“Reinventing one’s consciousness to a new concept of God… takes more than a little effort.”

“Happily  New Thought has come around to look at the nature of God more in terms of love and law, rather than in terms of a super being, somewhere out there who is judgmental, vengeful and jealous, and who insists on one unyielding way to salvation.”

George Sison words are in sharp contrast to what I was taught. He continues: “From school, we remember a white-bearded, aged figure with a thunderous voice expressing anger any moment one commits a sin or violates any of his commandments.”

Throughout my schooling and even through the 90s (!!!!) my life was ruled by the exacting cosmology of the nuns who taught me. Several retreat  masters ,mostly Jesuits, were just as fear trigger happy.

It took a young psychiatrist who eventually married my first cousin to open my mind. So ironical that eventually in the 2000s he left our church. I would like to believe he belongs to a more compassionate church now.

“Freeing the Soul from Fear” says: A culture that leaves no room for living connections with the spiritual realms can foster fear. Robert Sardello believes connections with angels, spirit guides or the dead can provide an antidote to fear.

My personal experience of this involves Julie Anne being stranded in Mexico because of stormy weather. I sought comfort through prayers addressed to my numerous prayer warriors among the dead. Two maternal aunts used to question this practice of mine. I couldn’t understand why these two aunts, traditional Catholics at that questioned my interpretation of communion of saints teaching!

Since August 29 of this year, (For lack of a better term) I have been spooked. It started with Emil’s passport which I could not locate just two days before our flight to Singapore. It was sheer agony to wait for the bank to open for us to check the safety deposit box. My husband and our daughter examined several options in case the passport could not be found.

In he bank, my husband calmly emptied the contents  of the safety deposit box. The passport wasn’t there. Then my husband decided for us to go back to the condo and for him to personally examine the contents of the overnite bag where the passport was supposed to have been kept.

Another round of agony for me. It was the longest three minute ride back to the condo for me. I did not even dare to check my overnite bag. My husband calmly too out the contents of my bag and quicly identified his passport. All along it was there but I mistook it as my old passport due to its thickness. I wrongly expected his passport to be as thin as my new passport. I completely forgot his old passport was attached to his new one when he applied for a visa to South korea. I did not go with him.

Back from Singapore this September, the spooky business continued. I could not locate my extra pair of glasses inside an embroidered Singaporean case. To make a long story short, my husband and I simultaneously saw the case on top of one of his many school bags. I did not bother to check in that area because I remember I did not unpack there. The logical explanation is: the embroidered case must have fallen from a paper lantern from Singapore I placed on top of Emil’s closed laptop.

I have yet to write about several unmindful episodes both in Singapore and herein Manila. Wake up calls!

I have been seeking answers in clear-edged concepts to many of my burning issues. I have been agonizing over my personal experiences of God that run counter against what was “indoctrinated” in school, and in church till the 90s when I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression.

Lately, I reviewed Bro. Ebner’s FSC book written in the 70s and first read when I was pregnant with our one and only daughter. Like Bro Ebner I have been searching for better explanations to questions about life. Like him I feel that : “Until church spokesmen and theological experts offer us more immediate helpful things, I feel that there is a place for me to tell my story.”

Our only daughter who has been living away from us since her college years was home from London lately. In spite of my serious work on expanding my consciousness for the past 3 years I feel humbled by her maturity and her global experience: Singapore, Australia, London, USA, Dubai, Spain, Vienna, Paris, Morocco, Prague etc

Between Bro. Ebner’s book and conversations with our daughter, I feel short-changed. My fearful clinging to traditional Catholic teachings has robbed me of the exuberance which our daughter exudes. She has unwittingly made me realize the truth in what Bro Ebner wrote:
“It arrives as something new in the Catholic church, where “objective faith” has been stressed officially for the past four centuries.”
“Whatever we can say and do about God that will be real for us has to grow out of this person’s experience.”
“We can expect to experience the true God only when we get in touch with ourselves. ”

I am still dealing with what Bro Ebner calls “layman’s frustration and perplexities.” He may be speaking of me as he wrote:
“We may be so conditioned by our past, we may perceive through so many filters, that we may scarcely know what actually we ourselves really think and feel. So that when contemporary writers urge us to explore the religious side of our experience, we may not be reading our depths but mainly remembering words we were told and which we only take as ours. However, to be sensitive to this problem is already to be solving it.”

I like Dr Page, Martha Beck, Lilou Mace, Barbara Hubbard, Laura Bushnell and of course Gill Edwards. Thy are all “bringers” of hope. I also like Aunty Mahealani and Kahu S. Ka’imiloa.

According to Gill Edwards : “The wisdom of the ancients …sees life from a much larger perspective. It has access to the unseen realities. It knows that life is a chosen adventure in consciousness. We are conscious beings who have freely chosen to become physical. (Consciousness did not emerge from matter; matter emerged from consciousness!).

“We are not victims. We were not sent here – much less banished here. The earth is not a penal colony for wayward souls who (if we’re very, very good and stoically endure a great  deal of suffering) might be allowed to come home eventually.”

To me this sounds like a repudiation of a formula pryer which my cousin refused to recite because she could not stomach “the valley of tears” phrase in that prayer.

Gill Edwards continues: “For thousands of years, mystics have insisted that we are all ONE – that we are all sparks of a creative Source, and our separateness is an illusion.”

“In the greater reality, all probable pasts, and probable futures co-exist, all causes and effects co-exist – evrything that ever was and ever will be simply “is”. We are multidimensional beings .”

Ms Edwards ventures to apply the Oneness belief: …”we can communicate with anything and anyone at will – from a tree to a typewriter, from a great grandmother in Spirit to a far-flung friend. since all consciousness is interconnected, we can send or receive messages, give or receive healing, or ask information – all at a distance. It just requires a little practice, and trust.”

“Another immensely practical consequence of our Oneness is that, since everything is interconnected, nothing happens by chance. Our thoughts and beliefs create our reality. Our thoughts are energy and that energy attracts people, events and opportunities which match that energy which resonate with it. Every thought is a prayer.”

“Our views of reality are forever changing, as we learn and grow – and thousands of people, including well-known scientists and philosophers, are now challenging common sense…”

I wonder…….
According to Rabbi Darfour: “Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species threatened a religious community that up to that point in history had only its own faith to shape it. The tools of biblical criticism, archeology, and modern day cosmology were not yet available to biblical scholars, theologians, and religious historians”

“Now they are, and because they are, science and religion no longer need to repudiate each other to justify themselves”
“Indeed, they can complement each other. The science of the cosmos can indeed strengthen, if not confirm the faith of the believer.”
“For such a person, the heavens do show the glory of God. Cosmology need not destroy that belief.”

According to Dr Christine Page: “It was not until the Lemurian Age …some 100,000 years ago, that separation occurred into two genders and the principle of duality began.” I would think that the Adam and Eve story of the Bible occurred not earlier than the :separation into two genders” There could not have been a male and a female earlier.

In the context of human evolution according to Dr Page: “the physical body would have looked almost transparent as its energy was still of a high frequency allowing easy exchange of light consciousness and thought between people, the Nature Kingdoms and those of the spirit world.”

Reading Dr Page, Neale Walsch and listening to the spiritual leaders of Hawaii as interviewed by Lilou Mace in Juicy Living Tours as well as listening to the interviews of Wayne Dyer and Barbara Marx Hubbard make me wonder how my church till now has not come up with an updated interpretation of Original Sin.In a previous essay I wrote that Original Sin could very well be the programmed memories as explained in Joe Vitale’s “Zero Limits”. I can only wonder because not even my 24 units of Theology in college, a long time ago, have adequately equipped me to give a substantial discussion of such a sacred teaching.