I shared an understanding of the Bible from my own reading and how it was explained to me in church.  The fall of Adam and Eve was a difficult concept to wrap my brain around and in many ways, that very story became the wedge that drove me away from religion for many years.

I cannot count the number of times I read or heard the story of the Garden of Eden and it always caused something in the pit of my stomach to turn over.  From a very early time, I questioned everything.  Although I like my world to fit in simple, explainable little boxes that I could organize, meditate on, and follow the chain of consequences backward and forward through the experiences I watched in others and later saw in myself, the Old Testament was a tough sell for me.

Positioning a perfect  and perfectly supreme, all-knowing and all-powerful entity that was the beginning and ending of all existence wasn’t the hard part.  That pill I can swallow easily.  I can accept that our lives and our choices were test and testament to our own value.  The difficult part was how this perfect entity of love was described to have very human failings and emotions.  Anger.  Jealousy.

Nuff said

Once the ego is annihilated, true life begins.  You see the world through a different set of eyes.  No longer are you limited and contained within your mortal coil.  You realize that your life is a temporary state and nothing of value will last beyond your mortality.  All that matters is what you do.  Not for yourself, for that is the price of immortality.  It is what you can do for your neighbor.  For your fellow man, woman, or child.  Your good deeds will last in the memories forever.

Our ego would tell us we are defined by the clothes we wear  The car we drive.  Where we work or what school we attended.  How much money we make.  None of it matters.  When your time is up, none of it matters.  The ego quests for external validation, rather than validation from within.  It wants to be praised.  It wants to be loved.  It wants to be fed these temporal gifts in an unceasingly greater quantity.

We sacrifice our ethics.  Our very sense of right and wrong in this quest.  We make ourselves feel better by finding faults in others rather than helping those that want our help.  Each of us must make a decision.  We can worship ourselves and tie our identity to the material world or we can free ourselves of these bonds.

I have seen the God Machine.  I have dipped my toe in the river of the Holy Spirit.  I have felt the bliss of connecting with the Source.  God gives each of us the power to free ourselves of our ego.  In 1996, I received my class ring and the words inscribed on it are my personal mantra.  “You are, What you do, When it counts”.

As I was digging into Pseudo-Dionysius I went to Chicago for business.  I met with Cress who is a good friend from Denver and we chatted over lunch.  We shared stories and I told him some of my immediate impressions of Pseudo-Dionysius’ work.  As we discussed the Divine Pattern that each of us can choose to follow or choose to ignore in favor of our individual egos, he shared the analogy that many Christians have come to associate with the term ‘sin’.

For most of human beings, we don’t roll out of bed in the morning with a daily plan to wreak havoc and destroy others.

I used to pray for blessings, wisdom, and protection.  It was like a spiritual Christmas list of self-improvement and my well intentioned desires for others.  As time passed, I realized that most of my prayers for myself were within my own power to resolve.  That the actual act of prayer or meditation was the moment when I was most humble.  When I gave up my own existence to something greater.  My thoughts are clear.  My heart and my mind are at peace.

When I asked God for help and wisdom, I was asking for “on the fly” help to my daily decision making.  Whether that was related to acting with generosity and love or catching myself protecting my ego.

What I was granted was the self-awareness to Pause.  To recognize true power is perfect defenselessness.  The choice NOT to respond.  Stillness.  Quiet.

We all want to run around fixing other people.  We want them to be happy by our definition and expectation.  As we get older, we see our friends and family make the same mistakes over and over, repeating the same patterns of behavior again and again.  We hear them tell us their dreams and hopes yet when the rubber meets the road, they fail over and over with the same problems.  We celebrate when we see them escape a terrible relationship and then watch them as months go by and they dive right back into a similar relationship.  It is as if they are damned to repeat their mistakes and as good friends we want to help them…

St. Maccarius tells us that inside the human heart are all manner of things.  All the dragons and demons and wickedness and chains of the Abyss reside with the Angels, glory, and wonder of Heaven within the heart.

You have the keys.  The keys to your our future.  Your own destiny   You can live in fear.  You can live in this temporal world.  You vluntarily wear the bonds.  You lock the chains that hold your own soul and spirit down in the Abyss.  YOu choose this life.  You choose whether your existence give you the wings of heavenly angels or chains you to the demons of the Abyss.

Our societal programming is incredibly difficult to circumvent.  Deprogramming and extracting yourself from the system you have promoted and subscribed to your entire life would damage your reputation, the expectations others set on you, your family’s future.  All this is a fabrication of the ego.  The Ego weaves an incredibly seductive set of lies to entrap you in this existence.  Rather than serving others, you serve yourself.  You raise your children to be successful rather than decent human beings who serve one another.  Every action in life becomes a zero sum game where winning means getting something for yourself.  You find yourself defined by ultimately meaningless things.  You work to make money to pay bills to buy stuff to work harder to make more money to pay more bills.  Everything of true value is set aside in a quest for commercialized consumerism and temporary satisfaction.

Words are cheap. Nobody likes a salesman. Be happy, generous, and healthy.