What is your relationship with your Self? To God?

Hmm..short answer, I'm a spiritual being having a physical experience. I used to think that paths were set out to teach lessons, but I'm not so sure that is the truth..We have spiritual connections we bring with us and we often seek them out..as teacher, lover, friend. I have a couple of teachers here in fact.
Why I chose this place and time I don't know..there are frustrations finding love from thousands of lives before that are not for me this time..but we will love again.
I practice christianity as a way to connect with that greater universal good and truth..

 

It's easily drowned out by words which can only give pale shadows of the answer to the actual experience. The nearest to come to it are the great souls like this guy, and they can still only hint at a little of the experience:

 

William Blake was an extraordinary guy - I love the imagery in this poem. He’s a giant who seems to bridge a magic experience of the divine and the self across into the ordinary and everyday.

 

Welcome to the forum by the way @plurjosh particularly at such a special time of the year. Christmas bridges the ordinary with the divine too doesn’t it. A very happy Christmas to you.

 

Not sure of Jesus having gone there but there is a vast amount of material that has been discarded by the church from the Roman era onwards as well a multitude of encounters and experiences that were lost to time. If one is open to reincarnation there are sources of information as to what was and still is of the time that would bring into perspective of what life was like as well some of the experiences.

 

I think 'God' is a broad term, sometimes used anthropologically, to categorize the supernatural attributes of our world as well as the phenomena it occasionally produces. I have no idea what God is actually like -- probably "light", and we are lenses that give it structure and definition.

I think we can interface with this 'larger consciousness system' (that's just how I like to think of it) and I think we do it by reaching out with our minds with as much sincerity and 'silence' as we can manage.

 

I am a giant to ants, and a flea to whales. Among humans I'm somewhere on the sunny end of the scale both physically and financially. Before God we are all equally nothing, yet loved and desired by him.

The universe is a vast and lonely place, but God knows and loves every little thing he wills to exist. I find it comforting that I don't have to justify my existence.

 

I used to be a Baptist for 18 years of my life. Then I became an atheist. Then an anti-theist. Now I see there is value in religion and I would currently consider myself agnostic. Mankind chooses to believe in things like justice and mercy, which don't exist in nature, so why can't the same be said for God? God is a tool used to unravel the universe and also a vision of the human ideal. Choosing to believe in God is declaring that there is an ideal for humanity that can be achieved.

I find it interesting that casual albeit usually facetious Satan worship is a growing trend in a world whose inhabitants appear to be more and more unhappy and "full of sin" with each passing day. Maybe God and Satan aren't real, but self-fulfilling-prophecies certainly are.

 

@RobRobRob I love your perspective, of God as something which may exist only in human minds and that that shouldn't diminish value. And I relate with your spiritual journey.

 

Rather than becoming an atheist I moved towards the new age in someways as the real issue isn't God per say but rather the garbage modern church built on fear, guilt, and self righteousness while failing vastly to deliver on basic promises. The other religious systems are pretty bad themselves where there are valuable truths with layers on BS piled on top, as for finding real truth it is there should people have it themselves to find it but it is rarely easy. Anyway back in my day I used to dredge up and expose popular pastors as frauds with many being masons and members of other secretive groups but many are faithless as it comes where even the shoes they're standing in has more faith in God than they do.

 

I've drifted in and out of various new age things myself but it's still all the same. Unless you're doing your own homebrew religion, you're still going to run into in-politics, hypocrisy, cliques, greed, etc. just less funded, less organized, and less visible. It's just easier for the less popular religions to hide in the overwhelming shadows of Abrahamic religions. The driving force behind my fall from grace was always other people and not a religion/spirituality itself.

 

Can just boil it all down to human $pirituality and ideology where it is all designed to keep people down and locked into systems of control after all this world is built on lies. Some of it is rooted in the base psychology particularly tribalism and it goes on and on even the "logically" minded are intrinsically flawed as before something always gets held up like idols of old in high places where something ultimately is worshiped be it fad ideologies or systems ect.

 

If you're gonna go that far, go hard nihilism.

Everything is a lie.

Love isn't real so your family only holds you in such high regard because you're a future provider/caretaker for the elders in your family and they don't want to be carted off to a home.
Your wife doesn't love you because she was groomed by her culture and you to be trapped in a legally binding contract, which if broken leans in her favor - therefore your wife only wants you for your money.
Your children don't love you because they are born with the genetic instinct to unconditionally seek their parents' approval no matter how they are treated. If your children knew better, they would pick a better caretaker.
Law and order doesn't matter because morality is just rules that were made up by someone who thought they knew better.

Just put it all in the garbage already.

 

I’ve found it best for myself to think of the major religions like I think of a transport system. If I get on a train, I don’t really worry too much if the driver is an arse, or if their motives in driving it are selfish, as long as they can move it safely to where I need to go.

Or I think of them like a city with many different places and facilities available. I was brought up in a large city and there were lots of places I liked, or were useful to me, and lots of places I didn’t like, or were unhelpful to me. I spent my time in the former and avoided the latter and we got on just fine.

I’m only speaking for myself, but I find that spiritual seeking on my own, without using the institutions available, can be like trying to row solo across the Atlantic. It can be done by some, but it’s impossible for me. The trick for me is to follow the star that life has put there just for me, but to use whatever helpful means is available to reach out for it. If what I am after is the view from the top, why slog up a mountain on foot, and maybe have to give up with fatigue, or get lost on the way, if there is a cable car that will get me there - within very broad limits, I don’t care who built it, or for what purpose of their own.