Sharing God

Sharing God

Brian Kowalchuk, PhD

©Brian Kowalchuk 2014

Table Of Contents

Preface

Introduction To Spirituality

BOOK 1: The Poems

The Happy Beast

The Light in Your Eyes

Life

What to Do?

Glory Us

I Grant You You

Power For Good

Beyond Limitations

Evil

Perspective

Love

Creation

Alone With God

BOOK 2: Giving and Receiving God

The Experience of Being an Individual

Vitality

Creative Co-existence

Personal Power

Re-visiting Reality

Understanding The Incredible Premise: We Are All God...

Domination and Surrender

Sex

Fear and Anger

Fun and Alternatives to Domination

Blessings and Limitations

Domination Through Aggression

The Purpose of Limitations

The Experience of Limitations as Estrangement from God

The Reluctance to Be Powerful

Being Responsible for the Will to Dominate

Consenting to Our Limitations

The Power of Relationship and Group Attachment

Trusting Our Blessings and Limitations

Building Capacity to Share God

Moving Past a Limitation

Reprise (Summary of the Book so far)

Physics and Metaphysics

Appreciating Who We Are and Making Changes

Learning with Limitations

Planning Change vs Going with the Flow

Self-directed Change vs Therapeutic Relationship

A Spiritual Practice of Personal Change

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

A Version of Meditation

A Larger Life Story

Postscript

Prayers

A Creed:

Intention Prayers:

BOOK 3: Struggles On The Path

Using Meditation in My Life

Fear and Anger vs. Sweet Cravings and Courage

Complementarity and Consistency

Surrendering to Burden and Innocence

Trusting the Path You Can’t See

In Between Craving and Oblivion

BOOK 4: The God Politik

Living Together with Assorted Blessings and Limitations

Accepting the Unacceptable

Inclusive God Energy

Appendix 1: Taijitu

Appendix 2: Respect Protocol

Appendix 3: List of Core Values Within Ourselves (with accompanying actions and feelings)

Appendix 4: A Guide to Building Capacity to Share God

Appendix 5: Noticing Breathing

Appendix 6: Meditation on Giving and Receiving God

About the Author

Jacket Description

Preface

Sharing God presents an alternative view of God meant to facilitate personal growth. It describes a practical philosophy. As such, it may appeal to people who appreciate scientific progress but who also want to renew their faith in a personally meaningful universe. Some readers might actually want to challenge their current religion but it is my wish that this book could help them better practice the highest principles of the faith they already have.

As a child I believed in God and when I grew up I believed in Science. As a psychologist for the last 27 years it has been my privilege and challenge to help people, when I can, with their troubles. I found that most of my clients believed in Science too. Much to my surprise, I learned that Science wasn't enough for them. I had already known for a long time that it wasn't enough for me.

Despite early attempts to focus on psychology as a hard science, I had felt compelled to study all manner of non-scientific disciplines and gain perspective. This was a most confusing venture. The variety of approaches to understanding who we are is staggering. I enrolled in a number of actual disciplines such as martial arts, Reiki, various other ‘energy healing’, hypnotherapy, ‘body work’ and yoga. I also explored Christian and non-Christian religions. After 30 years of Science I decided that, despite the risk of drowning in nonsense, I wanted to return to some form of spirituality. I believe it has been worth the risk and I have tried here to distill what I have learned and put it into words.

Our journey starts with a brief introduction and then offers you a choice: You can read the 13 poems that follow in Book 1. All the principles of Sharing God can be experienced in the poems—without any explanations. Or you can read Books 2, 3 and 4 in any order you like. If you want to start with an explanation of the ideas, start with Book 2. Book 3 is a narrative—an illustration of the ideas as I experienced them over a year's time. Book 4 is an application of the ideas to how to live together as a society.

I do not provide many references to other works. Most of the ideas are very old and I take credit only for putting them together as a model for the 21st century. The reader should have little trouble identifying and exploring the supporting literature.

Why should anyone read this book? Because we need to re-invent our spirituality, not abandon it. There is value in practicing a Faith, but it’s time to let go of the old concepts of God that divide us and ultimately take away responsibility for our own choices. I have identified a view that can accommodate both God and scientific inquiry. A summary of the entire work is captured by the creed ‘We are all God in the company of God, sharing God, disguised with limitations’. This is not an endorsement of narcissism; rather quite the opposite. Our reality is founded on respecting each other as separate entities with differing limitations.

Self-importance is still the prime source of tyranny and oppression in our world. It causes a great deal of suffering. Sharing God provides a way of addressing such selfishness by legitimizing it and thereby creating the least amount of shame. From this place of acknowledgment, we can more easily enjoy each others company and appreciate the diversity of life.

As counterpoint, this book may be of interest to readers of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) or Sam Harris (The End of Faith). It has kindred spirit but more detail than the fiction of Richard Bach (Illusions). As a piece of non-fiction, it shares common ground with many guides to ‘enlightenment’, from the Buddha’s Dhammapada to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. However, Sharing God is not primarily a book about love. As nice as love is, I believe that a prescription needs to be situated in a context that recognizes our entanglements with each other and specifically, the dynamic of Domination/Surrender.

I thank my friends and family who supported me in their own ways. I hope you enjoy the text. Better, I hope you benefit from standing under the light I am trying to direct your way, and that you practice, in your own way, the methods described herein.

Brian Kowalchuk

Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada

On the Seine River, in St. Boniface

Introduction To Spirituality

With apologies to Lao Tzu and with thanks to Richard Bach.

"...I'm looking for the face I had

Before the world was made"

(W.B. Yeats, 1933)

There is more to reality than what we can confirm with our senses. Certainly there is more than what we can control with our mind and body. Many scientists believe this, but in order to avoid deluding themselves, they follow the scientific method: they collect evidence that persists for all to see (consensual empiricism). This makes science reliable. In addition, science becomes valid when it produces valuable outcomes. But, of course, science does not decide for us what is valuable. Rather, we aim science at what we want to better control, such as health, food, power, comfort, beauty etc. It works well. Yet, as wonderful as science is, it is not sufficiently meaningful to many of us, who want more. What more is there? Well, we can make a list of the highest principles of spirituality. These principles have been valued for thousands of years and cut across the various religions that have obscured them with rules and rituals.

These principles don't contradict scientific inquiry, but they are difficult to demonstrate and more importantly, they are difficult to disprove. This is a serious problem. If we are going to have faith in something that can't be disproved, then it had better produce something good. We are responsible for how spirituality affects the well being of everyone and everything. Here is the list of spiritual principles:

1. All things are connected in the unity of All-That-Is and we sometimes experience this.

2. Since all life is connected, it is sacred—in the sense that everything matters in the big picture of All-That-Is. This doesn't mean that each thing should be preserved as it is without change, only that every thing affects everything else, in time.

3. Every event (moment) in life generates something of value, not just ‘more of the same’.

4. Moreover, there is something of value in each life that persists regardless of how many timelines begin and end (individual lives).

5. Despite the unity of All-That-Is, each human being feels separate from All-That-Is. We experience limited individual agency and power. In the same way, each person feels they could belong to, or be part of something greater than themselves.

6. Over time, there is order and harmony between all seemingly separate things. This can be called perfection. In an individual, order and harmony may not be experienced at any given time. In the big picture of All-That-Is, there is always order and harmony. There is no particular snapshot in time of All-That-Is that is more perfect than another.

7. In the present moment, when feeling separate, an individual can experience more connection and harmony with things and beings by loving them—where love includes many things—such as acceptance, caring, forgiveness, surrender and even taking control temporarily.

Obviously, the religions with which we are most familiar have defined specific beliefs for these principles. Conspicuously missing from the above list is a description of how we should relate to powerful gods—or to one all-powerful God. Instead there is reference to All-That-Is. What is meant by All-That-Is, is that we can imagine the existence of everything and consider all of it to be alive, like one organism with various parts that may or may not be aware of each other. Each of us is certainly part of All-That-Is, but we wouldn't normally consider ourselves to be part of God. The distinction is important and has been an endless source of speculation in philosophy and religion. Metaphorically, each of us draws the same Divine Breath of Life or shelters the same Divine Light within us. This seems plausible enough. Yet, these descriptions separate us from God and invite us to believe that we are receptacles for God. They also presume that we are distinct entities with degrees of separation from each other and from God.

According to many religions it is our need to be distinct and important individuals (and denial of that need), which blinds us both to our limitations and to an experience of the Divine. Hence, ‘good’ people attempt to overcome their selfishness by espousing more inclusive values—such as freedom-for-all, equality, appreciation of differences, compassion and harmony. These higher values become part of moral philosophies such as ‘live and let live’ and ‘love one another’. Notwithstanding these moral philosophies, each of us still values our own power. Each of us wants autonomy. That is, we want to believe that what we say and do represent choices, not just reactions. We shelter the Divine Light but we are also free to make our own choices. How can this be? There is no satisfactory answer as long as God is a separate entity, apart from us.

An alternative to keeping God apart from us is to assume that, despite our being separate entities, we are all, in some way, God. This is possible if we believe that a fragment of a thing can recreate the whole of that thing—or almost the whole of it—as with a hologram. In such a model, God has willfully fragmented into things and beings in space and time. We are the fragments and each of us has limitations that prevent us from recreating All-That-Is in the present moment. But, with sufficient iteration, all individuals become God again. So, in this model, we are all in the process of recreating God. As the living Hologram of All-That-Is, God experiences God's own fragments simultaneously from every fragment's point of view. God also experiences God as All-That-Is, without reference to any particular point of view.

As strange as all this may sound, most of it is not new. Esoteric descriptions of our God-nature abound. I present one in Book 2. Whatever the details, the spiritual value of such a description is its implication for how we should treat each other. That is, if we want to express our Divine nature then we will also appreciate the Divine nature of everyone. In daily life, this amounts to loving everyone. I find this difficult to do. So do most people. But, more on this later. For now, suffice to say, that if each of us is indeed God, we have forgotten this handy bit of information. On the other hand, our status as individuals with limitations is plainly evident. An older metaphor for all this is that we are all God's children and should treat each other as such.

BOOK 1: The Poems

The Happy Beast

December, 2014

I live each day

Happily beset by dragons

Wandering

Among the ruins

Of ambition

That softly erode

My desire.

I want you now

More honestly,

More easily,

More joyfully

-Less fretfully

Than before.

I love you now

So much more

By the warmth of this river

That lies between us

And with the contented beast

That awakens gently

In the breeze.

Surrendering to Spirit,

Whatever we love

Is easy

To love.

Let it be easy

To love

The contented beast

That asks for nothing

In return.

--Brian Kowalchuk

The Light in Your Eyes

May 2014

The soul takes the shape of its

Container

Then seeks to soften it

With its unseen glow.

Yet, it is the warmth of my voice

Which calls you here

That I might see

The same

Light in your eyes

And it is the touch of your hand

That draws me

Near

To discover again

The pleasant ache

Of returning Home

--Brian Kowalchuk

Life

April 2014

Life is God's blind and unrelenting ambition

To reach out with Light

And stab at the darkness

With ingenious self-deceit.

Creating just enough substance

To form a distinction

That whizzes round and round...

Repeating itself

And shouting joyfully

I''m here, I'm here!

Share something more with me!

Our time is thus,

And to notice as much as we can,

While we are drawn

Into the gravity and pleasure

Of all the curious forms

Around us.

Slowing ourselves to catch a ride

With a familiar something

That loses a little Light

Each time it is made to stand still.

--Still we lovingly cling to our form

And fashion the next generation

That whizzes round and round.

As we used to do

When we were happy and unfamiliar with the world

And cared nothing for our fate.

--Brian Kowalchuk

What to Do?

--For Lao Tzu

March 2014

Am I content?-- no I'm bored

Am I satisfied? --no I want more.

Am I uncomfortable?

Yes and I resent my limitations.

But if I were never afraid

What relief could I look forward to?

And if I need not struggle

What is worth the bother?

If to strive is to grasp

And if desire is just a deceit

What will be my pleasure?

This is the greatest dilemma.

You saturate your senses.

You pull and push all the players in the game.

For a moment of happiness.

And a brief respite.

What to do?...

Find the alternative to excitement

And you will be happy forever.

Take a breath that includes the presence

Of everything around you.

Touch without taking

Feel without touching

The threads that join us all

And as you release

Feel the gentle pull

That is still there

To remind you

That your freedom

Need not leave you

Alone.

--Brian Kowalchuk

Glory Us

February, 2014

Cover me in roses

Smother me

In the fragrance of glory.

I never knew

That I belonged to anything

So grand,

'til now.

Striving and surviving and

Leaning on each other

I will fall asleep with you.

Dreaming the same dream.

Enjoying the same glory.

Comforting the same pain.

We relish all this.

We do. We do

Imagine such togetherness

That returns us to the fold

Unbidden.

Should you be tempted to distinguish yourself

During moments of magnificence

Or desperate isolation.

You can just relax...

And return to the fold...

Disappear into the freedom of oblivion.

If you awaken to something new

We will be here to help you try again.

We will gladly share in your glory,

We will gladly share in your pain.

But mostly we will just laugh along with you

And cover you with roses.

When you start to smell funny.

Because after all,

God has a sense of humour.

That I sometimes fail to appreciate.

--Brian Kowalchuk

I Grant You You

February 2014.

--For Robert Louis Stevenson

It's not so much compassion

That makes the world go round

Or even being reasonable

That keeps us on the ground.

It's all about the circles

I'm drawing in the sand.

There's one for me and one for you

And each and every man

--And woman and animal and rock and tree--

That I happen to be thinking about

Right now.

How else can I know that I am not you

And you are not me?

Like so many little children

Digging in the sand.

We're little gods and goddesses

With busy little hands.

--And we are All-There-Is--

But feigning friends and enemies

And keeping things apart.

Takes lots of time and energy