The Abyss

I need to explain something about why I sometimes use the word Abyss instead of God or Allah or something more traditional. There are quite a few reasons. For one, I’m honestly trying not to offend all the atheists out there. I like atheists and owe them a great debt of gratitude. I think the idea of God angers them and scares them. They see all the war and hatred stirred up by our human obsession with the Divine or more accurately, our obsession with defining God in our own image and crucifying anyone who does not go along with our definition.

They have a point.

It took me many years to realise that religion and spirituality were, in fact, two different things.

Spirituality is the underlying foundation of religion. It is their reason for existence. Most people think the purpose of a religion is to spread its teachings, but it isn't. That's a methodology not a purpose. The purpose is to create a paradise on Earth - however you define that. Their disciplines are meant to instill the habits and beliefs systems that create the world you want to experience.

It used to be that the world was full of what we would now call barbarians. Their religions were designed to create their paradise – a land full of mighty fighting men, and the goddesses that made love to them. Thus Thor, Odin, Zeus, Hera, Jupiter and Mars. Our dream now is to create a world that can peacefully go about its business while being nice to each other (a bit like Canada). Christianity (to cite the only religion I know a reasonable amount about) is designed specifically to bring about a world of peace. It centers on love as the primary motivating factor in all decision making.

I believe there is truth underneath all the dogma religions throw at us. There is a reason for the rituals, yet there are times when we must not mistake the medium for the message. Dogma points AT the truth or it helps you maintain the truth (through discipline) but is NOT the truth itself. Religions point AT the truth but are not the truth itself. They are all just imperfect signposts - metaphors as that word was defined earlier. They can lead us to truth but the Truth itself (God) must be directly experienced. Religions can be of enormous help (or hindrance) but in reality, there is no need of a priest class to come between man and his Goddess. I have nothing against a priest class, by the way. In theory, having a spiritually wise priest class to guide us is a great boon to any society. The trouble comes when individual human frailty corrupts the application of theory. Yet any one of us can cut out the middleman and have direct access to the Source. All it takes is to open up your heart and get rid of all the crap stopping us from believing in ANYTHING.

I thank atheists for leading me to those truths. I became an agnostic and then an atheist in university many years ago. The experience helped me get rid of my preconceptions.

Atheism left me open to have a direct experience of God.

So … what was this experience like?

Things get a bit tricky when I try to describe it. In many ways it was incredibly simple - God was my drinking buddy. He was my pal. We called each other by our first names. It was hilarious. It was fun beyond my wildest dreams of what could be fun. It was touching, meaningful, friendly, light and yet deep - most of all it was incredibly intimate.

I can hear those beloved atheists screaming from here, “You delusional idiot. You invented God in your own image again!“ Yes, I made my God in my own image - in the image of what I wanted my God to be, but He didn’t care. He let me. He became whatever I wanted Him to be.

A reminder: The truth isn't in these imperfect words you are reading. Remember what I said in the beginning of this book: “… nothing I am going to say is to be taken as the Truth in any absolute way”. When I say, “I was made aware of certain rules right off the bat”, I don’t mean there were any rules at all. For all I know, I invented them on the spot. Nevertheless, to say, “I was made aware of certain rules right off the bat” does express what the experience I was going through FELT like.

I was made aware of certain rules right off the bat.

1. I couldn’t take anything too seriously. If things got too serious, that was a sign I was getting lost in my ego or whatever. Reality (God) is full of humour and joy. If it ever stopped being fun, I wasn’t dealing with God but something else.
2. I could NEVER get addicted to anything I was experiencing. To paraphrase E.M. Forster, I had to be able at any time to “cast off the mantle of civilization and walk in the naked majesty of my own being “. As soon as I got addicted to anything, that thing or that ability began to leave, and my power began to lessen.
3. I had no power. Everything that was done was done THROUGH me. I existed at the utter whim of a god.
4. I always had to be stronger than “the Force” I manipulated. I could not desire it in any way that seemed dependent. My center can never be outside of myself. To have the center of oneself outside of oneself is the definition of losing one's soul.
5. I could use this “magic” or “power” for my own personal gain but there was a consequence to doing so. When I used this power to fulfill the purpose of my greater self, I grew stronger. When I used it to fulfill my ego’s purpose, I became lessened somehow.
6. Whatever “powers” I had were inconsequential in comparison to the importance of this line of communication. They were like breathing - they came naturally, were largely automatic and I wasn’t supposed to get all weird and uppity about them (like “I‘m so special because I have superpowers“).
7. I should shut up about this - keep it secret. This was the seventies. Yes, things were opening up but I would still have been thought mad to say what was happening to me. Another reason was that this communication was something incredibly intimate to me alone. It was my own channel to God, and it didn’t need mucking about with by outsiders with an agenda. A third reason was rather peculiar … as soon as I begin talking about something, I remove myself from the experience - I make it abstract. Me writing this book to you removes me from the experience of being in these miracles, of being in the flow. I‘m talking ABOUT them - not experiencing them directly. As soon as I start abstracting things by talking about them, they stop happening. They start up again when I stop talking about them.

To say I heard a little voice in my head would be both true and false. That is one way it can happen. Yet a god is infinite and has an infinite number of ways to communicate. He can use the wind or the sky or a book or a crowded room. All of these things were used to communicate with me. Remember, the communication medium was coincidence - an unusual physical thing would happen to confirm an answer I came up with to an important question I asked so, I could ask for any kind of physical event to confirm my answer. Whether it happened depended on the importance of the question and the correctness of my answer.

When infinities are brought into a finite situation, things get a bit hard to define. It’s exactly like mathematics. Did God explain these things to me? Did I invent all this? Am I mad? All these questions sort of blend into each other and make no sense to ask. God is infinite so to say I invented everything is the same as saying God invented everything because I am part of God. To say that little voice in my head was God or to say it was me or something welling up from my sub-conscious was to say the same thing (that the process was fundamentally mysterious). There ends up being no point in asking questions that attempt to define the truth of what was happening because such questions can’t really be answered in any definitive way. You can literally pick and choose what to believe because all things are equally true/false in the presence of infinities.

The way I dealt with the situation was just to keep an open mind and listen to what was being said. If it made sense, then I ran with it to see where it led. The proof was in the pudding. If it worked, then I did not question it.

I got so good at this process of asking questions and forming answers that I used it to cheat at cards sometimes. I’d ask a question I already knew the answer to and ask for a specific card as proof (the ace of spades for example). God didn’t care if I cheated. I mean, big deal … I won five bucks in a game of poker. So what? In the grand scheme of things, that didn't matter. What really mattered was that I got consistent answers.

Chapter 4 - The Chinese Cookie