Choosing A Body To Be In

There is probably more than a few people who have gone to extremes to explain their reaction to experiencing God, because they couldn't find a suitable answer in the conventional way. Some people describe their reaction to a confrontation with God as their real religion. That's why I like this Carl G. Jung saying.

"Religion is a defense against the experience of God."

http://www.people.ubr.com/authors/by-first-name/c/carl-gustav-jung/carl-gustav-jung-quotes.aspx

I keep trying to definitively remember the first time I consciously met up with what might be described as God, but the problem is that I don't know what God is, and I don't think anybody else does either.

I remember joining the Baptist church when I was nine years old, but there were other incidents of confronting God that happened before that, which make me suspicious my joining the church wasn't the first time. It may have been the first time I could abstractly construct an image of God as a mental reference. It took me a long time to realize that just because I joined a Protestant church, it didn't mean that participating in their services was my actual religion.

In the past, when someone would ask me what church I belonged to, I had a tendency to get confused because I felt like they were saying something equivalent to claiming that I was a made man. I might reply that I didn't "belong" to or believe I was owned by a group of people by the mere act of baptism and becoming a member of their organization. My making such denials in front of other church members is all it took to invite some fanatical attack on my integrity.

Sometime I think my denial of being "owned" by the denomination of church my family attended was indeed an experience or confrontation with God. God, that is, as put forth by a formal religion. My only real religion was fighting those attacks on my integrity. I felt like I had to protect my right to decide for myself who I am is. I found myself constantly reaching for something that would allow me to keep these people as my friends or allies, and yet, still remain my own person. Those efforts I made to come up with some sort of rhetoric with which to defend that right to decide for myself, is the only ti-me I actually behave in a religious manner.

Remaining my own person and staying on good terms with the people I grew up with has proved impossible. First, I would have to know "my own person" from a hole in the ground. That's probably the most serious problem. Who I am appears to be up to the Other. I can act out my beliefs about who-I-think-I-am forever and a day, but the Other has to interpret my behavior as if I were them instead of me.

I had to have a way to find out what or who the Other thought I was. That's the real reason I started hitch-hiking. It usually put me in a car with a person who only knew me as a stranger they'd never see again. I asked hundreds if not thousands of people who didn't know me or my background who they thought I was. It took years for me to conclude that they couldn't do that. I was wasting my time. All they could tell me was who they thought they would be if they emanated the appearance I did to them. Their description of me was who-they-thought-they-were-or-would-be.

My realizing that I was asking the impossible of them finally took me off the road. I wasn't being fair. They could only perceive their own idea of who they would be if they were me, and they were not. No blame, but that facticity does support at least one of the Ten Commandments of Mosaic Law, "Thou shalt not worship any other God before me."

In consideration of this realized fact that the Other couldn't "see" anybody but themselves in me, I don't have any choice but to worship my own me. It's the only me I gnow. My idea of myself is the only God I know/no/deny. The Me is an abstract construction of God. We create ourselves in our own image. In our own "I" mage. In our own eye-mage. Shape shifters. My experience might force me to say shape choosers.

I've tried to describe this many times without feeling that I've actually done it. There is a zero point. A null point where I'm no thing. Nothing. From that null point I can be-co-me any thing. Anything. So can any body. Anybody. Only two conditions or situations have to be met. First, you have to become one with the null point, and the second is that you have to realize you still possess volition in the null point state, and exercise it as if to reach for some thing. Something.

This is the basis for what a voice I heard say when I was returning from an out-of-body experience. "Everything is nothing, but the idea that it's something, and it could be anything at All."