, you realize that there isn’t
all that much difference in the foundations of the world’s
various religions. But you’ve got to be really careful
in dealing with that. Christians don’t want to know that
the god Ahura Mazda is exactly the story of Jesus. [The Zoroastrian
god Ahura Mazda had a son, Mithra, whose life had many parallels
with that of Jesus.] They don’t want to know that the
concept of the devil and demons doesn’t exist in the
ancient Jewish faith, where the Christian roots are. Christians
don’t want to think that their beliefs are no different
than the primal beliefs of other religions, and so they don’t
look at it, and they create a rule that says you mustn’t
look at it, that only one way is allowed. And you accept that
way because you need it. When you stop needing it you start
looking beyond, and what you come up against is that your
religious faith won’t hold up to that kind of examination.
But the rules say that there is nothing else out there except
this one way, and if you look for something else you are an
enemy of your faith.
Because it won’t stand up to scrutiny,
religion doesn’t allow you to scrutinize.
Without being cast out. Do not forget, though,
that the other side of that religion is that it’s very
comforting to people. It’s even very empowering to those
who are willing to follow the rules and who have the need
to have the technique and the certainty. In fact, there are
a whole lot of Guardians who look to me to provide “One,
two, three, four, five . . . you do these things and it will
work out,” just like the religions say.
It’s very satisfying to have rules
to follow, and even more satisfying to be able to say that
you follow them perfectly. It’s human nature, and I’m
asking Guardians to turn their backs on human nature, and
not everyone can do that. Some come in and get it, and some
come in and are so afraid they never come back again, even
if they have a compact for it. That is the hard part.
Sacred Status is defined as that time when a
majority of humanity is consciously aware of its spiritual
component. Assuming that you could “keep score,”
would you count the primitive warlike religions and superstitions
among the spiritual?
Yes, I would.
How about the fundamentalists whose religious
views are narrow, exclusive or even punitive to those that
don’t share them? Are they contributing to Sacred Status?
I would count them too, and I would even
count the Inquisitors, with their zeal. It’s not what
coat you have on; it’s what’s under the coat. It
doesn’t matter what crutch you needed to get you there.
That answers the question, but it’s
an uncomfortable answer, because nobody wants there to be
a natural spiritual drive. Everybody wants their way of getting
to it to be right, better, real. And your way counts, but
so does that “horrible, blood-sacrificing evil version
that causes children to put on bombs and blow up good Christians.”
You don’t want to accept that that is just a different
coat, a different costume, and that what’s under it is
acceptable. That’s a real threat. That gets people storming
into a church and shooting the choir.
You find the religion that works for you;
you stick with it as long as it works with your beliefs. What
causes change in your version of what works says a lot about
the hold those beliefs have on you. You may have a child that
dies of a genetic disease before it reaches the age of three,
and your heart is broken and you become fully convinced that
no god would take children like that, and so you move away
from those beliefs that you held for so long because losing
something vital to your happiness is beyond the limits of
your beliefs. If you can’t see your god as bigger than
that, then you become angry with your god, and that makes
you change your view of what god is. That might open the door
to you no longer putting a limit on god and becoming godly
yourself, or you may become so angry that that anger touches
every spiritual part of your life, and you remain kicking
and screaming against any kind of spiritual acceptance—which
causes you to miss the spiritual boost that experience could
bring you. It’s as though you need to believe in evil
to justify painful things in the world because your god isn’t
big enough to have a bigger picture than you do.
Only good things should happen to good people
if god is good.
Correct. But at the same time you have a
religion that accepts the sacrifice of the first-born of a
household or of a herd. It’s horribly wrong when it’s
the Aztecs and Mayans, but not when it’s the foundation
of the Jewish faith.
You accept the beliefs that work for you,
and if what works for you is staying ignorant of your power,
you are going to find a way to do that. If that’s what
security is for you—a lack of responsibility and a lack
of commitment—then you are going to find that and stick
with it. If that’s not what you’re about, I promise
you that in one way or another you are going to find the means
within you to seek another way of understanding your world.
Some of the most amazing pagan beliefs are found in your comfortable
religions.
The fact that religious belief and devotion
have inspired such altruism and self-sacrifice, as well as
such incredibly beautiful artistic and musical expressions,
has always argued to me that, even though religious dogmas
contradict one another, they all express some sort of underlying
truth. Is this the case?
Yes.
How do you resolve the differences between the
paternalistic religions like Christianity and Islam, the pagan
polytheisms (such as those of the Celts, the Norse, the Hindus),
and animism such as Native American religions or the beliefs
of Australian aborigines? If there is such an underlying truth,
how does each of these express it?
Again, you create—or you find—the
religion that fits your beliefs.
Monotheism is the closest most humans come
to recognizing the individual’s godness. Monotheism reflects
a point in human awareness that your god-self is a possibility.
It’s an advance—not necessarily chronologically:
it’s not that polytheistic understanding was first and
monotheism came out of that later. The polytheistic religions
are looking at attributes, much in the way the Rays represent
aspects of Source. Any one Ray contains all the Rays, but
its focus is a particular function. In every multiple expression
of god, there is a single creator expressed through multiple
versions: god releases All That Is, which expresses through
Ellic force, and causes the world to say, “This being
is a god, a goddess. This is the highest representation of
this belief.”
You get the religion that fits your level
of spirituality at the time.
Does it have anything to do with our ability
to control the natural world—you have to pray to the
god of the spring, the god of the wind, because you need help
with the natural world, whereas when you get to monotheism
you have more control over your environment? Or is that way
off base?
It’s not off base, but it’s bigger
than that. Recognizing that the wind is bigger than you—that
you can’t control it—causes you to want to personify
it so that you can appease it in order to keep your house
upright, or your fields pollinated—to control it; thus
you have the god of the wind. But in the really big picture,
there is an elemental force that expresses itself in this
dimension as a force that can be affected by somebody who
knows how to weave that energy. It can either be used to make
you behave a certain way or to prove you are powerful and
therefore have a right to certain things because of that.
That’s behind every organized way of claiming your power
over a thing or a person. Recognizing power outside of the
human’s need to make it like itself so that it can relate
to it is very hard to do. It’s more advanced.
And I just keep coming back to this one
thing: you get what you want. You choose to live with the
religion that serves you. You do it in whatever way—culturally
and maybe someday individually—works, whether it’s
because you only expect this much out of life and it works,
or because you are so tuned in to your spiritual presence
that you can see how all the things work together. It depends
on how limited you need your view to be.
Religion and science have come to represent
contradictory outlooks rather than complementary ones. Has
this schism served a necessary purpose for our evolution,
or does it too severely separate what should be a more inclusive
view?
It severely separates what should be a more
inclusive view.
Do Christian fundamentalism or creationism or
beliefs about intelligent design continue to serve a purpose,
despite their contradictions of science and scientific fact?
You know, when a person’s beliefs contain
the unexplainable, it’s a religion. When your whole life
is about quantifying the unexplainable, you’re a scientist.
How would you differentiate between religion
and superstition?
Or between science and superstition. It’s
all the same. One is working to control the elements by internal
behavior, and it’s called religion; and the other controls
them by knowing and understanding how they work, and that’s
called science. But everything in science, as any scientist
will tell you, is filled with the unknowable, the unexplainable,
the beautiful and magical. You cannot truly study the way
this world works and not see the magic.
There should not be a gap between the true
basis of religion and the ultimate working of science. There
should not be that gap. But science doesn’t make people
behave in certain ways insofar as manipulating the human mind
and harnessing empowerment. Science looks to understand, and
religion looks to control, and I would go so far as to say
the methods you use, be they empowering superstitious beliefs
and calling them religion, or understanding natural law and
calling that science, whichever one you accept and believe
is because—here is my song again—it’s what
you need to believe to function here right now. They shouldn’t
be different. They shouldn’t be different.
Do you have anything to add to how all this
variety of religious belief and practice plays into the Grid
and the progression toward Sacred Status?
They play into the grid by creating such
ridiculous boundaries that more and more people are moving
out of it. And that’s a pretty good thing.
I don’t have any problem with religion
for those who are aware of why they’ve chosen it. The
thing of it is, though, if you’re aware of why you’ve
chosen it, you probably won’t choose it. A Guardian should
be compassionate with those who have chosen the religious
path, not judgmental, but should also be very grateful that
they see otherwise. To put it bluntly, conformity just makes
it h arder
to reach your potential. It doesn’t make it impossible.
|
