Uppie

I am writing this post with a budding sadness. An old friend sent me an email yesterday that he is in the hospital and diagnosed with bone cancer. He said the morphine helped with the pain and that he was comfortable with what is to come next.

This is a deeply spiritual and active man who has studied the esoteric teachings, from many disciplines, throughout his aging years. He knows there is a beyond. He knows that this life is a short experience compared to eternity. He knows that he loves and that he is loved and perhaps it is time to say goodbye to life, to family and friends and to embrace the true reality of the real life.

The other "perhaps" in this senario is that maybe this is not his time and that he will heal. His family and friends will rejoice that we have him for a longer time in this shared density.

When I read his missive I was surprised and saddened. We had not communicated in recent years even though we had had simpatico visions for a better world and worked to that end on a number of global projects.

I was immediately reminded of a great truth. People come into your lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. 

What I have come to know since embracing that truth is that this is not the only lifetime that I will enjoy with my friend or he me. We are from the same spiritual cluster of souls. We have shared other lives and there may be more to come. I don’t know. He does not know, but we both know that we have each tried to reach our planned level of perfection in the glorification of our God and, if we did not do what we  planned, we may choose to come back to try again.

I also know that this thinking is contrary to accepted dogmas in many beliefs today. My belief does not debase or disembowel my early foundation in Christian thinking. To me it enhances it.

Spirituality is an experience of depth in life. Dogma is different.

Being spiritual is acknowledging a conscious, loving presence as part of our being and knowing it is in harmonic resonance with all things.

 

Dogma, on the other hand is the process, the belief system , by which we choose to express spirituality or as Neale Donald Walsh says in his book “Home With God”, “Religion was created by human cultures to assist those who are born into those cultures in knowing and understanding that there is an ever-present source of help in times of need, strength in times of challenge, clarity in times of confusion and compassion in times of pain”.

In my view, religions have forgotten their collective spirituality and what they think they do remember of it, they confuse with dogma.

The word Dogma comes from the Greek and its meaning is  "opinion".  Its root word "Dokein" means "to seem good".  So when people say religious dogma, they are really saying, "religious opinion that seems good".  To me, "seeming good" and the knowing awareness derived through a direct revelatory experience of God, is not the same.

In Eckhart Tolle’s book, “Stillness Speaks” he writes:

“Dogmas – religions, political, scientific –arise out of the erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or the truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of “I know.”

He continues: “ ... It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness; however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others."

Centuries of non-spiritual ritual and adherence to man-made rules have seen religions give credence to doctrines i.e. dogma, not necessarily to Truths.  Even the early Christians were cautioned about dogma in the Gospel of Mark - Chapter 7 - Verse 7.  "...in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men".

To some religious authorities, an experiential truth, a mystical truth, a truth that comes from the feeling, the knowing, of the soul is too often discouraged, discounted and dismissed.

Not so with my friend and I salute his choices, his knowing, his passage and his spirituality. Compared to an eternity we all will join him in a few minutes.