God / Divine / Universe Doesn’t use Beatings To Teach You About Love!
The Hardest thing for me to understand
One thing I struggled with for years, even still struggle today, is the fact that the Spirit never uses punishment or attack as a teaching tool.
What do I mean by that?
All religions, east and west, have this concept that you will be punished for your deeds. That the universe is out to get you, that there is no escape from universal punishment, that every bad deed or thought we’ve had WILL be punished.
God can do nothing about that, it’s the natural law, says the mind.
FUCK NO.
It took me a long time, a lot of gently guidance, to realise: God does not use pain or fear to teach. The concept of punishment is alien to the Spirit.
In fact, the universe wants us to go BEYOND FEAR, and so why would it use fear as a teaching tool?
God ONLY, and I do repeat, ONLY uses Love to teach. The Universe teaches with Love, patience and kindness.
It is the ego that attacks.
Why do people suffer? Not because God kicks them because they broke some 2000 year old rule. No, it is ALWAYS the ego that punishes it. Like Ive said before, it first creates circumstances where we will do stupid things, then it attacks us for doing those same things. This is because the ego is insane.
We do suffer from all the negative energy we create, but that is 100% the ego.
The Spirit uses Love and Forgiveness to guide us out of our madness. It teaches with love and kindness.
The god that most people worship, the angry asshole who rains hell fire on them because they touched themselves once, is created by the ego. It is the Ego.
The ego is insane. It attacks itself in a fit of madness, and later, feeling guilty, it tries to blame on external devil, god, karma or other bullshit.
Little children often eat things like candy without permission. You later find them, their face all messy, candy on their clothes, hands and feet, and they look at you like What, me? Whatcha talkin’ ‘bout, baby? I didn’t eat no candy
The ego is as smart, and as easy to detect by the Spirit.
There is a story in Hindu mythology. A demon prayed to the god Shiv for thousands of years. Shiv was pleased with him and asked him for a gift.
“Anytime I touch someone’s head, they should turn to ash”
Shiv didn’t see anything wrong with this and granted the wish.
Bad mistake.
Shiv (and indeed other gods) really need a lawyer to veto their contracts and boons.
The demon said “Thanks, pal. I now need to try this wish. Let me try it on you first”.
And the great god Shiv had to run, as his own wish couldn’t be negated, and he too would die if touched by the demon.
The demon was finally defeated when Vishnu tricked him into touching himself (haha! ;) ) when in the guise of a sexy woman. The demon ended up killing himself.
The demon that went to Shiv is our ego, our desires. Like Shiv, we play with them, not realising the danger they pose to us, until the same demons we created wants to eat us.
God, the Spirit, Being, Existence- does not seek to punish us. Why would he, when we do such a marvellous job ourselves?
Like in the Gita, the divine is our guide. He shows us how to navigate this battlefield of a world. In the Gita, Krishna refuses to fight for Arjuna, only choosing to act as his guide.
The spiritual reason for this is: There is nothing to fight, it is all an illusion our mind created. The ego create enemies to justify its existence. It then fights imaginary wars with those same enemies.
If there were no enemies, the ego would have it die, as it would be forced to do the most terrifying thing it can imagine: Look at itself. (See Watching the Watcher- or Why the Mind Hates it When You Try to Meditate for more)
And so the Spirit comes as our guide, our Guru, our teacher; he comes into the illusion (and it really isn’t a he, not even a she, but I’ll use he for simplicity as I’m talking about Krishna in this example; previously I have also called the inner guru The Mother).
The Teacher comes into the illusion to guide us out of it; but he isn’t a part of it. The Teacher does not encourage our illusions, though the Teacher may interfere, though very delicately.
The Teacher is a guide, to guide us out of the maze we have created.
The world, this insane world full of violence, murder, rape, child abuse, nuclear weapons— do you think God created this shit? No, it is all the insane mind.
The Teacher guides us out of the illusion using love compassion and forgiveness.
He does not use punishment or violence, as that is the tool of the ego.
Indeed, God using punishment (or karma or sin or any other such religious bullshit) would be like someone giving a lecture on the danger of child abuse, and starting by hitting a child. “Look! Look! This is child abuse, don’t do it!”
Or starting a lecture on evils of torture, and begin by torturing everyone who was late.
It doesn’t make sense, does it? In fact, the examples I give sound stupid. Because it is. And yet the ego believes God would teach us about love using attack.
The Hard Lesson
And this was the hard lesson for me to learn. I was always scared, scared “they” would attack me. If I had a good day, I was worried I was going to have a bad one “to balance it out”. If I got really good news, I was scared it had used up my “good karma”, so that now the bad karma would come up.
Anytime I did something unspiritual, like get angry at someone, I quietly expected punishment. I was sure karma would teach me a lesson about being so unspiritual.
And its not just me. I was reading You can heal your life by Louise Hay, and she says how, when counselling people, they were often scared of being happy, because if they were happy they would be punished. Because they didn’t deserve to be happy.
Of course it sounds irrational, but that’s what the unconscious mind is. Part of the spiritual path is making the unconscious conscious.
And so the ego fears attack. The ego is, as I have said, scared shitless all the time. It fears an attack by god, the universe, something out there. If no one attacks it, it will often attack itself.
The Divine, the spirit, god, does not use attack to teach us love. Here, I don’t mean the god of religions, who is a projection of the ego. I mean the indwelling spirit, the inner teacher, the Inner Child, our one true SELF.
Karma may be real but it is law of the mind. It is not a divine law. The mind fills it’s led with negative energy called vasanas in the yoga terms. These are like a programming of the mind- the mind keeps repeating and reinforcing the program.
These vasanas, to use Yogas term, are like groove on the mind. If you have seen the old record player, they had grooves, and the needle would move along those lines and play the sound.
Or you can think of them as data on a hard disk.
The mind keeps playing the same tune it has been programmed to, or what the grooves make it. These grooves are also known to science- they are the neuro-pathways our brain has, that make certain tasks easy. For example, if you are used to smoking a cigarette after a stressful time, anytime you are stressed, those neural paths will start firing, activating the Start smoking dude habit in the brain. It takes willpower, time and patience to rewire these pathways.
And that is all karma is. Mechanical habits we have “programmed” into our mind, that keep repeating the same nonsense over and over again, and usually cause us misery. Why misery? Because that’s what the go loves.
Awakening is formatting the disk. You get rid of the programming.
You see there is no need for a vengeful god? It is all our own programming. We created we, we can wipe it and start fresh.
Of course it isn’t easy. Even giving up cigarettes, which is just one programming, is so hard for most people. Now imagine millions of such lines of computer code in our brain, most of which we aren’t even aware of, even though it controls our destiny.
God, the guide, shows us how to escape our own programming. He does this with love, patience and compassion.
Without god, the Spirit, awakening would be impossible. It would be like a computer changing its own code. Not possible, because, we don’t even know that we have this programming, this energy driving us. And we can’t change what we are not aware of.
And that’s why we suffer. As Ive said before, the insane ego, this mad programming, causes us so much suffering the mind just goes silent for a minute.
And like the Yoga Sutras say, when the mind is quiet, the Divine becomes visible.
The Divine then starts guiding us; but it does so with love and compassion, not beatings. The Universe wants to heal our pain, not create more pain. And the way to healing is with love and compassion.
Of course, the ego fights back and wrests control back from us. But once we have seen the Divine, the Spirit, we cannot go back. Our life is changed forever.
Once the sun comes out, the darkness, which is like thick ice, must melt. It may take time, the ice might “suffer”, but the ice is as good as dead in the heat of the sun.
Our job is to realise we are the Sun, not the pathetic little ice melting in it. Karma, sin, punishment — all effect the ice, the ego, NOT US.
And once the ice melts there will be nothing left but the Peace of God 😊
