Two Sundays in a row I went to a lovely church called Unity in the Olympics up in Port Angeles to give a talk on “The Heart of the Matter” – a two-part series on the nature of the ego. The congregation was delightful and the first talk went well
The second Sunday I was sitting there, tapping my toes, singing along to a catchy little tune, repeating the line “I am a messenger of God” several times over, feeling a swelling sense of awe and amazement that I was there, in a church, about to deliver the Sunday message.
“I am a messenger of God this morning,” I suddenly realized. Holy shit!
It was something I never in a zillion years thought I’d be doing. Over 30 years earlier I’d gotten out of the stiflingly formal religion of my youth as fast as my legs could carry me, filled with the firm determination never to darken the door of a church ever again.
And now … ?
I enjoyed giving the talk and the camaraderie and conversation afterwards. It wasn’t until I was in the car driving home that the significance of the song and my proud and stunningly hypocritical thought in response to it hit me.
My talk, “The Spiritual Ego and Enlightenment,” was all about recognizing how the individual human ego is strengthened rather than weakened by the pursuit of spirituality. Why? Because we don’t know who we really are. We think we’re human beings. We identify with our name and face and sexual orientation, our weight and IQ and professional label, our address, FB account and social security number—and yes, our religious/spiritual beliefs and denomination/label.
We pay lip service to unity all the while unconsciously carving ourselves into pieces by speaking words, saying prayers and singing songs that clearly indicate we believe God is separate and outside of us, that heaven is better than Earth and that spirituality is something we can pursue—a meaningful characteristic we can adopt that will make us better people.
And yet God isn’t outside us and heaven isn’t a place and we aren’t really “people.” It’s all an illusion. The world and our bodies aren’t even physical. They’re interpenetrating fields of intangible energy/information that appear as if they were physical.
In truth we are the vast I AM itself—Source Intelligence animating form on a thrill ride across Eternity. To say “I am a spiritual person” is ludicrous. We already are spirit. How can we become what we already are?
This, I explained in my talk, is why walking the spiritual path takes us, like, for freaking ever. Being “human” is a story. “Spirituality” is a story. Being a “spiritual human” is a story within a story — a mental trick we don’t know we’re playing on ourselves — a fable that keeps us spinning our wheels for years … for lifetimes … pursuing the unattainable goal of becoming what we already are through improving the illusion of what we are not.
I stressed the subtlety of our stories – how easy it is to get caught up in human/ego beliefs about how things are … how easily we get lost in delusion … how important it is to be critically aware of words of separation that create more story … like: I am a messenger of God.
Really?
How many stories is that? How many pieces have I just carved out of unity? How special and individual have I made myself? Yikes!!! I laughed so hard when I saw what I’d done – how seriously I’d taken the thought – I almost had to pull over.
Bottom line: “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
If you see a messenger of God … laugh.