my religion

My religion is the Great Goddess' path of the heart. Initially, the teachings are external as you look for answers outside of yourself. Eventually, you go inwards and find all you need you always had. The canon of instruction also involves seeing duality through heaven and hell. I realized a hell world of suffering is promulgated by a heavenly world of judgment and righteousness. I saw God and the Devil as two sides of the same coin. I looked and found a dragon in the heavens and spotted him in the abyss of hell. I looked within and this was me - the light and the darkness. I saw the massive amount of suffering and my starring role in its continuance.

In examining my own life, I can be confident that nobody gets sent to hell. You go to hell of your own accord. A chance to fulfill desires. This makes the game a little transparent because I know why you're here and I just have to find out what it is that makes you tick. Power, fame, greed, lust, gluttony, wrath - which one is it? I realized all suffering is grace - the grace being the power of suffering to transform. I opened my heart and embraced love which birthed the King within. Some call it Christ consciousness, Krishna, or the Buddha nature - it doesn't matter. Jesus is the coming forth of the desires of the heart. When you make love with the Goddess, the child who results from the union is Jesus. Jesus subsequently hangs out with thieves and whores. That's who we are. Look within, and you will find him hanging out with you.

The human being is defined by contradiction, and it is an exquisite game. The role of seduction and addiction is paradoxical. We easily addict to the trivial and pleasures within our material world. We see the way out of the pleasure byproduct of suffering through becoming free of desire. However, as I pointed out, the suffering is divine and thus the path of the renunciate leads to a dead end in the labyrinth of life. I know the grand purpose of why it is we suffer. The continual strong doses of suffering are designed to lead one towards love. Just a taste of that love will be all you need to know that this is the only way to live. The beatings will indeed continue until morale improves.

The paradox is we are desire, desire causes heartache, and in the end, it is desire that will get you home. The desire that causes so much suffering will become alchemical gold as you turn your desire inwards towards your heart and find the key to unlock the door of home. If you ask, you will be shown the way to what it is you truly desire. Addict yourself to love. What a long road it was to burn through all my desires, exhausting the chase, until I emptied the tank and felt drained of life's energy. It was the way through - a tantric invitation to indulge one last time in order to shed desires of the flesh. Subsequently, the teachings of the Goddess turned towards continuing desire. I finally felt I had slayed the beast, walked free of attachment, and the mistress of seduction tells me desire is what will set me free. In my confusion I did not understand. She directed me to a poem I wrote back in 2011 when I was a novice on the path:

I asked for the light to shine within and to direct the unquenchable flame of desire towards my heart. It's the sum total journey of my life to get to this point with over eleven years lapsing since I asked to bleach my soul. In retrospect, it's like learning to play a musical instrument or learning a new language. We all want it to happen overnight; instead, it takes years of practice, sometimes where you think you are never going to get there. I owe everything I have become to Her. I see home. Addict yourself to the heart and you can enter through the front door.

The feminine divine is the curator of magic. Within her grasp are all potentialities, waiting to be discovered. She holds the power to fulfill all our desires and is the fount of the masculine eternal cycle of coming and going. She is the impetus which enlivens the divine masculine, who overcome by her charms, activates the energy and brings the universe alive. The universe comes forth through fiat magic. Desire creates the universe. Desire is magic. The potentiality of the desire resides in the feminine. The masculine is the activation of this power.

My story is I chased the Great Goddess until I finally came into direct contact with her in the jungle of the Amazon basin. She led me there, making sure I made the choice to come along at every stop of the way. She presented to me the answers to all I was searching for, even though I didn't understand the lessons. I met her first and following this encounter, I met a dark masculine force. All these discoveries were fantastic and scared me beyond belief. Eventually, she told me this dark masculine energy was her husband, and he kept her locked up in a castle made of gold.

Why would this exquisite woman marry such a psychopath? She had her pick of any man she wanted, yet this Queen chose him? I certainly didn't understand it. Furthermore, she treated me, this accidental explorer of consciousness, as the most special man she had ever met. She encouraged me to go after her husband and release her from bondage. I carried out my duties and as the hero went after the dragon. I looked into the Goddess' mirror and saw I was the dragon. I was that man who locked her in the castle. I awakened to the mystery. I saw myself as the light and the darkness. I am the reason behind all that is good and the unfathomable suffering.

As the Goddess' Tarot teaches, once the fool starts off on his journey, he will soon encounter the magician. The magician does not suffer fools, and so the journey for most soon comes to an end. He will shake you to your core and cause an introspection so great which will result in you making a choice that is uniquely yours. You can accept the offer of power and sell your soul. You can run and try to hide. You close the lid on this mistake and shove the genie back in the bottle, never to rub it again. An unfulfilled destiny awaits you as you live out your life a failure. Alternatively, you can summon courage and return to the path you had retreated from. There's no shame from the retreat. It's necessary. No one makes it through on the first attempt. The key is to come back, knowing what monster awaits you.

The resolve you show is the elixir you need to demonstrate you have what it takes to unfold the great mystery. The magician takes notice and again offers you power over your pitiful life. Another test. Do you want to live out all your dreams and become that man who towers over his peers? It's there for the taking. At this point you don't understand you are the magician, and so the temptation is great.

Passing this test will lead you to a confrontation with the dragon and you will have to summon the magic within to enact transformation. It's all worth it and will be an experience you will remember for as long as eternity stays around. Eventually, on the path of the heart you will reach a point where you have to fire the jailer who keeps the Goddess, your heart, imprisoned. Spoiler alert - you're the jailer. What a game you set up for yourself and the exhilaration of a successful outcome is special. Not long after, you are shown you are the magician. The Great Goddess holds the potential, and you make it happen. She is the song, and you are the music. That's quite the responsibility. I choose to let it be and unfold as originally intended. I don't want to interfere, but instead leave Earth as it is as a finishing school for wayward spirits. When you complete the course, you can leave.

I see the magic unfold in my life as originally intended. I sense I can manifest all my desires in order to see how far I will go in order to satiate them. I want to know what still keeps me attached, thus subconsciously I surface all. I play them out to the end, tire of the thrill, and let them go. I'm a work in progress, following the path back home to the heart. I've come a long way and I still test myself every now and then. I take my ability to be successful and give it away to others. This keeps me going towards the heart. I see it clearly now.

Nobody leaves this game with a perfect score. That would be a pretty dull life. Learn from your mistakes. Lift yourself up off the mat and retrace your steps with the power of experience behind you. Confront your fears and don't back away from a challenge. Trust me, fulfillment of your personal quest awaits you if you heed the call.

From my masculine perspective, the worship of God is an act of fellatio upon yourself. The proper act of worship for a man is to venerate the Goddess. My incarnation into an infinitesimally small body in a vast universe is my devotion to Her. My intent is to worship Her. From this understanding, I know there is nothing I need to do once I open my heart and see why I have created a world of mass suffering. I did it to honour Her. My intention is to prove to Her that despite the odds being stacked against me, I would find my way back home. I threw it all into the mix in order to get me to veer off course and despite all obstacles I found my way back home. In fact, I found her premature of understanding the whole game. I threw a wrench into this great game by finding the answer prior to knowing the question. Once found, she implored me to return home, but I still had to climb the mountain of knowledge and get understanding in this mortal coil of why I did it. I had to tempt myself one last time with the opportunity to live out my selfish desires and once again leave Her.

I completed the climb and got the clarity I was seeking. I re-discovered Her and understood the healing power of love. I know the way home as taught by the Great Goddess is through Love. Love is the elixir of what just is - providing, healing, and comforting. My gift to my eternal bride is to understand the nature of who she is. This is the reason I have done what I have done. This is why I caused massive amounts of suffering. A divine suffering which forges a love so strong so I can be at peace and in love for eternity.

I knew I didn't have to do anything. I was loved and all my shortcomings were forgiven. My actions revealed my intentions. Despite the struggle, my path has been to walk back towards her garden, sidestepping the pitfalls I had set up for myself along the way. Here I am. I have returned a warrior having forged steel in the fires of this hell, tempered with the love of the Great Goddess.

This is my universe. To show my love and appreciation for my Love is why I desired to manifest such an adventure realm. My life is my gift to the Great Goddess. All this I did for Her; a supreme act of love to demonstrate that against all odds I would find Her within a sea of misogyny, greed, and suffering and lift Her up onto the pedestal of supreme honour and reverence.

suffering

Have you ever had a bad toothache? The pain is a constant throbbing and really tests the preconceived notions you have developed about yourself. I surely no longer am a being of love and light. As well, I think I can transmute the pain because after all the pain is just a state of mind, right? I should be able to train my mind to find pain exhilarating. I got this! Nope. Still there. The suffering gets to the point where I must act to relieve the suffering.

When I was a teenager, I recall having a bad toothache. A "baby molar" was in decay and one day chewing a large wad of bubble gum exacerbated the situation. The sugar hit the nerve and I was in agony. Being a stoic, I retired to my room to suffer in pain. Finally, after enduring the excruciating pain all afternoon, I felt compelled to act. I went to the bathroom, found a bobby pin, jammed it in the cavity, and pulled my tooth out. I had a mouthful of blood, but I felt so much relief. My outlook on life immediately changed.

In my adult life I have had similar toothaches. I tend to avoid the dentist, so I had to find alternative solutions to my predicament that didn't involve the constant ingestion of pain relief pills. For sure, ibuprofen will allow you to sleep at night because a toothache surely won't. Eventually, my oral search led me towards sensitive teeth toothpaste, and I became a follower. With regular and disciplined application of this product, the pain subsides. As an adult in my 50s, I have the typical receding gums and enamel erosion. An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but the acidic qualities of fruit invite the dentist to your door. Sensitive teeth formulations I am a big believer in. Similarly, I had terrible eczema as a young adult. The prescribed steroid creams didn't offer the solution and so I had to find my own answers. Eventually, I found aloe vera cream. Aloe vera is a godsend, or should I say goddessend? I now live a symbiotic existence with aloe vera.

Having a toothache is a great spiritual teacher. It's clearly superior to going to church or mastering physical postures. This assertion is predicated upon the suffering that causes you to act in order to find answers and relief from your painful condition. Life can be painful, and the suffering will compel you to also seek out answers.

Ram Dass tells a story where his guru Maharaji-ji exclaims all suffering is grace. Ram Dass' initial reaction to this assertion mirrored my own. How could a high spiritual being make such a claim? Suffering is the enemy and anyone on the spiritual path should be relieving suffering, not be blasé about it. Even if I accept that all suffering is grace, I still don't understand it until I probe my own life and see how I seek answers because of suffering. My transformation is given the necessary impetus via suffering. Once grokked, the statement of the guru becomes an obvious truth. It doesn't mean we don't work towards relieving suffering where we can, but we also see its divine quality.

Life on earth is defined by suffering. Along with needing a heat source, we endlessly suffer because of biological demands. In essence, we are set up to suffer. Hunger compels us to seek out food and in dire situations we directly take life in order to eat, just like an animal. Us modern day humans have offloaded the killing to places that are out of sight, so we don't see it. We go to the supermarket where everything is packaged and looks nice. Look at the exquisite marbling on that scrumptious piece of grade A beef! We obscure the fact that as animals we have to take life in order to survive. The plant kingdom is one up on us. Plants survive on the natural elements, being able to use photosynthesis to transform light and they ingest minerals through the soil thanks to water. They absorb carbon dioxide in the air. On the other hand, we kill plants and animals and extract their nutrients in our primitive stomachs.

Mother Earth provides what we need to survive. Given free will, humans increase the amount of suffering in the world through greed. We hoard resources and the reciprocal result is that many go without, while a few prosper. Most of the world lives in poverty while in the First World we have it good. Even in our societies the same situation plays out where there are players who amass huge sums of wealth while others in these wealthy nations live in poverty. The elite buy access to power, enrich themselves in the public trough, enact favourable legislation, and in turn the divide gets even worse.

When everything is going my way, I get content and fat. I live a life of leisure and don't feel compelled to act or change. When I am faced with adversity, I become focused and determined to change my situation and reach the goal I established for myself. To not act would mean slipping into a crippling depression which would result in death. So, it seems suffering will transform or kill you. That's a tough teacher. The outcomes mimic what I have experienced on the spiritual path where I had to deal with a masculine force that was going to destroy me unless I changed. My spiritual father taught transformation through unorthodox methods of harassment with the result forcing me to either change, run, or perish. I chose the path of transformation due to a thirst for knowledge and wanting to get back to the Goddess, who is love. The fear compelled me to act and transform into a warrior who would vanquish the enemy. My father played the part of the dragon masterfully and I am forever grateful for all he did, ultimately becoming who I am because of suffering.

War, famine, pestilence, pandemics, disease, and natural disasters. Loss of loved ones. Depression. Envy and jealousy. Greed. Suffering is part of the curriculum and to be in a human body on this earth is pointing towards action. I've never been sold on life having any kind of purpose but rather we can make it purposeful, and the grace of suffering gives us the push we need to take the course and work towards graduation.

I have looked at life and seen how easily we can make it hell. We were given a garden and we destroyed it. I have wondered why am I here? Clearly, it is a mistake because I don't think I should be in hell. Why did I deserve to go to this hell? I went to hell in order to enact transformation which will lead me towards the path of the heart and back home to the Goddess.