Alysia:

You make me feel like I should read Don Piper's 90 minutes in heaven sometime. My spirit guidance showed me the cover of his book a while back. I went to the bookstore and read the NDE part, but not the rest. Perhaps I should stop being a cheepskate and buy the book so I can read all of it.

What you describe reminds me of what Ranelle Wallace and Howard Storm went through after their NDEs (I have both of their books). They really had to pay the price for their NDEs.  Lots of physical pain afterwards. Ranelle experienced really bad burns all over her body. They'd put her in a whirlpool bath, several people would hold her down, and scrub her wounds really hard with a big plastic brush.  This would be done several times a day for a period that lasted a number of weeks. When she wasn't getting scrubbed she'd hear the other burn victims in the burn unit scream with pain as they got scrubbed. Nevertheless,  I bet you she and Howard would go through the pain they experienced again, in order to have their life changing NDEs. I on the other hand had my night in heaven in experience without having to go through any pain. I believe I should think of this as grace. Actually, I've had some other difficult growing pains in my life, and I'd be willing to go through them again.

Kathy:

I figure God got the process of creation going, and then we continue with the process. There is nothing that exists but God's being, so even when bits of God such as ourselves are involved, God is always involved, even when we create in an ungodly way.

P.S. I sort of understand what it is like to have burns scrubbed, because my head and face got burned one time, and it really hurts to get scrubbed when you don't have any skin protecting your nerves. I didn't get burned as bad as Ranelle, and no scars resulted.

I see what you're saying Rondele; however, sometimes people have good lessons to share that come outside of an NDE.  Alysia's thread shares such a lesson. Opening up to love from others is really important. We hurt ourselves when we play the role of a person who doesn't need to receive love from others. Howard Storm's and Ranelle Wallace's books make some good points when they aren't talking about their NDE.

Whatever the case, I changed my route while going for my daily walk today, and picked up a copy at a local bookstore.  If I don't like the book, perhaps I should have Alysia send me a refund.


rondele wrote on Mar 11^th, 2008 at 5:40pm:

Alan McDougall wrote on Mar 12^th, 2008 at 2:59am:

Hi Alan  I am somewhat in agreement but I agree this would sound for most people too impersonal to relate to. Humans have a need to personalize everything, including their concept of god; is why we have the ascended masters to look up to as super consciousness is a hard concept to deal with while in C1 consciousness. yet to complete my thought in alignment with yours, the thought of being drops in the ocean can bring one to the meditation of "nothingness" and therefore where "everythingness" begins..because then we can understand our total reliance upon one another in our oneness and how we all contribute to make this world here and now what it is aside from ego projections of grandeur, something that is against the oneness concept or the super consciousness what you've called it. The trick is for a human how to be attain oneness consciousness (global?) without losing individuality in the merge. in that case we fall back on god, which is Love undistorted by ego.

Religion must remain for the spiritual traveler (and we are all spiritual) signposts only pointing to what god is. if one were on a road walking for instance, there would be signs pointing to destinations, that is what religions are. just signposts. the ego would tend to worship the signposts rather than his own fellow man, the divine within each one.

There will always be greater beings than ourselves. there will always be some being whose light shines brighter than our own. for my own purposes I see the planets as beings. that might be personalizing a planet but I didn't hang the stars, I didn't create myself in the beginning, and I'm no accident of an explosion. Humanity I believe separated itself off from a god being in order to generate more of itself and circle it back into the place it originally separated from, increasing life that way.

We call god, the father. This puts it into perspective, we are the children. A father loves his own creations, his children, the children love the father. this is how we personalize our god in religious terms. if we depersonalize everything in favor of scientific reference, or left brain logic we soon lose touch with the heart path where love abides, and for me Love is God, therefore since I'm a child of god I too sprang from this love and seek to remember my identity.

so is god all of us? Yes, but I do believe it's even more unlimited than that mere conjecture. He is first cause..we are coming after first cause. We can increase god's kingdom by seeing the god within each person and remembering for them who they really are, should they have forgotten.

love, alysia

I pretty much agree with what Alysia wrote; including the part about us intentionally seperating from God for a while. However, I don't believe we ever become completely seperate.  We wouldn't be able to love each other if we did.

Sort of related to this, Ranelle Wallace wrote something interesting in her NDE book. She spoke of how she met spirits she knew before she incarnated. Spirits she was close to. She saw that there were two types of spirits. Those who had experience being human, and those who have yet to have experience being human. They seemed innocent and less developed than the spirits that had experience being human. This part of her experience reminded me of when Robert Monroe met his I-there.

I figure becoming human teaches us something. It provides perspective. It enables us and whoever we share our lessons with to understand what compassion means. It enables us to truly understand what happiness means, by seeing what a lack of happiness is like.  It enables us to truly appreciate what we have when we move on to the World of spirit. Plus it provides us with all kinds of experience and knowledge that we can make use of according to need when we are in the World of spirit. Becoming human also enables us to develop our uniqueness.

Here is another factor that sort of relates to this discussion.  When people meet light beings during NDEs and OBEs, these beings aren't hallucinations. They have too much love, energy and truth in them to be hallucinations.  I figure these light beings know all about the oneness, without having to first become non-existent as unique beings.

Rudolph Otto wrote a classic cross-cultural book on this question called "The Idea of the Holy."  What is most commonly reported in most religions is just the opposite of "God becoming us."  God is generally experienced as "wholly other" and that aspect of mystical experience explains why "fear" in the sense of reverential awe is a standard aspect of such experiences.

In its most basic form, the Judeo-Christian concept of God denies that God even exists!  In other words, God is not a Being in the sense of one among many beings.  Rather, God is "the ground of all being" (Acts 17:28) or the elusive answer to the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing at all?"  Thus, God is not "All That Is," but rather the ground of "All That Is."  One of the major branches of modern theology is called "Process Theology," meaning (1) that God is in constant process and (2) that creation ultimately expands and changes the Ground of Being.  From a Christian viewpoint, we cannot become God, but we can "participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4)" and simultaneously retain a sense of our own individuality and uniqueness.  

The spiritual danger of monistic God-talk is not metaphysical error, but the trap of praying to our own Self by virtue of our identity as God.  Practically speaking, such a tact almost inevitably precludes true humility in deference to ignoble pride.  We must remind ourselves of a simple fact: an omnipotent God can create independent units of self-consciousness which are free to make decisions that reflect the opposite of divine love.  If one accepts the moral value of love, then the creation of free will is best conceived as "dualism," since in ordinary word usage, "monism" lacks a moral perspective because it construes reality from a perspective beyond the level of polarities like good and evil.  As such, monism strikes me as the perfect rationalization for dysfunctional narcissism. I consider Matthew's analogy with Einstein's relativity  theory and quantum mechanics a weak analogy to the monist-dualist distinction because it overlooks the pragmatic consideration of the moral dimension of freely offered love which requires polarity.

Don  

Hi Rondele, members,


quote = Rondele
Quote:



If not in this lifetime than when?
In what sense does aspiration mean closing oneself in a box? Closing oneself in a box would be suffocation.
This attitude of gladly accepting limitation while seemingly charming, may also not be very inspiring. Is it self-defeating in that it wants to remain unconscious - not ask the question - while at the same time, presuming to know the answer for the question it doesn't want to ask?!?  If true, this attitude does not recognize the inate human potential to be explored and developed - an alternative question also with an implied answer, but one that is implied by faith in the ineffable within.  And if one really genuinely wants to be practical about it, then one's mantra might be: "right here and now" instead of "don't, can't, maybe later".

There are indeed "so many permutations of this question", and yet that is the mystery of life - also the blessing of human birth that offers self-consciouness and free-will as opportunity,  part of that mystery. Ironically, or not so at all, each human being is exactly that: one single permutation of the question, "Who am I?"  In that case, it is just one instance, albeit an important one that we are individually responsible for - right here and now. This leads to another question: If one answers the question, "Who am I?", will the Golden Rule be subsumed by the answer? One would hope so, and if true then nothing is lost in the greater quest.

"...we could spend the rest of our lives chasing our tails."?  
Can we just skip over the most glaring implication of that assertion and proceed from the physiological to the philosophical?...
 
Again, another forgone conclusion that implies already knowing the answer: 'a dead end'. So why bother?
Might as well pop the cork and watch the game - we're all going to die anyway, right?  
This is the same rationale that concludes with suicide, and from a spiritual pov, that is exactly what a wasted life is, because it means continued submergence in ignorance. It is the negative form of skepticism - life as futility, etc. - a premise in which there seems to be at least an equal measure of presumption as the inverse premise which does not imply self-limitation. So why choose the lesser?

Deferrence and submission to external authority can only ultimately lead to this kind of defeatism because its very action builds and becomes the limitation that necessarily - because of inherent orientation - circumvents the invocation and discovery of the truly authentic inner authority.  

How would that knowledge change one's life?
Because one would then consciously be God. How's that for a 'reality-show' makeover?
Of course, that is blasphemy for many conventionally religious people, which is understandable.
It is a very tough belief-system leap to make.

God is ineffable because God cannot be known through the finite concrete mind, which is itself structurally rooted in ignorance.
One needs to invoke higher principles embodied (latently) in human life in order to become, not perceive through the separating mind, this ineffability.

Yes, we can all be (or try to be) worldly good citizens politely operating within the Golden Rule, 10 Commandments, etc, etc., and yet still never discover our true nature. As a matter of fact, at one point in our development, people probably said the same thing prior to the advent of Golden Rule. ie: "Even without knowing Who or What God is, we can surely go on haplessly killing each other." Yet because of some unfathomable Sacrifices - huge numbers of people now have clearly defined, inspiring opportunities that are far beyond the possibilities of what the groundwork of simply 'being nice to one's neighbor' partly provides as a fertile field. So, right here and now in this life the question is - what will God grow into? Miraculously, we actually get to make that choice.
That's hardly closing ourselves in a box by any stretch of the imagination.

- u