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| Kent W. Dahl |
Leaving aside the Tao for now, God and Sex are both loaded, explosive words that have ruined lives, divided families, ignited wars, and destroyed entire civilizations. This is why I tend to avoid using these two contentious words. There are so many different ways to approach these concepts – and just as many ways to bypass them altogether. But in this instance I choose to label the ineffable mystery of our origins and destiny, God, if only for the sake of controversy...
IMAGINE MY SHOCK when I discovered, at 19, that I was God.
It was confusing, to say the least. Outwardly I looked the same as I always did – but inwardly I was seeing everything through different eyes. I realized that I existed in all things as sub-atomic awareness.
Everyday “inanimate” objects came alive as mineral or vegetable consciousness, responsive to focused attention. When I turned my eyes skyward to admire the stars and planets, I was conscious that what I was seeing was actually an externalization, a holographic projection of the awesome beauty and mystery of my own being. When I later stumbled on an exclamation attributed to Pythagoras (“Astonishing! Everything is intelligent!”), I understood perfectly what he meant.
Everyone I saw around me was essentially an aspect of my extended Self – not my superficial Ego but my Core Self. The astounding diversity and ingenuity of my multitudinous permutations of form and function inspired deep awe and reverence.
The ineffably sublime, the absurdly ridiculous, the ultramicroscopic, the supertelescopic, the metagalactic, and the paracosmic. All of it was me. Indeed, the individual ego dissolves the instant it experiences the sacredness of gecko shit and the equanimity of snowcapped mountains as part of the same continuum of wonder.
This mystical initiation made it impossible for me to ever again subscribe to anthropocentrism (which the dictionary defines as “interpreting reality exclusively in terms of human values and experience”). Inevitably, the use of alphanumeric symbols and language has led us to a male-dominated evolutionary dead-end – one in which we destroy everything beautiful and natural around us in our psychopathological pursuit of illusory power.
Only much later did I learn that what I had experienced was the death of my social ego, my persona. In its place arose a transcendental identity (which some call
Paramatman), reconnecting me with a vivid remembrance of having always existed in a world without beginning and without end.
And yet, in my interactions with people around me (parents, friends, strangers) who saw only my physical form - and who insisted on relating to me as a 2-dimensional social ego, devoid of mystery and existential depth – I became aware that I could easily slip back into the role I had played up till now, as a human being transiting between adolescence and adulthood.
Perhaps if I had chosen to be born in India or Tibet, my parents may have taken me to a temple where some priest or lama might have understood the situation immediately and suggested that I be placed in their care for special grooming as a newborn divine human. Instead, my parents took me to a madhouse where, for 3 months, I was left to learn how to navigate multidimensional realities, with the help of other inmates.
“You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses.” ~ Timothy Leary
It was a truly instructive period in my early life, and in those 3 months I learned far more than I could possibly have, had I spent 3 years in some university. The physical world around us, I discovered, is akin to a grand illusion maintained by consensus – by the acquiescence of millions of humans hardwired to believe that their everyday lives are the only empirical reality, and that the realms of the divine, as well as the diabolical, exist somewhere else (if at all) and not within our own minds.
I began to notice that the spark of divinity – and its shadow aspect or terrible twin – remains dormant in most humans until activated by some powerful experience. However, few have the necessary attention span or focus to nurture and fully integrate it. So our intimations of divine or diabolical consciousness are usually evanescent, fading from memory the moment we snap back into mundane awareness. That’s when God (as well the Devil) are banished to the mythic realms, as mere superstitions or external, unseen forces – where they can be invoked by predatory priesthoods as a means of behavior modification through religious indoctrination.
Celibacy and abstinence from sensual pleasures have long been considered prerequisites of the spiritual path. Sex and God have been made into seemingly antagonistic and antonymous concepts. Adam and Eve’s fall from grace and banishment from Eden are euphemistically attributed to their disobedience when they tasted the Forbidden Fruit, against God’s specific instruction. A closer reading reveals that the real issue was their discovery of the pleasures of recreational sex.
Well, that’s the Old Testament God for you. A judgmental, punitive, authoritarian male despot who views pleasure as sin, and pain as virtue; who sees wise women as witches and beautiful ones as temptresses. An angry, warlike, almighty tyrant who demands absolute loyalty and blood sacrifice. Who loves all creatures great and small – yet consigns some to eternal perdition and neverending torment.
Was this really an aspect of my Godself? I was prompted to do a little research on the God of Abraham, variously known as Yahweh, IHVH, Jehovah, Ialdabaoth, Zeus, Deus, Jove, Eli, and later Allah. The Hebrew version of the Old Testament, I discovered, was a paraphrase and summary of a much earlier, far more detailed scripture from Sumerian times, called
Enuma Elish (When the Gods Walked the Earth).
In Hebrew the word God appears as Adonai (Lord) and sometimes Elohim – a plural reference to godlike entities involved in designing ecosystems and cultivating intelligent life within the galaxy, and perhaps beyond. Mystical literature (e.g.,
The Urantia Book and J.J. Hurtak’s
Keys of Enoch) describes the Elohim as “Paradise Sons of God.” As I pondered this I had a vision of a primal supernova emanating rays of energy and consciousness in all directions.
Alone instead of All One
Each ray acquired individuality as it separated from its Source and had the potential to become a new star and condense into a multitude of planetary systems. I experimented with altering the spelling of Son to Sun – and it made even more sense. I was reminded of the rainbow effect of passing a beam of light through a prism. This is how One becomes Many.
Along with individuality came the potential to disconnect and disengage from everything beyond our ego fields, thereby reinforcing the illusion of separateness. Unplugged from the morphogenetic field or collective mind, it was easy for us to feel more and more isolated – alone instead of All One - to the extent that we no longer remembered where we originated, the source of our being. Eventually we even began doubting if something called Source existed.
To assuage the terrifying sense of eternal solitude, we began an internal dialog with ourselves, and eventually split into bi-polarity – one pole taking on the Yin or Feminine aspect, the other the Yang or Masculine aspect. Thus was formed the electromagnetic spectrum – the extrovert electrical male interacting with the introvert magnetic female in an endless dance of attraction and repulsion.
In the state of polarized consciousness we learnt to individualize as egos, and then specialize – just as atoms become different components of the anatomy as they form dense electromagnetic fields which gain mass and become molecules, then cells.
Evolution is driven by cell permutation and diversification, as differences get emphasized over similarities. Variations on a theme begin to occur and recur, according to synergetic-energetic-geometric principles that govern the manifestation of physical form.
We have only recently begun to recognize and identify these universal principles or mathematical laws of form. The golden or phi ratio rediscovered by early scientist-mystics like Pythagoras is what inspired a gifted 12th century Italian mathematician named Fibonacci to realize that all growth proceeds spirally in accordance with a predictable numerical sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34… the next number being 55, the sum of the two preceding it, and so on… to infinity!
Through an understanding of hidden structures gained by a close study of fractal geometry, cutting-edge thinkers have been repairing the broken link between female and male brains, between intuition and intellect, between mystical experience and the scientific method.
Meanwhile back in the realm of mythology, I found mytheology
So where does that leave the jealous, vengeful, punitive God of Abraham? It turns out that Yahweh (whose name in Hebrew is spelt IHVH) is by no means the Supreme Being or Prime Creator. In fact, IHVH is a collective of Archons inhabiting the Material Universe (or at least the other planets in our Solar System, according to Gnostic teacher John Lamb Lash).
Archon is the Greek word for lord, judge, or ruler. In short, external authority. From the Gnostic perspective, the Archons are really just a freakish species of Mind Parasite that preys on organic lifeforms through "neurological hacks," manipulating our perception of reality through fear, thereby thwarting our evolutionary potential and hijacking our true destiny as autonomous aspects of Divine Intelligence.
The Greeks, particularly the Platonists, called the Archons
demiurges and named Ialdabaoth as the young demiurge associated with Gaia or Earth. Some Gnostic scholars attribute the formation and seeding of the physical world to Ialdabaoth – and believe it was Ialdabaoth who expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. (John Lash has a very different and far more intriguing interpretation of the Gnostic creation myth, too complex to discuss here, which he eruditely expounds in his seminal 2006 work
Not In His Image).
Ialdabaoth was, it turns out, a parthenogenetic experiment conducted by Sophia, the Research and Development department of Prime Creator, Inc. The story goes that the newborn god was so deformed and monstrous to look upon, Sophia kept it quarantined in a Null Zone where it grew and began exploring its godlike powers of sub-creation, utterly unaware that it was merely a localized phenomenon – and by no means the whole shebang. Truth is often stranger than science fiction.
In effect, we have a bastard, feeling-unloved god believing itself to be God Almighty and imposing its arrogant, immature and temperamental will on everything around it. Sound familiar? That’s you and me on a bad hair day! Alas, this happens to be the monolithic image of God imprinted within the deep psyche of those who subscribe to the Abrahamic Agenda.
So when I broke free of my social ego and reconnected with extradimensional aspects of my Self, I spontaneously regained access to data from well beyond the Null Zone - where information flow is closely monitored and controlled by the agents of the Archons, to keep subscribers addicted to and imprisoned within the recycled ego-reinforcing melodramas they experience as their everyday lives. That’s right, folks, we’re talking about The Matrix.
Liberated from layers of old programming, I became the Metaprogram, and then the Metaprogrammer or Architect. I could have stopped there and ended up trapped in the realm of Mind in a holographic labyrinth. But my physical atoms, the wisdom of my cellular being, became animated with the remembrance of Sophia, my cosmic mother, who joyfully took me back into her arms and proclaimed me beautiful and true – not only as a soul, but also as a physical body.
Gods, like everyone else, experience infancy, adolescence, and maturity. In view of this, it is apparent that the psychic oppression of religious dogma is really just a problem of humans with domineering mothers who haven’t outgrown their belief in a childish, insecure, ill-tempered deity who is prone to approve of some things, and disapprove of others.
Experience becomes Knowledge (or Gnosis) as maturity sets in - and ultimately blossoms into Wisdom
Those who imagine God as an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent father figure tend to associate sex with deeply-ingrained guilt feelings and anxiety about getting caught and expelled from paradise. Indeed, the Book Religions warn of the grave perils of sexual intercourse unsanctioned by holy matrimony. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam emphatically preach that “illicit sex” is a damnable offence in the eyes of God. The taboo against recreational (as opposed to procreational) sex has spawned widespread neuroses and psychoses and perpetuated a culture of false piety and hypocrisy. Sex has been the subject of countless off-color jokes and the ruin of many careers, especially among politicians and priests. Sex has been equated with dirt – but what is dirt if not the earth itself, the soil from which springs sustenance and abundance?
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| Dragon vs Phoenix by Alex Grey |
The suppression of sexuality has, in fact, only served to turn it into an obsession, giving rise to aberrant attitudes toward pleasure wherein sex becomes confused with power - with dominance and submission, conquest and colonization, rape and pillage, with the exploitation and enslavement of women and children. By distorting and perverting our understanding of sexuality, stripping it of its sacred dimensions, power-hungry predator priesthoods have been able to maintain a deadly stranglehold on human consciousness, keeping it confined within a prison built of psychological and emotional blocks, with invisible bars of erroneous belief and fake morality.
How many generations of humans have been bludgeoned into submission to external authority with the evil teaching that pleasure is sinful - and that the wages of sin is death without hope of resurrection or salvation? Spiritual pilgrims of all faiths have been misled into renouncing sex if they desire union with God - their own Core Self. Others are promised unbridled sexual pleasure should they willingly martyr themselves in the name of Allah.
I consider myself entirely fortunate that I have never, even for a fleeting moment, experienced sexual guilt. Even as a child beginning to explore the secret pleasures of autoeroticism, it was a sense of excitement and wonder I felt, never shame. Instinctively, I knew the social taboo against sex was diabolically wrong, and that the key to true enlightenment and liberation was to be found in activating the kundalini, the primordial life force symbolized by the coiled serpent asleep at the base of the spine. Indeed, the awakened kundalini unleashes the creative urge when it isn’t channeled towards procreation.
Everywhere I looked I found the hidden clues: in the binary code of lines and circles, the playful dance of wind and water, sky and earth consummating their desire, the courtship rituals of dragons and unicorns.
Life itself is erotic, a paean to Aphrodite and Eros… the sacred portal to our own original and ultimate divinity… our sovereignty as bodies, minds and souls… our precious Humanity. I experience sex as a yearning to fuse with other energy fields – the impulse to reintegrate with all aspects of our Original Self.
To be fully present in the body, surrendered to love, heart wide open, tingling with vitality, blissfully merging with another warm, quivering, welcoming field – becoming one again and whole, and therefore holy. That’s the foretaste of paradise that lures us back into the beauty and truth of wholly conscious physical embodiment.
Godly sex as sexy gods and goddesses – that’s the path to balance, health, sanity, and integrity
The duality of Good Gods versus Evil Gods is finally reconciled when we see the evil in good and the good in evil – just like the Yin-Yang. Bringing focused attention to the joy of the moment, holding back nothing, dark secrets transmuted to self-aware humor, turning the static to ecstatic, dynamic, harmonic equilibrium. Amazed and amused by the miracle of our limited physical vehicles in the limitless context of the metaphysical, easing comfortably into our beautiful bodies and activating them with tender kisses and caresses, we go beyond confusion to fusion. No longer alone but All One again.
And this is where the Tao comes in
The first line of the first verse in the
Tao Te Ching states: “The Absolute Tao cannot be named.” It is ineffable, beyond concepts or words, nothing and everything, beginningless and endless, the Great Void or Primordial Chaos from which all formal existence issues. The Tao is a field of infinite potentiality beyond life and death, being and non-being. It cannot be seen but can be felt; cannot be dissected or discussed – but it can be embraced, enjoyed and celebrated.
The Tao is the silent backdrop against which all cosmic dramas are enacted. Our stories – and we are all stories – unfold in a many-storied universe that resembles a gigantic server farm where individual as well as collective memories are stored. It works along the lines of social networking sites like facebook and twitter: each entity is free to create an account, present a public profile, share photos, videos, opinions, interests, discuss current affairs or philosophy, play trivial games or build virtual communities, trawl pixel oceans for food or sex, interact with many or just a few.
Each timeline becomes an expression of the individual who has the ability to post and delete, expose or hide; the timeline documents the journey of each user through time and space. There is a delicate balance between anarchistic freedom and authoritarian control – a constant push-and-pull between users and shareholders, between follower and followed, between private and public, between active and passive involvement.
Digital technology has introduced a plethora of refreshing and stimulating new metaphors with which the mind can apprehend the mystery of Arthur Koestler’s ghost in the machine, explore fact and fantasy, navigate the known and the unknown, the spontaneous and the predictable, the mechanical and the magickal.
In the numinous realm of the Tao, creationism and evolutionism are reconciled, either/or is replaced by both/and. We are divine and human, animal and angel, magnificent and insignificant. In our canine aspect we are God; in our feline we are the Devil. If you can love both cats and dogs, you have integrated the diabolical and divine within your psyche.
Welcome home!
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Earth Angel by Josephine Wall
"The Universe is made of stories,
not of atoms." ~ Muriel Rukeyser
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[First posted 3 October 2013. Reposted 22 July 2015, 1 June 2016,
14 February 2019, 30 April 2022 & 12 January 2023]
No doubt a tiny cabal of well-connected families profit obscenely from perpetual war - while the rest end up enslaved by a benighted economic system or wiped out by large-scale epidemics and unnatural disasters (I won't discuss the possibility of man-made earthquakes, droughts, cyclones and tsunamis but the debate rages on this).
