i left the church ..

Audio Version: YouTube

If you're a writer you know, the words build up like mountains and burst forth as river streams. Some streams are great, some are okay, some bad, but they all come out. When it gets quiet, you know the mountains are building. It's been quiet, I've been integrating, changing, and those rivers are about to burst out again.

And with the river here, I'm sure I'll lose some subscribers.

I'll preface this to say, you can call me a Christian Mystic. So, I'm not an athiest like Sam Harris incitefully hating on the church and God.

Now, I didn't have horrific experiences in the church which I believe around 80% of Americans in the last generations incurred. I had my rebellious phase against the church in my earlier years, which I may write about someday, and maybe even write about why so many evil things happen in churches.

But my later years in church were beautiful.

90% of people should go to church. You get acceptance, community, encouragement, support, not to mention that someone caring about you when they don't even know you is really endearing. It just comes with a price tag. You get everything a person needs, with a few conditions, and a few consequences. For the price of loving acceptance, a faith to believe in, a purpose to live for, you also get a complementary bag of unshakable guilt and shame. You also get the complementary, "I'm different" story, because everyone else in the church seems to have their connection with God right except for you. Worst of all, you get a divided mind that leads to schizophrenia.

Every one of the worst cases of intellectual male schizophrenics I've worked with have been heavily religious, and their schizophrenic battle is always a war between God and Satan. Why? They cannot reconcile their beliefs. Jesus says to do one thing, and they fail and do another.

Let me just crack that code once and for all. Grief has to do with reconciliation. Grief is when you cannot reconcile good memories from bad memories, which creates an internal conflict. This internal conflict manifests as grief. Until the conflict is resolved, the grief persists. If you do not resolve conflict, the conflict grows.
Schizophrenia means a divided mind, a split mind, a conflict of minds. This means that if God and Satan have a conflict in your mind, they will war against each other. They will fight each other harder and harder to try to win the war. Neither will ever win, because a house divided cannot stand. A conflict cannot be resolved unless you resolve it, unless it is reconciled.

If you are a survivor, or you want a healthy life and you are isolated, church is the best place you can go. Why? Because we don't have any other readily available options in the U.S.A. for the general public. We don't have safe spaces to connect and commune and be in spirit together and hold an honor and reverence for our lives. –There are sanghas you can go to in California, but I don't live in California.

There were a few things that weren't so good for me personally going to church.

The first is that I would go to the front and worship God. This was a double-sided coin. It was good, but it was also bad because I let my left hand know what my right hand was doing. It was good because forcing yourself to do something you don't want to do builds good character, strength, and confidence. It was bad because I got a lot of spiritual power from worship, and this allowed me to gain huge amounts of spiritual pride under the surface. My spirit man was enriched, but my lesser man was also solidified. I purchased pride and humility.

But that's not why I left. There are a few more consequences and price tags for going to church, not all of which I'll write about today. One is that the path of the renunciate leads to spiritual poverty. The renunciate is one who renunciates, the one who chooses to be holy. Now the verse is, "If the salt loses its flavor, how can it be made salty again?" Let's imagine what a salty house looks like, a flavorful house. It has gadgets and gizmos a-plenty, whozits and whatzits galore.

A person's house is the outer reflection of their inner mind. A confused mind has a confused house, an analytical mind has a proficient house, and a renunciate's mind has a barren house.

The path of the renunciate leads to a barren desert landscape. Why? There are endless, countless reasons, thousands of religious beliefs that stack against the mind that leads to this, perhaps the most common is,

"I'm not sure if God wants me to pursue this interest, so I don't."

Over time, the renunciate can only feel safe to pursue an interest if they feel God is backing it, and they only way to be absolutely sure God must be backing it is if they pursue an interest that they know God must support. Then, all creative efforts become crippled and stained by the religious idea.

Unfortunately, if you cripple something, you can keep it alive, but it withers and becomes dry. I am a creative, and to create I must be uncrippled, but that alone was not motivation enough to leave the benefits of the church.

Although a fundamental motivation of my self was that I wanted to follow Christ, and that meant finding by any means necessary how to do what he asked, which was not available with my current understanding..

What gave me the motivation to go was that I had always intended to follow the path of the heart. This was possible because I kept my inner child alive and protected it throughout my life. There was a truth planted in my heart as a seed as a child, and I protected that seed and allowed it to grow until it became an oak tree. This is the meaning of the parable of the sower, and it is the meaning of the verse, "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

“I will open my mouth in parables,
    I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world."
"things we have heard and known,
    things our ancestors have told us."
- Matthew 13:35, Psalm 782️

Only a child's mind can hear the message of the heart, because a child still has the original real mind of a person. You lose your original mind as you get older, this is to say the real you, the original you does not change.

Now, although I began to lose my original mind as everyone does, I would throughout my life make brief contact with others on the path of the heart, and I knew it still existed.

The path of the heart has only one direction: towards the heart. The heart has only one condition: it cannot have conditions. If you try to place a condition on the heart, you have placed a condition on the ocean. This is not possible, you will simply disconnect from the ocean.

Now, if you're like right on the fence of unsubscribing right now, here's the statement that might push you off the fence: It is impossible to accept someone and put conditions on that acceptance. If you put conditions on your acceptance, it simply means you don't accept them.

Aside from pursuing the path of heart, this is what pushed me away from the church most of all, you don't accept me if I can't be me. You don't accept yourself if you can't be you.

I accept myself, I'm on the path of accepting myself, because that's how God leads me to change and grow. It wouldn't be very authentic of me to tell myself I accept myself and then continually show myself I don't by putting myself around people who don't accept me. Maybe even worse is when people tell you they accept you but the inability to show up as yourself shows you they don't..

Pretty heavy shit! The path and direction I'm going in is finding out what it means to be more fulfilled, more inspired, more interested, to have more life, to be more conscious. What's it mean to be conscious? It means to be alive!
But we've been misled, in our world, if you want to be alive, you got to fight to be alive. What makes a person alive is changing, growing, learning.

"Consciousness has to be a constant flow; only then do you remain conscious. Consciousness is riverlike. The moment you become stagnant you lose consciousness." - Osho

Living things grow. Dead things do not grow. For people like me, survival involves changing. If I don't change, I don't survive, because I'm not alive.

I don't mean any offense to you! If this is too much to hear right now, maybe it's not for you, and if this is goodbye for now, God bless you! But in that case, if you can, please do send my letter to Sam!