Posts Tagged ‘god’

I’m sorry, but you have to draw the line somewhere and frankly I just do not believe that He is going to condemn those who don’t join the Blue Team or the Red Team because He only digs the Green Team. I just don’t think He is that small minded and silly.

I don’t think he wants you to wear a particular kind of hat or go to church on a particular day of the week or call him by a certain name or even call Him a He at all – you can call Him a Her and that’s ok too.

I believe He gives us choice and I don’t think he will condemn you for making the “wrong” arbitrary choice. In fact I am unconvinced that there is any condemnation at all; fire and brimstone just reeks too badly of manipulative medieval, fundamentalist clap-trap to me.

Maybe there’s bad Karma – but who’s to say God’s dishing that out? Maybe it’s actually beyond His control?

In the old days, before our time, before mass communication and ever-increasing ubiquity of access to information, people were mostly presented with a single form of spirituality – it was the same form as everyone else in the village and we were informed that this was the only way. People could either choose to ignore it or go with it, but were told often told emphatically that they ignored or defied it at their own mortal peril.

These days we can choose. Well, we always could, and everyone has always been called to make a spiritual choice, but these days we are presented with a spiritual supermarket – a pick n’ mix of religions, philosophies and belief options. Traditional religionists probably don’t like this, but I do. I think it’s a very, very good thing.

And I believe God agrees with me.

It’s Always Been A Matter Of Choice

While my Pick n Mix idea might sound like some cutting-edge shit to say, in fact it’s nothing new. People have always been faced with spiritual choices:

• should I go with what my village’s local church says is gospel or shall I run off and join the slightly different Church down the road?

By Seamus Anthony

Continued from Part One

Everything Is Appropriate

The above three words were scribbled on a whiteboard in the office of Feedwell Café.

Feedwell, now closed down, was a famous, old, ramshackle vegetarian joint in the hipster suburb of Prahran in Melbourne, Australia. It was the spring of 1998. I had been working in the cafe for a week, squeezing vege juices for hungover groovers and health conscious yuppies.

Next to the words was a very crude drawing of five or six interlinking lines that basically looked a branch of a tree.

“What’s that all about?” I asked Alan, the cafe owner.

Alan was a tall, thin, white-haired fellow in his 70s who, I was vaguely aware, was into ‘all that New Age stuff” as I would have put it at the time.

He was definitely a dude – for example he chose his staff by holding a crystal pendulum over their resumes (apparently mine caused the pendulum to spin in the affirmative direction, something that, later, probably caused him to wonder if his crystal needed replacing).

“It’s true” Alan replied “Everything is Appropriate”

By Seamus Anthony

Part One

When Einstein theorized that space and time were not constants but were relative to the observer, no doubt there would have been those who dismissed his views as crazy talk. It can be hard to understand what he meant; he wrote and talked in terms of speeds and distances that are beyond our perceptive capabilities. Well, while unlikely to position me as a modern genius, the following article may similarly come off reading like the wacky ramblings of a nut-job as I try to understand, through the act of writing, God, no less.

More specifically, I am trying to get my head around my personal reunification with God and how I came to it by inventing my own theory of a Relative God and a Relative Truth.

Let’s start here:

If time, which we cannot experience as anything other than linear, is in fact not linear at all and also not separate from space (which, I believe – although I could have the whole thing wrong – is what Einstein hypothesized), then why can’t Truth be relative too?

By Seamus Anthony

A long time ago in another head space, I wrote the the following:

“Everything is Appropriate

“Just as above you is the Macrocosm, a massive spiralling universe, far too huge to even idly comprehend, so too within you is a microcosm. This microcosm reaches and descends within you to the most finite level, and then beyond measurement. On top of this, every other ‘cosm’ of whatever size or description (a hair, another person, a distant star) has it’s own microcosm descending within, and it’s own perspective on the macrocosm in which it is suspended.

“So it is obvious from this that the concerns of a single human individual do not count for much at all. Yes, that’s right. The often harrowing emotional pain and terrible physical misfortunes that eventually befall all humans to some degree, mean not a blip to the massive universe as a whole. And then, to really push the point, if these issues are so insignificant in comparison to the universe that we know, consider then their significance in the larger macrocosms that our universe must surely be a minute part of…And so on……

… the trick is getting in touch with this truth so that you feel it.

By Seamus Anthony

If you read a lot of Zen stuff, enlightenment stuff, you’ll come across the idea that we are all inherently enlightened, and I believe that this is true.

But also true is that most people don’t usually feel anything like they’re enlightened at all.

In fact most people either don’t even know what enlightenment is or they believe that it’s something “up there” that they cannot hope to achieve. Well, we’re not the first but we at Rebel Zen are here to tell you that it is true – you ARE enlightened but you just don’t know it yet.

Getting in Touch with Your Inherent Enlightenment

At the core of your being, underneath all of the emotions, moods, thoughts, opinions, and physical sensations is your True Self or your soul. Your True Self knows that it is one with all of creation, the Universe, God. It exists in a permanent state of peace that cannot be shaken even when you are in the midst of the worst possible crises imaginable. It is NOT the part of you that freaks out because somebody is pointing a gun at your head (or more likely, because the new guy in the office is using your favourite damn coffee mug). This part of you, much more readily accessible, is your ego.

By Seamus Anthony Ennis

It’s just my opinion, and I have no idea what I am talking about, but you – yes, you – have absolutely no clue what the hell is going on.

Yes, you heard me, and that goes for your guru, coach, expert or teacher also.

You see, sometimes when I am at barbecues, beer comfortably resting on my belly, paper plate piled high on my knee, the subject comes up that I write personal development articles and, for better or worse, I cringe. Why? Because the first thing that happens, at least in my mind, is that people look at me and think “Well, what the hell does he know that I don’t? He’s no guru; look at that blob of mayonnaise on his beard! And isn’t that the guy who drank a couple too many at Jo’s party last fortnight and made a fool of himself? Personal development writer indeed – hmmph!”

And the truth is they are right. I don’t know diddly. But neither do ‘they’ and neither, my friend, do you.