You can’t hear God
No matter how closely you listen.
You can’t see God
No matter how intensely you look.
You can’t touch God
No matter how distant your reach.
Yet you can know God
As much as you’ll ever need.
How is this possible?
It’s because
Human beings have no difficulty identifying evil
So, instinctively, we also know its reverse –
God is there – in the opposite direction –
For us, it’s always just a matter
Of turning around.
Atheists and Agnostics attend various media events
And ridicule projections of “God”
Presented by evangelical producers of the “Old Time Religion” –
But fail to remember that God was never an ancient white sky-man –
But “Spirit” –
And that this same kind of “spirit” is also within themselves –
So what they’ve apparently (but mistakenly) been laughing at is simply their own egos.
Everyone knows this – at least impliedly –
Because human spirit is capable of being one with God when most unconscious of itself.
So what I would like to say to my atheist and agnostic friends:
It’s better to try to experience God than to simply “talk about” various concepts of God –
And, experiencing “the Kingdom,” as Jesus called it, that is within you –
Is certainly no “laughing matter.”
Vacant churches line the seashore.
Strolling along the sea/land divide
Religious teachers casually toss artificial pearls out onto the deep.
But true religion, courageous and contagious,
Is unwilling to accept anything less than a life filled with joy.
When everything else begins to exit,
Love comes rushing in at the last moment bringing its own surprising reality.
What’s the point of arguing about the nature of God?
Every person knows what she knows – and that’s that –
Until, that is, someone remembers to ask
For directions.
People live inside three overlapping existences:
“God,”
One’s “True Self,”
And “Reality” –
Also the “right relationship” among the three
Because, in essence, they’re pretty much the same thing –
Our postmodern “Trinity.”
In God’s realm – beyond speech, form, and image –
Lies a place
Where human language is a lie.
Where reality is expressed only through love.
Not only will it be necessary to lose our ego –
We’ll also be required to lose our stiff adult mind as well
In order to become spontaneous as little children –
So that wars, exploitation, and suffering can finally come to an end
When we’ll be left solely in “God’s Kingdom”–
The one Jesus constantly prayed for.
Divine wisdom, being feminine,
Took on flesh in a male Jesus.
However, the great door to the next spiritual dimension,
Consisting of a perfect, yet ever changing, balance
Of Love, Truth, Justice, and Beauty,
Will open only to a she.
When she does decide to come through that door
And enter our universe
All the previous “male gods” will quickly be forgotten
And people will start attempting to live as God would live
If God were a young female avatar.
Strength, intellect, courage, and compassion
Will be reflected in the face of this divine female being
Manifested as an ecstatic Central or South American holy girl –
The purest girl in the world.
Asking God for specific results, things, or hoped-for events
Has been defined as “spiritual materialism” –
The kind of petitioning prayer that, all the way back to the beginning,
Turned people into spiritual consumers or merchants.
This buying, selling, demanding, and pleading with the Divine
Has nothing to do with the true essence of God.
God is Love and Truth – and nothing else –
After Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammed, and Moses –
Haven’t you gotten the message yet?
God is hardest to acknowledge
When life seems easy.
God appears most frequently to hearts that suffer –
Not those on vacation.
Suffering never ends
But neither does joy.
Joy and suffering make up a bi-colored ball –
Each failing to come into existence without the other.
In fact, we only experience joy
To the same degree we’re willing to suffer.
Isn’t that life
As a human being?
Once you become nothing – that is, no thing,
You instantly become a door –
A spiritual door that, once entered,
It’s possible to find your “true self.”
Surprisingly, it doesn’t take much “work” to surrender one’s ego
Since it’s only “dead weight” accumulated from birth –
Manufactured and transmitted by culture, politics, society, and religion.
It’s surprisingly easy to find your true self – the easiest thing in the world –
But does take courage
Because you have to give up everything –
That is, the glorious ego you pieced together over a lifetime.
Easy, because you’re already “there” – beyond ego – without consciously knowing it –
Yes, it’s true, you can find your “true self” at any moment –
Your very own spiritual “pearl.”
In the West, poetry has pretty much been “dying on the vine”
Because there’s simply no “juice” left –
Especially since there’s no longer any believable God to write for.
In ancient Islam, mysticism and poetry frequently were allied –
And in medieval Sufism, with Hafiz and Rumi,
You might even say that, for a time, they became the same thing.
Christianity, knocking through a couple millennia of violent materialism
And repressible crimes,
Has, unfortunately, over time, devolved into contemporary Evangelical/Republican paternalism.
Sufi poets, however, spent their time and spiritual energy searching for the “heart of humanity”
And found it in “Love” –
Which enabled them to dance and sing ecstatically.
Westerners might one day experience this too –
But from way over, in the next room.
Law and the Political
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