Get me out of here!: Part 1: Who Owns God?

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Part 1: This world - and the next

An old Jewish joke runs something like this:

A group of rabbi was discussing an aspect of Holy Law. Soon one of them found himself disagreeing with the rest on the interpretation of that aspect of the Law. However, he KNEW he was right and that God would therefore be on his side. So he called upon the All Mighty to help him prove his case: Please God, if I am right, let the streams of Israel flow uphill.

Immediately the waters changed direction and started flowing uphill - though to no avail for the other rabbi remained unconvinced.

Please Lord, if I am right, let the trees bend to the ground, he then tried, and the trees bent to the ground, but again his opponents remained unmoved.

In a last desperate attempt he said: Oh Lord, if I am right, please speak out in support of me, and a voice sounded from Heaven: My friends, I have to tell you that he is right and you are wrong.

Now the rabbi smiled in triumph knowing that victory was his, but then one from the group spoke out and said: We pay no attention to Heavenly Voices; the correct determination was written down a long time ago.

Chapter 1: Beginning the Journey

Yeshua bar Yosef (better known as Jesus) said: The Pharisees and the scholars have taken the keys of knowledge and have hidden them. They have not entered, nor have they allowed those who want to enter to do so. As for you, be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.

(Gospel of Thomas, Saying 39)

A question we ask too rarely could run like this: What is Reality?

In our rational reality where Scientism has proven everything worth knowing about our world and us, such an endeavour may seem the perfect waste of time, but philosophers have made such a waste of time their business since long before the birth of Scientism.

More recently the philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) continued the old tradition by describing three layers of reality - three worlds - the first of which contains the physical objects. The second world contains our minds in all its conscious and unconscious forms. The third world contains our thoughts and ideas - items the biologist Richard Dawkins have coined memes.

I was introduced to the concept of memes through the books of another biologist, Lyall Watson, who pointed out that memes behave according to the laws Darwin formulated, so once formed memes will live lives of perfect selfishness in single-minded pursuit of self-maintenance and self-propagation - self-promotion.

In a sense of things memes are like souls in that they are born out of thoughts, ideas, and imagination - and in that for their existence in this world they rely on the partnership with a physical body. In the case of the memes that body is us: We are not only the creator gods who put the memes into this world, we are also the vehicle they use for growth and development: Whereas we create the memes for our own reasons, and see them as servants or helpers to us, the memes quickly turn the table around, enslaving us to serve any meme we subscribe to.

That truth about memes forms the plot of the two books forming Get me out of here! In the present book the topic is addressed in connection with religion, where the power of the memes we have formed is very obvious and easy to understand. With this hammered home, the next book - Welcome to Easter Island! - extends the vision out into our secular societies, which turn out to be no less dominated by memes stealing our Freedom and locking us up in fixed patterns of thoughts and behaviour. These patterns may take the form of -isms - such as: Racism, Nazism, Darwinism, Capitalism, Communism, and Monotheism.

Those examples serve not only to make the concept concrete, but also to illustrate just how powerful memes are in controlling us - and that what they lead us into thinking and doing may be more to their advantage than to our advantage.

The meme known as Monotheism, the idea that there is only one god, referred to as God, is the primary topic of the present book. It comes in three main variants: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - three forms of one meme which have fought each other for centuries in a perfect illustration of just how selfish, dominant, and destructive memes are.

That dark side of memes is particular easy to recognise with this meme, as it should be obvious that if there really is only one God, those three versions of one super-meme should represent or serve the same master - so what would the point be in pitching the followers against each other?

Thus, while pretending to offer us a way to God, the three lower range memes act like pagan idols requesting our submission and sacrifice - or like demons driving us into thoughts and behaviour that is not for our own good: They have made themselves gods we must obey and serve - even before we serve the real God. Thus, if God speaks to you and tell you this or that, according to Islam you must shut your ears and disobey God if the information or instruction is not in accordance with the Koran, for according to the faith, the believers must subscribe to in practice, truth is in the Koran - not in God.

While the deeply ironic truth in that description of religious fanaticism should be obvious to anyone with an open mind, the clouded minds, memes create in their enslaved supporters, can easily dismiss the obvious, for it is clear from the religion referred to, that either you cannot have spoken directly with God, or that it must have been somebody else who spoke to you in that way, for God would never speak against the contents of the named pagan idol.

Christianity is equally silly about the bible, so it is not as if the other version of the super-meme is any better...

What such powerful memes create in us is a state of mass-psychosis where we deny not only ourselves but also God to serve them in stead.

Put that way, the memes come to look like really bad ideas, and that realisation begs the question of how on earth we got such bad ideas: Where did these three competing versions of the super-meme come from - how and why were they created?

For all three religions the answer lays in the world and the conditions of life people experienced a long, long time ago - circumstances that created the ideas of today through fairly logical chains of events that can still be reconstructed in some detail, as you may appreciate some chapters from now.

Given the selfish and destructive nature of memes, another obvious question to ask may be one of why we should stick with them - why keep them if they only serve themselves and not us or God?

If we do choose to overturn our current memes to set ourselves free of their rule, the next question becomes one of what to put in their place - if anything.

Thus, those questions will also be addressed in the course of this book and quite appropriately, on the day I was done with the construction of the manuscript for the present book - and wondered about the purpose of my efforts those recent months - the daily message from Neale Donald Walsch ran: Why am I bothering to tell you about this? Because we are talking here about the art of story telling --- and story telling is the process through which humanity tells itself about itself...and thus, shapes itself into what it is next going to be.

Indeed, with the publication of my tales I hope to have constructed a first foundation for a better shared future than what we could have if we remain in the grip of our current memes.

Wow - that’s a level of ambition - isn’t it?

Yet, I am not sure that I am terribly ambitious - more of a simple, practical man seeking to live a simple, practical life. Indeed, until I got hijacked and embarked upon the seven year project of creating these books, everything was certainly very simple and practical in the life of a man who wasted no time on things as useless as philosophy:

I am a medical doctor, and I have devoted my entire career to the life sciences, so Scientism was my religion - though I was not able to see it as a religion while I was firmly in its grip. In a sense of things, my fate was in that respect a bit unusual, as I come from a long line of farmers (and some shoemakers) where nobody else had ever graduated from a university. In another sense of things the fate could be seen as almost inevitable for I stood out as a genius already from childhood; in my first school years I was a boy consuming information like a wildfire consumes dry grassland, so I became a walking dictionary and later I entered the Mensa society for people with an unusually high IQ, blasting through the roof of the admittance test.

It was as if I was created and born to become a professor one day - and even in the ranks of Scientism I stood out through the span of knowledge I harboured, for soon the amount of information gathered by scientists became so enormous that it became obvious that nobody could embrace it all. At the dawn of the third millennium AD, 3rd February 2000, the development was acknowledged in a millennium essay in the leading scientific journal Nature under the title of: Decline of the generalist. (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v403/n6769/pdf/403483a0.pdf)

The point made was true enough, though I resisted the inevitable conclusion, for even people like I could not continue to have room for all the data being gathered or generated.

However, it is not as if I insist on knowing every detail about everything - it is more a matter of a deep intuitive understanding that if you become so myopic that you can only see trees and not the woodland they are part and parcel of, you are bound to miss the mains points - or as the essay phrased it in the subtitle: The vigour of every discipline depends on people with broad vision.

Indeed, the essay warned about the tunnel vision developing if we exclude the generalists, but in the stampeding heard of data gatherers nobody listened to the warning, so as the years went by I became more and more of a walking dinosaur - a curious remain from ancient times that became increasingly superfluous in a world populated with people blinded by details.

Thus, while it was other events that made me begin the construction of these books seven years after the publication of the essay, there was a certain practical logic to the dismissal of the dinosaur from his otherwise permanent university position another seven years later. Along the same line of logic one could see my books as an extension of the heresy I displayed as a scientist who refused to loose himself to the tyranny of details - once a rebel, always a rebel.

However, there is an added dimension that appeared to me because of the events that drove me into an alternative career as a freelance author, and it can be summarised in a sentence my late wife, who was a psychologist, once said: We only KNOW what we have experienced for ourselves - the rest is just something somebody tells us.

Thus, I am not going to rely blindly on our usual societal indoctrination, and with this agenda of mine, my books are bound to harbour a certain amount of disrespect for established truth - as illustrated in the Jewish joke - and a certain amount of resulting iconoclasm.

Despite my resistance to myopia, there was no real iconoclasm to my rebellious attitudes until the precipitating event you may already know of from my other books, but which I describe once more here, as the present books represent one of the three possible starting points to a journey through the Pentagon universe:

I was a family father and married to the mother of my two youngest daughters - a woman I had married after years of raising an older daughter on my own after her mother and I went our separate ways. With this background I had decided to hold out in my marriage regardless of anything - rather than dragging another child through the experience of a split home - but towards the end of 2003 I was having enough, none the less, and since we had married on New Year’s Eve, I decided to ask for divorce on the same date, ending things where they began.

I never got that far, though, for between Christmas and New Year my wife developed an inflammation in her left breast, so I decided to spare her the added trauma until she had recovered - which she never did.

Almost by knee jerk reflect she was given antibiotics for the inflammation, to treat the supposed infection causing it, and while the treatment had no apparent effect, it was for all intents and purposes just a matter of finding another type of antibiotic, the medical doctor knew: Apparently it was an infection that was resistant to the type of antibiotics first used.

I was thus safely locked up in my ignorance disguised as insight when one evening in February I was alone in our living room, sitting on the couch watching football in TV while my wife was putting our daughters to bed. This was a Saturday, and on the following Monday my wife had an appointment at the hospital to get the answers on some tests taken to explore why there had been no response to the treatment. My wife had asked me to go with her to the hospital, and reluctantly I had taken the time off from work to comply with her wish on this unbearably trivial matter.

It was in this state of mind I sat there all alone watching football when suddenly I was knocked so hard on my left shoulder that my upper body tipped forward. I pulled myself up to standard sitting position all confused about what happened there - and suddenly there were words appearing in my head. The words had the form of a full sentence saying that now I needed not bother about the divorce anymore, for my wife would develop a rampant disease and die of it within three to four months.

It was very concise - almost businesslike - but still hard to believe for a trained scientist, so when my wife returned to our living room I mentioned nothing to her about the event. However, when we saw the doctor the following Monday we were told that the inflammation was in fact a very rare and extremely aggressive, incurable form of cancer, so whoever planted the information in me certainly got the facts right.

You can’t argue with data, as we scientists have a habit of claiming, and here the data, the evidence seemed pretty indisputable, so now the scientist had to change or adapt his view of our world, our reality.

Initially I approached the situation by talking back to whoever it was that had knocked me over and spoken to me that evening in my living room, and that response led to more data - more evidence demonstrating that our solid, proven scientific view of reality is seriously flawed, and to process the situation developing I began writing these books.

Along the way I discovered that it was the Archangel Raphael who had invaded my life, and subsequently the conversation grew to include a long list of other non-physical beings - such as the Archangel Michael, Yeshua, Miriam of Magdala, Buddha, Shiva, and Isis, just to pick a few names. In fact the range if deities or entities, I communicated with, soon became so large and diverse that mostly I simple refer to them under the general heading of the Angels or Them.

You may also refer to them as my guides - the aspects of God that have guided me through the seven year journey of producing these books.

The journey has been a bit of an experience - not least since it has taken me back to numerous prior incarnations of mine, all of which contained negative experiences I have now recalled.

When I my asked my healer why we are to seep through all that old stuff, she answered that it is so that we can process it and release it - set ourselves free to experience life and joy.

A while later the scientific journal Science contained an article about how we can alter our memories by recalling them and redefining them so they get a new and different meaning to us - thus, if an experience created a fear in us we would rather be without, the experience can be recalled and redefined to remove or lessen the fear (http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1209/2).

Though it may all make sense, then, the journey has still been a bit of a marathon - or an ironman, possibly even a triple ironman - and my experience of the experience has swung back and forth between rejoicing in the release and suffering under the strain of the process.

When I sat down to write my books it was not only to process my experiences, though, but also to publish my writings - so the form of my texts was in line with this double agenda from the beginning, and that was probably were the iconoclasm began, for the decision to publish was sparked by the purchase of my first real bible:

As a scientist I had never bothered about such superstition, but now there was a need to address it, and for a nominal Christian, the bible would be an obvious starting point.

We have a well equipped academic bookstore at my university, which also has a faculty for Theology, so I did not have to go very far to get my bible. When I waited in line to pay for my new book, Raphael said to me: 10% of what is in the bible is God’s Word - the rest is something else.

My spontaneous reply was: I need to tell the world about that...

So that became my journey, then: The journey of my own liberation and the journey of producing these iconoclastic books.

With these intertwined agendas the journey also became a rather bodily experience as you will soon see - if you do not already know about it from my other books...

As for the present part of the book series, everything is in a sense of things said in the two sentences on the inner cover of this book, for in the book you are reading now I will describe how the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims created their religions: Images of God they worship in place of the God they cannot see, cannot touch - and apparently do not communicate with, since they need all those written instructions in place of just listening to God’s Word.

In the West we have largely turned our back on God, blinded as we are by material wealth and technological development, but that does not mean that we are any less un-free, as we have just made other gods in place of the ones we discarded as useless - so here we worship materialism, Darwinism, the free market forces: Anything to do with Rex Mundi, the lord of the physical matrix - but that part of the story I save for the next book.

It is not even as if we found entirely new ways of making gods when we entered into our worship of Rex Mundi, for the old religions sprang from very practical circumstances - there was a certain amount of pain and need that drove us in a given direction - and a given amount of gains offered if we picked the new deity. That is also how we embrace Rex Mundi: It is from negative experiences with the old gods and from a perspective of presumed personal profit.

One is left to wonder what kind of a world we can create from such a perspective - might it be that to create the best possible world for us to live in we should perhaps work from a different perspective?

- Might it be that in place of pain and misery and selfish pursuits of profit we should work from concepts of sharing and giving, of enough for all?

If we are to aim that high, and be successful in our endeavour, we have to stop making images of God - we must know and understand God - know and understand our own place in Creation: Understand God through us - and us through God.

So that is where we look now: Through the All Seeing Eye portrayed on the book cover...

Chapter 2: God and Creation - to be and not to be

Yeshua said: Images are visible to people, but the Light within them is hidden in the Image of the Father’s Light. The Father will be revealed, but His image is hidden by His Light.

(Gospel of Thomas, Saying 83)

In the Beginning God IS - the Source and spring of everything Created - but what does the statement actually mean?

Many religious misunderstandings must have their origin in the inability to understand that simple statement. For me it is pretty simple, as I was introduced to God through one of my very bodily experiences. It happened at the Barnabas Monastery in Cyprus where I was taken to see and meet the Source - suddenly and unexpectedly.

What I experienced that day may not be easily reduced to words, but I would speak of a source of Power so immense that you cannot grasp it - yet equally benevolent. It is easy to understand how the sun has often been used as an image for God, for the sun breathes life to our planet - which would otherwise be a lifeless chunk of frozen ice in deep dark space - and it is through the Breath of God and through His beating Heart that Life exists in Creation.

I was introduced to the Source with the comment that one day I would come to pour directly from it, so I might as well get to know it, and that is where this tale continues:

In the beginning Is but a Void, an absence of anything Created - and everything is in the Void - everything is the Void: There is no time, no space, and no creatures - everything is HERE and everything is NOW.

In this point of nothingness, of true Existence, is nothing but Love, Light, and Truth - so when I speak of Truth it is not a matter of academic truth or of words in some book, but of Truth in and of God. I am perfectly aware that there are many other truths in circulation here, and you may subscribe to whatever truth you prefer, but there is one Truth, and that is what I will speak from - otherwise I would not be pouring straight from the Source.

If at times my efforts to do so seem imperfect, then please remember that I am only a man - and remember that what you see relies on the eyes you see with.

As I said, we only KNOW what we have experienced for ourselves, and in God is a wish to KNOW. Thus Creation came about as a means to learn and KNOW - and it is through Creation that we can get to see and know God without degrading Him by making images of Him, for Creation is God’s self-image.

You could perhaps also say that it is a negative of a self-image, for everything gains meaning through its opposite: Small only exists because of big, hot only exists because of cold - and vice versa: Everything is understood because of what is different from it.

Thus, from what is without a beginning, Creation was made with a beginning - whereby time came about - and from the nothingness of real reality in the Void, an imaginary world of space and dimensions sprang at the dawn of time.

In that world, Oneness is replaced by the duality of Two - and from Two sprang the myriad creatures: Our world of duality exists in the equilibrium between darkness and Light; it is a world of yin and yang resulting in all the shades and shapes of grey we experience.

Everything in Creation is rooted in God - eventually - and it is actually possible to follow the trail back to the Source - I KNOW because I have done it - but it is not something I can take a snapshot of and show it to you, for it implies going beyond our world, so let us use an image:

Imagine that you combine matter with antimatter. If you did it, the two would annihilate each other and return to the state of pure energy from which they originated. That is a rather good image on the relation between God and Creation: Everything comes from God, and everything returns to God - eventually - and in between the points of entry and exit it exists in separation as halves of a whole.

Yeshua said that the sign of God in us is movement and rest - there is a substance which is receptive, you may call it the feminine, and there is a principle of movement, you may call it the masculine: There would be no waves on the ocean if there was no ocean, and there would be no waves on the ocean if there was no movement, no force acting on the ocean.

Thus, throughout Creation we have the Mother and the Father, and anything created results from their dance with each other. Any sound creation rests upon the balance and mutual respect of the two.

In a sense of things, this is all we need to know, but there are a few more things I would like to add:

Imagine a ray of white light. That ray of light contains all colours in the spectrum - and far more colours than we can see with our eyes. In fact, since light is merely radiation defined by its wavelength, any colour of light exists. Creation is God’s Light dissipating into ever smaller units, so each and everyone of us is a ray of that Light, and it is the colour of that ray of Light which is our true identity - though it wraps itself in myriad physical frames as it passes through the permissive, so that in each instant we appear in the marriage between the two. For want of better words you may call such an instant an incarnation of the Light.

You have heard about Einstein’s famous equation E=mc², I suppose: The formula translating back and forth between energy and matter. However, energy and matter is not just a matter of either or - it is equally much a matter of both at the same time. Imagine a substance from our material world, and drain it of all energy - cool it to the temperature known as zero Kelvin. At that point everything is stiff, and nothing moves, but if you infuse energy the substance may experience movement, and above a certain threshold the solid becomes fluid; it melts into a liquid. If you infuse even more energy, heat the liquid further, it will evaporate and turn into a gas. Then, if you infuse enough energy, the gas will dissolve as the matter returns to a state of energy.

Imagine now that you shine light through the substance when it is a solid, a liquid, or a gas: The light is one and the same, and the substance is the substance, yet the outcome may look very different when you shine light into ice, into liquid water, or into a fog.

I have said this as an introduction to the first figure I will show you:

Figure 1 - Four levels of reality:

In the figure I have translated the four energy states of solid, liquid, gas, and no form into four basic kingdoms, all of which expresses the Light, which is always one and the same. It should be rather obvious that the Light may appear differently if expressed through one or another layer in this pyramid.

At the same time, you may view the pyramid as a prism where the Light separates into finer and finer subdivisions as it travels through the pyramid from the top to the bottom - from Oneness at the tip to a rainbow of colours at the bottom.

Thus the Light expresses Itself in many different forms - colours -