Recapitulating God

An Excerpt from SCRAWLS ON THE WALLS OF THE SOUL

March 13, 2003

2 a.m. and the wind is soft and silver, a night-blanket cut from stardust and smoke from the fires in other people's chimneys. I climb the little knoll across the street and study the world as if it is a book written on the fabric of the universe - yet it is a book whose pages are forever changing in the same way dreams bend and quiver when one tries to look at them too closely. Nothing remains the same, yet everything is eternal in the Now. Perhaps that is all that can be said of the Infinite.


Gazing back in the direction of my house, I wonder if I am sleeping peacefully in my own bed, dreaming myself out here in the lonesome desert where the coyotes are prowling ever closer and the mockingbird is restless and off-key. Even the moon is a broken egg, lop-sided and bleeding albumen clouds that linger for only a moment before they are gone, like shapeless phantoms moving in and out of the night.


There was a time long ago when I wanted to believe in God. That is the thought that comes to me, uninvited. Just the prattle of the internal dialog running its inventory of the past. And so for a moment I am 7 years old again, trying on the role playing game of faith in some old man with a long grey beard sitting on a celestial throne. But in my heart, even then, I knew there was no God, just as I knew there was no Santa, no Easter bunny, no goddess or guru who could give me the keys to heaven. There is only the Self in its many manifestations - the mortal self, the immortal Other, the eternal I-Am who is the cohesion of both. Just those three... my personal triumverate. And, of course, all the identities and manifestations the Other puts on in order to learn the lessons required to teach the mortal self the process of its own evolution. A billion or so past lives that aren't really 'past' at all, but more like stories in a long book of fairy tales, with each and every character being one more Self, all of whom will turn out to be the storyteller when all is said and done.


It's enough to make my heads spin.


How very much easier it all would have been if only I could have believed in God. And yet... belief is not for warriors, and gods have no place in the Infinite. In recapitulating our gods, we give up our faith in external sources of salvation, turning instead to a one-on-one interpersonal relationship with eternity.


A Joshua tree scratches the wind with skeletal fingers, causing the night to sing softly to itself, like an old man whistling past a graveyard where his own tombstone already stands waiting with the date of his birth inscribed, and the date of his death drawing ever closer to the marble.


Overhead, a shooting star seems to hesitate in flight, perhaps just long enough to recapitulate the fall from heaven, the destruction of faith that paves the way for evolution. "As long as god exists, you are working with a safety net." So says the Silence in the middle of the night.

Alone in the darkness, we shed our gods in order to embrace the god-force of Creation within.

_________________
Excerpted from SCRAWLS ON THE WALLS OF THE SOUL (A Quantum Shaman publication)
Available on the Quantum Shaman website at:
http://www.quantumshaman.com/html/scrawls.htm

Or on Kindle at Amazon.Com
http://www.amazon.com/Scrawls-On-Walls-Soul-ebook/dp/B008CUKH6C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1340201422&sr=1-1&keywords=Scrawls+on+the+walls+of+the+soul

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by Della Van Hise & Quantum Shaman
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