Recoverer 2
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Don:
See my responses below within brackets. I highlighted some of the unnecessary adjectives you used:
Albert: "In his book "Ultimate Journey" on pages 224-225 Robert Monroe said: "These to me are Knowns: This, our Creator...does not demand worship, adoration, or recognition, does not punish for `evil' or `misdeeds', does not intercede or interdict in our life activity."
Albert: "The part about not demanding worship and adoration makes sense to me. Since God (the Creator) is the source of all love, I find it hard to believe that he is need of receiving worship and adoration. Worship and adoration is something a narcissistic being would desire."
Your first mistake is your crude anthropomorphic assumption that the biblical God has an ego. Among other false assumptions, you assume that the biblical God is the Supreme Being among countless other created beings. In fact, strictly speaking, God does not "exist:" rather, God is the ground of all existence (Acts 17:28). God gives us anthropomorphic images of Himself only to help us establish a loving relationship with Him. Thus, Jesus teaches us to address God as our heavenly Father. But speaking literally, God declares, "I am God and not a male (Hebrew: "ish"), the Holy One in your midst (Hosea 11:9)." And Numbers 23:18 can say, "God is not a human, that He should lie." Elsewhere God urges us to acknowledge the limits of anthropomorphic God talk: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9)."
[[I believe that God has an ego in the sense that he has a sense of self. I don’t mean he has narcissistic attributes. I believe that God is the source of everything, and everything is made up of his being. I’ve found that I feel love for God the most when I love him as a good friend, appreciate him, and care about his happiness. I don’t feel the need to praise him in the way an Islamic terrorist would, because my love for him doesn’t include the self-serving motive of receiving some sort of reward from him.]]
Your 2nd mistake is your assumption that the biblical God is a narcissist who NEEDS worship. In fact, the biblical God has no "needs;" rather, it is we who need to worship to establish and express a loving relationship with God. It is in that sense that we must interpret the poetic image in Psalm 22:3: "You are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel." Thus, God asks rhetorically that when Israel is guilty of false worship: "Is it I whom they provoke?...Is it not themselves TO THEIR OWN HURT (Jeremiah 7:19)?"
[I did not say that the Biblical God is a narcissist. There are some people who act as if he is when they claim that you better praise God or else.]]
Albert's irreverent reaction to the concept of worship has tragic roots in Monroe's arrogant dismissal of the need for worship. Consider Monroe's defiance in God's presence:
[[Don, you are so emotionally attached to lashing out at anything that doesn’t support your limited way of viewing things, that you feel the need to see negativity where it doesn’t exist. It is possible for people to have love, respect, gratitude, and loyalty to God without having to raise their arms and repeat “praise the lord” over and over again. People who act in such a way are often the same people who believe that they better believe in God and worship him, or they will be sent to hell for all of eternity. It isn’t possible to have genuine feelings of love for a being if one of your reasons for being devoted to that being is the fear of retribution. As far as I’m concerned “A God fearing” attitude is blasphemous towards God’s PUL. He is so understanding and he loves so unconditionally, that it isn’t necessary to fear him.]]
"A voice in my head, a cold, admonitory voice--"I am the Lord thy God whom you serve"...My lungs are full of water. I must have air...The idea of a god that threatens me amuses me..[God] ."You are damned. You are no more than wasted energy of me, who is your Lord!""
"Ultimate Journey" is published in 1994 and Monroe dies from pneumonia in early 1995 (March 31). Monroe's irreverent reaction to God's worship requirement seems to have triggered a divine warning of the ailment that would soon take his life. He experiences pneumonia-like symptoms, a drowning sensation in which his lungs are full of liquid and he has trouble breathing. Monroe's death reminds me of the depression psychosis that takes Helen Schucman's life after the publication of "The Course in Miracles."
[[The comparison you make here is ridiculous, and could only be had by a person who is so intent on finding evil associated with Robert, that he will come to conclusions that have no basis. I do not believe that Robert was opposed to feeling genuine love for God. If anything, he was opposed to the idea of loving a Creator like God without actually knowing if such a being exists. I do not believe that God has a problem with people who want to find out for certain whether or not he exists, before they feel love for him. Because Robert was brave enough to explore non-physically, he was able to find out if a Creator-like being exists. He was also probably opposed to the idea of loving a being because “you better or else.” There is no way you could truly love a being if you believe that such being will send you to hell for all of eternity if you don’t. Such an activity is forced submission, not wisdom based appreciation and acceptance.]]
Albert: "If one thinks in the LOOSH terms Robert wrote about, what kind of being would collect worship and adoration like energy?"
What you and Monroe overlook is that PUL is relational; true love requires an object, an other; so to experience God, we need to experience His love and to worship God is to express our love for God in adoration, praise, and thanksgiving. One of the great evils of the Monroe/ Moen model is that it accepts both a creator and PUL as a basic, and yet, it refuses to acknowledge the truth and mystical importance of the biblical affirmation, "God is love."
[[Regarding “relationship,” “an object,” “an other,” there are many occasions when I’ve read of somebody experiencing PUL, and they shared it with “Someone else.” How do you know that Robert and Bruce don’t think of God as love? That is your baseless accusation.]] So on the Monroe/Moen model, love floats around like a cosmic soup that can be dipped into and projected on souls in need of retrieval. This absurd notion in itself suggests that New Age retrievals are illusory. As the Bible and ES make clear, PUL is not a feeling, but a way of being. The concepts "pure" and "unconditional" imply a contrast with "impure' ways of being and ways of being in which love has conditions or strings attached. As ES eloquently demonstrates, real love is part of our core personality or core desires, not a lovin' feeling, and those core desires determine whether we progress spiritually in the afterlife territories.
[[With these last two paragraphs you are speaking according to your agenda laden concept of PUL, not what other people have experienced and understand. Due to the same prejudice and lack of experience, you cannot with any authority state whether other people have done retrievals. If you insist on claiming that you know better than the people who have done retrievals, this just shows how rigidly you cling to your way of thinking. PUL is a way of being and a feeling. If one abides as love, one is able to experience such love. If one isn’t feeling love, one isn’t actually abiding as love. Living according to PUL is not an all or nothing activity. For example, you allow yourself to feel love and respect when you speak to members of your church, but when you speak to New Age people you feel judgment, righteousness, a false sense of superiority, condescension and condemnation. When through experience you learn what PUL is all about and live according to it more completely, you will feel nothing but love and respect for all people, even if they are audacious enough to have viewpoints that disagree with your own.]]
Albert: "Regarding "does not punish for `evil' or `misdeeds', " I believe that God is way too wise and loving to think in terms of punishing the beings he created. He understands why some of us go astray thoroughly enough where he feels no need for Judgment."
This Monroe/ Moen claim is a corollary of the false principle, "There is no god, there is no evil. There is only expression." So I guess an unpunished Hitler is thriving in his reunion with his soul Disk, awaiting another incarnational adventure. It has been demonstrated that moral relativism and the lack of moral absolutes are recipes for a dysfunctional and immoral society. {I will document the relevant research in a separate post.) Famed Oxford professor, eloquently expresses God's respect for self-determination in our ultimate fate, "The gates of Hell are locked FROM THE INSIDE."
[[First of all, your response isn’t an accurate representation of what I said. Second, it shows a lack of understanding of how things work. What happened to Hitler after he died isn’t a matter of a God who lacked an understanding of Hitler’s life and who chose to punish him. Rather, it is a matter of Hitler having to experience a continuation of his negative state of mind after he died and what resulted, until he reached the point where he became honest about how he lived, and chose a more positive way. More children become gang bangers in neighborhoods where gang activity takes place as opposed to neighborhoods where it doesn’t not because those children are more evil than other children, but because these are the kind of influences they have to deal with. More children become racists in families where racism exists than children of families where racism doesn’t exist not because they are more evil, but because they had to deal with negative influences that non-effected children didn’t have to deal with. In order to create us so we have free will, God couldn’t download all of his wisdom into us when he did so. He had to allow us to have the opportunity to learn for ourselves. As a result, until we gain the wisdom that enables us to use our free will in a wise and loving way, some of us are likely to make some mistakes. Understanding what takes place isn’t a matter of being steeped in some brain-dead moral relativism where you can’t recognize a negative event such as rape. It is a matter of understanding the big picture well enough so you understand why some souls manifest in a negative way for a while. It isn’t a matter of some beings and events being evil through their entire core. It is a matter of what God’s creative process requires in order for the essential ingredient of free will to exist.]]
Monroe: "The Creator.. does not intercede or interdict in our life activity."
This atrocious claim is inevitable once the Monroe disconnect between the Creator and cosmic PUL is recognized. In fact, my threads here attest the opposite truth, that one way God expresses His love towards us is by hearing and responding to our prayers, thus establishing a loving personal relationship.
[[I already addressed this on this post with the below. Even if to some extent Robert was wrong about this, it is a bit much for you to try to discredit him on that basis. Your doing so is more about your agenda, than seeing what is so. If you can make as many discriminatory mistakes as you make, then why can’t Robert make some.
Regarding, "does not intercede or interdict in our life activity." I do not believe that Robert meant this completely, because elsewhere within Ultimate Journey he wrote that the Creator makes adjustments according to need. I believe it is a matter of finding the right balance of when it is appropriate to intercede, and when it isn't. Unless we understand the big picture to the extent The Creator/God does, it might seem curious at times why there are moments when it seems as if God doesn't intercede.]]
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