FROM RITUAL TO REALITY (2)
J. Dean Fagerstrom
(11) One day my heavenly friend, the assigned angel, said: All that the soul has learned from God is both remembered and foretold. I found that this wise saying had to do with my 'remembering' what my spiritual destiny had to say, and at this later date this is confirmed by the fellow-travelers on the royal highway, most of whom verify the same things described.
(12) Another saying by the angel is: God's gifts cannot be earned, which is why they are gifts and not rewards. This is just another way of saying that we make ourselves vulnerable to our own solution from whatever problem assails us. Many persons have a superstitious attitude about 'vulnerability' a term related to 'security'. To exhibit either vulnerability or insecurity is considered by many to be weakness and fear. Of course such feelings come from fear, and yet only because we often do not know what we fear, only that it is present.
(13) After the dynamic encounter and the vital change it effected at the seminary I began exploring the meaning of ego. As described in A World Beyond the ego is the pseudo-self. It is that social entity we have come to believe we actually are and what others likewise confirm we are. The ego begins its nefarious life when we are very young. It is inspired by a misunderstanding of parents and teachers and stabilized later on by coworkers. Basically the ego is irrational; it exists only because we grant it credence as reality. The ego is God's misinformed child, a kind of worldly alien, severed from the reality within, afraid of love, tenderness, gentleness, compassion and any form of spontaneous feeling toward others. The ego is the mask tediously formed from the old newspapers of urban legends, from superstitions and habits of fear. The ego, without fear, would cease to exist in its falsified semblance of reality. The foolish life known as ego is taught to expect threats and attacks from others, thereby using a falsified verification system when such things do occur. An even more realistic definition of ego is: it is a false personality derived from a dark and morbid realm of existence, a realm which denies God, love and the miracle that waits eternally to deliver us from this false concept of who we really are, either potentially or as we tend to believe is the actual day-to-day situation. A saying by the angel in this regard is: Whatever God created always was; what was not created never was. The ego was never created by God but only accepted by ourselves as the pitiful follower of all other egos on the road to nowhere. If one is not afraid of truth one will not build defenses against it. The egoistic person, convinced of this other 'alias' he or she is will always build sand-bagged bunkers around one's self in order to prevent dynamic transformation. From this comes insecurity and the effects of fear in the worst sense, and at last one becomes a morbid pessimist, cynical about everything in general, most tragically about the potential within to resolve the dilemma and be born anew into a kingdom of light, love and peace. The traditional religious leadership I had known would agree with this in general principles; the only problem arose when a needy person asked for help. This was most often met with a series of stipulations about one's habits of life, what one needed to do in order to find peace of heart. These religious bandages were always on full display as though in some emergency room ready to be applied as 'taped-on' solutions. The external aspect of life was always the emphasis, what one drank (or smoked), where one went for entertainment, what sexual habits one may have practiced, what kind of language one used, and a great variety of meaningless activities thought to be detrimental if not also the actual cause of one's spiritual problem. The ego always caters to a set of foolish prescriptions and will sell its 'snake-oil' to anyone naïve enough to buy. We are not flesh-and-blood except by proxy; our reality is that we are spiritual beings returning to our everlasting home and kingdom. The royal highway within is an access route straight to the soul that has always wanted to love. God has no magic bullets; He only has our cooperation in the salvation from ourselves and the propaganda system of a deluded world. The ego's stock-in-trade is illusion. The miracle of the individual is one's soul who is seeking to cause us to remember who we are from God's point of view. Once this is allowed to begin from free will we will see the alabaster stones of the royal highway gleam from the darkness of an old venue filled with suffering, loneliness and anguish.
(14) The ego has a pseudo-spiritual form of deception as well. Its deranged concept is to create a moral/ethical sense which passes for spiritual reality. This prescription calls for one to act honestly in one's dealings with others, to act as friendly and cooperative as possible with coworkers, to be careful not to offend those in power, in fact to cater to their needs and desires - all to one end that the ego's program for success, material gain and prominence is not compromised. Many persons may not find any of these attitudes disreputable until examined more carefully, a process that can only be known by the one involved as actually a self-advancement program looking for a plausible means of deception to succeed. The ego may suggest that one attend the same church as the boss attends, or at least show up at the same social functions in order to express support.
(15) The ego knows that even the word 'spiritual' connotes some transcendent attitude, or at least a popularized term meant to impress, yet never aware that its own pseudo-life is utterly void of any need to dramatically change. In general the ego is a faltering deranged entity in the country of the blind, able to unerringly guide another into the ditch.
(16) Another deception of ego is its irrational sense of self-consciousness when one hears the word religion. Lifelong ritual-habit has prescribed for us categories, one being religious of nature. The word adheres to a large collection of assumptions. If one has never perceived the difference between religiosity and spirituality then the ego has again succeeded in deluding the individual. It is not to defame nor to deny the religious culture of any society by this notation of distinction between terms. One may come to understand, as I had to understand, that religion as an institution is but the scaffolding around a much more significant temple within, the soul's sanctuary where God and the individual meet to discuss problems and to receive answers. The Lord told us that the kingdom was within; to go looking for it where it can never exist is one of ego's primary illusions. The only valid church in existence is where two are three are gathered together to share love. But its validity will always be that cosmic cornerstone deep within the soul whose inscription by the finger of God states: Love God and your neighbor as yourself.
(17) The advancement from a ritualistic life of blind obedience and a subservient habit of life leads inevitably to a genuine freedom, to an inner atmosphere of delightful liberty, humor and spontaneity possibly never imagined before. The angel said: The highest attainment of the soul is innocence. This saying does not refer to a child-like innocence but to a mature innocence, a state of life when one is able to look at the former pitfalls of ego's illusions and madness and to experience a genuine compassion and mercy for those still enmeshed with ego's deluding power. This state of innocence is one of peace and calmness, intensely aware of the miracle that is able to occur within another. Instead of indulging in the false sympathy that ego prescribes we understand the pathos and anguish of another from a whole new outlook. We are able to be touched with another person's suffering and confusion because we were once victims of the same malady of spirit.
(18) The benevolent function of a new heavenly program is to heal the mind of its illness which is an irrational thinking process sponsored by the ego. As the old rites of pseudo-morality and pseudo-spirituality are relinquished in favor of a dynamic reality which is God-sponsored - a person will undergo a recovery interlude in which most if not all of the fables of society will fall away like soiled bandages. At last we will be given a clearance to walk away from the collective coma of massive delusion and become children of a new kingdom.
(19) In the earlier days of my progress I saw the ego-victimized world around myself as a sanitarium, an asylum which never sought to heal its patients but rather to protect them from the truth. In that atmosphere it was okay to be resentful, to cheat, to pretend, to speak ill of others, to connive ways of creating material gain far beyond the limits of fairness, decency and honesty. Worst of all I experienced the disapproval of my theological peers when relating certain spiritual events of a nature which apparently exceeded the bounds of a dogmatic belief system. Several of these experiences were related in A World Beyond and many others have subsequently occurred soon to be described in the present work.
(20) At one point in my life I asked God: Why do the things of heaven and spiritual experience sound so outrageous in the ears of those who proclaim Your name ? It is one thing to become acutely aware of a dynamic change within one's self but quite another as one associates with those he believes to be friends. The result is often a strange alienation of former friends and colleagues as one moves along the royal highway discovering new friends he never knew he had. It isn't actually a state of dissociation within ourselves which selects new friends; it is what an acceptance of love and truth does for us.
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These words ring with a beautiful mix of inspiration, humility, love and compassion. This is the essence of the tone behind the selfless, claimless, blameless spirit of our ONE Lord God in Heaven.
Dean Fagerstrom has no interest in claiming anything. He's one of the most humble, self-effacing individuals I have ever met. And I can make no personal claim as to how I met this gentleman. I fell into "the matrix" and found myself reading the answers to messages, thoughts, sights and sounds relating to numbers which I had been receiving and documenting for a few months.
Again, this is not the core written material from The Book Of Anglion, but it gives you a sense of context from which TBA evolved.
I look forward to remaining open and sharing whatever happens to come along as we continuing celebrating this ongoing "process of becoming."
Peace.
Light!
ONE - LOVE!
GO!! |
