God Does Not Out-Rank You

Wednesday, February 21, 2007 – www.divinecosmos.com

Most people hold the image of a Supreme Being, a Higher Power, a Lord that may or may not care that much about you, but even if He/She/It does, you still rank much lower than this Power in the grand scheme of things… and you may never be able to make up the difference.

As we were saying yesterday, it can be quite an eye-opener to discover how many of our thoughts, actions and beliefs are actually holdovers from the animal kingdom. For most people stuck in this level of sub-consciousness, God is that which brings safety, comfort, warmth and love. Ultimately, that’s about as far as it goes for many, and it all traces back to issues that begin in infancy.

What terrifies us most is the feeling of being alone and abandoned – and although most people do believe in some form of Supreme Being, and are awed and inspired by such thoughts from time to time, their God Reflex does not sit by and idly wait for those moments to arrive.

We are constantly looking for God, and this subconscious search for safety, comfort, warmth and love is the root of all compulsive and maladaptive behaviors.

Yesterday we described how average people project this God Reflex into Food, Stuff and Family, which is all ultimately related to worshipping the body, and the comforts of the body, as if it were God.

Other people end up worshipping the mind, and use it to foster a feeling of superiority – a feeling of higher rank – over others.

This form of worship comes in the time and money that is invested to building knowledge, building up the mind’s resources, often at the expense of the body thanks to the long hours, lack of exercise and proper nutrition that results – leading to the stereotypical hair loss in men due to lack of proper circulation in the scalp.

People who worship the mind also tend to have a constant need to show it off to others. The Internet, with its open and public forums now being commonplace, has created a great opportunity for mind-worshippers to brag, argue with others, and attempt to catch them in contradictions, logical missteps and surges of emotion. Nowhere is this more common than in the paranormal, which mind-worshippers tend to dismiss whole-cloth as nonsense.

These “highly intelligent skeptics” are unwittingly venturing into what we call the negative path – the path of service to self. In this path, you consider yourself superior to others, separate from others, smarter or better than others – and you’ve actually strayed off course from the ultimate goal of spiritual evolution. No one’s going to step in and tell you that, though – you get the free will to do whatever you want here, within reason and the laws that society has established.

Certainly not everyone who gets a graduate degree has these issues, but there can be no doubt that when you put “Dr.” at the beginning of your name and / or “Ph.D.” at the end, it is a statement of rank… much in the same way that if you were Knighted, your proper name now begins with Sir.

Those who worship the body can definitely be confused about their spiritual orientation as well. We seek safety, comfort, warmth and love, subconsciously associating these needs with the God Reflex – and we often become resentful if others seem to have more of these qualities than we do.

This explains much of the “celebrity hatred syndrome” that is now so prevalent in the media. Money is obviously one of the biggest keys to the worship of the body – you can certainly increase your safety and comfort level with money, and warmth and love appears to follow because more people will want to get close to you for what you can provide them – so the theory goes.

The average person has the belief that celebrities are super-wealthy people, and therefore experience far more of God – far more safety, comfort, warmth and love – than the rest of us do. I met many of the top rock stars of the 80s thanks to my father’s work as a music journalist, and at first I was quite surprised at how few of them were financially stable in the long term.

In many music-industry contracts you have to put out three records before you see ANY money from what you’ve done. Up until then you’re paying the company back for all they’re giving you – the publicity, the opportunity to run around on stage, ride in the tour bus, meet the fans and “live the dream”. Your ‘personality self’ is quite satisfied for a time, but a dark gnawing inside you tells you that you’re really not making any money.

Most bands never stay popular enough to get up to a fourth record that sells – that’s why the contracts are written the way they are. On tour, they get a daily stipend of money called a per-diem, but that only covers enough to eat out at restaurants. Many of them eat poorly because they are using most of their per-diems to buy drugs, and they end up quite debilitated by the end of a tour because of it.

I can use the example of Twisted Sister (www.twistedsister.com) since I met them on each of their tours, and some knowledge is public domain thanks to their own free will decisions – though I have no knowledge of whether they had the standard three-record deal before they see any profit or not, nor did I see them using drugs of any kind.

Their debut album, “Under the Blade,” only had sporadic popularity after its 1982 release even though it had several songs on it that became legendary favorites of theirs. The second album came out in 1983, “You Can’t Stop Rock and Roll,” which had two songs that entered into the permanent Twisted Sister legacy but also didn’t make any headway on the charts.

However, their November 1984 release “Stay Hungry” had two big hits that catapulted them into stardom – the rock anthems “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock”, both of which were helped along by very clever and humorous music videos, featuring the wacky, furious military guy from Animal House. Other songs from the album got airplay but didn’t make it into popular videos, like the title track.

Then a follow-up album, Come Out and Play, was released soon afterwards in 1985 – but not a single cut on the album made it. “Love is for Suckers” came out in July 1987, but that also failed to have a single song connect. We went backstage on both of these tours, and being intuitive even at that age, I could sense that all was not well – the new songs just were not doing the job. No songs off these last two albums were played when I last saw them live at the Poughkeepsie Arena. (It was a pretty amazing time-warp to find that Dee looked the same and hit all the same notes as in the originals.)  

The lead singer, Dee Snider, eventually had a resurgence of popularity with the radio show “House of Hair,” and on that show he once publicly shared the story of his own rock-bottom point. The band dissipated after Love is for Suckers, and he eventually ended up working a lame job and not even having a car. He was riding his bicycle to go work in a call center when someone recognized him, saw him in this state and asked if he was Dee Snider. He shook his head, said nothing and rode off, feeling crushed.

There are a few notable examples of musicians who do get wealthy, and from what I can tell this seems to be the result of taking on corporate contracts – appearing in various advertisements, promotions, et cetera. It also seems that the industry has to create a handful of wealthy artists in order to maintain the illusion that they are living in a dream and not all struggling financially like the rest of us.

There are more film actors who actually become wealthy than musicians, but there again you are talking about an extremely small minority of the actual players involved. There are any number of actors you have seen playing bit parts in various movies who are working regular jobs right now to keep the bills paid, as I know from personal experience but do not have permission to talk about in specifics.

Others sock away their earnings to maintain a standard of living, but the industry is very fickle and you may go long periods of time without work. For women it’s even worse, as it is far less likely they will get any parts after their mid-30s at the latest – with actresses like Judi Dench or Helen Mirren in “The Queen” being notable exceptions.

I definitely hit a modest level of ‘celebrity’ through Internet and radio publicity, but the people I lived with would hiss at me in disgust if I dared use that word to describe myself. Everyone seemed OK with the term “public figure,” though. “No one who is a celebrity is allowed to call themselves a celebrity,” I was told. “It’s ego at the most disgusting level.”

Again and again I found that people came to me seeking fulfillment of their God Reflex – safety, comfort, warmth and love. Unlike a rock star, whose human weaknesses can be fully excused, I often received ridiculously unfair levels of scrutiny – even to the point that every word I wrote was gone over with a fine-toothed comb and silly exaggerations were read into it that I had never intended.

My own inability to charge adequately for my time and energy resulted in a perpetual lack of money, and all the unfair projections, jealousies and intrigues made my personal life a battleground as well – so most of the things people project their God Reflex into were not immediately apparent. There was no obvious safety, comfort, warmth or love from others in my life, for many years – I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me, this is just the way it was.

I certainly did get intrigued with developing and building up my mind – the three Convergence books on this site prove that – but I did not use this pursuit to try to profit from others or exhibit superiority over them.

If I had a stronger sense of self, and value in the work I was doing, I would have pitched a lot more shows to Coast and probably gotten a lot more popular – but I found that all the trimmings that came along with being a *ahem* public figure were really more trouble than they were worth.

Thus I voluntarily sabotaged myself, and in my own way I felt less and less safety, comfort, warmth and love over the years. I didn’t feel it from those I lived with and I didn’t feel it from being in crowds of people wanting to get me alone and tell me their life story, or ask for a reading. The work I came here to do became like my own Betrayer, and in that sense I just retreated more and more from it.

We’ve discussed an identification with the Body as God, and the Mind as God – but what about a genuine connection with the Spirit? I have found this type of connection to be few and far between, but more and more people are learning how to do it. Or, should I say, how to BE it, as in some senses “God is a verb”.

When you set up the idea of God ranking higher than you, a genuine connection to the archetype-cluster known as Spirit is almost impossible. Many people fall into the trap of worshipping words, worshipping scriptures, and believe that they are connecting with Spirit by doing so.

The benefit of inspirational teachings is that you can study someone else’s path to Spirit – but if “the Lord thy God is One,” as all spiritual teachings truly tell us, then no spiritual teacher out-ranks you, nor does ‘God.’

I am above no one and below no one.

That is about as true as it gets.

I’ve gotten harassed for pointing this out before, but it is a statistical fact that the most radical Fundamentalist religions tend to attract those with the lowest levels of education and income. Less education means less opportunity to make good money in our capitalist society, and many people fall back on drugs and alcohol to feel safety, comfort, warmth and love – i.e. the ‘presence of God’ on the subconscious level – as a result.

Chemical dependency is quite prevalent in our society, and with it comes a lowering of inhibitions and ethical standards. More often than not, you find yourself having done things that are clearly not loving and supportive towards others. You end up having temper flares, dishonesty, even criminal behaviors.

Most people’s sense of God involves some sort of perfected being, usually with a matching human emissary, that also expects you to be perfect – to never make a mistake, never commit a “sin” or otherwise.

The ravages of chemical dependency leave the average person feeling that they have strayed far from this goal. Fundamentalist religions sweep them up by acknowledging their apparent failure and unworthiness, and placating them with the idea that a higher-ranking being will exonerate them from punishment through forgiveness that would otherwise be impossible to be granted. The desire for an escape from reality – the safety, comfort, warmth and love of the God-Reflex – is transferred to the gatherings they have, and a sense of superiority and elitism is cultivated there – the idea that they are “God’s chosen”.

Most people really have no idea what to expect after they pass away, if anything – but as the sense of mortality creeps in, they become more concerned with insuring themselves safe passage. Chemical dependency invariably brings that sense of mortality very close to home – you almost crash your car while driving drunk, you nearly overdose on your drug of choice, someone attacks you, others are badly hurt by your actions, et cetera. Now you want insurance that you will be OK when you go to “the other side.”

Again, God does not out-rank you. If you truly believe that God is One, as all living masters teach, it is a logical error to think otherwise. Having a spiritual practice does not make you elect, special or chosen – it just means that you’ve decided to focus on that aspect of your overall journey as a perfect part of the Oneness.

The spirituality I have been taught blows the whistle on the idea that you can ever make a mistake. Everything you do is something you learn and grow from. The more you repeat a behavior that does not have an ultimately positive outcome, the more pressure builds inside you to eventually change yourself.

As a planet, we are moving towards a nexus or focal-point where we are seeing the same behaviors repeat often enough that we are choosing new ways to think. A true connection with Spirit involves a personal experience – not the memorization and recitation of words. This experience does not make you better, smarter or more evolved than others, it just means that you are remembering more of who you really are – and everyone around you is that One as well.

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW…