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Apostle Paul artilce6
Change Your Focus--Change Your Habit article11
The Meaning of Trust article16 article21 Unconditional Love and the Apostle Paul Earth is a neutral playing ground for discovering the truth that we are Source. This planet can be called the planet of illusions because it is full of them. No matter which direction we turn, we are bombarded with someone telling us how to live our lives. Individuals, governments, corporations, religions, and even our own families advertise in their own unique way their idea of how to live life. Most of us do what we are told because we want to fit in and be accepted. Unfortunately, it is rare that we are told that we are Source. Usually we are told the exact opposite—that Source exists outside ourselves, and we are given rules and regulations for how we must live to be in good favor with this Source. Historically, no one has had more impact on the planet regarding teaching us who we are than Jesus has. He taught very clearly that, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within” and his life was the example of this. He was aware that he was Source in human form and it was his earnest desire to wake everyone else up to this same fact—that we are all Source in human form. For the most part, his message fell on deaf ears because the vast majority of the people could not fathom the idea that we could possibly have anything to do with Source, let alone be Source. The very idea was downright fearful because humans have a tendency to fear Source. The leaders especially feared Jesus because they thought his message threatened their authority. As we all know, this ignorance and fear ultimately resulted in Jesus’ crucifixion. It can be argued that after his death no one has had as much influence on the world regarding the interpretation of who Jesus was than the Apostle Paul has. Today if you go into nearly any Christian church anywhere in the world you will hear either Romans or Corinthians quoted more than any other book. And yet, Paul was the most disillusioned of all the apostles. As a Jew, he was raised up in a household that taught the strict Jewish law (the Torah). He strove to live up to his father’s expectations at the expense of becoming alienated from the divine within himself (the love that was within his heart). To error meant punishment. He soon became an insecure perfectionist, filled with great frustration. He felt threatened by the early followers of Jesus and as a Temple Guard for the Romans, participated in persecuting and even murdering many. It was a legal outlet for his pent up anger. Suddenly on the road to Damascus he had an encounter with Jesus yet this opened the door to much guilt for his prior actions. When he was a child he had tried with all his heart to be blameless before the law in an effort to please his father but it never worked. He always felt judged and unworthy. Likewise, after encountering Jesus, he attempted to follow the example of love that he felt from his early followers but again, never felt he was good enough. In fact, their love was a tremendous threat to Paul. Masturbation (among other things) became a means of comfort to soothe his frustrations and fear. There was nothing wrong with this but because of his strict upbringing, he thought there was. Thus, this caused further guilt. His tendency was to beat himself up mentally for all these so-called “sins”. Throughout his writings he expresses hatred towards his body, stating such things as “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death.” What Paul did not realize was that he was Source; that divine unconditional love dwelled within him. He was so caught up into his struggles with his flesh that he became addicted to suffering and to ease the pain, sought desperately for relief—anything or anyone that could help him feel better about himself. Jesus became the perfect out. He chose to look to him for salvation rather than taking personal responsibility to let go of all the suffering he had created for himself. In essence, this means that because he was caught in the illusion that he was separate from Source and therefore in need of being saved by this Source, once he was convinced that Jesus was his savior, he couldn’t wait for Jesus to return to free him from his inner struggle. However, Jesus was simply an example of what he hoped all humans would follow—taking responsibility to be the love that we are. For the rest of his life he believed that the day that Jesus would come back to get him was imminent but because this was part of the illusion that he had created in his mind, he died without this desire being fulfilled. He carried his illusion with him into his grave. Paul never understood who he really was. His enormous effort to get his belief out to whomever he could was actually an attempt to involve everyone else in his own healing and it didn’t work. His frustrations with himself didn’t go away regardless of his belief in Jesus. For this reason he was always moving from one location to another. In essence, he was running from himself, from the love that he had inside himself. It was far easier to talk about the great love of Jesus than to be the great love that he was. Many people who had a desire to be free of their own self-created hell welcomed Paul’s message of a savior from sin. The result was the formation of pockets of followers that began growing steadily. By the time the early church decided on what books would go into the Bible, Paul’s letters fit nicely into the illusion of need for a savior that had already become deeply engrained into the psyche of humans. We are now living in a time in which humans are beginning to wake up from the illusion that we are separate from Source. Thus, the time has come for humans to claim their rightful position as the creator of their reality. While this has always been true, most humans don’t want to take responsibility for creating their world because it seldom looks like what they thought they wanted. That’s because our minds tend to think we know what we want but this is not true. We only think we know what we want and when life doesn’t turn out the way we thought, we look for someone or something outside ourselves to blame. We also tend to look for someone else to save us from our self-created predicaments. Such need to find relief outside of us has become an epidemic, one that has the vast majority of humanity totally alienated from who they are. We, like those in Jesus’ day, still cannot consciously fathom that we are Source—capable of loving unconditionally. This is the truth however, and it is the solution to war, poverty, hunger, and even disease. Discovering that you are Source requires a willingness to take responsibility for the world you live in, beginning with taking responsibility for your own inner world. No one created it for you. You created it all by yourself. No one knows this better than me. OK, so you had a bit of help along the way. Sometimes people abused you, persecuted you, and even rejected you. How did that make you feel? I know the feeling well. However, after 56 years I’m finally realizing that I didn’t have to take any of it personal. As a kid I was pretty vulnerable and getting angry with others for ridiculing me was an automatic response. And yet, now I realize I no longer have to choose such a response unless I want to. It’s completely up to me and this is how I now know that I am completely in charge of my reality. When life is a bear it’s because that’s how I’m choosing to see it. It is the same thing when life is sweet. Other people’s attitudes are not responsible for the way I feel—only my attitude is! Until recently, like the Apostle Paul, I lived my life constantly wanting others to love me while I hated myself. I finally realized I alone am responsible to love myself, not someone else. While hating myself, I experienced constant fear and doubt, feeling I was unworthy, not good enough, and always believed I was a victim of life's circumstances. Such feelings ran so deep that whenever I caught glimpses of the unconditional love I have inside me, I would do something to sabotage myself so that I could deny this love and claim to be a victim instead. This kept me in a safe, boring comfort zone, living out of my head rather than from my heart. The truth is that I was dreadfully afraid of my divine nature. I preferred to hurt and claim victimhood rather than to love and feel good because I was afraid of good feelings. In fact, I didn’t believe I was even worthy of such feelings. My belief that I, like the Apostle, was separate from Source and thus needed a savior, kept me stuck in a belief system that wouldn’t allow me the freedom to love. When you believe you’re unworthy of love, you don’t allow yourself to experience it. This causes such emotions as frustration and anger. These emotions are natural when we are denied the ability to experience the very thing that we are. The irony is that we are the ones that deny ourselves of love by buying into belief systems that we’re not worthy of it, thereby withholding it from ourselves. You cannot allow yourself to experience it when you believe you are unworthy of it. And then we spend our lives harboring bitterness because we think someone else is supposed to love us, all the while convinced that we’re incapable of being such love ourselves. This was the experience of Apostle Paul. He hurt so bad from denying himself love that he chose to become a courageous soldier for Jesus, willing to risk his life to get his message out to the world, all in a vain attempt to find a love he had within himself all along. I am now choosing to be ok with all that I am, for love is about being
compassionate. This means allowing myself the space to grow in the awareness
of love at my own pace, without demanding of myself to be any certain
way, and doing the same for others. Living this way is not easy because
it requires that I let go of my addiction to playing the game of believing
I’m a victim, constantly trying to get someone else to love me.
But I now know the truth. I cannot expect anyone else to love me. I need
to love me. This is my commitment to myself. Such commitment has allowed
me to experience a greater love than I’ve ever known.
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