Believe a Lie?

Would you believe a lie? That’s how I used to teach the spelling of beLIEve, as the rules on i and e are arcane at best and fraught with exceptions.

After reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, I wonder if all beliefs actually do contain a lie…the misunderstanding that well meaning people create by thinking from their egos about the messages given by the avatars….Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tse. According to Tolle, these messages are not factual, but are pointers to the truth that must be experienced to be known. Allthe opinions and interpretations are morelikely to lead away from truth than toward it.

If you know, you do not have to believe. An ex-mentor tells of meeting people in a religious organization who knew rather than believing, and he was converted to their path. I have had direct experience with that which is more than the individual, that which is the connection of all of us, ALL THAT IS.

As a teen in the 60s, I was in a fishbowl group in a UU church in Charlotte NC, when I felt an energy flow through the group, a sense of deep love and connection with every person in the circle. I don’t know if the people watching from the sidelines felt it, but they said that they saw something happening. I don’t remember what we were discussing, but I know that it started when one girl became upset about something someone else said. All at once was an outpouring of concern for her, and a sense of connection as if a beam of light passed through each of our hearts to connect us like pearls on a string. That’s how it felt to me anyway. I know there is a connection, and I have felt it at other times in ritual and in mundane life, though never as intensely as that moment.

I don’t pretend to understand what I know and experienced, and it would be a piss-poor universe that could be understood by one human mind. Bu I know it to be real. I also know the fundamentalism of preferring one set of metaphors or fairy tales for the ineffable over another set. I confess to being a fundamentalist pagan. Yet ALL THAT IS, by definition, is obviously available to ALL THAT IS. Who am I to tell someone else that his or her opinions (which everyone has) are less valid than mine?

All I can do is to shut my ego up, and open my awareness to that connection. Mike Dooley’s notes from the Universe, Jerry and Esther’s chanelling of Abraham, and even some of the teachings of Jesus point to the idea that the world is fine just as it is, and it is up to us to open to its abundance: “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:22).