kokopelle | Entries tagged with god

The poem “My God” is based on a blog post I wrote in 2007. I shared my relation to deity, with the form having parallels to Abrahamic beliefs. Beyond the broad strokes, I seem to defy the details of their faith.

My God

People wonder who is my God
a private matter brought to the front
with the answers too often thought
to be aligned along two fronts
either the holy or the damned
these are the choices near at hand
I’ll step aside from these paths
present my own as consequence

God exists for all to see
in the rocks and the trees
the sentient that came before
and will exist afterward
this span defies all attempts
even as their ego may desire
by mankind to raise themselves
above the realm shared by all

creation came from the one
a multitude beyond count
now the basis of all things
forever bonded as a result
the before defining now
with sanctity as the norm
there is no difference to be found
if the bits are pulled apart

even while mortal souls
attempt to state the good and bad
God still stands without regard
to dogmatic efforts of the priests
they chase after sin of every type
each a fault found in themselves
treating all with abuses
by chasing villains of the mind

the taint of sin is too real
though most are confused
to the source of this malaise
God is still a mystery
ask the suffering that persists
beneath the symptoms is the cause
companion to the ego’s will
with agendas few confess

deriving pleasure from the pain
explanations spun to impress
salvation is a worthy goal
if it weren’t needed after all
these sad attempts to compress
deity into a small book
once a reference to be checked
now the manual to suffering

into this life we are pressed
to reconnect to everything
forgotten in the agony
relief standing close at hand
this is my God that I grasp
both myself and much more
completeness found outside of tomes
connections to the Holy Grail.

© 2019. Sean Green. All Rights Reserved. 20190511.

Current Mood: contemplative

I watched Jason Statham in the 2013 “Redemption”. One of the films characters, a nun, remarks “I use God as an excuse not to look at myself”. Heavy stuff. The poem “Just Me” was inspired by this thought.

Just Me
Poem for Day 062 – 20150303

Where can I hide
from a world I disbelieve?
Submerge myself fully in
life's best retreats!

Throw I some religion,
heavy with guilt transmitted.
Laden on the belongings,
shiny toys most beloved.

Now I only know burden,
oppression of the heart.
Distracted by bangles,
too many to be counted.

Pledge my soul to the heavens,
burn the sage on the hearth.
Build the stack of belongings,
to the sky it will climb.

The more I raise up the holy,
the shallower it becomes.
Treasure of the kings,
dust blown by the wind.

Who are the shadows
to whom I'm pledged?
Rust and tatters remain
of treasures put aside.

Support is a wonderful thing
But it is not me, not me at all!
Don’t need no god
Don’t need no things.

Strip away the divine,
Strip away precious things
What do I have left?
Just me.

© 2015. Sean Green. All Rights Reserved

Current Mood: contemplative

This is really my posting for 10/07/14... I am just running a little late!

This poem based on a dialogue I had with a friend. They said that they felt God was angry with them. They had difficulty connecting with the ocean of love thing. I said that God is tricky thing. The oceans of love have pirate boats and sharks. There are islands of goodness and continents of depravity. The thing that is forgotten is that the ocean makes up 70% of the earth. Pirate boats and sharks aside, the love of God is predominate over the human condition called life.

Sea of God
Poem for Day 14 – 20141007

God is angry.
My sin is separation.
So goes the narration
of my sad little ego.

There is another angle,
one of universal love.
God is the ocean undreamed of,
and across it moves our hull.

There are pirate boats
and there will be sharks.
avoid these wide of mark
and gently along you'll float.

There are island of human goodness,
and continents of supreme evil,
The latter are ruled by the devil
and the former are a blessing to witness.

Just remember that terra firma,
in all its apparent realness,
is only 30% of the landscape.
The other 70% is love firmer.

The love of God is predominate,
across all our lives floating along.
It is a wonder to contemplate,
that it includes you too life long.

© 2014. Sean Green. All Rights Reserved.

Current Mood: contemplative

From 2007... a revisit to relation with God.

Who is my God? Two legged, four legged, six legged, eight legged, and more. No legged, non-physical, and more. They are my GOD. Music is my GOD. Art is my GOD. Love is my GOD. Anger is my GOD. The human experience is the shining start of my GOD.

GOD is not mine to have. GOD is what I share with all those things that are around me and part of me. In the big picture, I have no GOD. Instead, I am god. You are god. My cat Prince is god. If I have to put a name on the breadth of this infinitely nameless thing, I call it Spirit.

Having something that resembles an infinite nameless deity puts me at odds with some people. I have accepted a middle ground with those people who encourage others to believe their version of who/what God is. In the past I had an on line conversation with such an ardent person. I posted the following list and noted that I have a personal relationship with God, and that my definitions of God and Sin may differ from others.

1) God Exists
2) God Created the World
3) God is the World
4) Sin is inherent in life
5) Sin leads to suffering and craving
6) Sin separates us from God
7) The goal of life is to reconnect God
8) Removal of Sin reconnects us with God

The word Sin enters the picture here. I'd like to flesh out what I mean by this reference. My definition for Sin largely from my Buddhist explorations. Sin can be loosely defined as that part of ourselves that distracts us from connecting with our version of the God. In Buddhism, cravings and longings are manifestations of this. What is God when Sin is considered? God is completeness. God is the intuitive 'ah-ha' of how things work. God is the World. God is a personal experience with the divine, because how you fit into the world is a personal matter.

We are connected with God. IMO we are expressions and embodiments of God. So how can we be separated? The separation is an illusion. Somehow we, as humans, begin to think that God is "out there". This separation is fostered by Sin - those things that separate us from God. Sin doesn’t actually separate us from God, but Sin (in all it's embodiments) does strengthen the illusion of separation.

These statements above are all IMO and definitely a WAG. The details of how this works, or even if it works, is different for everyone. A spiritual life is so damn personal. I respect and honor those people who don't believe that God exists. I came pretty close to that in my agnostic days. The cool thing, be it painful or glorifying, is that we have a choice in the matter, and we are all perfect in our own choices.

Current Mood: contemplative

Back in 2007 I wrote about my connection with God. Seven years latter I still have the same belief system. I use the uppercase version of God, but I don't do it in reconnection of a single figurehead deity. Read on about what I said about God and sin...

Who is my God? Two legged, four legged, six legged, eight legged, and more. No legged, non-physical, and more. They are my GOD. Music is my GOD. Art is my GOD. Love is my GOD. Anger is my GOD. The human experience is the shining start of my GOD.

GOD is not mine to have. GOD is what I share with all those things that are around me and part of me. In the big picture, I have no GOD. Instead, I am god. You are god. My cat Prince is god. If I have to put a name on the breadth of this infinitely nameless thing, I call it Spirit.

Having something that resembles an infinite nameless deity puts me at odds with some people. I have accepted a middle ground with those people who encourage others to believe their version of who/what God is. In the past I had an on line conversation with such an ardent person. I posted the following list and noted that I have a personal relationship with God, and that my definitions of God and Sin may differ from others.

1) God Exists
2) God Created the World
3) God is the World
4) Sin is inherent in life
5) Sin leads to suffering and craving
6) Sin separates us from God
7) The goal of life is to reconnect God
8) Removal of Sin reconnects us with God

The word Sin enters the picture here. I'd like to flesh out what I mean by this reference. My definition for Sin largely from my Buddhist explorations. Sin can be loosely defined as that part of ourselves that distracts us from connecting with our version of the God. In Buddhism, cravings and longings are manifestations of this. What is God when Sin is considered? God is completeness. God is the intuitive 'ah-ha' of how things work. God is the World. God is a personal experience with the divine, because how you fit into the world is a personal matter.

We are connected with God. IMO we are expressions and embodiments of God. So how can we be separated? The separation is an illusion. Somehow we, as humans, begin to think that God is "out there". This separation is fostered by Sin - those things that separate us from God. Sin doesn’t actually separate us from God, but Sin (in all it's embodiments) does strengthen the illusion of separation.

These statements above are all IMO and definitely a WAG. The details of how this works, or even if it works, is different for everyone. A spiritual life is so damn personal. I respect and honor those people who don't believe that God exists. I came pretty close to that in my agnostic days. The cool thing, be it painful or glorifying, is that we have a choice in the matter, and we are all perfect in our own choices.

Current Mood: contemplative

I'm a spiritual type person. God is very real to me. This article pulls together my thoughts on the topic.

( Who is my God? )

Current Mood: contemplative

The following quote by Robert Frost was shared by

chimerae in a comment about teaching and sacred mysteries:

"We dance around the circle and suppose, while the secret sits in the center and knows."

I believe that the true nature of the divine stands outside of any number of words and practices that humans attempt to use. These are the dance that Frost refers to. In this dance we are the blind men who 'see' the elephant in a variety of complimentary but contrary ways. The visible faces of God only provides analogies to the true magical essence of the divine.

What can be said about the divine? We all have our own opinions, our own glimpses. What have I personally learned about the nature of the divine? Who is my God? To me God is two legged, four legged, six legged, eight legged, and more. God is no legged, non-physical, and more. They are my God. Music is my God. Art is my God. Love is my God. Anger is my God. The human experience is the shining start of my God.

I find the "my" word to be presumptuous. Teachings are the road signs to God. No teaching can own God. God is not mine or anybody else to have only for themselves. God is what I share with all those things that are around me and that are part of me. In the big picture, I have no GOD. Instead, I am god. You are god. My cats are god. If I have to put a name on the breadth of this infinitely nameless thing, I call it Spirit.

Thoughts on the divine and teachings provoked me to write the following free verse based on an Eastern story:

Who Is God?

I asked my teacher 'Who is God?'
He stood and said, 'There'
I blinked and heard the word
I blinked and saw my teacher
I blinked and saw the outstretched finger
I blinked and saw the puddle to which the finger pointed
I blinked and saw the reflection of the Moon
I blinked and saw the Moon
I blinked and…

Current Mood: awake

I think about God a lot. A recent conversation with a LJ friend had me saying the following:

I've been thinking about societies that have priests as their leaders. This doesn’t seem like a good model. The religious way society can have a "my way or the highway" philosophy, with sometimes the highway being death. The result is a society that stagnates under the influence of it's own dogmatism. Uneducated contemplation of the South American brings me to a place where I consider what happens to a society that has catastrophes, and the "god-connected" leaders don't have an answer. If a god-connected person doesn’t have an answer, who does? Society then collapses in anarchy.

I was contemplating this today, realizing that every society has a “God” of some sort. The blanket definition of a society’s God would be that force that defines and drives the society. Invariably, there are priests serving the society’s God. The priests are responsible for furthering the cause of the God, rewarding those who serve the God well, and punishing those who do not. The power of a society’s God is that it has most, if not all, of the answers. Any concepts not originating, or supported, by the society’s God are considered heresy. Those who promote the heretical ideas are subject to discipline, up to, and including, death.

Sounds fantastic eh? Consider the United States. The God of the United States varies, as the country is a representative republic. The vogue God of the past several years is that of Patriotism, Christian Religion, and Business. Those who opposed the priests of these Gods were condemned and considered to be untrustworthy. As I noted in my quotation from the previous blog entry, politics are the resting place for a society’s true, but temporary, priests. These priests will come and go with the shifting tide of political fate. The changes will bring in new Gods’ whims will be imposed on the people.

We are all on a spiritual path, even if that path is of “no religion”. The absence of an over-arching spiritual God places mankind in the God driver seat. In some ways, the atheist or Satanic path places more responsibility on man to be accountable for their actions. Perhaps this is the source of the society's God. Without an absolute agreement on who the Divine Godhead is, the God of mankind's society is present in the divine's place. Even a society that claims to be a theocracy is only a pale shadow of it's divine vision. The influence of society's God rules in place of projected Godhead.

Whatever the path, what are the duties that individual has to the society’s God? Does it matter if the society has a representative framework instead of a despotic? The two seem to blend at times when the society’s God is most revered by the appointed priests. The presence of the society’s God may be strong and weak at times, but it is always present.

Food for thought… ($.02) clink. Your thoughts on this topic???

Current Mood: creative

Several times I've bumped into a gentleman named Ben on MySpace. Ben is a devoted on-line evangelist. One of his arguments was:

Strangely, people don’t want to know about it because they are not even willing to check out its claims by actually trying to become one. Throwing out that option (considering its (Christianity) the biggest single religion in the world) seems like a bad idea to me. Unless people here have actually tried? But I supposed that would depend on someone’s definition of "tried."

I answered back with the following words. I feel drawn to post them in my blog because I feel the pain of societal separation from my Christian brothers. Part of my life-journey is to heal that in both myself and the larger world.

Allow me to share my own experience of 'tried'. I was baptized Episcopal. My father was Southern Baptist (Auburn, AL). My father remarried and converted to the Catholic faith. I was raised Catholic from age 4 and up. I fully participated in Church up through my college years. I also attended Baptist services when I visited my grandparents, and I must share that my grandparents were one of the highest examples of people who truly lived their faith. My parents are still devout Catholics, contributing both time and money to the honest pursuit of their spiritual paths. My immersion in the Christian faith/religion was complete, with participation in both the Catholic and Baptist churches.

The Christian faith, in all it's flavors, did not satisfy my desire to connect with God. While I was never atheist, I did go through an agnostic stage. I discovered Ram Dass' book "Be Here Now". It moved my search for God into the Eastern religions (Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism). I still carry some wonderful truths from these explorations. For a time I considered fully devoting myself to the Buddhist path. I did not. Instead I have found myself embracing a very global version of the shamanic path. I have a Western Cherokee teacher from whom I am receiving teachings that are culturally specific.

Now, before anybody thinks I've thrown out my Christian options, let me share that I remained very curious about what the draw to Christianity was. I was not raised Evangelical, so I considered that maybe that faith knew something the others did not. I also wanted to better understand where people like my brother Ben were coming from. To this end I listened to Christian radio for almost four months. I have a 45 minute commute each way to work, so I have lots of opportunity to listen. The stations I primarily listened to were Calvary Christian and Baptist Broadcasting. I listened and listened and listened and listened, searching for that thing in the Evangelical Christian faith that I could connect with. I heard all the explanations from very sincere preachers and ministers. I saw where their faith was inclusive and where it was exclusive. The exclusive elements drove me to end my radio listening experience.

I do believe in God. I have previously shared my beliefs with you Ben. I'll not list them here again. It is my belief that most pagans embrace God in their own ways. Many devout and spiritually striving pagans came from Christian backgrounds. If their experience was anything like mine, the Christian upbringing did convince them that there is a God. Our 'failing' is that we did not agree with the dogma and religion wrapped around the 'Christian' God. We (I) have met God on different terms. Our God is no less important than yours Ben. You are indeed a devout and driven man of God. There are pagans here that are also devout and driven in their own embrace of God.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Music: Front 242 - FRONT 242 - Take One(live)

There is a trailer is located in an used industrial equipment sales yard on the way to my girlfriend’s house. A vinyl sign on the trailer says "Jesus Christ is Lord". I guess I was being reflective at the moment and I had a "ah-ha" moment. I started thinking why we, as a people who are governed by a democracy, desire to have a Lord (aka King) over us. A friend of mine had told me, " Western thought is based on the idea that people need to become something greater than what they are." The thought I had was that people instinctively know that something is "wrong" in the world. The Christian world calls it original sin. The outcome of sin is people being mean to each other. We can’t have an ultimate human leader to lead us, because all human leaders have feet of clay. So, a perfect being is the answer, and only a perfect being has the right to rule over us.

I told this to my girlfriend, and she asked why a perfect being who was our Lord (ruler) allowed such pain and suffering amongst his charges. Though this question can lead into a dozen-dozen discussions, one new one came to my mind. I recently heard on the radio somebody ask, “why does God ask for X if it leads to sufferings Y and Z?” The answer was "X is part of God’s revealed word". The idea seems to be that the God is only showing some of his cards. This would be the X part of the equation. The rest of the explanation is hidden from us, and hence we have the mysteries of why is there pain and suffering. Why does the Christian God, or any God/Goddess of organized religions, keep secrets from their followers?

For more on the nebulous nature of God, check out this blog entry of my very insightful friend Ocean.

Current Music: Robots in Disguise - Argument

From a MySpace Group discussion in which a Christian motivational speaker made an appearance:

MarsWrote:
The bible claims that snakes originally did not go about on their bellies. (Genesis 3:14) (and so on)

( Read more... )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Depeche Mode - Behind the Wheel

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Journey to Ixtlan

(are we there yet?)

Entries tagged with god

Poem - My God

Poem - Just Me

Poem - Sea of God

Who Is My God?

Who is my God?

My Walk with the Divine (aka God!)

Who is My God?

The God of Society

Tried Religions

Kings, Lords and the Unrevealed

God, Sin and a Myspace Group Discussion